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Sonnet: A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode Of Paulo And Francesca

By John Keats

Topics: classic

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,     When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,     So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright     So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft     The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;     And seeing it asleep, so fled away     Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,     Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day;     But to that second circle of sad Hell,     Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw     Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell     Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,     Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form     I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

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Author:John Keats

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"As Hermes once took to his feathers light,..." by John Keats

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John Keats

About John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet whose odes—"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn"—are among the most celebrated in the language. Despite dying of tuberculosis at 25, he produced work of extraordinary sensory richness and philosophical depth.

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