{
 "id": "john-keats/written-in-disgust-of-vulgar-superstition",
 "title": "Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "John Keats",
 "poet_slug": "john-keats",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Poetry",
 "book_slug": null,
 "book_kind": "compilation",
 "sequence": null,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1876,
  "venue": "The Poetical Works of John Keats, Aldine Edition (London, George Bell and Sons, 1876), as “Written on a Summer Evening”",
  "note": "Dated “Sunday evening, Dec. 24, 1816” in Tom Keats’s copybook. Read here in the scan of the Aldine edition, where Lord Houghton heads it “Written on a Summer Evening” and footnotes it as a rare instance of anti-religious feeling in Keats; the corpus title is a later editor’s. Marked uncertain because 1876 is the earliest printing this corpus has located rather than one an authority calls the first: the sonnet is absent from the two volumes of Milnes’s 1848 edition read here, and the Cambridge Edition of 1899 says only that Lord Houghton “gives it in the Aldine edition”.",
  "uncertain": true,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/bib_fict_1432767",
   "https://archive.org/details/completepoetical0000keat"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/john-keats_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://archive.org/details/completepoetical01keat",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005261190"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 14,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 50,
  "max_indent": 1
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "The church bells toll a melancholy round,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Calling the people to some other prayers,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "More hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Surely the mind of man is closely bound",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "In some black spell; seeing that each one tears",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "And converse high of those with glory crown’d.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A chill as from a tomb, did I not know",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That ’tis their sighing, wailing ere they go",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "Into oblivion;⁠—that fresh flowers will grow,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "And many glories of immortal stamp.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}