greykit.poetry — #1820s
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1821
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Adonais
Shelley's pastoral elegy for John Keats in 55 Spenserian stanzas — mourning the death of genius at the hands of hostile critics, tracing the mourning of Urania and Keats's fellow-poets, and arriving at the vision of Adonais absorbed into the eternal One, a star beaconing from the abode where the Eternal are.
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1821
[lord-byron]
The Isles of Greece
A poem-within-a-poem sung by the anachronistic bard at Lambro's island feast — sixteen stanzas lamenting the fallen glory of Greece, invoking Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae, and urging the living not to drown their shame in Samian wine but to reclaim their inheritance.
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1820
[john-keats]
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Meditating on the frozen figures of an ancient urn, Keats finds that unheard melodies surpass the heard, and that the urn's last lesson to man is that beauty and truth are one.
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1820
[john-keats]
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats follows a nightingale's song out of the mortal world into an immortal darkness, then wakes to find the vision fled — was it a dream or a waking?
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1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ode to the West Wind
In five linked terza rima sonnets, Shelley invokes the autumn West Wind — destroyer and preserver — begging it to scatter his words over the earth as seeds of prophecy.
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1820
[john-keats]
To Autumn
Three stanzas address Autumn as a season and a presence — first as conspirer with the sun, then as a harvest figure at rest, and finally as maker of its own music in the dying day.