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This repitition of title as a refrain is now a reference to a prison. He who was once a searcher for Xanadu has found what he wanted, but failed in his moment of triumph. Xanadu now symbolizes a prison, the end of freedom.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
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The protagonist is weary of the night, since he doesn’t know if a new day will arrive, or the world has ended already. Therefor he is is praying for the morning to arrive again, to see the sun again, to know that the world is still there. And cherish the hope that he can somehow escape the caves of ice to return to the world of people, love and mortality.
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The millenial reference is amplified here, as the only solution to the frozen, prisoner-like state is the end of the world, the end of time. The weariness of the protagonist reflects the futility of his dream. So also, we might see a parallel between the drug-induced state in which Coleridge wrote the original poem, “Kubla Khan”, and his personal destruction due to drug use.
Is the end of the world, an ominous sounding prospect, really going to be a source of hope, or just a further descent into madness and despair.
The heat death of the universe predicted by some physicists is a secular image of the religious world view. Heat death, a state of maximum entropy, would mean the end of all movement, a state of being frozen.
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The stars are as if stopped, i.e., frozen. So is the protagonist frozen. The image of the caves of ice reappears as a prison: he is frozen because time has stopped for him, as with the stars.
This stasis is a kind of punishment or failure given his great hopes and expectations before undertaking the quest. The quest for immortality fails in its own success: a stunning paradox. One recalls the failure of other such mythic quests, as in the Gilgamesh epic of Babylonian lore, or in the Biblical account of Adam and Eve.
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In ordinary time and space as we experience it, the stars move in the sky. Though thousands of light years away, their motion marks the passing of cosmic ages for us here on earth. The stopping of the stars indicates that the protagonist is now beyond time.
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The protagonist is now in the “prison of the lost Xanadu”. He realizes that his once believed Paradise is not a blissful state, but a prison, a place where he is forced to be away from everything that real life can give. He realizes he has traded the love and loss of life for a vision of paradise. A vision that ultimately becomes his hell, instead of his heaven.
All Rush band members are atheists. This could mean the song is mocking the Christian view of paradise, showing it to be a prison.
I dont think it’s meant to mock Christianity. It’s just a realistic view of what isolated immortality would be like. The speaker is unfathomably lonely and bored, to the point where they are beginning to lose their mind.
Neil Peart is actually agnostic, Hedy is an atheist and Alex doesn’t seem to mention his beliefs.