The Complete Works: Poetry, Plays, Letters and Extensive Biographies. John Keats

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The Complete Works: Poetry, Plays, Letters and Extensive Biographies - John  Keats


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sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,

      Thus answer’d, while his white melodious throat

      Throbb’d with the syllables.– “Mnemosyne!

      Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how;

      Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest?

      Why should I strive to show what from thy lips

      Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark,

      And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes:

      I strive to search wherefore I am so sad,

      Until a melancholy numbs my limbs;

      And then upon the grass I sit, and moan,

      Like one who once had wings. – O why should I

      Feel curs’d and thwarted, when the liegeless air

      Yields to my step aspirant? why should I

      Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet?

      Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing:

      Are there not other regions than this isle?

      What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun!

      And the most patient brilliance of the moon!

      And stars by thousands! Point me out the way

      To any one particular beauteous star,

      And I will flit into it with my lyre,

      And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss.

      I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power?

      Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity

      Makes this alarum in the elements,

      While I here idle listen on the shores

      In fearless yet in aching ignorance?

      O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp,

      That waileth every morn and eventide,

      Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves!

      Mute thou remainest – Mute! yet I can read

      A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:

      Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

      Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,

      Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,

      Creations and destroyings, all at once

      Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,

      And deify me, as if some blithe wine

      Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,

      And so become immortal.” – Thus the God,

      While his enkindled eyes, with level glance

      Beneath his white soft temples, stedfast kept

      Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne.

      Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush

      All the immortal fairness of his limbs;

      Most like the struggle at the gate of death;

      Or liker still to one who should take leave

      Of pale immortal death, and with a pang

      As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse

      Die into life: so young Apollo anguish’d:

      His very hair, his golden tresses famed

      Kept undulation round his eager neck.

      During the pain Mnemosyne upheld

      Her arms as one who prophesied. – At length

      Apollo shriek’d; – and lo! from all his limbs

      Celestial

      Stanzas

I

      In a drear-nighted December,

      Too happy, happy tree,

      Thy branches ne’er remember

      Their green felicity:

      The north cannot undo them.

      With a sleety whistle through them;

      Nor frozen thawings glue them

      From budding at the prime.

II

      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.

III

      Ah! would ‘twere so with many

      A gentle girl and boy!

      But were there ever any

      Writh’d not at passed joy?

      To know the change and feel it,

      When there is none to heal it,

      Nor numbed sense to steel it,

      Was never said in rhyme.

      Spenserian Stanza

      Written at the close of Canto II, Book V, of’The Faerie Queene’.

      In after-time, a sage of mickle lore

      Yclep’d Typographus, the Giant took,

      And did refit his limbs as heretofore,

      And made him read in many a learned book,

      And into many a lively legend look;

      Thereby in goodly themes so training him,

      That all his brutishness he quite forsook,

      When, meeting Artegall and Talus grim,

      The one he struck stone-blind, the other’s eyes wox dim.

      Spenserian Stanzas on Charles Armitage Brown

I

      He is to weet a melancholy carle:

      Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,

      As hath the seeded thistle when in parle

      It holds the Zephyr, ere it sendeth fair

      Its light balloons into the summer air;

      Therto his beard had not begun to bloom,

      No brush had touch’d his chin or razor’sheer;

      No care had touch’d his cheek with mortal doom,

      But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.

II

      Ne cared he for wine, or half-and-half

      Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,

      And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;

      He ‘sdeigned the swine-head at the wassail-bowl;

      Ne with lewd ribbalds sat he cheek by jowl;

      Ne with sly Lemans in the scorner’s chair;

      But after water-brooks this Pilgrim’s soul

      Panted, and all his food was woodland air

      Though he would ofttimes feast on gilliflowers rare.

III

      The slang of cities in no wise he knew,

      Tipping the wink to him was heathen Greek;

      He sipp’d no olden Tom or ruin blue,

      Or nantz or cherry-brandy drank full meek

      By many a damsel hoarse and rouge of cheek;

      Nor


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