The Letters and Poems of John Keats Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EARLY SONNETS. OCHATTERTON I how very sad thy fate ! Dear child of sorrow?son of misery ! How soon the film of death obscured that eye, Whence Genius mildly flash'd, and high debate. How soon that voice, majestic and elate, Melted in dying numbers ! Oh ! how nigh Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die A half-blown flow'ret which cold blasts amate. But this is past: thou art among the stars Of highest heaven: to thy rolling spheres Thou sweetest singest: nought thy hymning mars, Above the ingrate world and human fears. On earth the good man base detraction bars From thy fair name, and waters it with tears. how sweetly sad thy melody! Attuning still the soul to tenderness, As if soft Pity, with unusual stress, Had touch'd her plaintive lute, and thou being by, Hadst caught the tones, nor suffer'd them to die.O'ershadowing sorrow doth not make thee less Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress With a bright halo, shining beamily, As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil, Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow, Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail, And like fair veins in sable marble flow. Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale, The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe. BPENSER! a jealous honourer of thine,1 A forester deep in thy midmost trees, Did, last eve, ask my promise to refine Some English, that might strive thine ear to please. 1 I am enabled by the kind- in Little Britain. The poem ness of Mr. W. A. Longmore, is dated, in Mrs. Longmore's nephew of Mr. J. W. Rey- hand, Feb. 5th, 1818, but it nolds, to give an exact tran- seems to me impossible that it script of this sonnetas written can have been other than an and given to his mother, by early production and of the the poet, at his fath...Read More