John Keats

To Byron

Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,

Pity's plaintive lute

Keats personifies Pity as a musician playing a mournful stringed instrument—Byron is positioned as the one who overhears and preserves these tones in his poetry.

As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,
Had touched her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffered them to die.
O'ershading sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,
As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,

dying swan

Classical reference to the belief that swans sing most beautifully just before death. Keats calls Byron a dying swan still producing enchanting music.

pleasing woe

The oxymoron at the poem's end—Byron's achievement is making sorrow pleasurable through art. This is what Romantic poetry claims to do.

The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Young Keats Writing to the Famous Byron

Keats wrote this sonnet in 1814 at age 19, when Byron was already the most famous poet in England. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had made Byron a celebrity, and his poetry was known for its melancholy and world-weariness—what contemporaries called "Byronic" gloom. This is an apprentice poem, Keats trying out the sonnet form while paying homage to an established master.

The poem's central argument is that Byron has discovered how to make sorrow beautiful. Notice the paradoxes: grief becomes "delightful," clouds make the moon more radiant, darkness reveals "amber rays," and woe becomes "pleasing." Keats is fascinated by this transformation—how Byron's poetry takes raw pain and converts it into aesthetic pleasure.

The moon-and-cloud simile (lines 9-12) is the poem's technical centerpiece. Keats argues that Byron's sadness doesn't obscure his poetry's beauty but enhances it, the way clouds don't hide the moon but make it glow more dramatically. The "fair veins in sable marble" image extends this: darkness and light aren't opposites but collaborators in creating beauty.

What Keats Would Later Reject

By 1818, Keats would dismiss Byron's poetry as too self-indulgent and theatrical. He wrote to his brother that Byron "describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task." This early sonnet shows Keats before that break, still admiring what he'd later call Byron's "egotistical sublime."

The phrase "pleasing woe" captures what the mature Keats would reject: poetry that makes suffering too comfortable, too pretty. His later work—"Ode on Melancholy," "La Belle Dame"—would explore darker, more complex relationships between beauty and pain. But here, at 19, he's still praising Byron's ability to make grief "enchanting."

The dying swan image is worth noting because swans would become important in Keats's later work, but transformed. Here the swan is classical and decorative—a pretty symbol of the poet singing beautifully in death. It's borrowed mythology, not lived experience. Keats would learn to write about mortality without these comfortable classical cushions.