“O! Were I One of the Olympian Twelve”

John Keats (1795–1821) · Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats · Extracts from an Opera · 1848

O! were I one of the Olympian twelve,
Their godships should pass this into a law,⁠—
That when a man doth set himself in toil
After some beauty veiled far away,
Each step he took should make his lady’s hand
More soft, more white, and her fair cheek more fair:
And for each briar-berry he might eat,
A kiss should bud upon the tree of love,
And pulp and ripen richer every hour,
To melt away upon the traveller’s lips.

Where this text comes from

First published in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1] [2]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-19.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/john-keats_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L10.

Cite this poem

John Keats (1795–1821). ““O! Were I One of the Olympian Twelve”.” First published in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-keats/o-were-i-one-of-the-olympian-twelve/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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