Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes

  • Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes,
  • Nibble their toasts, and cool their tea with sighs;
  • Or else forget the purpose of the night,
  • Forget their tea, forget their appetite.
  • See, with cross’d arms they sit — ah! hapless crew,
  • The fire is going out and no one rings
  • For coals, and therefore no coals Betty brings.
  • A fly is in the milk-pot. Must he die
  • Circled by a humane society?
  • No, no; there, Mr. Werter takes his spoon,
  • Inverts it, dips the handle, and lo! soon
  • The little struggler, sav’d from perils dark,
  • Across the teaboard draws a long wet mark.
  • Romeo! Arise! take snuffers by the handle;
  • There’s a large cauliflower in each candle.
  • A winding sheet — Ah, me! I must away
  • To No. 7, just beyond the Circus gay.
  • “Alas, my friend, your coat sits very well:
  • Where may your tailor live?” “I may not tell —
  • O pardon me — I’m absent now and then.
  • Where might my tailor live? — I say again
  • I cannot tell, let me no more be teas’d;
  • He lives in Wapping, might live where he pleas’d.”

× Cite this page:

MLA Style: Works Cited

Keats, John. “Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.” 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_pensive_they_sit_and_roll_their.html.

Chicago Style: Note

John Keats, “Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_pensive_they_sit_and_roll_their.html.

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Keats, John. “Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_pensive_they_sit_and_roll_their.html.