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By John Keats 1795–1821 John Keats

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs

Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell

Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well

Would passion arm me for the enterprise;

But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies;

No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;

I am no happy shepherd of the dell

Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.

Yet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet,

Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses

When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication.

Ah! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet,

And when the moon her pallid face discloses,

I’ll gather some by spells, and incantation.

Biography

John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But at each point in his development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, . . .

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