The bounty of beauty

What are these things of beauty? Most of them come from nature:

• the sun and the moon;
• trees, old and young, that give shade to simple sheep;
• daffodils, with the green world they live in;
• clear streams (rills) that make a cool covering for themselves against the hot season;
• the forest thickets, sprinkled with fair musk-rose blooms.

Beauty is also found in great stories: the 'grandeur of the dooms' (the grand fates) we have imagined for the mighty dead, and all the lovely tales we have heard or read.

All these, Keats says, are like an endless fountain of immortal drink, pouring down to us from the brink of heaven: a gift that never runs dry.

The poem is written in rhyming couplets: each pair of lines rhymes (for example, 'ever' and 'never'), and then the next pair has a new rhyme.

The lines are of similar length, and the sentences are balanced, often with repeated patterns, which give the poem a smooth, musical flow.