Will be elysium—an eternal book
Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves and flowers—about the playing
Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.
This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.