| | SparkNotes: Coleridge's Poetry: "Kubla Khan" |
 | | The speaker describes the "stately pleasure-dome" built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran "through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea." Walls and towers were raised around "twice five miles of fertile ground," filled with beautiful gardens and forests. |
 | | As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking "an anodyne" prescribed "in consequence of a slight disposition" (this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). |
 | | Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem--the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it--he was interrupted by a "person on business from Porlock," who detained him for an hour. |
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