by walls and towers There are acres of beautiful gardens flowers fragrant trees and streams of water Twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers We also find ancient forests and hills beside the palace which create a green atmosphere The palace is in a place where we see both sunshine and caves of ice Coleridge s imagery creates a vivid picture in our minds As if we are seeing the palace and its beautiful natural surroundings in front of our eyes The Sacred River Alph The sacred river Alph is a beautiful and mysterious image The river runs through the fertile land It starts in the gardens but then moves deeper into caverns measureless to man The caves are so vast and deep that no one can fully understand them The river then flows into a sunless sea meaning an underground sea Where Alph the sacred river ran Down to a sunless sea Here the images of the sacred river deep caves and underground sea just beside Kubla s palace create a beautiful and surreal atmosphere The description becomes dream-like because we are seeing beautiful gardens wild mysterious caves and a sunless sea side by side The Deep Romantic Chasm In the second stanza Coleridge shifts to a deep romantic chasm The poet vividly portrays the wild and eerie nature of the chasm a deep gap gorge opening in the earth s surface This place is wild and full of energy The poet says it is holy and enchanted He compares it to a place where a woman is crying for her demon lover This image makes the place feel both magical and dangerous The Fountain and the Geyser In the second stanza Coleridge portrays the images of the river s violent energy The river water suddenly bursts out of the chasm like a fountain or a geyser It produces a breathing sound as if the earth is panting Heavy rocks are thrown into the air from the geyser These images create a violent atmosphere The river then flows through woods and fields reaches the deep caves and falls into the underground sea In the sound of the rushing water Kubla hears his ancestors predicting that war will come Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war Kubla s pleasure dome is in a place where we can see both beauty and violence With these images Coleridge may suggest that Kubla Khan does not want to hear only beauty or only violence Kubla wants both beauty and war The Abyssinian Maid In the final stanza the speaker has a vision of an Abyssinian Ethiopian maid playing a dulcimer and singing about Mount Abora A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw The speaker wishes he could remember her song because it would help him create something magical like the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan This image of the signing maid represents poetic inspiration Her song is like a spark of creative energy that the speaker desperately wants to capture In conclusion The poem Kubla Khan is full of vivid beautiful mysterious and violent imagery Coleridge s imagery portrays a life-like picture of Kubla s pleasure dome in a dream-like atmosphere The images give the readers a tour of the magical world of Xanadu nbsp