In 1817, John Keats saw the Parthenon Marbles, then newly on display at the British Museum. At the time, the Museum was only open to visitors by special arrangement, and Keats visited in the company of the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, a spirited defender of Parliament’s 1816 decision to buy the Parthenon marbles from Lord Elgin and place them on display at the museum (link). A week later, he published the following two poems in The Examiner:
Haydon! Forgive me, that I cannot speak
Definitively on these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not Eagle’s wings—
That what I want I know not where to seek:
And think that I would not be over meek
In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings,
Even to the steep of Helciconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak—
Think too that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem?
For when men star’d at what was most divine
With browless idiotism—o’erwise phlegm—
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine
Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.