John Keats

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone, Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist! Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise – Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk holiday – or holinight Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight, But, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day, He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.