“My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die…”
-John Keats (Lines 1-4)
According to the passage on the sublime, in the Oxford English Dictionary, the sublime is described as “‘things in nature’ that affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur'” (66). Edmund Burke described the sublime as something that causes profound emotion due to its vast, gloomy, or threatening nature. He said it is an experience that is overwhelming, sometimes terrifying, but still delightful. He thought the reason the sublime moved one so deeply was because it is tied to the idea of pain, which encourages self-preservation.
Keats poem, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” embodies the idea of the sublime because his experience on seeing what he himself describes as “Grecian grandeur,” invokes all the feelings necessary to be characterized as such. His first lines tells how he feels after seeing the marbles. They have a harrowing affect on him; Keats writes that his spirit is weak after viewing them and that he is keenly aware of his mortality. He feels threatened, saying that they tell him he must die. Through the line “so do these wonders a most dizzying pain,” we see that the experience brings him pain -completely on par with Burke’s theory- but that he fights against this pain and the thought of death; “Such dim-conceived glories of the brain/Bring round the heart an indescribable feud.” Keats is awed and terrified by these “wonders.” The marbles’ grandeur is overwhelming on both his mind and heart, inducing fear of his demise, and so fights he against the thought of death, the idea of which is painful and like a physical weight on him.
