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Home  »  The Book of Sorrow  »  John Keats (1795–1821)

Andrew Macphail, comp. The Book of Sorrow. 1916.

Paolo and Francesca

John Keats (1795–1821)

AS Hermes once took to his feathers light,

When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,

So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright

So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft

The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;

And, seeing it asleep, so fled away—

Not to pure Ida with the snow-cold skies,

Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d a day;

But to that second circle of sad hell,

Where ’mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm.