This shop was intended to be intense but of short duration. I am sorry to say the response has been very limited and with my surgery deadline looming I don't think I will have time to do this subject justice. I am therefore closing it (regretfully) but hope to touch on this subject in the summer as I heal......stan

Number one for me anyway lol. I get an idea for a poem which includes both a surface and secondary message and even have a good starting line. So in I dive and start writing, setting the scene and mood, maybe even manage to personify the write to the reader. So I'm well begun................
then here comes that little problem : poetry is not an essay in which one can simply use plain prose to wrap things up. The wrap up (and usually the core message) must be put into a poetic form. And for me this also usually requires that the form be rhyming western classic. So there I am....stuck because I can't figure out and ending which rhymes, conveys both a surface and underlying message , and most importantly get the message out in POETIC form...............stan

I know you all have thoughts on why a poem might be left uncompleted. Maybe you can even think of a poem or two which is famous BECAUSE it was never completed?.......stan

ting[edit]

Coleridge, 1814
In September 1797, Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey in the south west of England and spent much of his time walking through the nearby Quantock Hills with his fellow poet William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy;[4] (His route today is memorialised as the "Coleridge Way".[5]) Throughout the autumn, he worked on many poems, including "The Brook" and the tragedy Osorio. Some time between 9 and 14 October 1797, when Coleridge says he had completed the tragedy, he left Stowey for Lynton. On his return, he became sick and rested at Ash Farm, located at Culbone Church and one of the few places to seek shelter on his route.[4]

Coleridge described how he wrote the poem in the preface to his collection of poems, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, published in 1816:

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 Pilgrimes:' '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 had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:

Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.[6]

I am returned
to haunt the site yet
still sans much
of worth to offer.
Pain Meds.
dulling my typing
as well as imagination.
Just a note of thanks to those who have picked up my load
during my being awol.................stan