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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  From ‘Hyperion’

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

From ‘Hyperion’

By John Keats (1795–1821)

(See full text.)

DEEP in the shady sadness of a vale,

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair.

Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud….

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,

No further than to where his feet had strayed,

And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground

His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,

Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;

While his bowed head seemed listening to the Earth,

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seemed no force could wake him from his place;

But there came one who with a kindred hand

Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low

With reverence, though to one who knew it not.

She was a goddess of the infant world….

Her face was large as that of Memphian Sphinx,

Pedestaled haply in a palace court,

When sages looked to Egypt for their lore.

But oh! how unlike marble was that face:

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.

There was a listening fear in her regard,

As if calamity had but begun;

As if the vanward clouds of evil days

Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear

Was with its storèd thunder laboring up.