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Favourite Words?

What words are our best friends?

Favourite Words? > Saturday, April-14-2007

EASEFUL

( from Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale')

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
    Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
    White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
        Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
            And mid-May's eldest child,
    The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
        The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
    I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
    To take into the air my quiet breath;
        Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
            In such an ecstasy!
    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
          To thy high requiem become a sod.

Read this poem in second year at Liverpool and it is has never been surpassed for sensory ecstasy...and its courage and power are palpable.( Very hard to read in the heat of summer finals too!) 

  And the word 'easeful' has stayed with me ever since. Haunting to the core. It seems a perfect promise and prayer to me.