Keats’s opening inscription celebrates how poets of passion and mirth achieve a double afterlife. He wonders if, besides leaving their souls on earth in their verses, they also have souls in heaven. He answers with a sensuous vision of Elysium—bards communing with sun, moon, fountains, and nightingales that sing “divine melodious truth.” Yet they live again on earth through the words they left behind. Those earth-born souls speak to us of human highs and lows: sorrow, spite, glory, shame, what strengthens and maims. Through this, they teach wisdom daily, even if that wisdom seems distant. The poem’s reverent joy bubbles up in a circling refrain, insisting the bards are “double-lived in regions new.” The mood is celebratory and serene, merging earthly warmth with heavenly splendor, full of gratitude for art that makes its creators immortal in two realms at once.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, written on the Blank Page before Beaumont and Fletcher's Tragi-Comedy 'The Fair Maid of the Inn' — Summary
BARDS of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Doubled-lived in regions new? Yes, and those of heaven commune With the spheres of sun and moon; With the noise of fountains wondrous, And the parle of voices thund'rous; With the whisper of heaven's trees And one another, in soft ease Seated on Elysian lawns Browsed by none but Dian's fawns; Underneath large blue-bells tented, Where the daisies are rose-scented, And the rose herself has got Perfume which on earth is not; Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries.
Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again; And the souls ye left behind you Teach us, here, the way to find you, Where your other souls are joying, Never slumber'd, never cloying. Here, your earth-born souls still speak To mortals, of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim. Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new!