This Mortal Body of a Thousand Days
This Mortal Body of a Thousand Days - context Summary
Composed During Scottish Tour
Keats’s sonnet, written in 1818 during his walking tour of Scotland, is an explicit homage to Robert Burns after visiting Burns’s birthplace. It registers admiration and imaginative sympathy: Keats occupies Burns’s room, shares in his pleasures, and contemplates poetic fame and legacy. The poem frames physical presence and ritual (opening the sash, drinking a bumper) as ways of communing with a poet’s spirit. Published 1820 in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.
Read Complete AnalysesThis mortal body of a thousand days Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room, Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays, Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom! My pulse is warm with thine old barley-bree, My head is light with pledging a great soul, My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see, Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal; Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor, Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find The meadow thou hast tramped o’er and o’er,– Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind,– Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,– O smile among the shades, for this is fame!
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