by Keats · Cluster: Ruins the Abbey · Sic Transit Gloria Mundi · Ubi Sunt
Abstract
A sonnet on the dizzy pain of mortality felt before the Greek marbles, mingling grandeur with the wasting of time; mortality, the sublime, Grecian art and the ravages of time.
Connections
Topoi: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Motifs: Ruins the Abbey, Time, Birds Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Sublime, Transience Forms & Genres: Sonnet Historical References: Ancient Greece
Testo integrale / Full text
My spirit is too weak - mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud:
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So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time - with a billowy main -
A sun - a shadow of a magnitude.