by Keats · Cluster: Memory and Time · Memory · Nostalgia
Abstract
A lyric envying the tree and brook their ‘sweet forgetting’ of past summer, while humans writhe at remembered joy now lost. It treats memory, transience, grief, and the seasons.
Connections
Motifs: Seasons, Winter Themes & Concepts: Memory and Time, Transience, Grief and Loss, Nostalgia Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
I
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them.
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
II
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
III
Ah! would ‘twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writh’d not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.