Quotes
Quotes - Keats
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.
The poetry of earth is never dead.
Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half-heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation--balmy pain.
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too?
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shine.
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns.
The sweet converse of an innocent mind.
She no tear--O shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more--O weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core.
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast.
Mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Note 1.See Chapman, Quotation 20.
Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal,--that on his gravestone shall be this inscription.--Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton): Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Letter to Severn, vol. ii. p. 91.
There is a budding morrow in midnight.
Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
Each Bond-street buck conceits, unhappy elf; He shows his clothes! alas! he shows himself. O that they knew, these overdrest self-lovers, What hides the body oft the mind discovers.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.
In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon.
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the grasshopper's--he takes the lead In summer luxury--he has never done With his delights, for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?
No, no, I'm sure, My restless spirit never could endure To brood so long upon one luxury, Unless it did, though fearfully, espy A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.
