Poem by John Keats

A Dream, after Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca

As 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. 

1. On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt
2. Bards of Passion and of Mirth
3. Specimen of Induction to a Poem
4. Calidore
5. To (“Hadst Thou Liv’d in Days of Old…”)

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