Some Famous Love Poetry
(one likely by a gay lover)
For T and B (two Ohio 17yo's)
A celebration of your love and of B's recovery
Here is some information on poet John Keats, whose thoughts in "
Ode on a Grecian Urn" have reminded me of your love. In a way, I view your chats with me as similar to that urn - a record for posterity!Ever since I read his poem senior year in high school English class, Keats ability to turn a cold pot into a permanent image of love that is forever young has stunned me. Like that Greek urn, your love recorded anonymously on the web will always be fresh and happy, no matter what else happens. Your thoughts are an inspiration to all who read them!
When B's heart stopped beating a few nights ago as we were chatting, I really did fear that an unhappy change was confronting you. I did not mention at the time that the writer of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" died of illness a year later, and that his very good friend
Shelley wrote a lament "Adonais" that also is world famous. That other poet died within a year. Fate is so unpredictable, and not always happy.So the need to appreciate every moment of true love is emphasized in some moving poetry for you as well as in my exhortations. My best wishes for 's full recovery and for your long lifetime of togetherness in love.
Your friend,
OralMarin
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Hopefully you will draw inspiration, not more "buckets of tears" from the lines below. There is a link to the full Ode poem that you've been wanting to read. It's not very long, but it may be a challenge to understand it all - I'd be glad to help. Perhaps you will shortly be like Keats, Shelley, and Byron, traipsing around Europe and remembering their passion. It might be fun to check out some of the same sights that inspired them nearly 200 years ago, like the dramatic Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva.
John Keats' work includes "three odes considered among the finest in the English language: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and Ode to a Nightingale." They were published in 1820, the same year he became ill with tuberculosis. Keats died the following year, when he was only 25 years old. He had been visiting in Italy with his fellow English poet Shelley, who was devastated. Information on Keats' life can be seen at
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ke/Keats-Jo.htmlexcerpts from Ode on a Grecian Urn
...Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave...
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!...
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd
For ever panting and for ever young...
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain,...
(the full text of the Ode is at http://www.bartleby.com/126/41.html )
"Shelley's great elegy, Adonais (1821), written in memory of Keats, asserts the immortality of beauty,". (Adonais is a poetic form of Adonis, a handsome young man loved by the goddess Venus; he was killed by a boar.)
Stanza 26 (out of 48)
"Stay ye awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of sudden memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained in Time and cannot thence depart!
Reading this stanza and other parts of Shelley's poem about the departed Keats makes one feel that they were much more than good friends - perhaps lovers. Shelly did marry and father children. A contemporary and the third great Romantic poet, Lord Byron, traveled frequently with Shelley around Italy and Switzerland. "Although his many attachments to women are notorious, Byron was actually ambivalent toward women. There is some evidence that he had several homosexual relationships."
Shelley died of a drowning in 1822, the year after Keats died, and shortly after he completed "Adonais." Shelley was 30 years old when he drowned. The tragic early deaths of Keats and Shelley fit their poetic images, and have stirred imaginations ever since.
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