Just wanted to share a part I was reading last night from his book of poems.
I will share more as I finish the book:)
It was a jasmine bower, all bestrown
With golden moss. His every sense had grown
Ethereal for pleasure; 'bove his head
Flew a delight half-graspable; his tread
Was Hesperean; to his capable ears
Silence was music from the holy spheres;
A dewy luxury was in his eyes;
The little flowers felt his pleasant sighs
And stirr'd them faintly. Verdant cave and cell
He wander'd through, oft wondering at such swell
Of sudden exaltation: but, "Alas!
Said he, "will all this gush of feeling pass
Away in solitude? And must they wane,
Like melodies upon a sandy plain,
Without an echo? Then shall I be left
So sad, so melancholy, so bereft!
I think the rhymes are cute. I particularly like this line: "Silence was music from the holy spheres"
ReplyDeleteme too
DeleteI love Keats so much. That line, "'bove his head flew a delight half-graspable" is pure perfection. It's what poetry is all about to me - finding a way to say something ordinary in an utterly extraordinary way.
ReplyDeleteLove that you posted this, Mayumi. Endymion… "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever…" Notice how Keats in his iambic pentameter, like in his poem "To Sleep" that we looked at in class on Monday… or in the Justice poem's iambic tetrameter from "First Death"— how the poems are so fundamentally sensory, driven by image and story (and underlying emotion of course :) — with baseline meter as a hypnotic guide, but never "sing-song" rhyme & meter! Meter and rhyme are just the Bass line in formal verse! All the gorgeousness is in the variations on that baseline, variations that are often in tension with the baseline and thereby reflecting the poem's content & tone! — and in the sensory experiences of the images and language. Thanks for sharing.
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