by Keats · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
A sonnet at Burns’s grave finding the cold beauty of the scene haunted by sickly imagination and the brevity of the northern summer. It mingles mortality, melancholy, and homage to a dead poet.
Connections
Motifs: Grave Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Melancholy, Beauty, Transience Forms & Genres: Sonnet Settings: Scotland the Highlands
Testo integrale / Full text
The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
Though beautiful, cold - strange - as in a dream,
I dreamed long ago, now new begun.
The short-liv’d, paly summer is but won
From winter’s ague, for one hour’s gleam;
Though sapphire-warm, their stars do never beam:
All is cold beauty; pain is never done:
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
The real of beauty, free from that dead hue
Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it! Bums! with honour due
I oft have honour’d thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face; I sin against thy native skies.