You are the muse of my awakening!
Keats! your gracious art has tempted me
To fill the waiting sonnet’s silent form

With something of myself, some rendering
Of my need for an illumined Beauty,
My search for love, my flight from passion’s storm,

My wanderings through Time’s variety.
O Keats! shall even this expression suit me!

Can Poetry release a voice withdrawn
Into that frenzied world of childhood dread
Where Youth falls in the balance and is led

To ruin! Though my verse be dull and mean
Yet may it serve to say, when I am gone,
How dear to me your poetry has been!

Copyright (2006) by Arnold Cantor.
All rights reserved.

[Written in March of 1958.]