Kubla Khan

A short, unfinished poem describing the pleasure dome of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan at Xanadu, written, Coleridge himself claimed in its 1816 preface, from a vision that came to him in an opium-influenced sleep after reading a passage about Xanadu, and broken off when a visitor, remembered only as the person from Porlock, interrupted him and the rest of the vision would not return. Its fragmentary state, presented by Coleridge as an accident rather than a design, became part of the poem's own mystique, and its closing image of a poet with flashing eyes and floating hair is one of the most quoted passages in English Romantic verse.