by Keats · Cluster: Wonder and Gratitude · Sublime · Storm
Abstract
A sonnet to the painter Haydon, professing the poet’s inadequacy before mighty art and praising Haydon’s vision against the dull crowd; the artist, genius and aspiration.
Connections
Topoi: Inexpressibility Motifs: Birds, Stars Themes & Concepts: Artist and Society, Ambition, Friendship Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitively on these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not Eagle’s wings -
That what I want I know not where to seek:
And think that I would not be over meek
In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak -
Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem? 10
For when men star’d at what was most divine
With browless idiotism - o’erwise phlegm -
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine
Of their star in the east, and gone to worship them.