Keats_Poems

Brand quotes Ben Jonson.

And on sweet St. Agnes' night,
Pleas'd yon with the promis'd sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.


02.LONELY SOUNDS.

Undescribed sounds,
That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors.


03.ORION.

At this, with madden'd stare,
And lifted hands, and trembling lips he stood
Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood,
Or blind Orion hungry for the morn.


04.CIRCE AND HER VICTIMS.

Fierce, wan,
And tyrannizing was the lady's look,
As over them a gnarled staff she shook.
Ofttimes upon the sudden she laugh'd out,
And from a basket emptied to the rout
Clusters of grapes, the which they raven'd quick
And roar'd for more, with many a hungry lick
About their shaggy jaws. Avenging, slow,
Anon she took a branch of mistletoe,
And emptied on it a black dull gurgling phial:
Groan'd one and all, as if some piercing trial
Were sharpening for their pitiable bones.
She lifted up the charm : appealing groans
From their poor breasts went suing to her ear
In vain: remorseless as an infant's bier,
She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil ;
Whereat was heard a noise of painful toil,
Increasing gradual to a tempest rage,
Shrieks, yells, and groans, of torture-pilgrimage.


05.A BETTER ENCHANTRESS IMPRISONED IN THE SHAPE OF A SERPENT.

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue,
Striped like a zebra, speckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson-barr'd,
And full of silver moons, that as she breath'd
Dissolv'd or brighter shone, or interwreath'd
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries.
So rainbow-sided, full of miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanc'd lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar;
Her head was serpent; but, ah bitter sweet!
She had a woman's mouth, with all its pearls complete.


06.SATURN DETHRONED.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head,
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deaden'd more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin sand large footmarks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed.


07.THE VOICE OF A MELANCHOLY GODDESS SPEAKING TO SATURN.

As when upon a tranced summer-night
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust,
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave:
So came these words, and went.


08.A FALLEN GOD.

-- the bright Titan, frenzied with new woes,
Unused to bend, by hard compulsion, bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch'd himself, in grief and radiance faint.


09.OTHER TITANS FALLEN.

Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor,
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.