John Keats: Translated from Ronsard

Updated May 6, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Translated from Ronsard

Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies
For more adornment a full thousand years;
She took their cream of Beauty’s fairest dyes,
And shap’d and tinted her above all Peers:
Meanwhile Love kept her dearly with his wings,
And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes
With such a richness that the cloudy Kings
Of high Olympus utter’d slavish sighs.
When from the Heavens I saw her first descend
My heart took fire, and only burning pains
They were my pleasures—they my Life’s sad end;
Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins…
.com/t/lit/keats-unpublished/17.html
Sources +