To Fanny

By John Keats 1795–1821 John Keats

I cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!

Merciful love that tantalizes not,

One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,

Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot!

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest

Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,—

Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,

Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,

Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,

Forget, in the mist of idle misery,

Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind

Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

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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