Collected English Verse — John Keats. b. 1795, d. 1821 (Part 7 of 7)

‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam
   With horrid warning gapàd wide,
And I awoke and found me here
       On the cold hill’s side.

‘And this is why I sojourn here
   Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
       And no birds sing.’

641   On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

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’s at each other with a wild surmise—
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

642   When I have Fears that I may cease to be

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-pilàd 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 feel 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;—then on the shore
   Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
   Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

643   To Sleep

O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom- pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
   Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
   In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
   Around my bed its lulling charities;
   Then save me, or the passàd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
   Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilàd wards,
   And seal the hushàd casket of my soul.

644   Last Sonnet

BRIGHT Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest- like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
   Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
   And so live ever—or else swoon to death.