"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" by John Keats

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Schedule change!

-My trip to England

-Romanticism

-The charm of Keats

-The tragedy of Keats

-The tragedy of Pergolesi

-Italian sonnet redux

-The creative opportunity that is rhyme

-Why this sonnet is weird

-The riddle of Keats's morbidity

-Ode To A Nightingale

-The Notorious B.I.G.

-Ode On Melancholy

-Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement

-The poet is un-poetical, unless the poet is Keats

-Keats's self awareness

-The undescribable feud, described

-On Looking Into Chapman's Homer

-The second-worst thing the Ottomans ever did

-Ubi Sunt

-The Romantic fetish for ruins

-Metrical FUBAR

-The doctrine of The Association of Ideas

-The shift from Objectivity to Subjectivity 

-Suns, seas, and shadows

Text of the poem:

 
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles  

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 undescribable 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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Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-6: “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” by John Keats

Hey everyone, I hope you had a lovely holiday and New Years, and welcome back to Versecraft fresh for 2023! I apologize for the late episode— I actually recently had a change in my work schedule, so after this week I’ll be releasing the show every Wednesday instead of Monday. I’ve got a lot of great episodes coming up, so stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, please make sure to spread the word about the show if you’ve been enjoying it so far. 

            As you may or may not know, I just got back from a trip to England with my fiancée Laura, which was exhausting but incredibly beautiful. London contains an embarrassment of riches, literally and figuratively, and is a veritable Mecca for museums— every day we were rushing around to see yet more masterpieces of art and architecture. On our day at the British Museum, I finally got a chance to see the famous Elgin Marbles, now more correctly dubbed the Parthenon Marbles. These are the magnificent sculptures and reliefs, designed by Phidias, the most celebrated sculptor of Classical Greece, that were controversially removed from the friezes and pediments of the Parthenon by the 7th Earl of Elgin in the early 19th century. 

Apart from reveling in the aura of such aesthetically mighty and historically lofty works of craft, I couldn’t help but be excited by the idea that I was beholding the same stones that inspires John Keats to write his early sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” At one point, I sat down on a bench in the great hall where the marbles are displayed, and read the poem, which is one I had glanced at before but hadn’t devoted much time to. Upon reading it with attentiveness and fresh eyes, I was immediately struck by the strangeness of its expression, as well as how perfectly it encapsulates, albeit in an immature form, the particularities of Keats’s mind. It inspired me to write my own sonnet on the experience, and after giving it some more consideration, I decided it would make for a great poem with which to launch back into this podcast. 

The early 19th century in which Keats was writing was the high tide of English Romanticism, and Keats very much fits the classification of a Romantic poet: a writer absorbed in his own subjectivity, prioritizing vague emotional reaction above precise logical consideration, and giddy imagination above sober reality. Those who know me know that I have little patience for this mentality. However, it struck me that in this instance I could use this poem as an opportunity to explore both the Romantic way of thinking that Keats embodies, and also Keats’ fascinating struggle with it. For myself and many others, Keats is by far the most endearing of the Romantic poets, and I’m curious to investigate, at least for myself, why this is true. There are obvious reasons: his bewilderingly precocious talent, gorgeous language, innocent sense of wonder, and pitiable early death, but there may be more subtle ones as well. Before we get to that, however, we must at least briefly touch on the more fundamental question: who was John Keats?

The life of Keats, who lived from 1795-1821, is the most tragic story of what could have been in English poetry. At his death from tuberculosis at 25, he had already written several poems which will never be forgotten so long as English is spoken, and which many consider to be some of the most perfect and beautiful in our language. To put this in perspective, if Shakespeare and Milton, often considered our greatest poets, had died at 25, they would have left behind virtually nothing of note, and would have been forgotten. Furthermore, Keats had a promising critical mind, as evinced by his incredibly influential letters, as well as immense ambition— by the time of his death he had already attempted on several occasions to write large scale epic and dramatic works, and saw himself as the heir of Shakespeare and Milton. Many people, including me, believe that if had lived at least a couple more decades, he could have matured into one of the most accomplished poets of all time. The only similar situation I can think of is that of the brilliant musical prodigy Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who similar to Keats, died of tuberculosis at 26, already having composed his exquisite Stabat Mater. 

The Elgin Marbles were first displayed in England in 1807. Keats first saw them and wrote his poem about them a mere nine years later in 1816, at the age of 21. The marbles were thus still relatively new in the public consciousness, and no one in England had ever seen anything like them before—they had seen marble statues, certainly, but not massive, Classical Athenian architectural features sculpted by the legendary hand of Phidias in the age of Pericles and Socrates. To Keats, much like with his first encounter with the poetry of Homer through Chapman’s translations, the marbles were a revelation— a breathless encounter with an ancient civilization that dazzled in its bygone mightiness. Today’s poem, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” is the college-age Keats’ attempt to grapple with the complexities of thought and feeling inspired by this overwhelming experience. It goes like this: 

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles 

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 undescribable 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.

We have fourteen lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, so we clearly have a sonnet on our hands. The rhyme scheme is ABBA, ABBA, CDC, DCD. Rhymes A and B together form two enclosed quatrains, an octet, while rhymes C and D together form two tercets of terza rima, a sestet. An octet plus a sestet equals, as we know, an Italian sonnet. If you would like a refresher on any of these terms: iambic pentameter, enclosed rhyme, terza rima, Italian sonnets—please scan the show notes of my previous episodes to find the show that explains the vocab you need. You can also google it of course, but that doesn’t get me extra plays, does it? 

As I mentioned on the Smith episode, Italian sonnets are tricky to pull off in English, due to the fact that each rhyme must be used either three or four times. When we find one that seems to flow naturally, we should be impressed, but we should also take it as an opportunity to pay special close attention to the rhyming words, keeping in mind that some of them, having been chosen in order to fill out a demanding scheme, may appear more or less apt, more or less inevitable than others. 

By the same token however, it is fascinating to consider how the choice of more distinctive rhyming words may have contributed to influencing the thought of the poem in a particular direction. I’ll talk more about this in a future episode, but one of the major benefits of using rhyme which isn’t always obvious to non-poets is that having to come up with a rhyme can often take the poet and the poem on unexpected paths, sometimes leading to thoughts and insights superior to the poet’s original intentions. For instance, it’s possible that the entire eagle simile in line five only occurred to Keats because he needed an image which would fit with the word “sky.” Likewise, would Keats have referred to the sun as the “morning’s eye” if he didn’t need it for the rhyme? Would he have happened upon the phrases “billowy main” or “shadow of a magnitude?” We can’t confirm one way or the other of course, but we can ask educated questions which make us more sensitive to the act of composition. 

As an Italian sonnet, this poem is unusual in a couple ways. Typically, an Italian sonnet presents a situation or description in the octet, and then a volta occurs at the sestet, which goes on to present a reflection on what has just been described or expressed. In Keats’ poem, things are all topsy turvy: we don’t get any direct reference to the situation at hand until the last four lines, by which time we have had twelve lines of uninterrupted navel-gazing, and even this description is subsumed within Keats’s own thoughts. This immediate thrust into extended reflection is apt to throw the first-time reader off balance, and lends the poem an insular, cryptic, and intimate quality. This insularity is compounded by the rhyme scheme—both quatrains and both tercets are enclosed by a rhyme, forming packets of verse which seem to fold the poem in upon itself. 

Keats’s sonnet also departs from the Italian norm by containing thrice the number of shifts in thought expected: the word “yet” in line six brings us to a premature volta, a qualification of what has already been said; line 9, beginning with “such dim-conceived” provides the traditional shift into reflection, yet in this case it is reflection upon reflection; finally, line 11, beginning “so do these wonders” shifts us finally toward the ostensible subject of the poem, the Elgin Marbles, which are hardly mentioned before they too are left behind for a string of disconnected yet mentally associated images, more reminiscent of late 19th century French Symbolism than early 19th century English Romanticism. The complex flow of thought in this poem— constantly shifting, hyper-actively metaphorical, meta-cognitive, bizarre, is what made this poem stand out to me, and from Keats’s body of work in general. Here we see Keats, still an apprentice poet, struggling to express himself, not entirely successfully, but in the process, revealing more of his own psyche at work than we perhaps see in any other poem of his of comparable length. This Italian sonnet, while having the appearance of tight construction, is bursting to its seams with mental chaos. It’s like a Philistine temple, with Samson in the middle struggling in his chains, threatening to bring the whole house down. 

In our breakdown of this poem, we’ll follow the shifts in thought as they occur. Let’s therefore begin with the first five lines: 

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.

If it were not for the title of this poem, we would have no idea at this point that it’s a reaction to the Elgin Marbles. Immediately, we are swept inside Keats’s skull: the fact that he will die, he says, weighs him down, much like sleepiness when one is struggling to stay awake. There are a couple interesting things about this image: firstly, shouldn’t the phrase be, not “unwilling sleep” but “unwilled for” sleep? After all, it’s not the sleep that is unwilling—the sleep is hanging on him— it’s Keats himself who is unwilling. We might also question why he wrote “weighs heavily” and not “weighs heavy,” when the anapestic substitution “heavily” requires the addition of a light syllable that adds a tripping quality which seems to sonically contradict his words. 

More interesting than these technicalities though is the implication of this simile: the reason why we struggle to stay awake when we’re sleepy is because the prospect of sleep seems so pleasurable to us. Just so, Keats struggles to live because he is so intoxicated by the desire for death. Keats will confirm this reading later on in the poem, as well as in later poetry and letters. In his famous Ode To A Nightingale, Keats makes the claim that he is “half in love with easeful death.” In a letter to his lover Fanny Brawn, he writes: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness, and the hour of my death.” One of the reasons that Keats is so fascinating is that he seems, legitimately, equally intoxicated by the beauty of life and the oblivion of death. How can a man be so thoroughly morbid, and also so innocently delighted by the world? This is one of the strangest riddles of this strangely charming man—his attitude is almost otherworldly.

He goes on to say, “each imagined pinnacle and steep/ of godlike hardship tells me I must die.” Mountains are a common metaphor for a strenuous ordeal, but it’s unclear what exactly this “godlike hardship” refers to. Perhaps Keats is imagining the hardship of warfare depicted in many of the marbles, or else the sheer amount of effort it took to create them, but the fact remains that Keats never clarifies what he means, and we are left to wonder whether he is referring specifically to the marbles, which have yet to be actually mentioned, or to any untold number of godlike hardships he is capable of imagining. The logical connection between imagining hardships and facing one’s mortality is also somewhat hazy. I think the key here is the word “godlike:” the hardships he imagines— either being performed on the reliefs, by the sculptors of the reliefs, or in his own mind— are so mighty, and smack so much of immortal strength or immortal legacy, that he feels by contrast the tenuousness of his own condition, and the weakness of his spirit. 

He goes on to compare himself to a “sick eagle looking at the sky.” The comparison is a tad grandiose perhaps, especially for a 21-year-old, but it is poignant: the sick eagle, possessed of a desire to soar through the infinite, can only impotently gaze up in longing, much as Keats, gazing upon the grandeur of the marbles, doesn’t feel capable of reaching such heights of artistry or inspiration before he dies. Keats was by no means terminally ill at this point in his life, but he was always a sickly man, and, much like Biggie Smalls, seemed to have had an eerily prescient awareness that he would die young. One suspects that he developed his unhealthy fetishization of death as an existential defensive response to his unfortunately accurate forebodings. In terms of the simile however, we are left to wonder whether he meant to imply that he was physically too sickly to accomplish anything noteworthy before he died, or that he was too spiritually sick, his spirit “too weak,” to accomplish such grand work. The doomed quality of this simile is only exacerbated when we consider that an eagle, under healthy conditions, is in fact capable of flying—Keats may be saying that he once had the potential to accomplish great things, but no longer does. Ironically of course, at this point in his short life, his best work was still ahead of him. 

Now let’s begin again, and read through the first ten lines: 

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 undescribable feud;

In the letter that I quoted earlier, Keats said that he found it a “luxury” to contemplate the hour of his death. Here, he says that he finds it a “luxury” to weep. He is simultaneously both sad and able to take pleasure in the sensation of his own sad feelings. In fact, Keats enjoyed feeling sad so much that he would later write a whole poem about it, his famous Ode on Melancholy. Keats’s astonishing ability to aesthetically appreciate his own emotions is one of the most distinctive aspects of his personality, one which, along with his more general worship of beauty, was to have an enormous influence on the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th century, as exemplified by Oscar Wilde, who saw his entire life as a work of art. It’s difficult to assess whether this proclivity to savor one’s own emotions is massively self-indulgent, or, an impressive display of meta-cognitive objectivity. On the one hand, it may lead one to focus excessively on the self, to bask in emotions rather than attempt to work them out, and to become so caught up in the experience of emotions that emotions themselves become insincere. On the other hand, the ability to observe closely how one’s own mind is working may lead to self-knowledge, general psychological insight, and more subtle thinking. 

Keats once claimed that a poet was the most un-poetical thing in existence, because he has no identity— he is constantly embodying subjects other than himself. In Keats’s poetry, we do detect an empty observer of this kind, it just so happens that the favorite subject of this observer is John Keats himself. The work of Keats thus plays out an intriguing tension between a Classical poet who wished, like Homer and Shakespeare, to contain all the world within himself, and a Romantic poet who could not help but see himself as the entire world. 

Lines 7 and 8 are essentially filler, because they don’t tell us much that we don’t already know. Taking on the persona of the eagle once more, Keats says he weeps because he doesn’t have the winds—that is, he cannot fly— long enough to soar until sunrise: the “opening of the morning’s eye.” There is no particular reason why these winds should be “cloudy,” and the unnecessary poeticism of saying “the opening of the morning’s eye” instead of sunrise indicates that Keats is both filling out the rhyme and filling up space here. 

In this eagle analogy, we might be curious to know what the sunrise represents for him. Again however, Keats is content to be vague. Our best guess might be that the sun represents the shining glory of artistic greatness, a horizon that Keats longs to reach but doesn’t feel he can. We will have reason to prefer this reading based on imagery later in the poem. 

It is the next line, line 9, that I believe holds the key to my appreciation for this poem, and my appreciation for Keats in general. He calls the thoughts he has had thus far “dim conceived,” and in that single description exhibits more self-awareness than any other Romantic poet of his age. His thoughts may not be clear, but he realizes that his thoughts aren’t clear. He realizes that he is under some kind of mental haze, that his spirit is weak, and he simultaneously laments and glories in the fact. Insofar as he laments, he is pining for the classical grandeur and clarity of the Greek marbles before him; insofar as he luxuriates in his inadequacy, he is possessed by the sleepiness of his Romantic inclinations. The pathos here lies in the fact that we sense Keats is aware of his own shortcomings as shortcomings, and though he is attached to them, he also longs to be released from them so that he can fulfill his own ambitions. Unfortunately, he simply did not live long enough to write his way out of the limitations of both his personal and historical age. 

These dim-conceived glories of the brain—the mountains of godlike hardship, his conception of himself as a sick eagle—“bring round the heart an undescribable feud,” a feud emphasized by a rare fifth foot anapestic substitution. Keats is coy about what this feud is and may even truly believe that it is undescribable. At this point though, we can well imagine what it is—it is the central conflict of Keats’s entire life: his desire for happiness and achievement on the one hand, and his appreciation for tragic sadness and death on the other. For most of us, these two options are hardly of equal attraction—it takes a man of such enthusiastic self-pity as Keats to see them as viable competitors for his affection. 

Let’s now begin again, and this time read all the way through to the end.

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 undescribable 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.

            Just as his undescribable feud is a battle between positive and negative inner forces, Keats claims that looking at the marbles causes him to have a similar feeling about positive and negative external forces—looking at the marbles, which are so clearly grand and yet so severely eroded by time, causes him to feel a “dizzy pain” a kind of existential vertigo. Just as Keats mistook Balboa for Cortez in his poem, “On Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” one suspects that he may not have all the facts here. While it is certainly true that the marbles have faded and eroded due to the passage of time, the main reason why many of them are in such poor condition is a much more human one: in 1687, during a battle for Athens between the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks, the Ottomans had the brilliant idea to store a massive cache of gunpowder inside the Parthenon—the Venetians of course blew it up, and the Parthenon exploded, causing catastrophic damage to the crowning glory of Ancient Greek craftsmanship. One would have to turn to the burning of the Library of Alexandria to discover a more egregious act of violence toward Classical culture. 

            In any case, Keats is struck by the contrast between the artistic excellence he detects, a clear example of human beings striving for an immortal legacy, and the natural forces—time and the elements—which wipe away even the grandest hopes and dreams. Here we have a great example of the literary topos, the rhetorical theme, known as Ubi Sunt. Latin for “Where are they?” it is, like the Carpe Diem and Memento Mori topoi that I discussed in episode 3, a meditation on mortality, but with a particular flavor: namely, by looking at the lost grandeur of the past, we recall how even the most lofty attempts to establish one’s legacy are doomed to fade into decay and obscurity. Perhaps the most famous example of Ubi Sunt in English literature is Keats’s friend Percy Shelley’s sonnet, “Ozymandias.” 

Romantic artists like Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Browning were fascinated by ruins, not only because they were mournful, ominous, and grand, but because their incompleteness and barrenness allowed the poets to fill in the gaps with their own imaginations. The vague, limitless speculation of the imagination is like catnip to the Romantic, and is the same impulse which leads many people today to treasure works of modern art that admit of almost any interpretation. 

Keats already felt intimidated by the marbles, which brought home to him his own incapacity to create anything as great; to contemplate how even the marbles themselves have not entirely survived brings into question the permanence of art in the first place. For those of us, like Keats, who devote ourselves to artistic accomplishment partly in the hopes that we will be remembered, such considerations may very well lead to an existential crisis, a “dizzy pain.”

            Of course, the fact that despite the passage of a couple thousand years and a massive explosion, Keats is in fact able to marvel at the artistic excellence of Phidias is a partial retort to the point made by Ubi Sunt: though perhaps in a diminished form, the things we leave behind can last, and deeply affect those who come after us. Furthermore, of all the arts, literature is the most permanent: so long as at least one copy of a poem exists, and there exists someone who can read it, that poem can be just as alive and intact in the far future as when it was written, as we see with the works of Homer, who continues to move us just as he did his audience nearly three thousand years ago. Keats though, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to maintain a certain mood, does not consider this rebuttal. 

            We have had a few rather minor metrical substitutions in this poem thus far, but in line 13, the meter abruptly breaks down entirely: “wasting of old time—with a billowy main—” according to my scansion, this reads: dactyl, spondee, anapest, anapest. BUM-ba-ba, BUM-BUM; ba-ba-BUM ba-ba-BUM. Though this is pentameter in the sense that it does have five accents, the iambic rhythm is completely gone. As we have often seen in other poems, Keats uses a breakdown in the meter to mirror the language of decay: “the wasting of old time.” Yet interestingly, here, even more than the subject of decay, the breakdown of the meter mirrors a breakdown in the logical thread of the poem. 

            Immediately after he contrasts Grecian grandeur with the “wasting of old time,” Keats does something very strange and atypical: he starts to free associate. 

            Now, as many scholars have pointed out, Romanticism in general was highly influenced by the doctrine of the association of ideas developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hartley, and others. This psychological theory, rooted in Empiricist principles, roughly stated that not only does all knowledge come to us through our senses, but that all our ideas, and thought itself, are composed of sense impressions synthesized not through a logical chain of thought, but a complex web of personal associations. For a believer in this doctrine, the idea of a chair was not a rational, abstract category as it was for Plato or Aristotle—rather, for each of us, the idea of a chair is a particular nexus of associations, many shared with other people, but some not: recollections of particular shapes, colors, smells, textures, emotions, actions, and other sensations associated with the word chair come together to formulate each of our conceptions of what a chair is. On such a theory, the world as we perceive it is no longer objective, but inter-subjective. Though we partake in a shared reality with others, because our experiences are different, our understandings of reality are fundamentally different, and the best we can do is to attempt to communicate our subjective experience to others. This conception in turn leads to a new cultural emphasis on self-examination and self-expression. 

For the Romantic poets, the acceptance of this doctrine manifested as a license to give themselves over to reverie and reflection, and to describe their vision of the world not in terms of objectivity and logic, but personal associations that others may or may not share. Imagination trumps reality. Furthermore, because ideas were merely collections of associated sensoria, one could express oneself through imagery rather than rational statements, a notion which eventually led to extremist movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, and Surrealism. 

Keats is here ahead of his time in that he has already taken the doctrine of the association of ideas to its extreme: overwhelmed by the marbles, incapable of coherent exposition, he begins to list images that his feelings remind him of: “A billowy main—a sun—a shadow of a magnitude.” Private as these associations are however, we can endeavor to make sense of them. 

A billowy main—that is, a tumultuous sea— seems to be a metaphor for time: a vast, nearly unlimited force that erodes whatever it comes into contact with. By contrast the sun, as in the eagle simile earlier in the poem, represents the human glory of artistic achievement, something that illuminates the world. Together, the sun and sea form a contrast, but also create an appropriately Grecian atmosphere. With the phrase, “a shadow of a magnitude,” Keats plays upon the image of the sun, which casts a shadow of grandeur upon him which he is too weak to escape. However, the phrase “shadow of a magnitude” could also mean a couple other things as well: it could refer to the marbles, which, because they are damaged, are a mere shadow of their former selves: or it could refer to Keats himself, either a shadow of his former self, much as the sick eagle is a shadow of a healthy eagle, or a shadow, a mere imitation of the great artists he hopes to emulate. Though the execution is confusing, Keats concludes this poem with astounding richness. 

We might speculate that this poem itself is a shadow of the magnitude of what Keats could have accomplished had he lived. In one of his last letters to his sweetheart Fanny Brawn, the dying Keats wrote: "I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd." Though he did not accomplish what he wished, Keats has indeed given us immortal beauty, and for that he will always be remembered. 

Let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles 

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 undescribable 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.