by Keats · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
A sonnet on accepting mortal life with temperate calm rather than vexing oneself; uses rose, plum and lake imagery to counsel against spoiling one’s salvation by feverish self-torment.
Connections
Motifs: Rose, Nature Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Humility, Grace and Redemption Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
You cannot eat your cake and have it too. - Proverb
How fever’d is the man, who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,
Who vexes all the leaves of his life’s book,
And robs his fair name of its maidenhood;
It is as if the rose should pluck herself,
Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom,
As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf,
Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom,
But the rose leaves herself upon the briar,
For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed,
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And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire
The undisturbed lake has crystal space,
Why then should man, teasing the world for grace,
Spoil his salvation for a fierce miscreed?