Person on business from Porlock facts for kids
Have you ever been working on a creative project, like a drawing or a story, and gotten interrupted right when you were in the zone? That's exactly what the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said happened to him in 1797. He was writing a poem called "Kubla Khan" when he was stopped by a mysterious visitor, now known as the "person on business from Porlock."
Because of this interruption, Coleridge's poem was never finished. Today, people use the phrase "person from Porlock" as a literary allusion (a reference to a famous story) to describe anyone or anything that unexpectedly stops creative work.
The Story of the Unfinished Poem
In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was living in a quiet farmhouse in a part of England called Exmoor. He was not feeling well and was resting. One day, after taking some medicine, he fell asleep and had an incredibly vivid dream. In this dream, he said he saw a complete and wonderful poem, about 200-300 lines long.
When he woke up, he remembered the whole poem perfectly. He immediately grabbed a pen and paper and started writing it down. But just as he was getting started, there was a knock at the door.
An Unwelcome Visitor
The visitor was a man who had come "on business from Porlock," a nearby village. This man kept Coleridge busy for over an hour. When the visitor finally left, Coleridge returned to his desk, ready to finish his poem.
To his great disappointment, he found that the dream had faded from his memory. He could only remember a few scattered lines and images. The rest of the amazing poem was gone forever, like a reflection in a pond that disappears after a stone is thrown in. All that was left is the 54-line fragment of "Kubla Khan" that we can still read today.
Coleridge described the experience himself:
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... 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...
Was the Story Real?
For a long time, everyone accepted Coleridge's story. But later, some experts began to wonder if the "person from Porlock" was actually real.
In 1953, a writer named Elisabeth Schneider suggested that Coleridge might have invented the visitor. She thought the story was a clever excuse for why the poem was so short and seemed incomplete. It was a way for Coleridge to explain why he couldn't finish it.
The poet Stevie Smith agreed with this idea. She wrote a poem about it, suggesting that Coleridge wasn't interrupted at all—he was probably just stuck and didn't know how to continue writing.
Because no one can prove whether the visitor existed, the "person from Porlock" is a fun historical mystery.
