Happy (Belated) Birthday to John Keats

November 1, 2012

Yesterday, October 31, would have been my beloved John Keats’s 217th birthday. My favorite of the second-wave Romantic poets, Keats deserves more than a belated mention; but it matters little, because his truth is beautiful and his beauty is truth every day.

Keats’s death mask, located at the Shelley and Keats Memorial House in Rome, Italy

Here’s a favorite of mine, from 1818, just three years before his untimely death—

When I have fears that I may cease to be
    Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
    Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
    Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
    Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
    That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
    Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.