1O Golden-tongued Romance, with serene Lute!
2Fair plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!
3Leave melodizing on this wintry day
4Shut up thine olden Pages, and be mute.
5Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute,
6Betwixt Damnation and impassion'd clay
7Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
8The bitter-sweet of this Shaksperean fruit.
9Chief Poet! and ye Clouds of Albion,
10Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
11When through the old oak forest I am gone,
12Let me not wander in a barren dream:
13But, when I am consumed in the fire,
14Give me new Phoenix Wings to fly at my desire.
"On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" is a sonnet about the power, pain, and challenge of great art. Getting ready to reread Shakespeare's King Lear for the umpteenth time, the poem's speaker braces himself for an experience that he knows will be as difficult as it is inspiring. By confronting both the play's relentlessly tragic events and its astonishing artistic greatness, the speaker prays that he'll go through an inner trial by fire, emerging ready to write great poetry himself. Keats wrote this poem in 1818 but never published it himself. It first appeared in a literary newspaper in 1838 (27 years after he died) and was later collected in the 1848 book The Poetical Works of John Keats.
Oh sweet-voiced Romance, with your calm lute! Beautifully feathered Siren, Queen of far-off lands! Stop your singing on this cold, wintery day; close the ancient pages of your book, and fall silent. Goodbye! For, once more, I must experience the searing, furious battle between cruel fate and passionate, mortal humanity. Once more, I must humbly taste the bittersweet beauty and pain of Shakespeare's play. Greatest of the poets! And clouds that hang over Britain! Makers of this deathless story! When I've gone into the old oak wood, don't let me wander aimlessly in a futile, bleak dream. Rather, when I'm burnt up, give me the wings of a resurrected firebird, so that I can fly toward my desires.
This poem’s speaker—a voice for John Keats himself—contrasts Shakespeare’s great tragedy King Lear with chivalric romances, legends, and fairytales. While such fantastical stories offer the speaker an escape into a pleasant dreamworld, the dark beauty of Shakespeare’s play strikes him as more powerful and more meaningful. By capturing the “bitter-sweet” reality of life, King Lear transforms pain into something profoundly moving and even pleasurable. King Lear is special, the poem suggests, because it makes beauty out of life’s senseless sufferings rather than merely offering a vacation from them.
Before he can sit down to “read King Lear once again,” the poem’s speaker must bid a firm “Adieu” to “Golden-tongued Romance”—a personification of fantastical medieval tales full of knights, ladies, and magic. Though this “Syren” (that is, an alluring musical spirit) has a lovely voice and the speaker has clearly spent some happy time with her in the past, he knows he doesn’t want her company today.
Instead, the speaker wants the pleasure, pain, and challenge of Shakespeare’s King Lear. This is the altogether unromantic story of a selfish old king who falls out of power and into a terrible madness. After much suffering, he’s forced to face the fact that kings, like all other human beings, are just frail, fallible little animals at the mercy of an arbitrarily cruel universe. The argument “betwixt Damnation and impassion’d clay” (that is, between cruel fate and suffering mortals) the play presents is so grand and so awe-inspiring that the speaker can only approach it “humbly,” hoping to learn something from it.
The speaker’s desire to return to King Lear doesn’t just come from a sober wish to confront the pain of life, however. This “Shaksperean fruit” isn’t sour but “bitter-sweet,” so beautiful and so truthful that (as Keats wrote in one of his letters) it makes artistic pleasure out of all-too-real horror.
The contrast the speaker sets up between “Romance” and King Lear ultimately suggests that the “far-away,” escapist land of romance is delightful, but its pleasures only run so deep. King Lear holds a special place in the speaker’s heart because it doesn’t turn away from life’s pain and misery. Rather, it confronts them and makes them into a work of art that’s all the more beautiful because it faces ugliness.
Keats’s poem is a testament to Shakespeare’s particular genius—and to the way one great artist can inspire another. This sonnet’s speaker isn’t just sitting down to read King Lear: he’s sitting down to read King Lear “once again,” revisiting a play he finds endlessly fascinating. In offering him an awe-inspiring vision of what literature can do, Shakespeare's tragedy makes the speaker aspire to such literary heights himself. Reading King Lear, to this speaker, is an encounter with a kind of artistic greatness that he longs to achieve, but knows he’ll have to strive and suffer to reach (if he can get there at all).
Keats's speaker doesn’t sit down to reread King Lear lightly. He has to prepare himself for the experience, banishing all thought of “Golden-tongued Romance” and bracing as if he’s about to undergo a trial by fire. In fact, a lot of the language he uses suggests that King Lear might just about set him aflame: this “fierce” play isn’t something he can read, it’s something he has to “burn through,” and he in turn feels he’ll be “consumed by the fire” as he reads. Both in its clear-eyed vision of the world’s horrors and its sheer poetic greatness, King Lear makes the speaker feel as if he’s facing an elemental force, awesome and dangerous.
That encounter, he hopes, will change him. After he’s been through the exhilarating, tormenting experience of reading the play again, he prays, he’ll earn “new Phoenix Wings.” In other words, like the mythical phoenix, he’ll burn up in the play’s fires—only to arise again, better than new, ready to “fly at [his] desire,” to write something as powerful as this play. Or at least, so he hopes: he prays, too, that he won’t “wander in a barren dream” instead, just fooling himself, never reaching the creative heights he recognizes in Shakespeare (who is, after all, the “Chief Poet,” the king of them all).
For an artist, this poem suggests, a relationship with a great (and a favorite) work of art can be both terrifying and inspiring. King Lear is at once a treasure and a challenge to the speaker: it shows him all that poetry can do, tempts him to burn himself up in pursuit of such poetry, and warns him that he might well fail. Spurred by his awe for the play and for Shakespeare, he seems ready to try nonetheless.
O Golden-tongued Romance, with serene Lute!
Fair plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day
Shut up thine olden Pages, and be mute.
“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” begins, like plenty of poems before it, with an invocation to a muse (that is, an apostrophe to a spirit of artistic inspiration). This one is different than most, though. Rather than begging the personified figure of “golden-tongued Romance” to guide his pen, this speaker summons her only to shush her.
“Romance,” here, doesn’t mean “romantic love.” Rather, the speaker alludes to a branch of literature that began in the Middle Ages: a fantastical genre that tells idealized tales of knights, damsels, quests, and magic. (One good example might be The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s elaborate 16th-century allegory—a work Keats loved.)
The speaker depicts Romance as an elegant lady. The “Queen of far-away,” she seems to emerge from fairyland itself. She plays a “serene Lute,” strumming gentle ditties on an instrument that evokes the courtly music of Spenser’s era—and if she’s “golden-tongued,” she sings beautifully, too.
The speaker still wants her to be quiet, though. There’s a hint as to why in the backhanded compliment he gives her in line 2. When he calls her a “fair plumed Syren,” he’s pointing out that she might be as deceitful as she’s lovely. Sirens (as they’re now more often spelled) were treacherous figures from Greek mythology. Spirits with bird bodies and women’s heads, they sang beautiful music to lure sailors toward rocks. This “Syren,” then, might have a gorgeous voice and lovely plumage, but she isn’t altogether trustworthy. Romance’s song has something deceitful about it.
On this “wintry day,” the speaker wants Romance to “leave melodizing” and “be mute”—to stop her seductive, dreamy, elegant singing so he can listen to a different kind of music. As the poem’s title tells us, he’s “sitting down to read King Lear once again”—and a romance, Shakespeare’s great and terrible tragedy is not. This will be a poem about the speaker’s longing to immerse himself in a richer, darker, more truthful kind of art than Romance can provide.
Keats will sing Shakespeare’s praises in a sonnet—fitting, considering Shakespeare was a great sonneteer. Oddly enough, however, Keats won’t write a Shakespearean sonnet (a.k.a. an English sonnet), which is built from three quatrains and a closing couplet. Rather, he picks the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet form, which begins with an eight-line stanza (or octave) and closes with a six-line sestet.
What both sonnet forms have in common is good old iambic pentameter, one of the most familiar and flexible meters in English poetry. Lines of iambic pentameter are built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here’s how that sounds:
Shut up | thine old- | en Pa- | ges, and | be mute.
Keep an ear on Keats’s meter as the poem goes on: this sonnet has some tricks up its sleeve.
Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute,
Betwixt Damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shaksperean fruit.
Unlock all 627 words of this analysis of Lines 5-8 of “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+Chief Poet! and ye Clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream:
But, when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix Wings to fly at my desire.
At the end of the poem, the speaker wishes for "Phoenix Wings"—a reference to a legendary creature that symbolizes rebirth and immortality. The phoenix was a mythical bird that was said to burn to death, then rise, resurrected, from its own ashes.
In this poem, the speaker alludes to the phoenix in the hopes that the pain and power of King Lear might burn him up and transform him into a brand-new poet—one who might aspire to make art as great as Shakespeare himself did, art that itself might turn out to be as deathless as a firebird.
The speaker opens this poem with an apostrophe to an alluring figure: “Golden-tongued Romance” herself, a personification of fantastical tales of chivalry and magic. A “Syren” (that is, a spirit of temptation) with a melodious voice, decked out in “fair plume[s],” Romance is both attractive and a little dangerous, threatening to lure the speaker onto the rocks of triviality. The speaker conjures her up only to banish her in favor of a darker, richer kind of poetry: the poetry of Shakespeare’s King Lear. His vivid description of her, however, suggests he knows her pretty well. Romance has been his longtime companion, but he’s ready to move on; even still, he sends her packing on a tide of praise for her beautiful voice.
He then makes a fresh apostrophe to the figures he hopes will guide him in his new works: Shakespeare himself (whom Keats saw as his “Presidor,” his literary hero and forebear) and the “Clouds of Albion,” the clouds that hang over Britain. These together, he says, are the “begetters of our deep eternal theme,” the sources of the ideas that will inform his work now: ideas about the nature of life, the shape of the human soul, and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of suffering.
This “eternal theme,” in other words, comes both from Shakespeare himself and from the English landscape Shakespeare and the speaker share across time. Praying to Shakespeare and the clouds at once, the speaker asks for support in becoming not just a great poet, but a great English poet, a master of his native language as well as the “deep eternal theme.”
By framing these two ideas as apostrophes, the speaker draws on a grand old poetic tradition of calling on muses, gods, or spirits to guide one's pen. (See, for instance, the first lines of Paradise Lost, another work Keats held in special regard.) A writer’s writer, this speaker can't think of a better muse than the immortal “Chief Poet” of them all.
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Get LitCharts A+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.
"Romance" here is a personified figure representing, not romantic love, but fantastical or magical stories, especially tales of knights and chivalry. Presenting Romance as a "golden-tongued" singer, the speaker suggests that she's a beautiful charmer.
Like all sonnets, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" is a 14-line poem; like most sonnets, it's written in iambic pentameter. Surprisingly, though, this sonnet about Shakespeare isn't a Shakespearean sonnet! Rather, it's a Petrarchan sonnet, built not from three quatrains and a closing couplet (as a Shakespearean sonnet is), but from two parts: an eight-line octave rhymed ABBA ABBA and a six-line sestet rhymed CDCDEE.
Though Keats loved Shakespeare's sonnets, he more often reached for the Petrarchan form when he went to write a sonnet himself. Here, the form's two-part shape suits a two-part idea. Keats spends the opening octet banishing delightful "Golden-tongued Romance" in favor of the "bitter-sweet" of Shakespearean tragedy, and the closing sestet hoping that the searing, death-like intensity of the reading experience might remake him into a greater artist.
Like the great majority of sonnets, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" is written in iambic pentameter. That means its lines are built from five iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's line 5 as an example:
Adieu! | for, once | again, | the fierce | dispute,
Perhaps it would be odd to write a poem honoring Shakespeare in anything but iambic pentameter: he was the great master of this old, familiar rhythm. At the end of the poem, however, Keats introduces his own little metrical innovation. Listen to the poem's closing line:
Give me | new Phoe- | nix Wings | to fly | at my | desire.
Readers might notice a couple of variations here. Keats starts the line with an emphatic trochee, the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. More striking still, he gives the line an extra foot, making this into a six-foot line of iambic hexameter rather than pentameter. This rule-breaking line mirrors the speaker's longing to transcend his own poetic boundaries—and thus to earn artistic immortality.
"On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" is a Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, so it uses one of several slight variations on a traditional rhyme scheme. All Petrarchan sonnets start with an octave, an eight-line stanza rhymed like this:
ABBA ABBA
They conclude with a six-line sestet that can rhyme in a number of different ways. Here, Keats chooses this pattern:
CDCDEE
In picking these rhymes for his sestet—and especially in choosing to end on a rhymed couplet—Keats tips his hat to the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet form, which is built from three four-line quatrains of alternating rhyme capped with a closing couplet. In other words, the rhyme scheme in this sestet could just as easily have come from the last six lines of an English sonnet as an Italian one. This choice mirrors one of the poem's themes: readers might see this as a movement from a "far-away" Italian romance to a drama rooted in "Albion" (that is, Britain).
The poem’s speaker is a voice for Keats himself. When he wrote this poem in early 1818, Keats was coming to the end of his first major project: the book-length poem Endymion, a mythological tale about the love of the moon goddess for a mortal shepherd. He was feeling a little deflated about this poem, sure that it wasn’t the best he could do. When it was published later that year, both friends and foes would agree with that assessment, more or less damningly. (Nonetheless, Endymion gives us one of the most famous opening lines in English poetry: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”)
In turning away from “Golden-tongued Romance” here, this poem’s speaker reflects Keats’s desire to move past the sparkling enchantments of his early work and try his hand at a differently ambitious kind of poetry—or even, as his image of the “Phoenix Wings” suggests, to become a new kind of poet altogether.
As he once wrote, Keats aimed at being “among the English Poets” someday, and he saw Shakespeare as “Chief Poet” of them all. King Lear in particular haunted Keats all through his life. Just a few months before he wrote this poem, he spoke of Lear as the greatest kind of art, a play whose “intensity” is “capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” In other words, King Lear’s greatness is in its ability to depict horrors so fully and truthfully that they become artistically beautiful.
While the speaker now longs to achieve something similar in his own art, he doesn’t leave “Golden-tongued Romance” behind without a fond look back: she may be a dangerously enchanting “Syren,” but she’s given him a lot of pleasure. And indeed, some of Keats’s later work would return to the world of romance (though he’d peer at it through a darker glass).
As the speaker sits and writes, it’s a “wintry day” outside—no time for “Golden-tongued Romance” to warble her pretty melodies. No, this is a day to huddle by the fire and take another crack at King Lear, the most “bitter-sweet,” beautiful, and daunting of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Preparing to approach the play, the speaker imagines it as a landscape, an “old oak forest” overhung by the dark “Clouds of Albion.” Though the speaker claims to have banished Romance, this forest itself, a place of quest and pilgrimage, sounds not unromantic. The speaker imagines it as the setting of his own poetic trial by fire, hoping that his difficult, awe-inspiring journey through the play will burn him up and resurrect him like a “Phoenix,” making him into a new and better kind of poet. He fears, too, that his journey might just as well leave him “wander[ing] in a barren dream,” only fooling himself if he thinks he can approach Shakespeare’s greatness.
If this forest is presided over by the “Clouds of Albion,” it’s also a specifically British place. King Lear is set in an ancient, legendary Britain, and Keats once wrote that he believed he’d earn a place “among the English poets” specifically. In following Shakespeare through the old oak forest, this speaker wants to make his way toward not just any greatness, but poetic greatness—and that means being rooted in a particular language associated with a particular terrain.
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 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."
One of those "English Poets," William Shakespeare, was the foremost of Keats's great heroes. (Keats even printed a bust of Shakespeare on the title page of his 1817 collection Poems.) Keats loved all of Shakespeare, but confessed that King Lear in particular "haunted" him. This poem is a tribute to Shakespeare in more ways than one: as a sonnet, it follows in the artistic footsteps of Keats's "Presidor."
Keats was also among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime: he met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. However, he 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. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). 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.
When Keats wrote this poem in January 1818, King Lear was soon to enjoy a strange renaissance on the English stage. Shakespeare's tragedy was first performed in 1606. It wasn't long before it was usurped: starting from the year 1681, the version that most people saw wasn't Shakespeare's! Rather, it was a modified version by a writer called Nahum Tate.
Tate regarded the ending of King Lear (in which Lear dies howling over the corpse of his beloved daughter Cordelia) as simply too awful. So he cheerfully rewrote the final scenes, rescuing Cordelia, marrying her off to the virtuous Edgar, and restoring Lear to his throne. This sentimental conclusion became wildly popular, and Tate's bowdlerized Lear soon supplanted Shakespeare's. Before the mid-19th century, if you went to see King Lear, it was Tate's version you saw.
Sitting down to read the play rather than to watch it, then, Keats was engaging with the original Shakespeare in defiance of a world too squeamish for the unflinching depiction of human suffering—precisely what Keats valued about the play. In this, Keats was part of a swell of Romantic thinkers who venerated Shakespeare and recognized the genius of Lear's original ending. Two notable friends of Keats's, the essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, publicly criticized Tate's treacly modifications.
The Romantic-era theatrical world struck back against Tate, too. For instance, the legendary actor Edmund Kean (whose work Keats admired) would defiantly restore Shakespeare's version of Lear in an 1823 staging. The final scenes shocked his audiences so much that he was forced to revert to the Tate version after only a few performances. It wasn't until 1838 that the actor William Macready would put his foot down and commit to the Shakespeare version, at last meeting with a success that toppled the Tate version for good.
The Keats-Shelley Museum — Learn more about Keats via the Keats-Shelley Museum (housed in Keats's final home in Rome).
Portraits of Keats — See images of Keats at the website of London's National Portrait Gallery. Many of these portraits were made by his close-knit circle of friends.
The Poem in Context — Learn about what Keats was up to around the time he wrote this poem—and how his experiences might have reshaped his artistic ambitions.
Keats's Life and Work — Learn more about Keats via the British Library.
Keats on King Lear — Read one of Keats's most famous letters, in which he discusses King Lear as an example of Shakespeare's greatness.