A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode..
A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode.. - context Summary
After Dante's Canto V
Keats's sonnet, written in 1819 and inspired by Dante's Inferno, Canto V, imagines the poet's dreamy transport to the second circle of Hell. Using classical allusion (Hermes, Argus, Delphic reed), the speaker slips into a tempest where punished lovers wail. The scene blends mythic imagery with Dantean torment, yielding a melancholic, seductive vision of a pale beloved and the speaker's fleeting, sorrowful embrace amid the storm.
Read Complete AnalysesAs Hermes once took to his feathers light, When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept, So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes; And seeing it asleep, so fled away, Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies, Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day; But to that second circle of sad Hell, Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
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