WRITING

“A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw”

A reflection on reverie & writing

Xanadu (here spelled Xandu) on a map of Asia made by Sanson d’Abbeville, geographer of King Louis XIV, dated 1650.

One night in October, 1797, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke from an opium-influenced dream. Before he nodded off, he’d been reading a description of Shangdu — aka Xanadu — a city built by Mongol Emporer Kubla Khan as the his summer residence. Coleridge’s dream was so…