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The Full Text of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
1My spirit is too weak—mortality
2 Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
3 And each imagined pinnacle and steep
4Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
5Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
6 Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
7 That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
8Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
9Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
10 Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
11So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
12 That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
13Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
14 A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Introduction
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"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" is the English poet John Keats's reflection on art and mortality. In this sonnet, a speaker feels both awestruck and mournful at the sight of the Elgin Marbles, the great Greek statues housed in the British Museum. The enduring power and beauty of these ancient sculptures remind the speaker that he's comparatively puny and doomed to one day die. But the statues are also looking pretty banged-up themselves; they're only a "shadow" of the "Grecian grandeur" they depict. Even the very greatest art (and the greatest artists), the poem thus suggests, are still subject to time and decay. The poem first appeared in the London newspaper The Examiner in 1817, not long after the Elgin Marbles first went on display.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Summary
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My spirit isn't strong enough. The inevitability of death weighs me down, making me feel as if I were right on the verge of nodding off even as I try to keep my eyes open. And, in front of these craggy, mountainous statues of the gods and their struggles, I'm constantly reminded that I'm going to die one day. I feel rather like an eagle that's too sick to fly, gazing longingly at the sky. But at least I can take some comfort in the fact that I can at least cry over being unable, like that eagle, to soar on the misty winds forever, greeting every new sunrise. These mysterious, shadowy, beautiful thoughts set off a kind of wordless struggle in my heart—in just the same way that these astonishing statues make me feel both awestruck and agonized: they combine the beauty and splendor of ancient Greek art with the bluntly unkind effects of time (which wears even great statues away). They put me in mind of wild seas, and the sun itself—but they're also just shadows of something huge.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Themes
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Time and Mortality
Standing in front of the Elgin Marbles—ancient statues that once decorated the Greek Parthenon, now housed in the British Museum in London—the poem’s speaker feels terribly aware of his own “mortality” and smallness. Because these glorious, powerful ancient Greek statues have outlasted their creators, he can’t help but be aware they’ll outlast him, too: he feels all too mortal next to them. And yet, even these astonishing works of art aren’t completely immortal; they show the marks of wear and age, reminding the speaker that even the mightiest statue crumbles in the end. The poem thus reflects that death conquers all—even seemingly deathless stones.
The awesome power and beauty of the Elgin Marbles makes the speaker aware of just how “weak” his own “spirit” is in comparison. Gazing at the “godlike” beauty of these ancient statues, which have endured for well over 2,000 years, he’s reminded that his own little life will be a mere blip in the grand scheme of things. He feels his “mortality” as a “weigh[t]” pressing him down: however “unwilling” he is to entertain the thought, the sheer age of the statues forces him to confront the reality and inevitability of his own death. The mere idea is enough to make him “weep.”
But even these mighty statues, the speaker observes, aren’t completely or uncomplicatedly immortal. “Old time” has “wast[ed]” them away, breaking and battering them. What’s more, they’re relics from a vanished culture, and they represent gods whom no one really believes in anymore. It seems that nothing in the world, not even carved stone, can escape death.
The speaker’s encounter with these statues is thus at once moving, humbling, and chastening. The poem suggests that, if even stone statues of “godlike” might and beauty are subject to decay and death, then people have to acknowledge that they themselves are even more fragile and vulnerable. Time and death hold the ultimate power, here and everywhere.
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The Power and Limitations of Art
Visiting the ancient Greek Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, this sonnet’s speaker feels overwhelmed by their glory—and moved by their decay. On the one hand, the speaker admires and envies the Marbles for their deathless artistic power: their sheer beauty can still speak to people living 2,000 years after they were carved. But on the other hand, these statues show all the signs of their age; battered by the years, they’re “shadows” of their former selves. They might be enduring, but they’re certainly not truly immortal. Art, in this poem, is thus both powerful and limited—and aspiring artists, as the speaker seems to be, must learn to reckon with both of these facts.
The poem’s speaker is awestruck by the glory of the Elgin Marbles and feels all too aware of his own limitations in their presence. Their “godlike” beauty makes him feel very small by comparison: next to these statues, he feels like a “sick eagle looking at the sky,” a frail mortal desperate to fly to the statues’ artistic heights, but afraid he’s far too “weak” to do so. (And the image of an eagle in particular suggests that the speaker might well long to make art this lasting himself: birds of all kinds are a common symbol for poets.) These statues have remained beautiful and moving for over 2,000 years—an astonishing feat that the speaker can only dream of matching.
But the statues are also limited, in their own way. The “wasting of old time” has broken them down and worn them away; not one statue has made it through the centuries unscathed. Now, they’re a “shadow of a magnitude”—ghosts of what they once were, and some of the last remnants of a long-vanished civilization. Art might have the power to reach people across the centuries, but it isn’t all-powerful: it can’t defeat time, at least not forever.
The speaker’s encounter with these statues is thus also a reckoning with what art can and can’t do. But perhaps art’s limits are also part of its power. By simultaneously showing their age and remaining moving and beautiful, the Elgin Marbles manage to tell this poem’s speaker a deeper truth: great art is one way of finding meaning and beauty in the world in spite of decay and death.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
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Lines 1-2
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,The first lines of "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" might catch readers off guard. This sonnet's title suggests that this will be a poem about a visit to a famous collection of 2,000-year-old statues: the titular Elgin Marbles, named for the British ambassador who spirited them away from the Parthenon in Greece and sold them to London's British Museum, where they remain to this day.
But the speaker doesn't begin by describing those ancient, stony gods and goddesses. Instead, he describes their effect on him—his experience of looking at them for the first time. And it seems as if that experience hasn't been altogether comfortable.
"My spirit," the speaker begins, "is too weak." An abrupt caesura after those first few words leaves readers wondering: too weak for what?
The speaker goes on:
[...] mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,In other words, looking at these statues has, for some reason, made the speaker feel terribly aware of his own inevitable death. Perhaps "mortality" itself is his spirit's "weak[ness]"—or perhaps he feels "weak" because thoughts of death leave him so shaken up.
Either way, he clearly feels powerless in the face of these thoughts. His simile here, in which "mortality" feels like "unwilling sleep," suggests that he worries he might nod off into an eternal slumber at any moment. The "heavi[ness]" of this sleep might put readers in mind of the way eyelids feel when you're trying hard not to fall asleep: so weighty they keep on shutting whether you like it or not. The enjambment at the end of line 1 evokes this heaviness as well, pulling the reader from one line to the next. Death, this speaker reflects, is just as involuntary and just as inescapable as that kind of helpless exhaustion.
The rest of this sonnet will explore why, exactly, the sight of some of the world's most beautiful statues should make the speaker so acutely aware of death—and what that awareness might suggest about the nature of art itself.
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Lines 3-5
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
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Lines 6-8
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye. -
Lines 9-10
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; -
Lines 11-13
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time -
Lines 13-14
with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Symbols
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The Elgin Marbles
The Elgin Marbles themselves are a complex symbol, representing both the height of human artistic achievement and the inevitability of death and decay.
The poem's speaker is overawed by the beauty of the Marbles: their sheer "Grecian grandeur" makes him feel helplessly small and weak in comparison. It's astonishing to him that any human being could have created art this powerful.
But at the same time, the Marbles aren't what they used to be. "Old time" has worn away at them, leaving them a "shadow" of their former selves. Even these mighty statues can't "live" forever.
The Marbles thus illustrate how even the greatest human creations are subject to the power of time.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
Allusions to the Elgin Marbles are this poem's bedrock.
The Elgin Marbles (now usually known as the Parthenon Sculptures) are a collection of marble statues and friezes that the British ambassador Lord Elgin spirited away from the ruins of the ancient Greek Parthenon between the years of 1801 and 1805. (See the Historical Context section of this guide for more on the controversies around that!) While battered and broken both by "old time" and by years of war, these statues were (and are) acclaimed as some of the most beautiful and powerful extant examples of classical art.
At the time Keats wrote this poem, the Elgin Marbles had only just gone on display in the British Museum (though they began their tenure there in a shed, not the grand hall they're shown in today). When this poem was published in The Examiner newspaper in 1817, the general reading public might very well have been to see these statues themselves and thus have known precisely what Keats was talking about.
The allusions to the Marbles here are thus, fittingly enough, both topical and timeless! In drawing on the Elgin Marbles in particular, Keats evokes both a mysterious ancient world and his own exact (and fleeting) moment in history.
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Paradox
Unlock all 243 words of this analysis of Paradox in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Simile
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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Assonance
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Alliteration
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Mortality
- Pinnacle
- Steep
- Dim-conceived
- Glories
- Feud
- Mingles
- Rude
- Wasting
- A billowy main
- Magnitude
Mortality-
The state of being mortal—that is, doomed to die!
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
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Form
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" is a Petrarchan sonnet, also known as an Italian sonnet. That means that it's built from an eight-line introduction (the octave) and a six-line conclusion (the sestet), and that it uses a strict rhyme scheme and meter (more on those in their respective sections of this guide). It's also an ekphrastic poem—a poem that responds to a work of art.
This form suits the subject matter! Keats chooses a rigorous, bounded, and traditional art form to describe his experience of stony, imposing, enduring works of art.
The sonnet is also a traditional form for working through a problem or a question—often one with a twist in its tail. Here, the speaker uses the octave to reflect on just how weak, small, and mortal he feels in the face of this seemingly immortal art, and the sestet to observe that even these majestic statues aren't immune to the ravages of time. Line 9 here marks the poem's volta, or turn: the moment when it switches gears to respond to the opening octave.
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Meter
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," like nearly all English-language sonnets, is written in iambic pentameter. That means that every line uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 9:
Such dim-| concei- | ved glor- | ies of | the brain
(Note that, in this poem, "conceived" is pronounced with three syllables: con-SEE-ved)
But like a lot of sonnets, this one plays around with this steady, pulsing meter for effect. For instance, listen to the rhythm of line 5:
Like a | sick ea- | gle look- | ing at | the sky.
Keats begins this line with a strong trochee—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Then, even more emphatically, he introduces a spondee, a foot built from two stresses in a row (DUM-DUM). These choices give this striking image some extra force.
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Rhyme Scheme
As a Petrarchan sonnet, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" uses a traditional rhyme scheme that runs like this:
ABBA ABBA CDCDCD
Alert readers might notice that this rhyme scheme divides the poem into two sections: an eight-line octave (built from two four-line quatrains) with dreamier, slower rhymes, and a six-line sestet with a more intense, swiftly alternating rhyme pattern. That movement of rhymes works right alongside the speaker's energies as he turns from melancholy thoughts of death to the powerful, shadowy energy of the great Greek statues he's admiring.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is almost certainly John Keats himself. Keats wrote this sonnet after a real-life visit to the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum—a pilgrimage he would eventually make many times, and one that would inspire more than one of his most famous poems. And the themes and ideas the speaker discusses here were ones that Keats would return to over and over: a pressing awareness of death, a longing for artistic greatness, a delight in classical art, and a reverence for the power and depth of the imagination.
Whether or not the reader interprets this speaker as Keats, the speaker is certainly a poetic soul. This is someone who's deeply moved by both the enduring power of these ancient statues, and by their woefully battered state. To this speaker, the Elgin Marbles speak of both immortal greatness and the inevitability of death and change.
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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Setting
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While the speaker doesn't say so explicitly, readers who know the story of the Elgin Marbles (now usually known as the Parthenon Marbles) can assume that this poem takes place in the British Museum in London. At the time Keats wrote this sonnet, the Marbles had only recently gone on public display and were the talk of the town. Keats made many visits to the museum to admire these beautiful, powerful sculptures.
But the poem doesn't feel as if it were set in London. Instead, the sight of the Marbles seems to carry the speaker far away from the museum and the city. Much of the real action here takes place in the speaker's imagination—a place of rocky crags, tormented eagles, and rolling seas. For this speaker, the Elgin Marbles seem to capture some shadow of "Grecian grandeur," and to put him in contact with the myth and mystery of the ancient world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
Literary Context
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by more aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius: in an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Much of Keats's poetry deals with his love of ancient Greece. Keats saw in the classical world a kind of imaginative richness he felt had been lost in his own time and often set his poems in a mythological dreamscape that drew on Greek tales. He was also deeply moved by classical art; this sonnet is, in fact, only one of his poems inspired by the Elgin Marbles (and far from the most famous of the bunch).
In these preoccupations, Keats fit right in with his Romantic contemporaries. Like many of the Romantic poets, Keats was interested in the power of myth and magic. Both played a big part in the Romantic worldview, which turned away from the Enlightenment rationalism of the 18th century to embrace the mysteries of the imagination.
Keats met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics, but never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, for instance, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the granddaddy of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Historical Context
"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" was a timely poem, appearing not long after those famous statues were first displayed in London's British Museum in 1817. The ambassador Lord Elgin either rescued or looted the Marbles (depending on whom you ask) from the ruined Greek Parthenon, an ancient temple. Elgin saw himself as the Marbles' savior: these astonishing works of art had been badly damaged over the years by warfare and neglect, and he believed he was preserving them from further decay by removing them.
Elgin's choice to remove the Marbles fits right into both the political and artistic values of early 19th-century Britain. At the time, Britain was well on its way to becoming a vast empire, and the British often liked to think of themselves as the world's stewards and civilizers. And a lot of that self-image was founded on a reverence for classical ideals: the British educational system was built around the study of Latin and Greek, and much public architecture in the period was modeled on the pillars and pediments of Greek and Roman temples. The Marbles were a much-discussed sensation, seen as perfect examples of classical harmony and beauty; Keats was only one of thousands of visitors to be moved by them.
Controversially, the Marbles (now usually known as the Parthenon Sculptures) are on display in the British Museum to this day. Greece has many times requested that the Marbles be returned, even building a museum with space to house them. The British Museum has, so far, firmly refused.
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More “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” Resources
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External Resources
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Keats and the Marbles — Read about Keats's personal experiences with the Parthenon Marbles.
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More on the Parthenon Marbles — Visit the British Museum's website to learn more about the history of (and controversies around) the Parthenon Marbles.
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Keats's Influence — Read a recent reflection on Keats's enduring importance; 2021 marked 200 years since his death, and he remains a deeply beloved and influential poet.
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The Debate Over the Marbles — Read a letter to the editor of The Guardian newspaper that discusses Keats's role in the ongoing debate over where the Parthenon Marbles should be housed.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Keats's life and work via the British Library's website.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Keats
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