by Keats · Cluster: Seasons · Winter · Autumn
Abstract
A sonnet on a mild day after long dreary weather, gathering a chain of calm images ending in a poet’s death; nature, the seasons, transience and serene mortality.
Connections
Motifs: Seasons, Spring, Autumn, Nature, Clock Themes & Concepts: Transience, Mortality Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
After dark vapours have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - autumn suns 10
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -
Sweet Sappho’s cheek - a smiling infant’s breath -
The gradual sand that through an hourglass runs -
A woodland rivulet - a Poet’s death.