Negative Capability and Stuff - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

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Negative Capability and Stuff

 

For Nat Lipstadt

 

Exactly inexactly that sheet of paper

A blank sheet of paper rich in its blankness

Because there is nothing there and so

The possibilities of being are without limits

 

Except for that 8.5 x 11” thing

Which the writer is free to repudiate

And see beyond it a spectrum of beauty and truth

Which is not there except in seeing it so

 

Letting go too can make imaginings new

(But still, my very dear friends, the rent is due!)

For John Keats, +23 February 1821 - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

For John Keats, +23 February 1821

Wanderer by moonlight, you never knew
That mellow autumn of elusive fame
Which you well-earned in your suffering youth
As you laboured in haste through hastening death

In haste to set in jeweled, sunlit lines
Each joyful day’s delight in nature and man
Before they faded into that long night -
You never knew what treasures you left to us

Then may your desperate pilgrimage to Rome
Lead you at last to more glorious Stairs

"A Cave of Young Earth Dragons" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Poetry of John Keats is not Safe

You may find there “a cave of young earth dragons”
Or with a “sea-born goddess” fall in love
You might not escape “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
Or finish reading all your “high-piled books”

Yet “tender is the night” when sings the nightingale
And you are shown that all “Beauty is truth”
Through your soul, “The wanderer by moonlight”
And there “like pious incense” the hours pass

Though in that “season of mists” one’s life must end
“Go not to Lethe,” but sail on with the wind

1 “Ben Nevis”
2 “Endymion”
3 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
4 “When I Have Fears that I may Cease to Be”
5 “Ode to a Nightingale”
6 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
7 “I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill”
8 “The Eve of Saint Agnes”
9 “To Autumn”
10 “Ode on Melancholy”