Khubla Khan-- relationship between time and memory?

[atokupe]

on Kubla Khan-- seems an interesting poem but where in the poem do we really see the point where the author was interrupted, and the effect of that on his memory. i am trying to write on "the inter-relationship of time and memory in Kubla Khan" Please help me

[Whifflingpin]

The poem ends abruptly, and the continuation is not there, because Coleridge forgot it. That, at least, is what Coleridge himself states.

Coleridge's preface, in which the, possibly apocryphal, story of the interruption is found:
http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/notes.html
"In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"


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There is a dramatic change of pace, and mood, starting with the line "A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw."
You might build some kind of argument on the possibility that the interruption occurred there, and Coleridge's mood had changed when he returned to finish the poem, but you would not be in accordance with Coleridge's account.

Many people think that the visitor from Porlock was entirely made up by Coleridge - so your essay collapses at once.