Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? The transient pleasures as a vision seem, And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.
How strange it is that man on earth should roam, And lead a life of woe, but not forsake His rugged path; nor dare he view alone His future doom, which is but to awake.
Where this text comes from
First published in The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman (London, Reeves & Turner, 1883). Assigned by George Keats to 1814 and first printed sixty-nine years later. The claim is the headnote to this poem in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1899), which names Forman’s edition of 1883. No volume of that edition has been read here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
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–#L8.
Cite this poem
John Keats (1795–1821).
“On Death.” First published in The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman (London, Reeves & Turner, 1883).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-keats/on-death/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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