Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819):
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time”
The word still is doing triple duty: motionless (the urn doesn’t move), yet (the bride remains unravished), and always (the permanence of art). Keats couldn’t read Greek — he came at antiquity through Lemprière’s dictionary and Chapman’s Homer, through translations and through the objects themselves. When he writes still, does the word know that it descends from OE stille (fixed, stable, calm) and has nothing to do with Latin distillare (to drip, to trickle — whence the temporal “still” meaning “yet”)? Two etymologies have collapsed into one spelling, and Keats is using both without knowing they were ever separate.
The temporal ‘still’ is not from distillare. Etymonline derives ‘yet’ (1530s) from OE stille through ‘continual’ (c.1200), and MED gives all seven senses — silent, motionless, secret, continual — under one headword, one etymology. The only still from Latin is the apparatus: stillen v.(2), ‘to drip, trickle’ — a different word entirely. The urn is not caught between two etymologies; it holds the full range of one.
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair Love’s ripening breast To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest; Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever, — or else swoon to death.
— Keats, “Bright Star” (1819)
The last four lines run the word five times without repetition. Still steadfast (continuous), still unchangeable (motionless), still, still (silent/motionless/continuous at once) — not ambiguity but compression. What the MED holds in one headword, Keats loads onto a single line-opening, twice. The star cannot do this; it is only motionless, only sleepless. The speaker wants the form of the star’s stillness without its solitude — wants continuation that is also contact, immobility that is also warmth. The word carries all of it because it always could. No split required.