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John Keats (1795-1821)

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles


              1My spirit is too weak -- mortality
              2    Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
              3    And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
              4Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
              5Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
              6    Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
              7    That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
              8Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
              9Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
            10    Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
            11So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
            12    That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
            13Wasting of old Time -- with a billowy main --
            14    A sun -- a shadow of a magnitude.

Notes

1] Elgin Marbles: fragmentary sculptures taken largely from the frieze and pediment of the Parthenon in Athens by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (1766-1841), sold to the British government, and placed in the British Museum in 1816.

13] main: sea.

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 John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958): 478.
First publication date: 9 March 1817
Publication date note: In The Examiner.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: 2007
Recent editing: 1:2007/8/21*1:2007/8/22

Form: sonnet
Rhyme: abbaabbacdcdcd

Other poems by John Keats

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