Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
(Romantic Poem into Victorian version)
I feel pain, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though I rejected to hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
Feeling pain in thine happiness, —
That thou, residence of buildings have taken over
In some apartment playing music
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer with a great beat ease.
O, don’t want a taste of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And don’t want a purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And cannot fade with thee into the forest dim because of light:
Fade far away, I cannot disconnect myself to forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I am not able to fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But I was not able to fly couse of having no wings;
But I can fly with the invention that modernization has brought
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And the Queen-Moon has lost its power
Because the buildings are as bright as the sun at night;
Cluster’d around by all the building;
But here is light everywhere,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I can see everything that is at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in brightness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
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