Why Did I Laugh Tonight? No Voice Will Tell: Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: No God, no Demon of severe response, Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell. Then to my human heart I turn at once. Heart! Thou and I are here, sad and alone;...
Ode on Melancholy NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor...
To George and Georgiana Keats, Friday 19th March 1819 My dear brother and sister; This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I long after a stanza or two of Thompsons Castle of indolenceMy passions are all asleep from my h...
Ode to a Nightingale MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too hap...
To Fanny Keats, 1st May 1819 Wentworth Place, Saturday My dear Fanny; If it were but six oclock in the morning I would set off to see you today: if I should do so now I could not stop long enough for a how dye doit is so long s walk through Hornsey a...
A Casement High and Triple-Archd There Was A casement high and triple-archd there was, All garlanded with carven imagries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid...
To George and Georgiana Keats, 16th December 1818, 2-4 January 1819 My dear brother and sister; You will be prepared, before this reaches you for the worst news you could have, nay if Haslams letter arrives in proper time, I have a consolation in thi...
To George and Georgiana Keats, 14th October 1818 My dear George; I am grieved to say that I am not sorry you had not letters at Philadelphia; you could have had no good news of Tom and I have been withheld on his account from beginning these many day...
Deep in the Shady Sadness of a Vale DEEP in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eves one star, Sat gray-haird Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest...
To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 My dear Woodhouse, The best answer I can give you is in a clerk-like manner to make some observations on two principle points, which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con, about geniu...