O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close, In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
Or wait the Amen, ere thy poppy throws Around my bed its lulling charities; Then save me, or the passed day will
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes; Save me from curious conscience, that still
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.'This sonnet was first given by Lord Houghton among the Literary Remains in 1848. Keats appeared to have drafted twelve lines of it in the copy of Milton's Paradise Lost which he annotated and gave to Mr. and Mrs.
Dilke; and there is a complete fair manuscript dated 1819 in Sir Charles Dilke's copy of Endymion.'~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.
H.
Buxton Forman,
Crowell publ. 1895.
