Consider, for example, the liebestod which implies an ecstatic union between two lovers whose love cannot be contained in the ordinary world (and evoked in the letter to Fanny Brawne quoted in the Introduction). This is perhaps not too far from Keats’ thought: he, too, is in “ecstasy,” a word usually etymologised as the soul standing separate from the body. He, too, feels that this moment is his ultimate fulfilment. Perhaps there is even a sense that to die at this moment would in some way preserve the soul forever, and this is why “more than ever seems it rich to die/To cease upon the midnight.”