Keats: Poems Published in 1820
These are the poems Keats wrote knowing he was dying. In 1820, tuberculosis had already claimed his brother Tom; it would take Keats by the following winter at twenty-five. Yet this collection contains the greatest odes in English poetry: "Ode to a Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," "On Melancholy," "On Indolence" - each a meditation on beauty, mortality, and the unbearable tension between the immortal and the fleeting. Here too are "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," poems where romance curdles into nightmare and desire becomes indistinguishable from death. Keats believed "a Poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures" because he had no identity - he could become a nightingale, an urn, a lover frozen at the moment of bliss. His genius was feeling everything too completely and transmuting that feeling into language that still makes readers catch their breath two centuries later. This is the book that contains "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - and proves it.
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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”
— John Keats
“Life is but a day;A fragile dew-drop on its perilous wayFrom a tree’s summit.””
— John Keats
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.””
— John Keats
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art”
— John Keats
“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,”
— John Keats
“I bade good morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind.- ””
— John Keats
“And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed,Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.””
— John Keats
“When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!”
— John Keats
“Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!The flower will bloom another year.Weep no more! oh, weep no more!Young buds sleep in the root’s white core.Dry your eyes! oh, dry your eyes!For I was taught in ParadiseTo ease my breast of melodies,”
— John Keats
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Keats, John. Keats: Poems Published in 1820. Lex, lex-books.com/book/keats-poems-published-in-1820-7ffdb932-a623-462a-9f9e-2563c33c6952.Keats, J. (n.d.). Keats: Poems Published in 1820. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/keats-poems-published-in-1820-7ffdb932-a623-462a-9f9e-2563c33c6952Keats, John. Keats: Poems Published in 1820. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/keats-poems-published-in-1820-7ffdb932-a623-462a-9f9e-2563c33c6952.
