John Keats Quotes page 3

“Tis the pest
Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.”

Stanza 30
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!”

Bk. II, l. 365
Endymion (1818)

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 8
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“So many, and so many, and such glee.”

“They will explain themselves — as all poems should do without any comment.”

Bk. IV
Endymion (1818)

“Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is — Love, forgive us! — cinders, ashes, dust.”

Letter to George Keats (1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

John Keats Lamia

"Lamia", Pt. II, l. 1
Poems (1820)

“He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.”

“And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?”

Bk. II, l. 211
Endymion (1818)

John Keats Lamia

"Lamia", Pt. I, l. 61
Poems (1820)

“And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!”

John Keats Ode to Psyche

"Ode to Psyche", st. 5
Poems (1820)

“As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave.”

“To his sight
The husk of natural objects opens quite
To the core; and every secret essence there
Reveals the elements of good and fair;
Making him see, where Learning hath no light.”

Bk. I, l. 72
Hyperion: A Fragment (1819)

“At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

"The Poet," London Magazine (Oct 1821)

John Keats Letter to George and Thomas Keats

Letter to George and Thomas Keats (December 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

“The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide.”

“O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.”

Stanza 4
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

John Keats book La Belle Dame sans Merci

Stanza I
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)

“Works of genius are the first things in this world.”

“She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears —
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found. —
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.”

Letter to G. and F. Keats (January 13, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“Call the world if you please "The vale of soul-making."”

Stanza 40
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

“A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power;
’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.”

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (April 21, 1819)
Letters (1817–1820)

John Keats Sleep and Poetry

"Sleep and Poetry", st. 11
Poems (1817)

“Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?”

“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.”

"Lines on the Mermaid Tavern", l. 1–4
Poems (1820)

John Keats To Autumn

"To Autumn", st. 3
Poems (1820)

“Time, that aged nurse,
Rocked me to patience.”

“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”

Bk. I, l. 705
Endymion (1818)

“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”

Stanza 7
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

John Keats Lamia

"Lamia", Pt. II, l. 229
Poems (1820)

“The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.”

“And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.”

Bk. II
Hyperion: A Fragment (1819)

“The poetical character… is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.”

Bk. I, l. 20
Endymion (1818)

John Keats Letter to Richard Woodhouse

Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried- "La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"”

John Keats book La Belle Dame sans Merci

Stanza X
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)

“I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.”

“I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.”

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (October 14, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half-heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation—balmy pain.”

Letter to James Hessey (October 9, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”

I stood tip-toe upon a little Hill; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 5
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“To one who has been long in city pent,
’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven.”

“For cruel ’tis,” said she,
“To steal my Basil-pot away from me.”

" Sonnet. To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent http://www.bartleby.com/126/23.html" <br class="br">Poems (1817)

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

"Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil", st. 62
Poems (1820)

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 5
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

John Keats Ode on Melancholy

"Ode on Melancholy", st. 3
Poems (1820)

“That large utterance of the early gods!”

“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.”

Bk. I
Hyperion: A Fragment (1819)

“And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.”

"This living hand" (1819)

“No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade.”

Stanza 42
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

John Keats Ode on Melancholy

"Ode on Melancholy", st. 1
Poems (1820)

“In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.”

“There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.”

Bk. I, l. 11
Endymion (1818)

“A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing.”

Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (September 22, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.”

Stanza 18
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

“And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings in a distant mart?
Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb.”

Letter to his brother, (January 23, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.”

" Sonnet. Addressed to the Same http://www.bartleby.com/126/27.html" (Benjamin Robert Haydon) <br class="br">Poems (1817)

John Keats book La Belle Dame sans Merci

Stanza IV
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)

“The sweet converse of an innocent mind.”

“As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.”

Sonnet, To Solitude; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”

Stanza 23
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

“I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.”

Bk. I, l. 1
Hyperion: A Fragment (1819)