“The poetry of earth is ceasing never.”
Keats closes the sonnet by insisting that nature’s music changes performers with the seasons but never truly stops.
On the Grasshopper and Cricket, final line; the cricket continues the earth’s poetry in winter.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.
Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), Book I, line 1, Project Gutenberg #24280, reproducing the Taylor and Hessey 1818 text. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” opens the poem’s mythic Romantic meditation on beauty; the statement remains a poetic proposition rather than empirical evidence that every aesthetic experience produces permanent happiness.
“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”
Instead of measuring autumn only against spring, the poem redirects attention to the distinct music of the season that is actually present.
“To Autumn,” final stanza, in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The line follows the question “Where are the songs of Spring?” and answers by valuing autumn’s own sounds.
“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.”
Shelley turns the wind into a living seasonal force, opening a poem where destruction, preservation, sound, and renewal are woven together.
Ode to the West Wind, opening line; Shelley addresses the autumn wind directly.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
The ode privileges imagined music over audible performance, presenting imagination as capable of sustaining an ideal beauty that physical sound cannot preserve indefinitely.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The line addresses figures represented on the urn and belongs to the poem’s meditation on art, imagination and permanence.
“The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of Night.”
Longfellow gives evening a gentle physical movement, making darkness feel less like absence and more like something settling over the world.
The Day Is Done, opening stanza; Longfellow introduces the evening mood before asking for soothing poetry.
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
“The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
