Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies

  • Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies,
  • For meet adornment a full thousand years;
  • She took their cream of beauty, fairest dyes,
  • And shap’d and tinted her above all peers
  • Meanwhile love kept her dearly with his wings,
  • And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes
  • With such a richness that the cloudy kings
  • Of high olympus utter’d slavish sighs.
  • When from the heavens I saw her first descend,
  • My heart took fire, and only burning pains,
  • They were my pleasures — they my life’s sad end;
  • Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins . . .

× Cite this page:

MLA Style: Works Cited

Keats, John. “Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, by G. Kim Blank. Edition 3.29 , University of Victoria, 26 October 2026. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_nature_withheld_cassandra_in_the_skies.html.

Chicago Style: Note

John Keats, “Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.29 , last modified 26th October 2026. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_nature_withheld_cassandra_in_the_skies.html.

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Keats, John. “Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.29 , last modified 26th October 2026. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_nature_withheld_cassandra_in_the_skies.html.