The voice I heard this passing night was heard Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain. While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Now more than ever seems it sweet to die, I have been half in love with easeful Death,Ĭall’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine įast fading violets cover’d up in leaves The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,īut, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:Īnd haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Where but to think is to be full of sorrow Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Here, where men sit and hear each other groan What thou among the leaves hast never known,

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,Īnd with thee fade away into the forest dim:įade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath beenĬool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,ĭance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!įull of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Visit the archive or learn more about Pinsky’s work here. During his tenure as Laureate, he began the Favorite Poems Project, an archive of Americans reading their favorite verse. Pinsky was elected Poet Laureate of the United States in 1997, and he teaches in the Writing program at Boston University. In this installment, Robert Pinsky reads 'Ode to a Nightingale' by John Keats.

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