Saturn! sleep on: me thoughtless,[1] why should I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
Saturn! sleep on, while at thy feet I weep."
As when upon a tranced summer night[2]
Forests, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a noise,[3]
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Swelling upon the silence, dying off,[4]
As if the ebbing air had but one wave,
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She prest her fair large forehead to the earth,
Just where her fallen hair might spread in curls[5]
A soft and silken net for Saturn's feet.]
Long, long these two were postured motionless,
Like sculpture builded-up upon the grave
Of their own power. A long awful time
I look'd upon them; still they were the same
The frozen God still bending to the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
Moneta silent. Without stay or prop
But my own weak mortality, I bore
The load of this eternal quietude,
The unchanging gloom and the three fixed shapes
Ponderous upon my senses, a whole moon;
For by my burning brain I measured sure
Her silver seasons shedded on the night,
Page:Keats - Poetical Works, DeWolfe, 1884.djvu/309
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MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.
293