On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time - form Summary
A Sonnet's Inward Turn
Keats frames his response to the Elgin Marbles in a tightly organized sonnet. The poem’s opening lines present a personal, burdened speaker overwhelmed by mortality and thwarted aspiration. At the turn (around line nine) the focus shifts to the sculptures themselves: their "Grecian grandeur" collides with time’s decay, producing a mixed awe and pain. The sonnet’s compact form concentrates that emotional paradox into a single, inward moment.
Read Complete AnalysesMy spirit is too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined 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 indescribable 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.
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