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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Kubla Khan
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or, A Vision in a Dream (1797)
Fragment of a poem by *Coleridge which he published, on the urging of Byron, in the same volume as Christabel in 1816. Coleridge introduces the poem with his famous account of its inspiration and interruption. He was in a lonely farmhouse in Somerset in 1797, under the influence of opium, and he fell asleep when reading in Purchas's Pilgrimage how Kubla Khan had built a great palace in the 13C at Xanadu in northern China. In his sleep he composed between 200 and 300 lines.
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On waking he began immediately to write them down, with their magnificent opening image: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. When he had completed only 54 lines, he was 'called out by a person on business from Porlock'; and by the time he got back to his desk, the rest of the poem 'had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast'.
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The surviving lines are a potent romantic brew, intermingling deep chasms and mighty fountains, sunny pleasure domes and caves of ice, a damsel with a dulcimer and a woman wailing for her demon lover.
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