Went to the used book store and found a book on all over John Keats, one of the greatest Elizabethan Romantic poets of his time. Of course with most of the greats, his genius wasn’t fully appreciated until his death. Broke and in debt for most of his life he wrote poems that are like velvet to the mind. Here is one of my favorite ones…
Written on a Blank Page in Shakespeare’s Poem, facing a Lover’s Complaint,
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids
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 steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for eer 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.
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids
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 steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for eer 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.