Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

References to this poem

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

  • 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.
  • 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.

× Cite this page:

MLA Style: Works Cited

Keats, John. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, by G. Kim Blank. Edition 3.26 , University of Victoria, 12 July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_on_seeing_the_elgin_marbles.html.

Chicago Style: Note

John Keats, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_on_seeing_the_elgin_marbles.html.

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Keats, John. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_on_seeing_the_elgin_marbles.html.