Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

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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 3.8 , University of Victoria, 18 January 2021. 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 3.8 , last modified 18th January 2021. 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 3.8 , last modified 18th January 2021. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_on_seeing_the_elgin_marbles.html.