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To Keats
“I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd
the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.”
– John Keats to Fanny Brown, Feb. 1820
No man knows aught of what he leaves behind;
But you, immortal prince, I cry to think
You thought, while on your death-bed, that your mind
Was not yet gleaned by your eternal ink;
As if we could forget the beauty wrought
On urns, from melancholy, indolence,
The vanishing of autumn; in the fall
Of gods, Hyperion and Psyche, brought
Back into life, the past in present tense;
And we’re all raptured out of perfect sense
By nightingales that, like sweet death, still call.
Being a prisoner of that deceiving
Elf—oftentimes it’s all that we can do.
How easy we forget there’s others grieving
Like us, who’d welcome living death, like you.
So we remember, yes, But what’s the use
To those deaf-mutes amongst the dead? Your thought
Of being forgotten was your own, your last,
And though we praise your life and work, the sluice
Of death drowns all the laurels that you sought,
The thin-spun life is cut, the Gordian Knot,
And everything is buried in the past.
Are you now standing all alone upon
The shore of that wide world, still lost in thought,
Where love and fame to Nothingness are gone,
Sunk far below the night? And have you brought
With you that fane, the sanctuary built
Inside your brain; and is the casement
Still opened, letting warmth and shadows in?
Or have the rosy buds begun to wilt,
The gardener gone, his tools left in the basement,
With everything awaiting their replacement
In shambles, where the brightest torch had been?
No, no; the fire lives beneath the leaves
That never burn—a phoenix set ablaze
May die, and turn to ash, but will conceive
New life, reborn in every spark and gaze
That enters in the palace you created,
Yielding its beauties to us willingly,
Like harvests in a fall that never ends.
Remember thee? While memory is seated
Inside this globe, aye poet; while the sea
Still flows and eats the rocks from fallen screes,
Aye prince. Though we’re apart, your art can mend
What days sicken and break—time out of joint;
And is it truth or beauty that will heal?
You’d say that they’re conjoined twins, a point
We question. What I know is what I feel;
You’d say that that’s enough; but lonely, lost,
It’s hard to find that Gemini, or one
Bright star, steadfast. The nightingale may sing,
But it’s a siren’s song, while we’re all tossed
About the foam and spray. Yet let the sun
Set. I’ll open your music box and shun
The world; no need to change my state with kings.
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Originally Posted by Neely
