By John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone ?
The...
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill...
More Poems about Living
Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam
I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:
One day she took the train to Boston,
made her way to the darkened room,
put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.
When they read her name...
Altered After Too Many Years Under the Mask
I feel you
...
More Poems about Love
Riddance
Ok, we’ve rendered
the rendition
how often?
What were we trying
to get rid of?
We exposed the homeless
character of desire
to the weather.
Shall we talk
about the weather
worsening four times
faster than expected,
eight times,
until the joy
of pattern recognition
kicks in?
Until the crest
...
My partner wants me to write them a poem about Sheryl Crow
but all I want to do is marry them on a beach
that refuses to take itself too seriously.
So much of our lives has been serious.
Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing
when it persists after learning where we come...
More Poems about Nature
Poem
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I
heard it, I felt it
like temperature,
all said in a
whisper—build to-
morrow, make right be-
fall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking
place, time is not filled,
time is not late,...
For the Feral Splendor That Remains
sometimes I strain
...