John Keats Quotes About Water

Quotes about: Water

• A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

  John Keats

  Lakes, Water, Poetry

• I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

  John Keats

  Sad, Depression, Water

  Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 25 May 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 287

• Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water-lilied pond to eat white currants and see goldfish: and go to the fair in the evening if I'm good. There is not hope for that -one is sure to get into some mess before evening.

  John Keats

  Book, Wine, Doors

• Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

  John Keats

  Death, Suicide, War

  Quoted in Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848)

• Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
  Is - Love, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust.

  John Keats

  Life, Dust, Water

  'Lamia' (1820) pt. 2, l. 1

• This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

  John Keats

  Lying, Heart, Names

  Epitaph for himself, in Richard Monckton Milnes 'Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats' (1848) vol. 2, p. 91.

• 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, Pillowed 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 in death.

  John Keats

  Sweet, Art, Stars

  'Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art' (1819)

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