The world wants Keats -- the well-worn wonderment
That feels so chaste, like bedsheets pulled half-tumbled,
Half-cool, from a dryer. The innocent
Half-rhyme with this, unhip to one who fumbled
With Shakespeare, frowned at Wordsworth, and attained
The peaks of Darien alone, a life
That rang the fragile chimes the others deigned
To leave unringed, and toppled into strife
All precedence. The cotton is still warm;
We lie upon it; read the sonnets; nod
Devoutly; train our ears to hear the form;
But they go "pop" with Keats. On Earth, what God
Makes lovely, poets seek; but Beauty's just
Skin-deep, and Keats is deeper than his dust.
1 comment:
I wrote this on the airplane this Friday on a notepad, away from my comfort-zone of computers and rhyme tools and digital thesauruses. The prompt was from a purpose who commented on a recent poem of mine, noting that while they loved my poetry, they prefered my Keats to my Eliot; which is to say, they prefered the sonnets I wrote in the vein of Keats ("fascinating felicity" and "perception of loveliness," to quote the book) over my more modern-cum-post-modern Eliot-inspired verse. That's fair, I suppose. I think most non-poets do want that, which raises interesting questions about art and artistry.
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