Why Is Coleridge's Poem Kubla Khan A Fragmented Poem?

The full title of "Kubla Kahn" is "A vision in a dream: a fragment." Coleridge refers to it as a fragment because it is incomplete.

According to Coleridge's own account, it was written in the summer of 1797 (though he may have got this wrong and meant 1798.) His health was poor and he was staying in a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and LInton (in South-West England, on the Devon-Somerest border.) One day, he says, he took a "prescribed" medicine (actually opium, which was legal at the time, and to which he was addicted) and fell asleep while reading about the medieval Mongol Emperor of  China, Kublai Khan. He had a vivid dream about the Emperor's Palace, gardens etc, and when he woke began to write everything down. He claimed that the poem came to him just as it stands now.

Unfortunately, before he could finish it "a person from Porlock" came to see him on business. By the time Colerdige returned to his study, he could no longer remember the dream; so we will never know what else he might have written.

Coleridge had a superb faculty of imagination and visualisation. In this poem, he imagines of the magnificent palace built by Kubla Khan on the bank of the river Alph. The poem is full of dream-like atmosphere but it is free from the vagueness of a dream.

Kubla Khan ordered a splendid palace to be built at the bank of the river Alph. So ten miles of ground were enclosed with huge walls and towers. The palace was full of flowers and sweet-smelling plants. But the most beautiful thing was the deep chasm near the green hill. From this chasm flowed alph. This sacred river flowed through woods and valleys for five miles and then fell into an underground and immeasurable ocean with a great noise. In the midst of his tumult, Kubla Khan heard the voices of his forefathers. They asked him to leave his luxurious and prepare himself for the war. There could also be heard a strange music coming from the pleasure house.

The poet says that once in a vision he saw an Abyssinian girl singing of Mount Abora. The poet thinks that if he could recall to his mind the same music again, he would be able to build a beautiful palace like that of Kubla. But the people would be taken aback to see his excitement and frenzy. They would be frightened to see "His flushing eyes, his floating hair." They would ask others to beware of him lest he should cast his spell on them because he had "drunk the milk of paradise".