by Keats · Cluster: Birds · Music and Song · Nightingale
Abstract
A sonnet praising Byron’s sweetly sad melody and the melancholy beauty of his verse; a tribute on poetry, sorrow and the artist.
Connections
Motifs: Music and Song, Moon, Birds Themes & Concepts: Melancholy, Artist and Society, Grief and Loss Forms & Genres: Sonnet Historical References: Romantic Movement (Sensibility)
Testo integrale / Full text
Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,
Had touch’d her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffer’d them to die.
O’ershadowing sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,
As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are ting’d with a resplendent glow, 10
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,
The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe.