object:1.jk - Sonnet. Why Did I Laugh Tonight?
author class:John Keats
book class:Keats - Poems
subject class:Poetry
class:chapter
Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell
Then to my human heart I turn at once:
Heart! Thou and I are here sad and alone;
I say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan,
To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain.
Why did I laugh? I know this Being's lease,
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;
Yet would I on this very midnight cease,
And all the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds;
Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser -- Death is Life's high meed.
'This sonnet, first given in Life, Letters &c. (1848), was probably composed between the 19th of March and the 15 of April 1819. Keats says in a letter, that he had intended not to send the Sonnet to his brother George and his wife, on account of their anxieties about his temperament; but he refers to other passages in his letter as "the best comment" on the sonnet, and ends the subject with a triumphant "I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep: sane I went to bed, and sane I arose." A man might well go to bed sane after writing the final couplet, which is a thoroughly self-contained and contemplative vein -- strangely so for the end of such a bitter series of "obstinate questionings."'
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