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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Keats
John Keats
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper,...
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FURTHER READING
Related Poems
To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles
by John Keats
Related Prose
Notes on Ekphrasis
by Alfred Corn
Other Ekprastic Poems
Purgatorio, Canto X
by Dante Alighieri
The Iliad, Book XVIII, ["The Shield of Achilles"]
by Homer
Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Die Muhle Brennt--Richard
by Richard Matthews
Joseph Cornell, with Box
by Michael Dumanis
Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
by William Carlos Williams
Messieur Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfy Intermediate School, Detroit 1942
by Philip Levine
Museum Guard
by David Hernandez
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats
On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Photograph of People Dancing in France
by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Seeing All the Vermeers
by Alfred Corn
Stealing The Scream
by Monica Youn
The Family Photograph
by Vona Groarke
The Mad Potter
by John Hollander
The Painting
by John Balaban
The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers
by Andrew Marvell
The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden
To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles
by John Keats
War Photograph
by Kate Daniels
Why knowing is (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat)
by Martha Ronk
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On Seeing the Elgin Marbles  
by John Keats

My spirit is too weak—mortality
   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
   And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
   Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
   Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—
   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
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