by Sam Juliano
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 priestlike 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 stedfast, 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.”
-John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1819, Hampstead, England
Over a period of a few weeks in 1819, John Keats composed three of the most famous poems in all of English literature, Ode to a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Melancholy, and many literary scholars now consider him the greatest poet in the English language after Shakespeare, despite the fact that he lived only into his twenty-fifth year. Yet during his short life Keats, who was born in London in 1795, received little acclaim, and wasn’t recognized as a great figure until decades after his death. (more…)
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