O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell

This is Keats as a young man, still in his twenties, already incandescent with love for the natural world. Written in 1815 when he was just twenty, "O Solitude!" announces a poet who would become one of English literature's greatest sensations of nature. The sonnet takes the form of an argument: the speaker rejects the "jumbled heap" of London life and retreats to what he calls "Nature's observatory" - a rural vantage point where he can watch the world in peaceful isolation. The poem builds toward its luminous close, where the speaker imagines himself "climb[ing] the Jasper-stair" of some rural height, and there, alone with bees and butterflies, finding a contentment no city could offer. Here, in miniature, are all the gifts that would bloom into the great odes: the ravishing attention to sensory detail, the faith that beauty is truth, the refusal to settle for less than wonder. For readers who have loved "To Autumn" or "Ode to a Nightingale," this early sonnet offers something rare and precious - watching a genius find his voice.