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Dedication To Leigh Hunt, Esq.
By John Keats
Glory and loveliness have pass'd away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the east, to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft voic'd and young, and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
Extra Info:
Dedication of his Poems, 1817. 'Keats's first volume, published early in 1817, is a foolscap octavo worked in half sheets. It was issued in drab boards, with a back label Keats's Poems, and consists of a blank leaf, fly-title Poems in heavy black letter, with imprint on verso, ''Printed by C. Richards, No. 18, Warwick Street, Golden Square, London,' title-page given opposite...' etc.
'Readers of Charles Cowden Clarke's Recollections of Keats,... will remember the statement, still appropriate here, that, ''on the evening when the last proof sheet [of the 1817 volume] was brought from the printer, it was accompanied by the information that if a 'dedication to the book was intended it must be sent forthwith.' Whereupon he withdrew to a side table, and in the buzz of a mixed conversation (for there were several friends in the room) he composed and brought to Charles Ollier, the publisher, the Dedication Sonnet to Leigh Hunt.'' The first of the three Sonnets to Keats in Hunt's Foliage forms a fitting reply to this.'
- The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.
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