A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its…

The lines open Endymion, and the sentence goes on: beauty “will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” Therefore, Keats continues, we are every day wreathing “A flowery band to bind us to the earth”, in spite of despondence and “the gloomy days”. He then lists such things of beauty, the sun, the moon, trees, daffodils, clear rills, and the “grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead”, before beginning the tale of the shepherd Endymion, loved by the moon.

Keats wrote the poem in 1817, at twenty-one, as a test of his powers, aiming at four thousand lines, and published it in 1818 with a preface admitting its immaturity. The reviews were savage, and the legend that they killed him, spread by Byron and Shelley, long outlived the truth: he died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821.

The first line is the most quoted in Keats, a proverb in its own right.

Endymion, Book I, opening lines, 1818

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work