A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by Sir Frank Dicksee (1853-1928)

Today is the anniversary of the death of John Keats, one of the major poets of the Romantic era. He died of tuberculosis on this day in 1821 at the age of 25. In his brief life he wrote several poems that are considered major works in English literature such as “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “Endymion.”

Here is one of my favorites:

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then I felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.