Keats in Rome

chapbook

Ll editions, 1980

Poem later collected in The Visitation and reprinted in Early Poems.

from Keats in Rome

Delight in heaven’s porch: nothing,
not hell, is a far from paradise.
Disease, they say, can unbuckle man from the wheel.
Awakening, he won’t awaken again
to the birth of pleasure and fear: this man,
who wrote the story of what always happens
everywhere in the earth. He hoped perhaps
to end it with the old sun’s ascent,
Hyperion, triumph and restoration
of the exile. What stopped him:
inability to stop the sun in the sky?

While this chapbook and The Visitation are no longer in print, Keats in Rome appears within The Visitation section of Early Poems (Insomniac).