Kubla Khan, in Xanadu

Coleridge said he composed Kubla Khan in 1797 after falling asleep over a book about the Mongol ruler, and that an interruption cost him the rest of it. He kept the poem unpublished for years and printed it in 1816 in a pamphlet with Christabel, at Byron’s urging. He called it a fragment on the title page. Wikisource carries that 1816 printing.

Where this text comes fromThe copy linked below is the third edition, printed in London for John Murray by William Bulmer and Company. Inside it, Kubla Khan sits in the middle, between Christabel and The Pains of Sleep. What you copy here is the opening: the decree, the river, the walled ground, and the gardens, stopping well before the poem turns to the damsel with a dulcimer. The 1816 spelling is left as printed, which is why blossom’d carries an apostrophe where a modern edition would put an e.

What you might not noticeColeridge’s own preface quotes his source, Purchas, as saying ten miles of fertile ground. The poem turns that into twice five miles, and it is the only quantity named anywhere in the fragment. Source

What it trainsThe challenge here is how long you go without a landing point: sixty-seven words in two sentences, and the second of them runs to forty-two before a full stop arrives. That length is what makes the passage hard: there is no punctuation pause deep enough to let you re-read, so you have to hold the line you are copying in your head to its end. Three commas in the whole fragment is the other half of the problem, because almost nothing breaks the run. Fifteen capitals appear in 404 characters and thirteen of them are not sentence openings but proper names and verse line starts: Xanadu, Kubla Khan, Alph. Two compounds are joined without spaces, pleasure-dome and incense-bearing; the second runs to fifteen characters and is the longest thing you type here.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource