RPO -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : Keats

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Keats

1The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;

2 The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!

3 The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold

4 To the red rising moon, and loud and deep

5The nightingale is singing from the steep;

6 It is midsummer, but the air is cold;

7 Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold

8 A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.

9Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,

10 On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name

11 Was writ in water." And was this the meed

12Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write:

13 "The smoking flax before it burst to flame

14 Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

Notes

1] See Keats' poem Endymion, which tells of a youth searching for beauty who is rewarded by the moon goddess with unending sleep. Longfellow associates Keats with his own subject.

5] See Keats' poem Ode to a Nightingale.

10-11] The epitaph Keats wrote for himself.

13-14] Isaiah 42.3: "A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth."

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Bibliographical and Critical Notes, Riverside Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), III, 201-02. PS 2250 E90 Robarts Library.
First publication date: 1875
Publication date note: In The Masque of Pandora
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 4:2002/4/4*4:2002/4/4

Composition date: 4 December 1873
Form: Italian Sonnet
Rhyme: abbaabbacdecde

Other poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow