A Song of Opposites
A Song of Opposites - meaning Summary
Embracing Contraries Together
Keats celebrates the coexistence of opposites, deliberately welcoming joy and sorrow, beauty and decay, life and death. Through striking, often paradoxical images—infant with a skull, Cleopatra with the asp—he insists on experiencing and recording mixed states. The speaker asks for artistic permission to hold and write both day and night, pleasure and pain, making creative truth from contrast and longing for a bower that blends life, death, and poetic inspiration.
Read Complete AnalysesWelcome 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 are under, And a giggle at a wonder; Visage sage at pantomine; Funeral, and steeple-chime; Infant playing with a skull; Morning fair, and shipwreck’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.
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