Yet could life and death not be the strength of breath
One must be the very air
To never sleep perhaps the bitterest bite
Fall and swell and fall endlessly--Oh! that sweep of faith
Do not so much as move or swallow as I reside here
Sacrifice the vulnerable--the softest gesture
Of rain upon the fallow fields
Lying there broken with eyes of amethyst
Circle round the sun once more
Dedication and Renunciation
To hermit myself evermore against sorrow's surrender
Silent hope of death's shores gazing
One star--caught in one indigo moment stolen
Merely human this light be
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 - John Keats
