"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.