Selected Poems and Letters. John Keats

should be sung

      Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

      Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

      The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

      I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly,

      And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,

      Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side

      In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof

      Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran

      A brooklet, scarce espied:

      ’Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

      Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

      They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;

      Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;

      Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,

      As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

      And ready still past kisses to outnumber

      At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

      The winged boy I knew;

      But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?

      His Psyche true!

      O latest born and loveliest vision far

      Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!

      Fairer than Phœbe’s sapphire-region’d star,

      Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

      Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,

      Nor altar heap’d with flowers;

      Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

      Upon the midnight hours;

      No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

      From chain-swung censer teeming;

      No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

      Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

      O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

      Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

      When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

      Holy the air, the water, and the fire;

      Yet even in these days so far retir’d

      From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

      Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

      I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.

      So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

      Upon the midnight hours;

      Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

      From swinged censer teeming;

      Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

      Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

      Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

      In some untrodden region of my mind,

      Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

      Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

      Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees

      Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

      And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

      The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;

      And in the midst of this wide quietness

      A rosy sanctuary will I dress

      With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

      With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

      With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

      Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

      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!

       On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

      Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,

      And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

      Round many western islands have I been

      Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

      Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

      That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

      Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

      Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

      Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

      When a new planet swims into his ken;

      Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

      He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

      Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

      Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

       To Autumn

      I.

      Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

      Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

      Conspiring with him how to load and bless

      With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

      To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

      And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

      With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

      And still more, later flowers for the bees,

      Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

      II.

      Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

      Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

      Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

      Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

      Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

      Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

      And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

      Steady thy laden head across a brook;

      Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

      III.

      Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

      Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –

      While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

      And