by Keats · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
A sonnet written in Burns’s birthplace, the speaker drunk with whisky and homage, musing on mortality and fame at the dead poet’s shrine. Its themes are mortality, fame, and the poet’s legacy.
Connections
Topoi: Immortality Through Verse Motifs: Wine and Drink Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Melancholy Forms & Genres: Sonnet Settings: Scotland the Highlands
Testo integrale / Full text
This mortal body of a thousand days
Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room,
Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays,
Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom!
My pulse is warm with thine own barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
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The meadow thou hast tramped o’er and o’er, -
Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind, -
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name, -
O smile among the shades, for this is fame!