by Keats · Cluster: Joy · Animals · Comic Verse Song
Abstract
A song embracing joy and sorrow together, weaving paradoxical pairings of mirth and death, roses and serpents; the union of opposites, melancholy and the sweetness of pain.
Connections
Motifs: Death, Rose, Serpent Snake, Grave Themes & Concepts: Paradox, Melancholy, Joy Forms & Genres: Comic Verse Song Historical References: Greek Mythology
Testo integrale / Full text
Under the flag
Of each his faction, they to battle bring
Their embryon atoms.
Milton
Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,
Lethe’s weed and Hermes’ feather;
Come today, and come tomorrow,
I do love you both together!
I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;
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 shipwreck’d 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 hearache!
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.