Tabb Centenary Year LVIII

A sonnet on John Keats by Rev. John B. Tabb.

At Keats’s Grave

“I feel the flowers growing over me.”
Prophetic thought! Behold, no cypress gloom
Portrays in dim memorial the doom
That quenched the ray of starlike destiny!
E’en death itself deals tenderly with thee;
For here, the livelong year, the violets bloom
And swing their fragrant censers till the tomb
Forgets the legend of mortality.
Nay, while the pilgrim periods of time
Alternate song and holy requiem sing,
As through the circling centuries sublime
They scatter frost, or genial sunshine bring,
With gathered sweets of every varying clime
They weave around thee one perpetual spring.

1882 (p. 298, Sonnets)

[English poet John Keats was born this day, October 31, 1821. The opening line of the poem was attributed to Keats by a friend of his.]

The references (page number and section) are to The Poetry of Father Tabb, ed. Francis A. Litz, Ph.D. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1928). All of Tabb's poems published here in the Father Tabb Centenary Year were originally published before 1923.

Biblical references link to the New Advent Bible comprising Bishop Challoner's edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible (English) and the Sixto-Clementine edition of the Vulgate (Latin), since they are the versions which Father Tabb would have used as a Catholic.

The year 2009 is the centenary of the death of Rev. John Banister Tabb, November 19, 1909.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 10/31/09 09:41:46 PM
Categorized as Father Tabb Centenary Year & Literary.