greykit.poetry — #1810s
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1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
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1832
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
The Masque of Anarchy
Written in response to the Peterloo Massacre (1819), in which cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reformers in Manchester — Shelley's furious call for non-violent resistance, cataloguing the allegorical figures of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy and ending with the clarion "Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.
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1830
[lord-byron]
So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Written at twenty-nine after the Venice carnival, Byron's three spare stanzas bid farewell to midnight roving — the sword outwears the sheath, and love itself must rest.
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1820
[john-keats]
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A knight-at-arms palely loitering tells how a faery's child lulled him to cold-hill sleep, where pale kings warned — La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.
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1819
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, princes who are the dregs of their dull race, a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field — a catalogue of graves from which a glorious Phantom may burst.
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1818
[lord-byron]
Apostrophe to the Ocean
Seven Spenserian stanzas from the close of Canto IV — Byron's famous apostrophe to the sea as the one force man cannot despoil, the "image of Eternity," ending with the poet's declaration that he has loved the ocean since boyhood and lays his hand upon its mane.
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1818
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ozymandias
A traveller's report of a ruined desert statue whose pedestal proclaims the vast ambitions of a king whose works have wholly vanished.
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1816
[lord-byron]
Darkness
Written in the sunless summer of 1816: the stars go out, men burn their cities for light and then their homes, the last two enemies die of each other's faces, and the universe is left darkness, without a wind.
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1816
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Kubla Khan
A poet recalls a vision of the great Khan’s pleasure-dome in Xanadu, and laments the faded trance that would have let him rebuild it in song.
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1816
[john-keats]
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Reading Chapman's Homer for the first time, described as an astronomer finding a new planet and as Cortez on a peak in Darien — the whole poem arriving at one silence, upon a peak.
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1816
[lord-byron]
Prometheus
The Titan's crime was pity, his punishment silence — and Byron makes that silence the whole lesson: a firm will and a deep sense that can make even death a victory.
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1816
[lord-byron]
When We Two Parted
A parting kept secret and a name now spoken freely by everyone else — so the grief has to stay private too, and the only greeting left, should they meet after long years, is silence and tears.
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1815
[lord-byron]
She Walks in Beauty
Byron's celebrated lyric of feminine grace, finding in one woman's face the perfect union of dark and bright, inner virtue and outward loveliness.
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1815
[lord-byron]
The Destruction of Sennacherib
In thundering anapests Byron retells the annihilation of the Assyrian host — gleaming one evening at sunset, silent and dead by dawn, melted by the Lord's glance.