The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats/On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

by John Keats

ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

This and the following sonnet were printed in The Examiner, March 9, 1817, and reprinted in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 't is 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-conceivèd 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.