Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

“Under the flag
Of each his faction, they to battle bring
Their embryo atoms.”

Milton

• Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,
• Lethe’s weed and Hermes’ feather;
• Come to-day, and come to-morrow,
• I do love you both together!
• I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;
• And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;
• Fair and foul I love together.
• Meadows sweet where flames burn under,
• And a giggle at a wonder;
• Visage sage at pantomime;
• Funeral, and steeple-chime;
• Infant playing with a skull;
• Morning fair, and stormwreck’d hull;
• Nightshade with the woodbine kissing;
• Serpents in red roses hissing;
• Cleopatra regal-dress’d
• With the aspic at her breast;
• Dancing music, music sad,
• Both together, sane and mad;
• Muses bright and Muses pale;
• Sombre Saturn, Momus hale; —
• Laugh and sigh, and laugh again;
• Oh! the sweetness of the pain!
• Muses bright, and Muses pale,
• Bare your faces of the veil;
• Let me see; and let me write
• Of the day, and of the night —
• Both together — let me slake
• All my thirst for sweet heart-ache!
• Let my bower be of yew,
• Interwreath’d with myrtles new;
• Pines and lime-trees full in bloom,
• And my couch a low grass tomb.