As Hermes Once Took to His Feathers Light
As Hermes Once Took to His Feathers Light - meaning Summary
Love Amid Storm and Flight
This sonnet sketches a speaker who, like Hermes who lulled Argus, slips away from a waking world into a stormy, secondary hell where lovers share sorrow without speech. Mythic references frame an escape from public sight into melancholic intimacy. The speaker remembers a pale, beloved figure and a brief, ghostly union amid hail and gusts. The poem often reads as Keats’s reflection on love, loss, and his fraught feelings toward Fanny Brawne in 1819.
Read Complete AnalysesAs Hermes once took to his feathers light, When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept, So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, 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 that 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 kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
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