(3) “Where are the songs of spring—ay, where are they?
Think not of them: thou hast thy music too,
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
(4) “But, when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud,
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave.
“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
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
(5) “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
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 grey hairs;
Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
“Darkling I listen: and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,—
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
“The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
“Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?”
To one or two of these phrases a few words of comment may be given. That axiom which concludes the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,”
is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry of Keats contains: it pairs with and transcends