...performative speech act that seems to make manifest the uncanny presence, and power, of his deadly auditor: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. VI Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...the weakness which has taken possession of so many - the lust for death." Longing for Easeful Death Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme. To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...spectre-thin, and dies, Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs 6 . . . for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring...

...diluted by wishful thinking. In the sixth stanza this prompts a moment of philosophical stocktaking: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been...take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever it seems rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul...

...at, without making its object concrete, in the well-known lines of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale": "Darkling I listen; and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death" - to which Shelley seems to respond equally vaguely when, in the preface to Adonais, his elegy on Keats's...

...within us. No wonder, then, that the last fifteen years of his life, in many respects, echo Keats's "and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." Perhaps this love, half -ironically stated in some of the entries of Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,...

...ode's structure and meaning is the apprehension that, death once dead, there's no more dying then: Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever...

...to honor the two poets (43). 29. This is reminiscent of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," lines 51-52: "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time, / I have been half in love with easeful Death." The Protestant Cemetery was "a most romantic setting of which Shelley wrote 'it might make one in love...

...felt like that. How extraordinarily comfortable it would be. One gets so damnably tired sometimes. "Darkling, I listen; and, for many a time /I have been half in love with easeful Death." Yes, "easeful." He gets it exactly. Just what I feel, only more so, if you see what I mean. BARMBY:...