Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, August 26, 2004.

Today's poem is by John Keats, and it was written in and for an age that suffers maybe from different ills than our own,

but I think you'll see it has a way of speaking to us as well.

It's called On the Sonnet. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

On the Sonnet.

If by dull rhymes our English must be chained, and like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet-fettered in spite of painted loveliness, let us find out if we must be constrained, sandals more interwoven and complete to fit the naked foot of poesy.

Let us inspect the liar and weigh the stress of every cord

and see what may be gained by ear industrious and attention meet.

Misors of sound and syllable no less than midas of his coinage,

let us be jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath crown.

So if we may not let the muse be free, she will be bound with garlands of her own.

So as I said, this reads like a poem written for a different age, an age that had to worry

a lot more about empty formalism, an age where the chief problem, or at least the problem

that Keats feels he needs to address here, is that form is being used without imagination. The sonnet is common, but the beautiful

sonnet, the sonnet that dignifies the English language is rare. If we must chain the English language

like Andromeda, this beautiful princess that's being

tied up and offered to a sea monster of some sort, if we must tie up our English tongue

in these metered, measured rules and forms, then let us do it in a way that augments that beauty, that

is befitting the beauty of the thing being packaged, being formed. Let us find out, if we must

be constrained, sandals more interwoven and complete to fit the naked foot of

poesy. And I say that in our contemporary moment, we don't have to worry so much about

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