Journey to the Orient

Xanadu

THIS is surely one of the best known couplets in English poetry. It’s the first two lines of a fragment of verse describing an opium dream. Samuel Taylor Coleridge started writing it and then was “called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour”.

By the time he’d got rid of the person from Porlock he’d forgotten the rest of the dream, which is why it’s a fragment.