To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall

John Keats (1795–1821) · Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats · 1844

Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb,
Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand,
Since I was tangled in thy beauty’s web,
And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.
And yet I never look on midnight sky,
But I behold thine eyes’ well-memoried light;
I cannot look upon the rose’s dye,
But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight;
I cannot look on any budding flower,
But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips
And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour
Its sweets in the wrong sense:⁠—Thou dost eclipse
Every delight with sweet remembering,
And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

Where this text comes from

First published in Hood’s Magazine (April 1844). The sonnet beginning “Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb”, first published twenty-three years after Keats’s death and afterwards included in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848), which is the volume this text is placed in. The claim is the headnote to this poem in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1899). No copy of that number of Hood’s Magazine 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–#L14.

Cite this poem

John Keats (1795–1821). “To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall.” First published in Hood’s Magazine (April 1844). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-keats/to-a-lady-seen-for-a-few-moments-at-vauxhall/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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