This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold,
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights,
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience calmed - see here it is -
I hold it towards you
~John Keats
This fragment of a poem was written in 1819, shortly after Keats began to show symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him. It's my favorite Keats poem. Every time I read it I am struck by it. It is at once the most chilling poem I have ever read, and one of the most beautiful, and, of course, romantic. The apocryphal story is that this fragment was found on the back of a manuscript of one of the odes, scribbled off hurriedly and forgotten, but I don't know if there's any truth to that, although I'd like to think there is.
This is the also the most successful poem I have encountered at "breaking the page barrier" to borrow a phrase from Professor Allen Grossman - at the end of the poem, the hand does seem to burst through the page, at once threatening and beckoning.