Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats 
Often rove 
Through woods and on the green; 
And thou were still a hope, a love ; 
Still longed for, never seen. 
To Keats the vista unfolded of the past 
reached far beyond his own time : 
The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
In ancient days by emperor and clown ; 
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
The same that oft-times hath 
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 
The modern poet finds in the varied notes 
of the birds not the bodings and portents, 
superstitiously associated in the olden time 
with such cries as those of the raven and 
the owl, but high and solemn thoughts of 
death and the hereafter. Shelley wrote of 
his Skylark : 
Waking or asleep, 
Thou of death must deem 
Things more true and deep 
Than we mortals dream, 
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ? 
P2 RET 
