John Keats

A Draught Of Sunshine

Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port, Away with old Hock and madeira, Too earthly ye are for my sport; There's a beverage brighter and clearer. Instead of a piriful rummer, My wine overbrims a whole summer; My bowl is the sky, And I drink at my eye, Till I feel in the brain A Delphian pain - Then follow, my Caius! then follow: On the green of the hill We will drink our fill Of golden sunshine, Till our brains intertwine With the glory and grace of Apollo! God of the Meridian, And of the East and West, To thee my soul is flown, And my body is earthward press'd. - It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill'd with worldly fear. Aye, when the soul is fled To high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in an eagle's claws - And is not this the cause Of madness? - God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through sights I scarce can bear: O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd! 'These lines are part of an extract from a letter to Reynolds dated "Hampstead, Jan. 31st, 1818," published in Volume I of the Life, Letters &c. (1848), but omitted from the first Life and Letters of 1867 as "a page of doggerel not worth transcription. " The time has now come when students will feel entitled to have even Keats's doggerel, some of which, by the bye, has far less reason (and rhyme too) than the present effusion -- to my mind rather a bright and happy specimen, notwithstanding Keats's own plea to his correspondent, "you must forgive all this ranting; but the fact is, I cannot write sense this morning. " With the view of giving Reynolds "some sense" nevertheless, he proceeds to copy out his latest sonnet, "When I have fears" &c. ' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.