Keats by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Amid moonlight, a nightingale's song, and an image of a shattered shepherd's pipe, the speaker reads an epitaph declaring a name written in water. Mourning Keats, the speaker proposes a different inscription, comparing his premature death to flax quenched before flame and a broken reed.
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Genre: Elegy, Sonnet · 173 words
First lines
The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep; / The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told! / The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold / To the red rising moon, and loud and deep / The nightingale is singing from the steep; / It is midsummer, but the air is cold; / Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold / A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep. / Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white, / On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name / Was writ in water. " And was this the meed / Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write: / "The smoking flax before it burst to flame / Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed. "
Genres
- Elegy — The speaker laments the poet's death and questions whether his epitaph adequately commemorates his singing.
- Sonnet — Fourteen rhymed lines move from a moonlit pastoral scene to the reading and proposed revision of an epitaph.
Tags
mourning · epitaphs · premature death · poetic remembrance · sonnet
What this Textopian page supports
Keats is listed on Textopian as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Elegy, Sonnet
- Length: 173 words
- Structure: 1 section, 1 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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