Three Sonnets - out of Keats, Shakespeare and Coleridge

True minds for you

When I have fears that I may cease to write,
Lead me not to the marriage of true minds,
For the melodies will clog up my ear
And my pen will join with my teeming brain.
Admit convolutions; song does not sing
Like mawkish romance, or the murmuring
Heard from a wall of earnest, hard bound books -
Sounds alter seasons, while judgement must hear
A hornet’s nest on the first day of Spring.
Risk it for wonders that can fill your core,
Bend with removal men, freely add more:
Rhythmic sounds of sev’ral senses will change
The dark starry face of night, while thinking -
Having aimed it straight - will sleep near the mark.

A fancy fling

If your lonely breast rouses a mindful tear,
A huge cloudy symbol of high romance
That looks on tempests and is never shaken,
Then treat forlorn thought to a fancy fling
And know that you will never have to trace
Every wandering star back to base.
Find fragrance and dew under fortune’s wing,
Mix shadows with the magic hand of chance,
Whose worth’s unknown, though its rule is taken,
And play ‘til your sickly doubts are drooping.
After you feel the fairness of this hour,
Sing not the fool through rosy lips and cheeks,
Blossom anew and thrill at the news that
You can turn a lonely breast to fancy.

Love shifts your age

Bend his sickle, invite the compass more;
Duty’s strains keep you in memory's dream
Where bright fairy power hardly ever goes.
Love shifts your age, not by filling up weeks
With pale forms of past delights lived by eyes
That can’t reflect on zeal in the bedroom,
But by building lights round your edgy gloom.
Paint a peach on love's pale cheek, try surprise,
Start anew in the wide, wide world and think…
If this be error and upon me proved,
That pleasure’s smiles are faint and beauteous lies
Voiced to cut love to nought before it sinks,
I never sang, nor no man ever loved
Or pictured a rainbow over a stream.