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.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Part of a reply to a letter Keats wrote:
"I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not."