by Keats · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
A translated sonnet on the heavenly-made beauty of Cassandra, whose descent sets the poet’s heart afire with sweet burning pain. It treats idealized beauty, romantic love, and Greek myth.
Connections
Topoi: Unattainable Beloved Motifs: Fire Themes & Concepts: Beauty, Romantic Love Forms & Genres: Sonnet Historical References: Greek Mythology
Testo integrale / Full text
Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies,
For more adornment, a full thousand years;
She took their cream of beauty’s fairest dyes,
And shap’d and tinted her above all Peers’
Meanwhile Love kept her dearly with his wings,
And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes
With such a richness that the cloudy Kings
Of high Olympus utter’d slavish sighs.
When from the heavens I saw her first descend,
My heart took fire, and only burning pains,
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They were my pleasures - they my life’s sad end;
Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins …