That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;7
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
1. Charles Brown, with whom Keats was then liv-evergreen tree; a sedative if taken in small doses. ing in Hampstead, wrote: 'In the spring of 1819 a 3. River in Hades whose waters cause forgetful- nightingale had built her nest near my house. ness. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; 4. The Roman goddess of flowers or the flowers and one morning he took his chair from the break-themselves. fast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where 5. Provence, in southern France, was in the late he sat for two or three hours. When he came into Middle Ages renowned for its troubadours?writthe house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper ers and singers of love songs. in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting 6. Fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon, behind the books. On inquiry, I found those hence the waters of inspiration, here applied metascraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic phorically to a beaker of wine. feeling on the song of our nightingale.' 7. Keats's brother Tom, wasted by tuberculosis, 2. A poisonous herb, not the North American had died the preceding winter.
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90 4 / JOHN KEATS
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,8 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 35 Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;? fairies But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 40 Through verdurous0 glooms and winding mossy ways, green-foliaged
5 I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed0 darkness, guess each sweet perfumed Wherewith the seasonable month endows 45 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;9 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6 Darkling0 I listen; and, for many a time in darkness I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused0 rhyme, meditated To take into the air my quiet breath; 55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain? 60 To thy high requiem0 become a sod. mass for the dead
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:0 peasant 65 Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth,1 when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn;0 wheat The same that oft- times hath Charm'd magic casements,0 opening on the foam windows 70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy2 cannot cheat so well
8. I.e., by getting drunk not on wine (the 'vintage' 9. Sweetbrier or honeysuckle. of stanza 2) but on the invisible ('viewless') wings 1. The young widow in the biblical Book of Ruth. of the poetic imagination. (Bacchus, god of wine, 2. I.e., imagination, 'the viewless wings of Poesy' was sometimes represented in a chariot drawn by of line 33. 'pards'?leopards.)
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ODE ON A GRECIAN URN / 905
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75 Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem0 fades hymnPast the near meadows, over the still stream,
