Classical Poetry PDF EPUB Audio

Endymion

A Poetic Romance

by John Keats

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1818
Pages: 99

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Read by Adrian Stephens, Alan Mapstone, Kurt and others · 4 h 14 min · 19 parts

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Preface
3:09
Book 1 lines 1-222
16:01
Book 1 lines 223-488
14:20
Book 1 lines 489-710
14:30
Book 1 lines 711-993
17:05
Book 2 lines 1-219
8:42
Book 2 lines 220-428
14:10
Book 2 lines 429-650
14:28
Book 2 lines 650-829
12:31
Book 2 lines 830-1026
12:41
Book 3 lines 1-218
12:52
Book 3 lines 219-419
12:21
Book 3 lines 420-617
12:40
Book 3 lines 618-823
11:22
Book 3 lines 824-1043
13:36
Book 4 lines 1-292
17:48
Book 4 lines 293-513
14:40
Book 4 lines 514-775
16:26
Book 4 lines 776-1012
15:31

Endymion (1818) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Music and flowers fill a woodland gathering on the slopes of Latmos, where shepherds and children assemble around a marble altar. Endymion appears among the company with a smile, though some observers notice the trouble beneath it. In this poetic romance from 1818, John Keats sets personal sorrow against the comfort offered by beauty. The opening verses linger over trees, clear streams and remembered tales before bringing the young man into view.

Greek mythology gives the poem its figures and its imagined spaces. A passage with the sea overhead leads into reflections on worldly rulers, followed by praise of the moon and the longing of Cynthia. Rhyming lines connect small natural details, from an ivy leaf to a nesting bird, with mountains and the ocean. For readers of love poetry, the interest lies in how landscapes express feeling, while the preface offers Keats's own candid account of an uncertain young writer's ambitions.

About the author

John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English poet and, with Byron and Shelley, one of the central figures of the second wave of Romanticism. Trained as an apothecary, he abandoned medicine for poetry, and though critics savaged his early work, he died in Rome believing himself a failure.