"The Writer" sample paragraph

In "The Writer", Richard Wilbur remembers an incident that helped him understand anew the travails of his daughter who is upstairs in her room, trying to compose a story. He uses two distinct but contrasting metaphors. First, he overhears his daughter typing in the "prow" of their house, the sound of her typewriter like "a chain hauled over a gunwale". Her life has "great cargo", some "heavy". The speaker concludes this moment with a wistful hoping she has a "lucky passage". Then, remembering how a starling once got caught in the same room, and fought for its life to escape, the speaker rejects his first metaphor--of the writing life as some kind of journey--and reaffirms, by the image of the persistent, trapped starling, that writing is more like a life-or-death attempt to break free from that which would confine us than a long journey to someplace else.

Satelitte Image of Congo Republic

http://geology.com/world/democratic-republic-of-the-congo-satellite-image.shtml#satellite

Map of Congo River

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/CongoLualaba_watershed_topo.png

"Picnic, Lightning" by Billy Collins

Picnic, Lightning

by Billy Collins

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.

Short Biography of Lord Byron

Known as a romantic poet for his rendition of Don Juan and his travelogue poem called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron would become one of Europe’s most captivating artists. His satire mixed with an ironic ego brought freshness to literature that was wholeheartedly accepted.

Born to a Scottish Heiress, Lord Byron’s father squandered away the family’s wealth, which meant that for some time of his childhood he would be brought up in meager conditions. However, at around the age of 10, the young Byron inherited the estates of a great uncle. Bryon went to England’s top school in Newstead. And, at Trinity College, in Cambridge, Byron admitted he had fallen in love with one John Edleston. But, even with his homosexual tendencies, Lord Byron had a greater attraction in his heterosexual undertakings. While there, he also became good friends with John Cam Hobhouse.

Soon after his studies, Byron released his first book of poetry called Hours of Idleness, which did not receive the best reviews. In vengeance, he wrote another satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which actually won him great recognition. Bryon in 1809 became a member of the House of Lords. With his friend Hobhouse, the two traveled through Portugal, Spain, and onward through Greece. During this voyage, he began one of his most famous works, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Back in London, with the poem’s publication, Lord Byron found himself famous.

Even after his pilgrimage abroad, Lord Byron began to have relationships with his half sister, named Augusta. With Lady Frances Webster, however, he also carried on a relationship. His remorse can be seen in the publication of his next three volumes of poetry, including his most famous, The Corsair. In 1815, Lord Byron married Anne Milbanke and the two conceived a daughter together. The marriage was nothing more than a cover up from Byron’s real sexual interests. However, with greater public pressure about his sexuality and especially about his relationship with his sister, he left England permanently.

In Geneva, he settled and wrote another volume of Childe Harold. In Italy, after several more relationships, he wrote the fourth volume to the book of poetry. He then released a poem called Beppo and thereafter began working on his greatest work, Don Juan. Following, Lord Byron became involved with a periodical in The Liberal. By the mid 1820s, Bryon got involved in the politics of Greece and looked for adventure amongst the islands that had brought him his most poignant stories. Thereafter, he passed away after contracting an illness from which he didn’t recover. He would later be recognized as one of England’s most prominent poets.

Byron Letter to Shelley, 1821

to Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Ravenna, April 26, 1821

The child continues doing well, and the accounts are regular and favorable. It is gratifying to me that you and Mrs Shelley do not disapprove of the step which I have taken, which is merely temporary.

I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats - is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of "Endymion" in the Quarterly. It was severe, - but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.

I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem; it was rage, and resistance, and redress - but not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.

"Expect not life from pain nor danger free,
Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee."

You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry, - because it is of no school. I read Cenci - but, besides that I think the subject essentially undramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists, as models. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to my drama, pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.

I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know if it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead - or that he was alive and so sensitive - I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.

You want me to undertake a great Poem - I have not the inclination nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference - not to life, for we love it by instinct - but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians has latterly disappointed me for many reasons, - some public, some personal. My respects to Mrs S.
Yours ever.
BYRON
P.S. Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not you take a run here alone?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The child Byron refers to was Allegra, his daughter with Shelley's sister-in-law Claire Clairmont.

"When I Have Fears" by Keats

When I Have Fears
by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
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 think 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.

John Keats

"When We Two Parted" by Lord Byron

When We Two Parted
by Lord Byron

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:—
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met—
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.

"Oh! Snatched Away In Beauty's Bloom" by Lord Byron

Oh! Snatched Away In Beauty's Bloom

Oh! snatched away in beauty's bloom,
On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
But on thy turf shall roses rear
Their leaves, the earliest of the year;
And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom:

And oft by yon blue gushing stream
Shall Sorrow lean her drooping head,
And feed deep thought with many a dream,
And lingering pause and lightly tread;
Fond wretch! as if her step disturbed the dead!

Away! ye know that tears are vain,
That death nor heeds nor hears distress:
Will this unteach us to complain?
Or make one mourner weep the less?
And thou -who tell'st me to forget,
Thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet.

"Ode on Melancholy", by Keats

Ode on Melancholy

NO, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries, 5
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. 10

2.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, 15
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. 20

3.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight 25
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. 30

MAENADS

The MAENADS or Bacchants are women sacred to Dionysus, maddened by his inspiring power.

"The Writer" by Wilbur

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

PEROY BYSSHE SHELLEY BIO

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, August 4, 1792; and his eventful life came suddenly to a sad termination. He had gone out in a boat to Leghorn to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy, and while returning on the eighth of July, 1822, the boat sank in the Bay of Spezia, and all on board perished. When his body floated to shore a volume of Keats' poetry was found open in Shelley's coat pocket. The remains were reduced to ashes and deposited in the Protestant burial ground at Rome, near those of a child he had lost in that city.

His father was a member of the House of Commons. The family line could be traced back to one of the followers of William of Normandy. Thus in noble blood Shelley was more fortunate than most of his brother poets, considering the estimate that England placed upon the distinction of caste. He had all the advantages of wealth and rank, and hence much was expected of him.

At the age of ten Shelley was placed in the public school of Sion House, but the harsh treatment of instructors and school-fellows rendered his life most unpleasant. Such treatment might have been called out by his fondness for wild romances and his devotion to reading instead of more solid school work. While very young he wrote two novels, "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian," works of some merit. Shelley was next sent to Eton, where his sensitive nature was again deeply wounded by ill usage. He finally revolted against all authority, and this disposition manifested itself strongly in Eton.

Shelley next went to Oxford, but he studied irregularly, except in his peculiar views, where he seemed to be constant in his thought and speculations. At the age of fifteen, he wrote two short romances, threw off various political effusions, and published a volume of political rhymes entitled "Posthumous Poems of My Aunt Margaret Nicholson," the said Margaret being the unhappy maniac who attempted to stab George III. He also issued a syllabus of Hume's "Essays," and at the same time challenged the authorities of Oxford to a public discussion of the subject. He was only seventeen at the time. In company with Mr. Hogg, a fellow-student, he composed a treatise entitled "The Necessity of Atheism." For this publication, both of the heterodox students were expelled from the college in 1811. Mr. Hogg removed to York, while Shelley went to London, where he still received support from his family.

His expulsion from Oxford led also to an inexcusable confusion in his social life. He had become strongly attached to Miss Grove, an accomplished young lady, but after he was driven from college her father prohibited communication between them. He next became strongly attached to Miss Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful lady of sixteen, but of social position inferior to his. An elopement soon followed, and a marriage in August, 1811. Shelley's father was so enraged at this act that he cut off his son's allowance. "An uncle, Captain Pilfold--one of Nelson's captains at the Nile and Trafalgar--generously supplied the youthful pair with money, and they lived for some time in Cumberland, where Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Wilson. His literary ambition must have been excited by this intercourse; but he suddenly departed for Dublin, whence he again removed to the Isle of Man, and afterward to Wales. After they had been married three years and two children were born to them they separated. In March, 1814, Shelley was married a second time to Harriet Westbrook, the ceremony taking place in St. George's Church, Hanover Square. Unfortunately, about this time the poet became enamored of the daughter of Mr. Godwin, a young lady who could `feel poetry and understand philosophy,' which he thought his wife was incapable of, and Harriet refusing to agree to a separation, Shelley, at the end of July in the same year, left England in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin."

Upon his return to London, it was found that by the deed, the fee-simple of the Shelley estate would pass to the poet upon his father's death. Accordingly he was enabled to raise money with which he purchased an annuity from his father. He again repaired to the continent in 1816, when he met Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. Later he returned to England and settled at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. His unfortunate wife committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine River in December, 1816, and Shelley married Miss Godwin a few weeks afterward (December 30).

Leaving his unfortunate social career, we come now to consider his poetical works. At the age of eighteen he wrote "Queen Mab," a poem containing passages of great power and melody. In 1818 he produced "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," full of almost unexcelled descriptive passages; also the "Revolt of Islam." Shelley was most earnest in his attentions to the poor. A severe spell of sickness was brought on by visiting the poor cottages in winter. Poor health induced him to go to Italy, accordingly on the twelfth of March, 1818, he left England forever.

In 1819 appeared "Rosalind and Helen," and "The Council," a tragedy dedicated to Leigh Hunt. "As an effort of intellectual strength and an embodiment of human passion it may challenge a comparison with any dramatic work since Otway, and is incomparably the best of the poet's productions." In 1821 was published "Prometheus Unbound," which he had written while resident in Rome. "This poem," he says, "was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to inspiration, were the inspiration of this drama." Shelley also produced "Hellas," "The Witch of Atlas," "Adonais," "Epipsychidion," and several short works with scenes translated from Calderon and the "Faust of Goethe." These closed his literary labors, for he died as described in the beginning of this sketch, in 1822.

A complete edition of "Shelley's Poetical Works" with notes by his widow was published in four volumes in 1839, and the same lady gave to the world two volumes of his prose "Essays," "Letters from Abroad," "Translations and Fragments." Shelley's was a dream of romance--a tale of mystery and grief. That he was sincere in his opinions and benevolent in his intentions is now undoubted. He looked upon the world with the eyes of a visionary bent on unattainable schemes of intellectual excellence and supremacy. His delusion led to misery and made him, for a time, unjust to others. It alienated him from his family and friends, blasted his prospects in life, and distempered all his views and opinions. It is probable that, had he lived to a riper age, he might have modified some of those extreme speculative and pernicious tenets, and we have no doubt that he would have risen into a purer atmosphere of poetical imagination.

The troubled and stormy dawn was fast yielding to the calm noonday brightness. He had worn out some of his fierce antipathies and morbid affections; a happy domestic circle was gathered around him, and the refined simplicity of his tastes and habits, joined to wider and juster views of human life, would imperceptibly have given a new tone to his thoughts and studies. The splendor of his lyrical verse--so full, rich and melodious--and the grandeur of some of his conceptions, stamp him a great poet. His influence on the succession of English poets since his time has been inferior only to that of Wordsworth. Macaulay doubted whether any modern poet possessed in an equal degree the "highest qualities of the great ancient masters." His diction is singularly classical and imposing in sound and structure. He was a close student of the Greek and Italian poets. The descriptive passages in "Alastor" and the river-voyage at the conclusion of the "Revolt of Islam," are among the most finished of his productions. His better genius leads him to the pure waters and the depth of forest shades, which none of his contemporaries knew so well how to describe. Some of the minor poems, "The Cloud," "The Skylark," etc., are imbued with a fine lyrical and poetic spirit.

THE CLOUD.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet birds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun,
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.


Biography from: http://www.2020site.org/poetry/index.html

"Ode to the West Wind" by Shelley (1820)

Ode to the West Wind

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

_____________________________________________________________

1. According to Shelley's note, "this poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions" (188). Florence was the home of Dante Alighieri, creator of terza rima, the form of his Divine Comedy. Zephyrus was the west wind, son of Astrœus and Aurora.

2. Having taken a boat trip from Naples west to the Bay of Baiae on December 8, 1818 Shelley wrote to T. L. Peacock about sailing over a sea "so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with glaucous sea-moss, and the leaves and branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water," and about "passing the Bay of Baiae, and observing the ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent sea under our boat" (Letters, II, 61). Baiae is the site of ruined underwater Roman villas. pumice: lava cooled into a porous, foam-like stone.

3. "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World."--"Defence of Poetry", Shelley

4. "Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody."--"Defence of Poetry"

5. "Language is vitally metaphorical; that is it marks the before unapprehended relations of things"."--"Defence of Poetry"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Bio

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 - 1834
English romantic poet, philosopher and critic. His works include Poems on Various Subjects (1796), Lyrical Ballads (1798) written with Wordsworth and which includes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, conversation poems Fears in Solitude, Frost at Midnight, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, The Nightingale and the "dream" poem Kubla Khan (1797-8). His love poems include Love (1799); Dejection: an Ode (1902) was about his addiction to opium. Sibylline Leaves (1817) was the first of his collected works. His major work the Biographia Literaria was written after his rediscovery of Christianity and Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830) are religious prose. Along with Wordsworth, Coleridge was one of the founders of the Romantic movement. Other romantic poets include Byron, Keats, Burns and Wordsworth.

"Frost At Midnight", Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Frost At Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams ! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O ! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come !
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams !
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book :
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike !

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought !
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

"Ode To A Nightingale" by Keats

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 happy in thy happiness,---
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain---
To thy high requiem become a sod

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep?

"He is gone..." Keats' Death

In the film we get only the briefest shot of the house at the Piazza di Spagna, where Keats died, and Severn's letter bearing the news is read out by Charles Brown, Keats's best friend, to the distraught Fanny:

My dear Brown,

He is gone - he died with the most perfect ease - he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. "Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy - don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come!" I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death - so quiet - that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now - I am broken down from four nights' watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone. The Doctors could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his poor body to the grave on Monday ...

J. S.

A window to the soul of John Keats

A window to the soul of John Keats

As the Romantic poet is celebrated in a major film, our writer searches for his spirit in the city in which he diedStefanie Marsh

It is 12.30pm on the Piazza di Spagna and a trail of English literature students are stumbling up the stairs of No 26. They had arranged to meet here at noon, but either the sheer excitement of Rome or its nightmarish public transport system has sabotaged any attempt at punctuality: befuddled and lightly sweating, they are led into an ante-chamber, a small wood-panelled library wheretake their seats, slump-shouldered, gormless as a herd of cattle.

Where are we? In one of Rome’s “better kept secrets” as the travel guides like to refer to the third-floor apartment where John Keats spent the final months of his life. Officially this is a sort of a museum, but it feels more like a sanctuary, a place of literary pilgrimage where Keats-lovers have been known to shed tears when they are confronted by the tiny wooden sleigh-bed where the great Romantic poet finally succumbed, at the age of 25, to tuberculosis.

A few personal notes in the visitors’ book convey the meaning of Keats to his many admirers: “I’ve wanted to come here for 40 years. All my life,” reads one. Another chronicles the death of a woman’s husband, himself a poet. The woman has found, she says, great comfort in reading Keats’s work and visiting his home in Rome.

It’s not clear, though, that the students know what they’re doing here, and when the head curator of the Keats-Shelley house interrupts their teenage reverie with an impatient harrumph, a little tremor of apprehension passes through the room.Katherine Payling, who has worked here for 12 years, is one of those passionate academics with that rare ability to convey phenomenal knowledge in just a few well-chosen sentences. Even in her casual attire, she is imperious.

A window is open and for a while the noise of the Piazza di Spagna threatens to demolish what’s left of the students’ concentration. Of course, it’s a more modern sort of a noise than Keats would have heard — more mobile phones, fewer horses hooves — and the view from the window has also changed since the early 19th century when the Piazza was dominated by artisans and flowersellers. Nowadays this is where you come to shop at Dior or the shirtmaker “Byron”. Competing for attention with the church of Trinità dei Monti some clever advertisers have hung a gigantic advertisement for yellow neon gloves. But the fundamentals are still in place as Keats would have seen them: the scalinita, of course, and the Pincian Hill behind it. The splashing of the Fontana della Baraccia remains just about audible above the din of hundreds of tourists that are sprawled over the Spanish Steps.

Payling closes the window. “I’ll make a start or else we won’t get anything done,” she says. “OK — what have you read?”

After an excruciating silence, a trembling pimply boy volunteers: “Ode to a Grecian Urn?” Payling says: “Good,” and, encouraged, a girl in a yellow cardigan blurts, “To a Skylark!” Payling shoots back: “No. That’s Shelley,” and the students lower their heads in embarrassment.

It’s always shaming to be confronted by your own ignorance. I spent the flight here trying to get to grips with Andrew Motion’s brick of a Keats biography. Halfway through the introduction it struck me that I couldn’t name a single Keats poem.

“This is like a pub quiz,” says Payling with some exasperation. Eventually, it is established that most of her audience have read Bright Star, or at least heard of Bright Star, as Jane Campion’s forthcoming Keats biopic bears the same name. “So it’s fresh in your mind,” she says, generously. And then she gets on to the good stuff. It’s Keats’s life that often draws people to his poetry. And it’s only when Payling asks: “Do you know how Keats died?” that the roomful of students finally begins to come alive.

“Tuberculosis!” beams one girl.

“That’s right,” Payling says. “How about Shelley?”

“He drowned,” chorus more voices.

“Right. He drowned a week before his 30th birthday. Byron, as you know, died of fever three years later. Which means Keats, Shelley and Byron all died within three years of each other. By 1824 all the second-generation Romantic poets were dead.” The room ponders the possible significance of this. Then Payling lobs the students another grenade: “Can you tell me who the first generation were?” Another ghastly silence.

“Words . . . Worth?” One girl finally ventures, pronouncing the former poet laureate’s name as if he were a discount supermarket chain. “Yes,” Payling says. “Anyone else? Who wrote Kubla Khan?” She is forced to answer her own question: “Coleridge. And there is one other early Romantic, who was an illustrator as well.”

A girl with a heavy cold and heavier eyeliner whispers: “Blake?” Satisfied, Payling says: “Which means the first generation of Romantic poets outlived the second.”

It is the tragedy of the second generation that fascinates the young. And most appallingly, no, catastrophically, tragic of all, was the life of Keats, a man pursued by bad luck from the start. Payling told me earlier that she still feels great sadness about the poet’s life: “He is so easy to like; you can’t say that of all writers. It’s easy to admire his aspiration, but his hopes were all dashed.”

As Payling now tells the room: “There is a clear distinction between Shelley, Byron and Keats that would have affected how reviewers received Keats’s work. Shelley and Byron were the sons of aristocrats while Keats was the son of an innkeeper. He was to become, no, not a doctor. An apothecarist.” She goes on to explain that the snobbery within Britain’s literary establishment at the time meant that many critics felt that Keats could not be taken seriously as a poet and reviewed the first two volumes of his work with deliberate spite.

Keats’s origins counted as his first stroke of bad luck. When he decided to abandon a career in medicine to concentrate on writing poetry, it meant that any love affair was unlikely to end in marriage. So it was the poet’s bad fortune to fall deeply in love with 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, who lived next door when Keats moved to Hampstead in his twenties: the posthumous publication of his love letters to her was to scandalise Victorian society.

Had he been a more roguish character, the impossibility of this relationship might have not caused him such pain, especially at the end of his life when it became clear that he would never see Fanny again.

Keats’s life was not merely bookended by tragedy but invaded by it at every turn: when he was 8 his father was killed in a riding accident. His mother’s second marriage collapsed, but not before her husband took possession of most of her wealth. She returned to her children but died when Keats was 10. His brother Tom succumbed to tuberculosis and the poet diagnosed the same fatal disease in himself not long after: one night, having coughed up some blood he is recorded as saying: “I know the colour of this blood: it is arterial blood . . . that drop of blood is my death-warrant. I must die.”

His doctor prescribed starvation and bloodletting, which only exaggerated his symptoms. On July 5, 1820, he was ordered to travel to Italy. The country fascinated him; he had mastered the language well enough to read Dante, but the circumstances of his journey robbed it of any pleasure.

That September, he sailed from Gravesend with his friend, the artist Joseph Severn. The journey was a minor catastrophe — storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship’s progress. When it finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days because of a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on November 14 by which time all hope of a warmer climate had evaporated. He rallied briefly, wrote his last known letter on November 30 and relapsed on December 10. Agonised by his separation from Fanny, thwarted by the literary establishment and close to death, he never left the apartment in Piazza di Spagna again. He had wanted to take his own life but Severn confiscated a bottle of laudanum, a decision the artist later partially regretted. On February 23, disillusioned and in great emotional and physical turmoil Keats died. It was 11pm, his final words were, famously: “Severn, I, lift me up, I am dying — I shall die easy; don’t be frightened, be firm, and thank God it has come.”

Once you have visited Keats’s apartment in Rome it is impossible not to be drawn farther south, on a 15-minute metro ride, to the Protestant Cemetery. Like the apartment, it is presided over by a dedicatedex-pat, Amanda Thursfield, who is justly proud of this unexpectedly peaceful spot, flanked though it is by a boisterous Italian roundabout. Germans come here to see where Goethe’s only son, August, is buried; Americans to admire The Angel of Grief, an exquisite tomb carved by the sculptor William Story, or Daisy Miller, the heroine of Henry James’s novella. Italians rarely visit, says Thursfield, though members of the country’s Left will drop in to see the tomb of Antonio Gramsci, Italy’s Marxist luminary. “We live more alongside our dead in Britain.”

In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets. Keats wanted an anonymous headstone. During his lifetime, the reviewers had never ceased their sniping and even Wordsworth had dismissed his poetry as “a pretty piece of paganism”. Famously, the epitaph that Keats chose for himself was: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

“It is a pentameter,” Thursfield says. “There is a sense there of impermanence, that his name wouldn’t survive. He wanted to be a great poet, that’s what he felt was the whole purpose of his life.” There is something terrible about the image of the young Keats, talented and brave, cooped up in a room in the centre of what was then Europe’s most culturally vibrant city, helpless against his disease.

Severn and his friend Charles Brown later added a lyre with broken strings to his headstone, and words explaining how the poet chose his epitaph “on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his heart at the Malicious Power of his enemies”.

Beside the grave you’ll often find epistles, teenage attempts at romantic poetry scrawled on notepaper, and lovingly dedicated letters. The grass in front of the grave is worn down to the soil. “People spend a lot of time here,” says Thursfield. “They’re mainly sensitive types. Academics, young people, who’ve been touched by his poetry.”

Though Shelley, one of Keats’s most fervent champions, is also buried here, “people seem more drawn to Keats’s”. When Oscar Wilde visited he was so moved that he prostrated himself on the grass beside it. Severn often came to see his friend. “Poor Keats has now his wish — his humble wish,” he wrote, ”he is at peace in the quiet grave. I walked there a few days ago and found the daisies had grown all over it. It is one of the most lovely retired spots in Rome. You cannot have such a place in England . I visit it with a delicious melancholy which relieves my sadness.”

It is sad still. A whimsical-looking girl is hovering about with a note in her hand. The English-lit class will visit tomorrow, a little less preoccupied by their mobile phones now that they have heard this young poet’s extraordinary life story.

La belle damned

Keats’s friends did not like Fanny Brawne and critics and biographers have not been kind to her since. This is partly because of the way half-truths about the poet developed after his death. His friends quarrelled over who had the right to compose his biography. Fanny, who did not want to have any part in this ugly dogfight, wrote that “the kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which unhappy circumstances have condemned him”. It was a big mistake on her part, even if made with the best of intentions, as her critics used it as evidence of her unfeeling heart. She showed, they said, “so little belief in his poetic reputation”; she was “no mate for the poet either in heart or mind”.

Most importantly, Keats’s friends believed that Fanny did not love him as much as he did her and that his crazy obsession had served only to hasten his death from TB. Some thought that the blood vessel in his lungs had burst under the stress of sexual frustration, living so close to Fanny but unable to consummate his love. Leigh Hunt told the story of going for a walk with Keats on Hampstead Heath, and sitting on the bench in Well Walk while the poet told him, “with unaccustomed tears in his eyes” that “his heart was breaking”.

Caricatured and hated, Fanny was the unprepossessing femme fatale of the Keats story. Unable to fight back because of the potential scandal that the revelation of her relationship with Keats might cause, she kept silent, secretly holding on to the poet’s letters, which were published after her death. Her letters to Keats were lost for ever. The emotional upheaval of reading her letters sent to him in Rome was too great for the dying poet, and he preferred simply to clutch them to his chest unopened, requesting that they be buried with him in his coffin.
Jennifer Wallace

The author directs Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci", by Keats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by John Keats

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lilly on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kissed to sleep.

And there we slumbered on the moss,
And there I dreamed, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried--"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

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

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