The Full Text of “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
1O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
2Let it not be among the jumbled heap
3Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
4Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
5Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
6May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
7’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
8Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
9But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
10Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
11Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
12Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
13Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
14When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
The Full Text of “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
1O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
2Let it not be among the jumbled heap
3Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
4Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
5Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
6May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
7’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
8Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
9But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
10Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
11Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
12Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
13Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
14When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Introduction
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The sonnet "O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" is the first work that the great Romantic poet John Keats published. It appeared in Leigh Hunt's weekly Examiner in 1816, when Keats was not yet 21 years old; Keats would later collect it in his 1817 book Poems. In the poem, a speaker prepares himself to spend some time in the company of Solitude—that is, some time all by himself. (Paradoxically enough, he personifies Solitude as a kind of companion.) Wandering the countryside by himself gives the speaker opportunity to think deeply and relish natural beauty. But in the end, he'd rather share what he sees with a "kindred spirit[]" than experience it altogether alone.
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Summary
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Oh, Aloneness! If I must live with you, let's not stay in the dark, ugly city. Instead, climb with me up the mountainside (the astronomical watchtower of Nature), from which the valley—with its blossoming slopes and its crystal-clear river—might look only about the size of a hand's span. Let me sit out my long devotions to you beneath the elegant shelter of tree branches, where quick deer jump and startle bees out of the foxgloves. But while I'd happily look over these landscapes with you, Aloneness—all the same, the pleasure of conversation with a person of pure mind, whose words give clear shape to their thoughts, satisfies my soul. And it's surely almost the greatest pleasure that humanity can experience when two likeminded people escape to lonely places together.
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Themes
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Solitude vs. Companionship
The speaker of "O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" lays out what at first might seem like a classically Romantic vision of a lone speaker making his way through gorgeous, peaceful mountains and valleys. But unlike some other Romantic wanderers, this speaker doesn't seem to feel the "bliss of solitude" as the deepest possible pleasure. For this speaker, solitude is all well and good, so long as one can be alone in the beauty of nature. But what's really good is to enjoy such beauty with a true friend. Deep friendship, in this poem, enriches experience—perhaps even the experience of solitude, paradoxically enough.
Right from the start of the poem, the speaker seems reluctant to fully embrace the company of "Solitude"—a personification of aloneness. (Even the fact that he imagines Solitude as a person suggests he'd rather avoid being alone!) He'll live with Solitude if he "must," he says. And he'll even find great pleasure in Solitude's strange company. There's a lot to love about wandering alone through a quiet landscape of crystalline rivers and wild foxgloves humming with bees.
But better yet, he concludes, would be to return to this same lonesome landscape with a friend with whom he could discuss it. His "soul's pleasure" is to appreciate "the sweet converse of an innocent mind": conversation with a pure-minded fellow thinker who has the power to "refine[]" (or distill) their thoughts into speech. Such a fluent and thoughtful speaker would be the speaker's "kindred spirit[]," a truly simpatico friend—and to approach Solitude's usual "haunts" with a friend like that might be "almost the highest bliss of human-kind," in the speaker's view.
This happy vision of going to beautiful, once-lonely places with a true friend suggests that shared experiences have a value that solitary contemplation can't quite reach. For this speaker, there's a pleasure in encountering the world alone, certainly. But the real joy is in exchanging thoughts about what one encounters. Companionship allows for a kind of enriching expression that solitude can't offer.
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The Countryside vs. the City
Preparing to spend some time with Solitude—that is, some time all by himself—this poem's speaker reflects that, if he has to be alone, he'd far rather do it in the beautiful countryside than the city. His visions of what the city and the countryside are express a very Romantic idea of what urban vs. country life might mean.
A defining feature of Romantic poetry is reverence, awe, and relish for the beauties of nature, and this poem's speaker has these in spades. Imagining the places he might wander out in the countryside, he pictures an idealized landscape of "crystal" rivers and trees whose branches form "pavilion[s]," elegant shelters. Here, he imagines, he'll be able to delight in views of "flowery slopes" and shady places where wild bees buzz among foxgloves.
Perhaps he'll also be able to gain some wisdom or perspective. Imagining a mountainside as "nature's observatory," he hints that he might be able to learn something from gazing out over the landscape, much as an astronomer might sit in an observatory tower and learn from gazing at the stars.
In contrast with this gorgeous, tranquil, wise landscape stands the city. To the speaker, the urban landscape is just a "jumbled heap / Of murky buildings," a place of mess and disorder. The image of the city as "jumbled" and "murky" strikes a sharp juxtaposition with the clarity the speaker gains from "nature's observatory": metaphorically, these words suggest the city might be a place of obscure, tangled-up thought as well as literal, higgledy-piggledy ugliness.
Keats's contrast between the countryside and the city, then, suggests a serious preference for the former over the latter. Not only is the countryside beautiful where the city is ugly and fresh where the city is dirty, it offers a clarity of thought and vision that the city only stifles.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
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Lines 1-3
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings;As this sonnet begins, the speaker is preparing to spend some time alone. He knows that, for a while, he “must […] dwell” with Solitude, a figure he personifies and speaks to in a direct (and dramatic) apostrophe: “O Solitude!”
There’s something paradoxical about that apostrophe, surely. If Solitude is a person, can one ever really be alone? Even as the speaker gets ready for solitude, he seems to feel he’s still in company. And it’s not necessarily the company he’d choose. If he “must” live with solitude for a while—emphasis on the must—he wants to do so only under certain conditions.
First off, he and Solitude need to leave the city, a place that he can only see as a “jumbled heap / Of murky buildings.” For the speaker, there’s no grandeur in a city, no charm: just mess and darkness, buildings upon buildings thrown together all higgledy-piggledy. (Keats seems likely to have been thinking of his native London here—at the time, a crowded city badly polluted with coal smog.) The imagery here presents the city as above all a place of confusion. Perhaps part of the reason the speaker wants to get out of there is that it’s a place where it’s hard to see, metaphorically as well as literally: a place where you can’t think straight. The speaker’s mind might feel as jumbled and murky as the buildings.
In that light, perhaps this speaker’s certainty that he “must” live with Solitude for a while is coming from within him. After enough time in the city, a proper aloneness might feel urgently necessary—and not the kind of aloneness one gets by sitting in one’s bedroom, but the kind in which there’s really only Solitude for company. Shortly, in the grand Romantic tradition, this speaker and his companion Solitude will head for the countryside.
Keats’s use of his chosen poetic form here suggests how eager the speaker is to shake the coal dust of the city from his feet. This is a Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet. That means that:
- It’s 14 lines long.
- It's written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "But though | I'll glad- | ly trace | these scenes | with thee")
- And it uses a set rhyme scheme that divides the poem into two parts:
- An octave (an eight-line section) rhymed ABBA ABBA;
- And a sestet (a six-line section) rhymed, in this case, CDDCDC.
Take a look at the way the speaker’s voice works against the rhyme scheme here. Rather than neatly fitting his rejection of the city into the first four-line ABBA passage, Keats’s speaker does away with it in the middle of a line, closing the city off with a sharp caesura:
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; || climb with me the steep,—And before even the end of the third line, he’s off on his way to somewhere else.
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Lines 3-6
climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; -
Lines 6-8
let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. -
Lines 9-12
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; -
Lines 12-14
and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
This sonnet makes a curious apostrophe to Solitude: a personification of the concept of aloneness, and a figure with whom the speaker seems resigned to spending some time. Readers might already spot the paradox here. If Solitude is a person, then to be with Solitude is not exactly to be alone. By turning aloneness into a person he can speak to, Keats suggests that even solitude contains a strange kind of company, if only the company of one's own imagination.
The speaker isn't necessarily thrilled about aloneness: his first words to Solitude are "O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell." But when he imagines heading into the countryside with Solitude, he seems to accept his lot willingly enough. "I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee," he assures Solitude: Solitude is pretty good company, apparently (if not so good as a friend who can offer "sweet converse" as well as silent companionship).
He seems to picture the figure as a constant companion, one who will "climb with [him]" up mountainsides and look over the view with him. But Solitude also seems a little like a deity or a saint. The speaker imagines keeping "vigils" for or with Solitude: that is, sitting watchfully and quietly, as if in prayer. Solitude itself seems as much a part of what the speaker is worshiping here as the deer, bees, and sheltering branches he observes during his vigils.
The personification of Solitude helps to suggest that the speaker has a complex relationship with being alone. He admits that he'd rather visit Solitude's usual "haunts" with a "kindred spirit[]," a true friend. But he also knows that his time with Solitude has its own pleasures and powers. Spending time alone, he finds himself vividly observant of the world around him. And he seems to understand Solitude has a presence that demands a quiet reverence. Paying due homage to Solitude might allow the speaker to see clearly—though the thoughts that such seeing generates are ones he feels keen to carry back to the world of other people.
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Juxtaposition
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"O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Solitude
- Thee, thy
- Dwell
- Jumbled
- Steep
- Observatory
- Whence
- Dell
- Span
- Vigils
- 'Mongst boughs pavillion'd
- Fox-glove
- Trace
- Converse
- Refin'd
- Haunts
- Kindred spirits
- Flee
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Aloneness (but not necessarily loneliness!).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
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Form
"O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" is a Petrarchan sonnet (a.k.a. an Italian sonnet). That means:
- It's fourteen lines long.
- It's written in iambic pentameter—a line of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "But though | I'll glad- | ly trace | these scenes | with thee."
- And it uses a rhyme scheme that begins ABBA ABBA, then transitions into a new pattern of C and D rhymes—in this case CDDCDC. (Some Petrarchan sonnets use other patterns or include an E rhyme, too.)
Keats was fond of the Petrarchan form and wrote many of his best and most famous sonnets using this shape. (Though he revered Shakespeare, he wrote comparatively few Shakespearean sonnets, which use a different rhyme scheme.) Here, he makes good use of the two-part shape into which the rhyme scheme divides the poem:
- The first eight lines of the poem, known as the octave, here describe the speaker's desire to (rather paradoxically) accompany the personification of Solitude to the beautiful countryside, as opposed to mooching glumly around amid the "murky buildings" of the city.
- And the closing six lines, known as the sestet, add the caveat that the speaker would really rather take a good friend along to talk to, if it's all the same to Solitude.
- That marked change between the ideas expressed in the octave and the sestet is known as the volta (Italian for "turn").
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Meter
Like the vast majority of sonnets, "O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines contains five iambs, metrical feet that pulse like a heartbeat, da-DUM. Here's how that rhythm sounds in line 9:
But though | I'll glad- | ly trace | these scenes | with thee
However, Keats plays fast and loose with this rhythm all through the poem. When a deer alarms a bee in lines 7-8, for example, the rhythm startles, too:
Startles | the wild | bee from | the fox- | glove bell.
The first and third feet in this line use trochees, the opposite feet to iambs. Rather than going da-DUM, in other words, these feet go DUM-da—and in doing so, they give the line a good shake, rather as the deer shakes the bee from its flower.
Similar moments of irregularity help to give the poem a naturalistic movement. One of the big virtues of iambic pentameter, in fact, is that it's flexible, making easy room for musical variations. Keats, a devotee of masters of iambic pentameter like Shakespeare and Milton, developed a particular knack for playing with rhythm in this way.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem is a Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet—a form defined by its characteristic rhyme scheme. Here's how that scheme runs in this case:
ABBA ABBA CDDCDC
An eight-line ABBA ABBA section (known as the octave) kicks off every Petrarchan sonnet. But the six-line section that follows (known as the sestet) is a little more flexible: different poets choose different patterns of C, D, and sometimes E rhymes here.
Keats, for his part, picks a pattern of Cs and Ds that tunes in pretty harmoniously with the ABBA ABBA section: the first CDDC uses the same enfolding shape even as it introduces new sounds. Thus, the speaker's idea that perhaps it might be just as nice (or, dare he say it, even nicer) to visit Solitude's usual haunts with some good company eases into the poem gently.
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a person preparing himself to spend some time in the paradoxical company of Solitude: that is, he's about to go hang out with the personification of aloneness. (And fun fact: Keats himself would have said "hang out." The turn of phrase was trendy new slang for him.)
He seems a little ambivalent about the prospect. "If [he] must" live with only Solitude for company, he thinks he can find a way to enjoy it. But he'd have to leave the "jumbled heap / Of murky buildings" that is the city and head out to the countryside. There, with only Solitude for company, he might enjoy exhilaration and peace alike: gazing down from a mountainside to see a whole valley reduced to the size of a mere "span" (a handbreadth), or resting under a "pavilion[]" of branches to watch the deer and the bees.
But this sociable speaker would really rather visit these places with company. Though the countryside is one of Solitude's favorite haunts, it seems to him a place best enjoyed with a "kindred spirit[]," a close friend whose "converse" (or conversation) might enrich his "soul's pleasure" in what he sees.
In his pleasure in nature and his love of good talk, this speaker can be read as a voice for Keats himself, or at least for a remarkably Keatsian figure. Like any good Romantic poet, this speaker feels at home wandering lonely through vales and hills. But like the sociable, affable, good-hearted Keats in particular, he's a man who feels friendship as "almost the highest bliss of human-kind."
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“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Setting
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The setting here seems, in one sense, to be the speaker's imagination or memory. As he prepares to spend some time with Solitude, he insists that he'd much rather do so out in nature than in the city, and he speaks with loving familiarity of the mountains, dells, rivers, glades, and wildflowers of the countryside. But the very fact that he longs to get out amongst these beauties might hint that he's actually stuck in a "jumbled heap / Of murky buildings": that is, in the big city.
If readers take the speaker here to be a voice for Keats, that city is the London of the early 19th century, at a particularly grimy point in its history. The flora and fauna of the landscape he describes also sounds a lot like the English countryside. It's an idealized version of that countryside, though—a faintly enchanted place where branches form fairy-tale "pavilion[s]" overhead and rivers run crystal-clear.
The juxtaposition between degraded city and dreamy countryside here suggests a very Romantic preference for nature's innate wisdom over humanity's disorderly, noisy, messy folly. This was Keats's first published poem, and readers might well detect the influence of Wordsworth on the young Keats here. Perhaps there's even a touch of Wordsworthian inspiration in the description of the landscape, which sounds a lot more like the dramatic scenery of Wordsworth's Lake District than the gentler hills of southern England (from which Keats, in 1816, had not yet traveled far).
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Literary and Historical Context of “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
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Literary Context
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as the archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class youth making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet, justified faith in his own genius. In an early letter, he declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Keats was also among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime: he met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. However, he never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the grandfather of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier artists, Londoners like him: Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon, just for example.
"O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" was Keats's first published poem. It appeared in 1816 in Leigh Hunt's influential newspaper and literary journal The Examiner, when Keats was not quite 21 years old. Keats later collected it in his first volume of poetry, Poems (1817). This, then, was Keats's grand arrival on the literary scene—an arrival that would shortly be met with snobbish distaste from many critics. One of these, upon learning that Keats had trained as a doctor, scornfully wrote: "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’"
But in spite of such dismissals, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Historical Context
When Keats published this poem in 1816, he was not yet 21: a young poet at the beginning of a brief but miraculous career. During this period, he was spending a lot of time with Leigh Hunt, an influential (and controversial) poet and journalist. Hunt was a key figure in what some stuffy critics called the "Cockney School" of poetry, a group of London-based writers with left-leaning politics and a taste for nature poetry. Hunt welcomed the young Keats enthusiastically and became one of his important early mentors, encouraging his poetry and introducing him to other big names like Percy Shelley. It was in Hunt's rabble-rousing journal The Examiner that this poem first appeared.
The longing for nature that this poem expresses was very much Keats's own. Born and raised in London, Keats often felt oppressed by the smoke and mess of the urban scene. But in the early 1800s, escape might have felt a bit easier: woods and fields were not so difficult to find near London as they are today. When Keats was getting acquainted with Leigh Hunt, he would go out to visit him in his house in Hampstead, an area that is now a well-connected suburb (albeit a leafy one). But in Keats's day, it was still firmly part of the countryside, a hamlet of its own.
Keats himself would move to Hampstead in 1817. But in 1815, when he likely wrote this poem, he was living right in the heart of the "jumbled heap / Of murky buildings" that was central London, halfheartedly studying to become a doctor at Guy's Hospital in Southwark.
It was little wonder that the young Keats's thoughts might have wandered longingly to crystal rivers and foxgloves: doctoring was not a prestigious or a pleasant occupation in his time. Medical students learned anatomy by dissecting corpses—often thoroughly rotten ones fished out of rivers, cut down from the hangman's scaffold, or quietly "liberated" from paupers' graveyards. (Donating one's body to medical science was not yet something respectable people did.) And when a young doctor got around to treating live patients, he (and, at the time, he was certainly a "he") only encountered more horrors. Antibiotics hadn't been discovered, and anesthesia was primitive.
Being a doctor, then, demanded a strong stomach and a firm resolve. Keats possessed both, but his heart wasn't in it: in 1817, he would leave the profession to dedicate himself to poetry.
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More “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell” Resources
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External Resources
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Keats's Debut — Read an article by Keats's mentor Leigh Hunt published in the Examiner not long after this poem appeared, in which the elder poet praises this up-and-coming young man's work.
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A Keats Timeline — Read a timeline that traces Keats's miraculously rapid poetic development over the course of his short life.
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The Keats Letters Project — Visit the Keats Letters Project to find a wide range of scholars and amateur Keats-lovers writing responses to Keats's wonderful letters.
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Keats at Guy's Hospital — Learn more about Keats's beginnings as a trainee doctor amid the "murky buildings" of London (and see a touching monument dedicated to him at Guy's Hospital, the institution where he trained—still a working hospital today).
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The Keats-Shelley House — Visit the website of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome: a museum dedicated to Keats and his contemporary Shelley, hosted in the apartment where Keats lived his last days.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Keats
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