Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is about how nature and the imagination are parts of a reality which is deeper and more alive than everyday reality. Coleridge uses extended metaphor to show this. He describes Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome" (line 2) as a wonderful place, but it is pale beside the wonders and power of nature: "But oh! that deep romantic chasm. . . . A savage place! as holy and enchanted/ As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman waiting for her demon-lover!" (12-16).
The pleasure-dome is a metaphor for man's desire to control the world and especially to control nature. It can also be a metaphor for man's ego and his belief that he is the most powerful and wonderful force in the world. However, nature is too powerful to be controlled, just like the human imagination. There is a dark side of nature which the poet sees as far more wonderful powerful than man's desire to take over the world and run things the way he wants.
Therefore, the poem has at least one extended metaphor and perhaps two. One is the pleasure-dome which stands for man's ego and his everyday mind, and his belief that he can control the world and make it in his own image.
Nature is the other major image in the poem. It can either stand for itself, or it can be seen as an extended metaphor for the darker and deeper part of the human mind or human imagination.
Coleridge makes clear that he is not as inspired by the man-made pleasure-dome as much as he is by nature, or by "that deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover" (12-13). The poet might also be talking about the human subconscious, or the human imagination. Nature and the subconscious or the imagination are wild, compared to the "stately" grounds of the pleasure-dome which was created by Kubla Khan "with walls and towers . . . girded round" (7).
Coleridge is saying that the palace is full of man-made things which protect...