Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born

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

This mortal body of a thousand days
Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room,
Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays,
Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom!
My pulse is warm with thine old Barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
The meadow thou hast tramped o’er and o’er,⁠—
Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind,⁠—
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,⁠—
O smile among the shades, for this is fame!

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]

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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). “Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born.” First published in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-keats/written-in-the-cottage-where-burns-was-born/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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