FROM THE POEMS OF JOHN KEATS

 

          FROM THE POEMS OF JOHN KEATS

The English poet John Keats was born in 1795 and died in 1821 at the young age of 26, yet he earned a permanent place in English literature.

As a romantic  poet, says Edward Albert in “A Short History of English Literature”,  whereas Lord Byron (1788-1824) looked around and criticized;  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) looked forward and aspired; Keats looked backward into the romantic past and sighed.

Keats’s great search was for the joy that lies in beauty, and this beauty he found most easily in the past.

Physically he was a weakling, suffered from consumption, studied medicine, wandered in search of health and died in Rome where he lies buried beside Shelley.

  What follows are a few quotable lines from a handful of his poems.

* A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. ------From Endymion.

 

**Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d.--------From Ode On A Grecian Urn.

 

***Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.----From Ode to  Autumn.

 

****Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.

 

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,

And lead a life of woe, but not forsake

His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom which is but to wake.----From On Death.

 

*****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.-----From Ode To A Nightingale.

 

******Thou,, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral !

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’---that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. ------Last stanza of Ode On A Grecian Urn

 

                                                *******

G.R.Kanwal

14^th January 2025