| William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Georgian Verse. 1909. | | | | On Seeing the Elgin Marbles | | By John Keats (1795–1821) |
| | | 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. | 5 |
| 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-conceivèd glories of the brain | |
| Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; | 10 |
| 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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