1.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue
From budding at the prime.2.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never
About the frozen time.3.
Ah! would 'twere so with manyA gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.'I have not succeeded in tracing this poem further back than to Galignani's edition of Shelley,
Keats, and Coleridge (1829).
In 1830 it appeared in The Gem, a Literary Annual. Some years ago a correspondent sent me for inspection a manuscript varying slightly from the received text: thus, each stanza began with 'In drear nighted December;' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.
H.
Buxton Forman,
Crowell publ. 1895.
