Sonnet A Dream After Reading Dantes Episode Of Paulo And Francesca

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,

When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,

So on a Delphic reed, my idle

So played, so charmed, so conquered, so

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

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not

Their sorrows.

Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the formI floated with, about that melancholy storm.'This beautiful Sonnet seems to have been written originally in the first volume of the miniature Cary's Dante which Keats carried throughout Scotland in his knapsack; and the composition should probably be assigned to the early part of April 1819.

There is a fair transcript written on one of the blank leaves at the end of the copy of Endymion in Sir Charles Dilke's possession.

The sonnet was published over the signature "Caviare" in The Indicator for the 28th of June 1820. Inside the recto cover of the little Inferno Keats began by writing the words 'Amid a thousand;' and he then seems to have turned the book round for a fresh start; for inside the verso cover he has written --'Full in the midst of bloomless hours

Seeing one night the dragon world

Arose like Hermes....'The sonnet is finally written in a cramped manner on the last end-paper, and is almost identical with the fair copy; but it shows the cancelled seventh line'But not olympus-ward to serene skies....'~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.

H.

Buxton Forman,

Crowell publ. 1895.