Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: – do I wake or sleep?
But were there ever any Writhed not at passed joy?
Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?
In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne’er remember Apollo’s summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.
I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
The opinion I have of the generality of women – who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
I have nothing to speak of but my self-and what can I say but what I feel.
The grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead.
The poppies hung Dew-dabbled on their stalks.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?
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 poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.
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 gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair.
Why employ intelligent and highly paid ambassadors and then go and do their work for them? You don’t buy a canary and sing yourself.
You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour...
And when thou art weary I’ll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.
But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.