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Home  »  Poems of Places An Anthology in 31 Volumes  »  Grave of Keats

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.

Rome, the Protestant Burial-Ground

Grave of Keats

By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

(From Adonais)

PEACE! peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,—

He hath awakened from the dream of life;

’T is we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;

Nor when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

He lives, he wakes,—’t is Death is dead, not he;

Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young dawn,

Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee

The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!

Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou air,

Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown

O’er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

He is made one with Nature: there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird;

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never-wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.