We’re starting a new series called Drunk Literary History. The first videos, featured here are an experiment. In the future, they may appear on a new site I’m running called www.Top100ClassicLiterature.com. Here, the subject is my favorite poet, John Keats. Because my friend started recording late, I’ll fill you in on what I had been saying. John Keats was only five feet tall, which partly explains the immediacy of poems like “To Autumn.”
Here’s the poem I refer to:
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.
Ernest Hemingway will be next week.
Daniel the Writer 