Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/79

Rh Fair and foul I love together.

Meadows sweet where flames are under,

And a giggle at a wonder;

Visage sage at pantomime;

Funeral, and steeple-chime;

Infant playing with a skull;

Morning fair, and shipwrecked hull;

Nightshade with the woodbine kissing;

Serpents in red roses hissing;

Cleopatra regal-dress'd

With the aspic at her breast;

Dancing music, music sad,

Both together, sane and mad;

Muses bright, and muses pale;

Sombre Saturn, Momus hale;—

Laugh and sigh, and laugh again;

Oh, the sweetness of the pain!

Muses bright and muses pale,

Bare your faces of the veil;

Let me see; and let me write

Of the day, and of the night—

Both together:—let me slake

All my thirst for sweet heart-ache!

Let my bower be of yew,

Interwreath'd with myrtles new;

Pines and lime-trees full in bloom,

And my couch a low grass-tomb.

whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,

Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,

And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars,

To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou, whose only book has been the light

Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on

Night after night when Phœbus was away,

To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,

And yet my song comes native with the warmth.

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,

And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens

At thought of idleness cannot be idle,

And he 's awake who thinks himself asleep.

 'Dark eyes are dearer far Than those that mock the hyacinthine bell'

'T is the life of heaven,—the domain

Of Cynthia,—the wide palace of the sun,—

The tent of Hesperus, and all his train,—

The bosomer of clouds, gold, gray, and dun.

Blue! 'T is the life of waters—ocean

And all its vassal streams, pools numberless,

May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can

Subside, if not to dark blue nativeness.

Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green,

Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,—

Forget-me-not,—the blue bell,—and, that queen