Representative Poetry Online
On this day: February 7th
Random Poem of the Day
2 Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
3And watching, with eternal lids apart,
4 Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
5The moving waters at their priestlike task
6 Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
7Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
8 Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
9No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
10 Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
11To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
12 Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
13Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
14And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Notes
1] First published in a Plymouth newspaper (1838). Copied by Keats into Severn's copy of Shakespeare's Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint." September 28, 1820. For almost a century this sonnet was generally believed to be Keats's last poem; it now seems fairly certain that it was written not later than April, 1819, perhaps in February. Back to Line