Logos Virtual Library: Keats: Translated from Ronsard

John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821)

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…