John Keats (1795 – 1821)
One of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement.
Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thicksighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.
Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!
“For cruel ’tis,” said she,
“To steal my Basil-pot away from me.”
I remember… his first introduction to Mr. Haydon; and when in the course of conversation that great artist asked him, "if he did not love his country," how the blood rushed to his cheeks and the tears to his eyes, at his energetic reply. His love of freedom was ardent and grand.
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory — and very few eyes can see the mystery of life — a life like the Scriptures, figurative... Lord Byron cuts a figure, but he is not figurative. Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.
'Tis the pest
Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.
Scenery is fine — but human nature is finer.
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.
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven!
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing.
I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of — I am, however young, writing at random — straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness — without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?
Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain
Clings cruelly to us.
[On Monckton Milne's Life of Keats] An attempt to make us eat dead dog by exquisite currying and cooking [...] The kind of man that Keats was gets ever more horrible to me. Forces of hunger for every pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force -- that is a combination! Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen 'Vessel of Hell' [...]
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you!