John Keats citations

Page 3

“My chest of books divide amongst my friends.”

“We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.”

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”

“To Sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.”

“The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.”

“It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.”

“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

“To feel forever 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 in death.”

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

“Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free?”

“You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

“Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.”

“And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed,
Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.”

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.”

“I will clamber through the clouds and exist.”

“When by my solitary hearth I sit,
When no fair dreams before my “mind’s eye” flit,
And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;
Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,
And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head.”

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

“Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away.”

“I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.”

“then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

“Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,
- Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead.
Awake! arise! my love and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”

“Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”

“The air is all softness.”

“Already with thee! tender is the night.”

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death”

“I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.”