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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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
[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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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.