Extract

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.

A pleasure dome rises where a sacred river runs through caverns measureless to man, and for fifty-four lines the English language achieves a music so pure it seems to arrive from outside the poet entirely. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed the poem came in an opium dream in 1797, whole and complete, and that a visitor's interruption shattered the vision before he could transcribe it all. Whether the story is true matters less than the effect: an incantation that builds a paradise of ice and sun, of wailing women and ancestral voices prophesying war, only to dissolve into lament for the song he cannot finish. Published in 1816, it became one of the most celebrated fragments in literature, proof that incompleteness can be its own perfection.