Poetry, John Keats [grave mercy .txt] 📗

thy dear shepherd’s kisses:
Was there a Poet born?⁠—But now no more,
My wand’ring spirit must no further soar. Sonnet After Dark Vapours

After dark vapours have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play,
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
And calmest thoughts come round us; as, of leaves
Budding,⁠—fruit ripening in stillness,⁠—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves,⁠—
Sweet Sappho’s cheek,⁠—a sleeping infant’s breath,⁠—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs,⁠—
A woodland rivulet,⁠—a Poet’s death.

Written on the Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of The Floure and the Lefe

This pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honied lines so freshly interlace,
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops
Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And, by the wandering melody, may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh! what a power has white simplicity!
What mighty power has this gentle story!
I, that do ever feel athirst for glory,
Could at this moment be content to lie
Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings
Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.

To Haydon

Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitively of these mighty things;
Forgive me, that I have not Eagle’s wings⁠—
That what I want I know not where to seek:
And think that I would not be over meek,
In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak⁠—
Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem?
For when men star’d at what was most divine
With browless idiotism⁠—o’erwise phlegm⁠—
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine
Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak⁠—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time⁠—with a billowy main⁠—
A sun⁠—a shadow of a magnitude.

On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The Story of Rimini

Who loves to peer up at the morning sun,
With half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek,
Let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek
For meadows where the little rivers run;
Who loves to linger with that brightest one
Of Heaven⁠—Hesperus⁠—let him lowly speak
These numbers to the night, and starlight meek,
Or moon, if that her hunting be begun.
He who knows these delights, and too is prone
To moralize upon a smile or tear,
Will find at once a region of his own,
A bower for his spirit, and will steer
To alleys, where the fir-tree drops its cone,
Where robins hop, and fallen leaves are sear.

To Leigh Hunt, Esq. A Dedication

Glory and loveliness have pass’d away;
For if we wander ont in early morn,
No wreathèd incense do we see upborne
Into the east, to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft-voic’d and young, and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

On the Sea

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be mov’d for days from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
O ye! who have your eyeballs vex’d and tir’d,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
O ye! whose ears are dinn’d with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody,—
Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!

Endymion

“The stretched metre of an antique song.”

Shakspeare’s Sonnets

Inscribed
with every feeling of pride and regret
and with “a bowed mind”
to the memory of
the most English of poets except Shakspeare,
Thomas Chatterton

Preface

Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.

What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished. The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press; nor should they if I thought a year’s castigation would do them any good;⁠—it will not: the foundations are too sandy. It is just that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.

This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a punishment: but no feeling man will be forward to inflict it: he will leave me alone, with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.