...what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous blooms and winding mossy waysDarkling I listen ; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death ; Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath : Now more than...

...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...breath ; .Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To seize upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy....

...poetically preoccupied with death, whether as late as Wagner's Liebestod or as early as Keats' Nightingale: "I have been half in love with easeful Death. "Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme..." and Rachel Carson — all latter-day Isaiahs and saint Johns, all preaching the same sermon in different...

...lyricism of Keats's poem. Stanza 6 articulates Ike's heart's truth as though it were Ike's own voice: Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...full, she felt, as hers had never been— never even during those easy years when her father was alive. Darkling, I listen: and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. He seemed to be saying: I am getting old and death will overtake me not so long from now. But I am...

...existence."1 Keats' poem "Ode to a Nightingale" expresses this Hades Moon readiness for death perfectly: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...spectre-thin, and dies, Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs 6 . . . for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring...

...at, without making its object concrete, in the well-known lines of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale": "Darkling I listen; and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death" - to which Shelley seems to respond equally vaguely when, in the preface to Adonais, his elegy on Keats's...

...diluted by wishful thinking. In the sixth stanza this prompts a moment of philosophical stocktaking: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...within us. No wonder, then, that the last fifteen years of his life, in many respects, echo Keats's "and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." Perhaps this love, half -ironically stated in some of the entries of Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,...