In the Library
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats, 1817
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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My spirit is too weak—mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
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About the book
"My spirit is too weak," the poem begins, and it means every word. In a room of the British Museum stand the sculptures Lord Elgin carried off the Parthenon, horsemen and gods and torsos broken at the neck, and the young Keats has come with his friend the painter Benjamin Haydon to look at them. What he finds there is vertigo. Mortality weighs on him "like unwilling sleep," and the stone makes him feel like "a sick Eagle looking at the sky," a creature built for height and unable to rise to it. Here is a sonnet about art that confesses what great art can do to a person: crush them, make them feel small and doomed, and still hold their eyes. Fourteen lines carry the whole dizzy pain of standing before something more than two thousand years old, scarred by the rude wasting of old Time, and knowing he will not last a fraction as long. It closes without consolation, on the marbles themselves, which open out into a billowing sea, a sun, and "a shadow of a magnitude."