Does It Rain In Xanadu?

Insofar as Coleridge is, in ‘Kubla Khan’, describing a territory somewhere in the vicinity of China, or (at the poem's end) Abyssinia/Ethopia, then we can assume the answer to my question is: ‘yes’, because of course rainfall happens periodically in those places. But insofar as Coleridge is talking about a kind of terrestrial paradise then the answer is not so clear.

Let me come at this another way. It's an old chestnut of ‘Kubla Khan’ studies that, in addition to reading Purchas His Pilgrimage (‘in Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall’) as we know Coleridge was doing immediately prior to writing his poem, Coleridge had also been reading his Milton. This is always a safe bet, since Coleridge was always reading his Milton. Coleridge's ‘Mount Abora’, which is not an actual mountain found in any atlas, has long been assumed to owe something to the Ethiopian prominence called Amara, a mountain also mentioned in Paradise Lost. This is the relevant bit from Purchas:

The hill Amara hath alreadie been often mentioned, and nothing indeed in all Ethiopia more deserueth mention. .... This hill is situate as the nauil of that Ethiopian body, and center of their Empire, vnder the Equinoctiall line, where the Sun may take his best view thereof, as not encountering in all his long iourny with the like Theatre, wherein the Graces & Muses are actors, no place more graced with Natures store, ... the Sunne himself so in loue with the sight, that the first & last thing he vieweth in all those parts is this hill ... Once, Heauen and Earth, Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking this for the place of our Fore-fathers Paradise. [Purchas (1617), p. 843]

And here's the relevant bit of Milton's epic, describing Eden (and, we're on safe ground presuming, influencing Coleridge's Edenic Xanadu too):

                             Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of som irriguous Valley spred her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of coole recess, o're which the mantling vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her chrystal mirror holds, unite thir streams.
The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring. Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; ...
Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by som suppos'd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclosd with shining Rock, [Paradise Lost 4:246-283]

Those last few lines in particular make it look as though Milton has read his Purchas (as he might very well have done; although my edition of PL cites instead a similar passage from Heylyn's 1652 Cosmographie). From ‘Amara’ to ‘Abora’ might be explicable in terms of Coleridge's subconscious playing language games—Ted Hughes had a theory that Abora was A + B plus ora, the Latin for ‘prayer’, specifically the 2nd person imperative (‘mountain of alphabet pray for us!’ is what Hughes comes up with having run the name through his enigma machine). Or it might be that Coleridge is remembering, or half remembering, a different travelogue: we know he read James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile in the early 1790s, and in that book Bruce mentions the Abyssinian river ‘Atbara’, as well as a peninsula of the same name, and says that there is a ‘division of the country’ called Amhara, which is pretty close to Amara. There's a lot of this kind of, more or less barren, source-hunting in Coleridgean scholarship, I'm afraid.

I'm interested in a slightly different angle, here. The river Milton is describing is the Biblical river that ran through paradise: ‘and a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’ [Genesis 2:10]. But a few verses earlier, the Bible tells us ‘there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground’ [Genesis 2:6]. That's something of a crux. Here's Carey and Fowler's footnote on the Milton passage.

The fertility of Paradise is explained in Genesis as not due to rain, ‘there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.’ The passage is a famous crux. St Jerome's Vulgate version e.g. had a fountain instead of a mist: sed fons ascendebat e terra, irrigans universam superficiem terræ. Dante had used the detail in his earthly paradise (Purg. xxviii 121ff) where it is emphasised that the moisture, being independent of rainfall, does not fluctuate in abundance ‘but comes from a stable and certain source.’ ... The principle model for M.'s description is Philo Quaest. in Gen i 12, where the difficulty in finding any location for Paradise that meets the requirements of Gen ii 10-14 is overcome by the speculation that ‘perhaps Paradise is in some distant place far from our inhabited world, and has a river flowing under the earth, which waters many great veins so that these rising send water to other recipient veins, and so become diffused. And as these are forced by the rush of water, the force of which is in them makes its way out to the surface, both in the Armenian mountains and elswhere.’ [Carey and Fowler (eds) The Poems of John Milton (Longman 1968), 623-24]

Coleridge was familiar with Philo, certainly at second-hand (via Brucker), and although I'm not sure how much Philo he read first-hand it's certainly possible he knew this passage from the Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesis. At any rate, we're on safe ground, I think, in assuming Coleridge's interest in and familiarity with these questions as to whether Eden was watered by rains, mists from above or a subterranean river feeding veins from below—or indeed watered by the bursting-out of a great fountain.

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

‘Alph’, then the prime river, runs underground, and so, we assume, waters Xanadu. Through Philo's veins, or rather through such veins and also via this Saint-Jeromian fons:

A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Perhaps, then, Xanadu has no need of rain.

This tempts me into abstruser musings, as per my blog biog. Take naming. One thing that happens in this poem is that Coleridge's poetic subconscious shifts what in Purchas is ‘Xamdu’ (unless he was reading a 1st or 2nd edition of the Pilgrimage, where the place-name is ‘Xaindu’)—plus what is in Paradise Lost [11:388] ‘Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can’—into Xanadu. Coleridge at this point in his life lacked Hebrew (which he didn't acquire until the 18teens); but if he had recently been reading one or other of the many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works of theological interpretation of the Bible which we know he read, he might have learned that the original Hebrew for Genesis 2:8 is ‘And YHWH planted a gan in ‘ēden, at the east’: gan meaning garden. An Edenic refiguration of Cublai Khan's earthly park could see gan-ēden, with Khan bleeding into the sound (gkhan-ēden) reshaping the word into ‘Xanedu’. The -u is a given in all three earlier versions of the name, otherwise Coleridge might have gone the whole hog and set his poem in ‘Xanaden’. Maybe.

Hmm: maybe not.

One objection, of course, is that there's no ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ in Eden, at least not in Genesis (setting extra-Biblical speculation about Lilith and the like aside). We could say that this woman is not actually in Coleridge's garden: it's an as-if comparison, not a description (the place is ‘as holy and enchanted/As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’) But we could take a different line, and note the many scholars who draw comparisons between this portion of Genesis and the Song of Solomon:

The relationship of the Song with Genesis 2 has been remarked upon at length by Karl Barth, in his immensely comprehensive Church Dogmatics, from a theological perspective; for him they sanctify sexual love, in contrast with the repressive attitude towards eroticism in the rest of the OT. Daniel Lys, too, points to the parallel with the garden of Eden in discussing the function of the Song in the Bible. He writes “Le Cantique n'est rien d'autre qu'un commentaire de Gen.2.” [Francis Landy, ‘The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden’, Journal of Biblical Literature 98:4 (1979), 513]

I think this makes more sense. It is, after all, hard to deny the erotic charge Coleridge's poem communicates: the pleasure dome, the wailing lover-women and the toothsome-sounding Abyssinian maid at the end. The point is that the Biblical Canticle takes these Edenic images of garden, underground river and bursting fountain and turns them into metaphors of sexual yearning and sexual consummation:

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. [Song of Solomon, 4:12-16]

The question does it rain in Xanadu? takes on, in this light, something anticipatory, something erotic. That doesn't strike me as a million miles off the mark, I must say.

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The illustration at the head of this post is of Coleridge's poem, and is by Dugald Walker.