John Keats.
Artist: William Hilton (1786–1839).
Date: Circa 1822.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery.
Source/Photographer:
(Wikimedia Commons)
Zephyrinus has received reports of exceptionally cold Winter weather, from Our North American Correspondent, who relates that temperatures of minus-fifteen degrees are imminent.
Prayers are offered for the safety and comfort of all our North American Readers.
Meanwhile . . .
Text: POETRY FOUNDATION
St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was !
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His Rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious Incense from a Censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for Heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his Prayer he saith.
His Prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
Along the Chapel Aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Emprison’d in Black, Purgatorial rails:
Knights, Ladies, Praying in dumb orat’ries,
He passeth by; and his weak Spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music’s golden tongue
Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor;
But no — already had his deathbell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh Penance on Saint Agnes’ Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his Soul’s reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve.
Following Text is from Wikipedia - the free encyclopædia,
unless stated otherwise.
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
His poems had been in publication for less than four years, when he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five.
They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death.[1]
By the end of the 19th-Century, he was placed in the Canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 described his “Ode to a Nightingale” as “one of the final masterpieces”.
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