Dedication to Leigh Hunt, esq.

Glory and loveliness have passed 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.


John Keats

John Keats (October 31st 1795 – February 23rd 1821) died at only twenty-five, but, in his short career, produced poetry that has made him one of the most studied figures in the English canon. His name is synonymous with poet and he is often characterized as the poet of “silken phrase & silver tongue” (a phrase from his own letters) he is one of the primary Romantic poets (along with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley).

Keats is most famous for his “Great Odes” but has several other major poems.


Comment:

This poem is dedicated to Leigh Hunt (1784-1895) an English writer, poet critic and essayst.
He wrote "The Story of Rimini" and he was influenced by Geoffrey Chaucer, in brief he is considered the father of the English Literature and Yeats is conscious of this thing.

In the first stanza Keats is preoccupied by the lost Leigh not only for himself but for the entire community engaging also the reader "Glory and Loveliness have passed away" I noticed a strengthening of his grief or it could be a gag considering that the poem of Leigh were often comic, and no wreath, no flowers and even no incense to sustain Leigh Hunt and nor the beautiful nymphs and their qualities.

It seems to me a sort of "Opera Buffa" where with hilarity he tells what the humanity has lost, from now we won't heard his poems, it will be a season without the spring, but always a cold and a mono colour winter.

Agag of Keats is considering himself as the new seed of the literary renaissance but in reality he is an humble poet.