by Keats · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
A sonnet (on a dream of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca) in which the poet’s spirit, like Hermes lulling Argus, flees to the second circle of hell to float with pale-lipped lovers in the storm. It fuses dream, classical and Dantean myth, and doomed love.
Connections
Topoi: Katabasis Descent Motifs: Dreams, Storm Themes & Concepts: Romantic Love Forms & Genres: Sonnet Historical References: Dante, Greek Mythology
Testo integrale / Full text
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And, seeing it asleep, so fled away -
Not to pure Ida’ with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d a day;
But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw 10
Of rain and hailstones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.