Chapter IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817
Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The sex-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of Emancipation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--Calidore: influence of Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--Sleep and Poetry and I stood tiptoe--Analysis of Sleep and Poetry--Double invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--Analysis of I stood tiptoe--Intended induction to Endymion--Relation to Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek Mythology--Tintern Abbey and the three stages--Contrasts of method--Evocation versus Exposition.
The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:--
What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty?
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.
Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,--truly rather of Spenser's eighteenth century imitators; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats's own,
--new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance,--
especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the Midsummer Night's Dream but through Wieland's Oberon, a romance poem which Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more durable than in Shakespeare's play.[1]
Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called 'occasional',--records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic, manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,--but I will quote it nevertheless,--on Chapman's Homer. That walk in the morning twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind's eye the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The 'realms of gold' lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats's range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated in this other, written six months earlier[2]:--
How many bards gild the lapses of time! A few of them have ever been the food Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime: And often, when I sit me down to rhyme, These will in throngs before my mind intrude: But no confusion, no disturbance rude Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. So the unnumber'd sounds that evening store; The songs of birds--the whisp'ring of the leaves-- The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves With solemn sound,--and thousand others more, That distance of recognizance bereaves, Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.
Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained use of 'store' for 'fill' and 'recognizance' for 'recognition.' But the main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats's miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,--a frank and illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work. Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,
From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty poets.[3]
Compare Shelley in the preface to Prometheus Unbound:--'One great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study.'
Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning, 'Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain'; that beginning 'Had I a man's fair form'; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable opening, 'Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,' and its rather lame conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added 'Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters.' That excellent critic, the late F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put him ill at ease with his company and himself.
A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt's release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman's enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:--'To one who has been long in city pent' (this opening comes with only the change of a word from Paradise Lost), 'O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,' 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude:--
Let me thy vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:--'Give me a golden pen,' 'Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,' 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there': to which may be added the sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket written in Hunt's house and in friendly competition with him.
A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea):--
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears, Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been.
Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed 'As from the darkening gloom a silver dove' he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,[4] seem not to have been written (as that on the Floure and the Lefe certainly was not) until the book was passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out 'After dark vapours' and 'Who loves to peer,' and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie's coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject. 'Tassie's gems' were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova.[5] The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.
Come hither all sweet maidens soberly, Down-looking aye, and with a chasten'd light Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white, And meekly let your fair hands joined be, As if so gentle that ye could not see, Untouch'd, a victim of your beauty bright, Sinking away to his young spirit's night,-- Sinking bewilder'd 'mid the dreary sea: 'Tis young Leander toiling to his death; Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips For Hero's cheek, and smiles against her smile. O horrid dream! see how his body dips Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile: He's gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath![6]
More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams) in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely on Browne's Britannia's Pastorals. Keats, as has been said, was already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following motto chosen from Browne's work Keats seems to put the group of Epistles in his volume under that poet's particular patronage:--
Among the rest a shepheard (though but young Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.
But before coming to questions of the special influences which successively shaped Keats's aims both as to style and versification in poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of illustration are passages which we know to have been specially familiar to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first consider Chaucer's use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to Diana in the Knightes Tale:--
O chaste goddesse of the wodes grene, To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene, Quene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe, Goddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire, As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire, That Attheon aboughte cruelly. Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I Desire to been a mayden al my lyf, Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf. I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye, A mayde, and love hunting and venerye, And for to walken in the wodes wilde, And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe. Noght wol I knowe companye of man. Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can, For tho thre formes that thou hast in thee. And Palamon, that hath swich love to me, And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore, This grace I preye thee with-oute more, As sende love and pees bitwixte hem two; And fro me turne awey hir hertes so, That al hir hote love, and hir desyr, And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr Be queynt, or turned in another place; And if so be thou wolt not do me grace, Or if my destinee be shapen so, That I shal nedes have oon of hem two, As sende me him that most desireth me.
The rime-syllables with which Chaucer ends his lines are as a rule strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of 'I | desire.' The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a line by falling at any point except the end. On the other hand it is as often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the second but of the first line, so that the ear has to wait a moment in expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.
When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the sense or sentence-pattern, which together compose the formal elements in all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system: its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.
Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in Mother Hubbard's Tale and Marlowe in Hero and Leander were among the earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate. Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:--
It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect: The reason no man knows; let it suffice, What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, 'Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;' And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him. He started up; she blushed as one ashamed; Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed. He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled: Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands: True love is mute, and oft amazed stands. Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled; And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day).
The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough.
Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or 'gemells' as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:--
Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny, Nay, I'll affirm and swear, I am not I: Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive, Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave. And yet, methinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand, Nor seem so much appalled at my hand; For my misfortunes have inur'd thine eye (Long before this) to sights of misery. No, no, read on, 'tis I, the very same, All thou canst read, is but to read my shame. Be not dismay'd, nor let my name affright; The worst it can, is but t' offend thy sight; It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm, It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.
But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from one of his epistles:--
O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve For all this world, yet will I not believe But that she's fair and lovely and that she So to the period of the world will be; Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all, For that so many sundry mischiefs fall Upon her daily, and so many take Up arms against her, as it well might make Her to forsake her nature, and behind To leave no step for future time behind, As she had never been, for he that now Can do her most disgrace, him they allow The time's chief Champion--.
Turning to Keats's next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of Tavistock, here is a passage from Britannia's Pastorals which we know to have stuck in his memory, and which illustrates the prevailing tendency of the metre in Browne's hands to run in a succession of closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:--
And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste, With naked iv'ry neck, and gown unlaced, Within her chamber, when the day is fled, Makes poor her garments to enrich her bed: First, put she off her lily-silken gown, That shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down; And with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine, Embracing her as it would ne'er untwine. Her flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders, She next permits to wave about her shoulders, And though she cast it back, the silken slips Still forward steal and hang upon her lips: Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces, Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers, As loth to be enchain'd but with her fingers. Then on her head a dressing like a crown; Her breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down, And all things off (which rightly ever be Call'd the foul-fair marks of our misery) Except her last, which enviously doth seize her, Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure, Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her, And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.
Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties, constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixth Odyssey:--
These, here arriv'd, the mules uncoach'd, and drave Up to the gulfy river's shore, that gave Sweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took Their clothes, and steep'd them in the sable brook; Then put them into springs, and trod them clean With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then, Who should have soonest and most cleanly done. When having throughly cleans'd, they spread them on The flood's shore, all in order. And then, where The waves the pebbles wash'd, and ground was clear, They bath'd themselves, and all with glittering oil Smooth'd their white skins; refreshing then their toil With pleasant dinner, by the river's side; Yet still watch'd when the sun their clothes had dried. Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa With other virgins did at stool-ball play, Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.
The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,--
Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire; There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire May mollify, milk, honey redolent With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content. The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food; Affording banquets without death or blood. Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy: And yet not all; in pastures horses joy: So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath (Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin, That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb! That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become! While by one creature's death another lives!
Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul's, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:--
Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The fair Pharonnida recovers strength, Though sighs each accent interrupted, to Return this answer:--'Wilt, oh! wilt thou do Our infant love such injury--to leave It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive A comfortable smile to cherish it, When thou art gone? They're but dull joys that sit Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would Our rigid fortune only be content With absence; but a greater punishment Conspires against us--Danger must attend Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day Wherein your battles join, how will my fear With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast, My heart's exposed to every danger that Assails thy valour, and is wounded at Each stroke that lights on thee--which absent I, Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.'
The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit--that is the separate couplet--as the completely dominant element in the measure, the 'heroic' measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:--
In every language now in Europe spoke By nations which the Roman Empire broke, The relish of the Muse consists in rime: One verse must meet another like a chime. Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace In choice of words fit for the ending place, Which leave impression in the mind as well As closing sounds of some delightful bell.
Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college Vacation Exercise, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats's early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:--
Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
* * * * *
I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their passage out; And wearie of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck't them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears; Yet I had rather if I were to chuse, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soare Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav'ns dore Look in, and see each blissful Deitie How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th' touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire: Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire, And mistie Regions of wide air next under, And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder, May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves, In Heav'ns defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pass When Beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of Kings and Queens and Hero's old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast, While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmonie In willing chains and sweet captivitie.
But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment of the admired quality of 'smoothness' (another name for clipped and even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time, however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine Philips ('the matchless Orinda'), who was a stickler for the strictest form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662):--
Although the most do with officious heat Only adore the living and the great, Yet this Queen's merits Fame so far hath spread, That she rules still, though dispossest and dead. For losing one, two other Crowns remained; Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned. Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less But to that third which she does now possess. Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know, That seeking her own fame in such a foe, She drest the spacious theatre for the fight: And the admiring World call'd to the sight: An army then of mighty sorrows brought, Who all against this single virtue fought; And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows, To her heroic soul they did oppose: But at her feet their vain attempts did fall, And she discovered and subdu'd them all.
Cowley in his long 'heroic' poem The Davideis admits the occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer's prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden's 'translation':--
O Goddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green, To whom both Heav'n and Earth and Seas are seen; Queen of the nether Skies, where half the Year Thy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere; Goddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts, So keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts, Which Niobe's devoted Issue felt, When hissing through the Skies the feather'd Deaths were dealt: As I desire to live a Virgin-life, Nor know the Name of Mother or of Wife. Thy Votress from my tender Years I am, And love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game. Like Death, thou know'st, I loath the Nuptial State, And Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate, A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate. Where Love is Duty on the Female Side, On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride. Now by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen In Heav'n, Earth, Hell, and ev'ry where a Queen, Grant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease, And make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace: Quench their hot Fire, or far from me remove The Flame, and turn it on some other Love. Or if my frowning Stars have so decreed, That one must be rejected, one succeed, Make him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast Is fix'd my Image, and who loves me best.
In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and the like, thus:--
I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet Ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; I'm what I was, a little harmless Devil. For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures, We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.
In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions, all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in memory from Ariel's account of the duties of his subordinate elves and fays:--
Some in the fields of purest ether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day: Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky: Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain. Others, on earth, o'er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,--
let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in which Pope congratulates himself
That not in fancy's maze he wandered long, But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song; That not for fame, but virtue's better end, He stood the furious foe, the timid friend, The damning critic, half approving wit, The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit; Laughed at the loss of friends he never had, The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad; The distant threats of vengeance on his head, The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed; The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown, The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,--
and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:--
Swearing and supperless the hero sate, Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate; Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.
The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred years the settled norm and standard for English 'heroic' verse, the length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost from Pope's own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main unconsciously, in men's minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate. Joseph Warton made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope's death, a formal protest against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and at all times stoutly maintained 'Invention and Imagination' to be the chief qualities of a poet; illustrating his views by what he called odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger brother Thomas, with his passion for Gothic architecture, his masterly editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what was to come were Chatterton's audaciously brilliant blunder of the Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the enthusiastic reception of Percy's Reliques. But current critical taste did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the labour of scholars--even those of pretended scholars--in collecting and publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should conform as a matter of course to the standards established since language and style had been 'polished' and reduced to 'correctness' by Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope's editors, and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in this thoroughly Popeian wise:--
Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold With eager eyes thy wings bedropp'd with gold; The purple spots that o'er thy mantle spread, The sapphire's lively blue, the ruby's red, Ten thousand various blended tints surprise, Beyond the rainbow's hues or peacock's eyes: Not Judah's king in eastern pomp array'd, Whose charms allur'd from far the Sheban maid, High on his glitt'ring throne, like you could shine (Nature's completest miniature divine): For thee the rose her balmy buds renews, And silver lillies fill their cups with dews; Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes, For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.
William Blake, in his Poetical Sketches of 1784, poured scorn on the still reigning fashion for 'tinkling rhymes and elegances terse', and himself struck wonderful lyric notes in the vein of our older poetry: but nobody read or marked Blake: he was not for his own age but for posterity. Even those of the eighteenth century poets who in the main avoided the heroic couplet, and took refuge, like Thomson, in the Spenserian stanza or Miltonic blank verse, or confined themselves to lyric or elegiac work like Gray,--even they continued to be hampered by a strict conventional and artificial code of poetic style and diction. The first full and effective note of emancipation, of poetical revolution and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge and Wordsworth with the publication and defence of their Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800). Both these young masters had written in the established mould in their quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost entirely (The Happy Warrior is of course a conspicuous exception); while their contemporary Walter Scott avoided it from the first.
The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from or coloured by the old ballad literature of the country, or helping itself from the simplicities and directnesses of common every-day speech, or going back to Miltonic and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style all these three elements play their part, now rapidly in the face of all opposition, as in the case of Scott with his dashing Border lays. But the heroic couplet on the Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning and official form of verse; and among the most admired poets of Keats's day, Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in the older generation, each in his own manner, still kept sounding the old instrument essentially to the old tune, with Byron in the younger following, in The Corsair and Lara, at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but with a beat even more monotonous and hammering than any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt declared his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how he carried out his promise in Rimini. He did little more than revive Dryden's expedients of the occasional triplet and Alexandrine, with a sprinkling of Elizabethan double-endings; failing withal completely to catch any touch either of the imaginative passion of the Elizabethans or of Dryden's fine virile energy and worldly good-breeding.
Rimini was not yet published, nor had Keats yet met its author, when Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the case, his strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little in the same manner as Hunt's, it is that there was really as he himself said on another occasion, something in common between them. At the same time it should be remembered that some of Keats's most Huntian-seeming rimes and phrases contain really an echo of the older masters.[7] That William Browne was his earliest model in the handling of the metre will, I think, be apparent to any reader who will put the passage from Britannia's Pastorals above quoted (p. 98), with its easily flowing couplets varied at intervals by whole clusters or bunches of double endings, alongside of the following from Keats's first Epistle:--
Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee Past each horizon of fine poesy; Fain would I echo back each pleasant note As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float 'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted, Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted: But 'tis impossible; far different cares Beckon me sternly from soft 'Lydian airs,' And hold my faculties so long in thrall, That I am oft in doubt whether at all I shall again see Phoebus in the morning: Or flush'd Aurora in the roseate dawning! Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream; Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam; Or again witness what with thee I've seen, The dew by fairy feet swept from the green, After a night of some quaint jubilee Which every elf and fay had come to see: When bright processions took their airy march Beneath the curved moon's triumphal arch. But might I now each passing moment give To the coy muse, with me she would not live In this dark city, nor would condescend 'Mid contradictions her delights to lend. Should e'er the fine-ey'd maid to me be kind, Ah! surely it must be whene'er I find Some flowery spot, sequester'd, wild, romantic, That often must have seen a poet frantic; Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing, And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing; Where the dark-leav'd laburnum's drooping clusters Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres, And intertwin'd the cassia's arms unite, With its own drooping buds, but very white.
This is artless enough as writing, but obviously sincere, and interesting as showing how early and instinctively both Greek and mediaeval mythology had become to Keats symbols and incarnations, as living as in the days of their first creation, of the charm and power of nature. The piece ends with a queer Ovidian fancy about his friend, to the effect that he, Mathew, had once been a 'flowret blooming wild' beside the springs of poetry, and that Diana had plucked him and thrown him into the stream as an offering to her brother Apollo, who had turned him into a goldfinch, from which he was metamorphosed into a black-eyed swan fed by Naiads.
The next experiments in this measure, the fragment of Calidore with its Induction, date from a few months later, after the publication of Rimini, and express the longing of the young aspirant to follow the example of Hunt, the loved Libertas, and tell, he too, a tale of chivalry. But the longing is seconded by scarce a touch of inspiration. The Gothic and nature descriptions are quite cheap and external, the figures of knights and ladies quite conventional, the whole thing a matter of plumes and palfreys and lances, shallow graces of costume and sentiment, much more recalling Stothard's sugared illustrations to Spenser than the spirit of Spenser himself, whose patronage Keats timorously invokes. He at the same time entreats Hunt to intercede with Spenser on his behalf: and in the result it seems as though Hunt had stepped bodily in between them. In the handling of the metre, indeed, there is nothing of Hunt's diluted Drydenism: there is the same direct though timid following of Elizabethan precedents as before, varied by an occasional echo of Lycidas in the use of the short six-syllable line:--
Anon he leaps along the oaken floors Of halls and corridors.
But in the style and sentiment we trace Leigh Hunt, or those elements in Keats which were naturally akin to him, at every turn. We read, for instance, of trees that lean
So elegantly o'er the waters brim And show their blossoms trim:
and of
The lamps that from the high-roof'd hall were pendent And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.
A few months later, on his August and September holiday at Margate, Keats resumes the measure again, in two familiar epistles, one to his brother George, the other to Cowden Clarke. To his brother he expresses frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspirations of a youth passionately and justly conscious of the working of the poetic impulse in him, but not less justly dissatisfied with the present fruits of such impulse, and wondering whether any worth gathering will ever come to ripeness. He tells us of hours when all in vain he gazes at the play of sheet lightning or pries among the stars 'to strive to think divinely,' and of other hours when the doors of the clouds break open and show him visions of the pawing of white horses, the flashing of festal wine cups in halls of gold, and supernatural colours of dimly seen flowers. In such moods, he asks concerning an imagined poet:--
Should he upon an evening ramble fare With forehead to the soothing breezes bare, Would he naught see but the dark silent blue With all its diamonds trembling through and through? Or the coy moon, when in the waviness Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress, And staidly paces higher up, and higher, Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire? Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight-- The revelries, and mysteries of night: And should I ever see them, I will tell you Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.
But richer even than these privileges of the poet in his illuminated moments is the reward which he may look for from posterity. In a long passage, deeply pathetic considering the after-event, Keats imagines exultingly what must be a poet's deathbed feelings when he foresees how his name and work will be cherished in after times by men and women of all sorts and conditions--warrior, statesman, and philosopher, village May-queen and nursing mother (the best and most of the verses are those which picture the May-queen taking his book from her bosom to read to a thrilled circle on the village green). He might be happier, he admits, could he stifle all these ambitions. Yet there are moments when he already tastes the true delights of poetry; and at any rate he can take pleasure in the thought that his brother will like what he writes; and so he is content to close with an attempt at a quiet description of the Thanet scenery and surroundings whence he writes.
In addressing Cowden Clarke Keats begins with an odd image, likening the way in which poetic inspiration eludes him to the slipping away of drops of water which a swan vainly tries to collect in the hollows of his plumage. He would have written sooner, he tells his correspondent, but had nothing worthy to submit to one so familiar with the whole range of poetry and recently, moreover, privileged to walk and talk with Leigh Hunt,--
One, who, of late, had ta'en sweet forest walks With him who elegantly chats, and talks-- The wrong'd Libertas,--who has told you stories Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo's glories; Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city, And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.
(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to The Feast of the Poets and Rimini. The passage seems to make it certain that whatever intercourse Keats himself may up to this time have had with Hunt was slight.) Even now, he goes on, he would not show Clarke his verses but that he takes courage from their old friendship and from his sense of owing to it all he knows of poetry. Recurring to the pleasantness of his present surroundings, he says that they have inspired him to attempt the verses he is now writing for his friend, which would have been better only that they have been too long parted. Then follow the lines quoted farther back (p. 37) in affectionate remembrance of old Enfield and Edmonton days.
In these early attempts Keats again ventures some way, but not yet far, in the direction of breaking the fetters of the regular couplet. He runs his sentences freely enough through a succession of lines, but nine times out of ten with some kind of pause as well as emphasis on the rime-word. He deals freely in double endings, and occasionally, but not often (oftenest in the epistle to George) breaks the run of a line with a full stop in or near the middle. He is in like manner timid and sparing as yet in the use, to which a little later he was to give rein so fully, of Elizabethan word-forms, or forms modelled for himself on Elizabethan usage.
Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre and in diction are the two poems, Sleep and Poetry and 'I stood tip-toe,' which Keats wrote after he came back to London in the autumn. These are the things which, together with two or three of the sonnets, give its real distinction and high promise to the volume. Both in substance and intention they are preludes merely, but preludes of genius, and, although marked by many immaturities, as interesting and attractive perhaps as anything which has ever been written by a poet of the same age about his art and his aspirations. In them the ardent novice communes intently with himself on his own hopes and ambitions. Possessed by the thrilling sense that everything in earth and air is full, as it were, of poetry in solution, he has as yet no clearness as to the forms and modes in which these suspended elements will crystallize for him. In Sleep and Poetry he tries to get into shape his conceptions of the end and aim of poetical endeavour, conjures up the difficulties of his task, counts over the new achievement and growing promise of the time in which he lives, and gives thanks for the encouragement by which he has been personally sustained. In 'I stood tip-toe' he runs over the stock of nature-images which are his own private and peculiar delight, traces in various phases and aspects of nature a symbolic affinity, or spiritual identity, with various forms and kinds of poetry; tells how such a strain of verse will call up such and such a range of nature images, and conversely how this or that group of outdoor delights will inspire this or that mood of poetic invention; and finally goes on to speculate on the moods which first inspired some of the Grecian tales he loves best, and above all the tale of Endymion and Cynthia, the beneficent wonders of whose bridal night he hopes himself one day to retell.
Sleep and Poetry is printed at the end of the volume, 'I stood tip-toe' at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces was written first.[8] Sleep and Poetry is the longer and more important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak, all of a piece. We know that 'I stood tip-toe' was not finished until the end of December 1816. Sleep and Poetry cannot well have been written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the new year. What seems likeliest is that Sleep and Poetry was written without break during the first freshness of Keats's autumn intimacy at the Hampstead cottage; while 'I stood tip-toe' may have been begun in the summer and resumed at intervals until the year's end. I shall take Sleep and Poetry first and let 'I stood tip-toe' come after, as being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment, Endymion, which was to follow.
The scheme of Sleep and Poetry is to some extent that of The Floure and the Lefe, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so strongly caught Keats's fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the activities of Sleep personified,--'Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses,' etc.,--in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of sleep are those of something else which he will not name:--
What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and nought else can share it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Chasing away all worldliness and folly; Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So that we look around with prying stare, Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning; To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended. That is to crown our name when life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, And die away in ardent mutterings.
Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation, declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her acceptance he will be admitted to 'the fair visions of all places' and will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things, in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains to 'the events of this wide world,' which it will be given him to seize 'like a strong giant.'
At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the warning and its reply are alike felicitous:--
Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden's veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.
Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days--Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores--certainly with visions from Poussin's Bacchanals in his mind's eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul. Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically. He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while 'with glorious fear,' then swooping downward to alight on a grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, 'awfully intent,' and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, 'shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,' sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind's eye the multitude and variety of figures in this procession--
Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward--
contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts,'--and close with the vision of
a lovely wreath of girls Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,
as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant's mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.
This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats's mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads seventeen years earlier:--
Is there so small a range In the present strength of manhood, that the high Imagination cannot freely fly As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? From the clear space of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening Of April meadows? Here her altar shone, E'en in this isle; and who could paragon The fervid choir that lifted up a noise Of harmony, to where it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound, Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, Eternally around a dizzy void? Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd With honors; nor had any other care Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair. Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom,[9] and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye thought a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it,--no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau!
The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the Biographia Literaria (1816). In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Why should the hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason and 'correctness',--however clearly we may see the weak points of a passage like this, yet we cannot but feel that Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his verse.
So much for the indignant part of the passage. The congratulatory part repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon beginning 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and declares that fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are 'ugly clubs' and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses 'disturbing the grand sea of song' (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus, and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up and hurls after them into the sea).[10] The obvious supposition is that Keats is here referring to Byron's Eastern tales, with their clamour and heat and violence of melodramatic action and passion. Leigh Hunt, indeed, who ought to have known, asserts in his review of the volume that they are aimed against 'the morbidity which taints some of the productions of the poets of the Lake School.' I suspect that Hunt is here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What productions can he mean? Southey's Curse of Kehama? Coleridge's Ancient Mariner or Christabel? Wordsworth's relatively few poems, or episodes, of tragic life--as the Mad Mother, Ruth, Margaret? For certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most disliked in Wordsworth's work, could never be called thunders.
But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,
And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.
Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will--and then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him, and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friendship and encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt's over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by association a string of the delights ('luxuries' as in Huntian phrase he calls them) of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had been enjoying and the place where he now rested--that is on the couch in Hunt's library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:--
The very sense of where I was might well Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came Thought after thought to nourish up the flame Within my breast; so that the morning light Surprised me even from a sleepless night; And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay, Resolving to begin that very day These lines; and howsoever they be done, I leave them as a father does his son.
The best reason for thinking that the poem 'I stood tip-toe,' though probably finished quite as late as Sleep and Poetry, was begun earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had attempted in Calidore and its Induction but gave up in Sleep and Poetry, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the Epithalamion and Milton in Lycidas,--
Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds!
No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt's statement that this description was suggested by a summer's day when he stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his imagination to the right taking-off place--to plant it, so to speak, on the right spring-board--from which to start on its flight through a whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest vein of Keats's lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of Enid) how the minnows would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and corresponding moods of poetry,--
In the calm grandeur of a sober line, We see the waving of the mountain pine; And when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,--
and so forth. And then, having in his mind's eye, as I should guess, some of the mythological prints from Hunt's portfolios, he asks what moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo, and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,--and for the remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth's invention are lovely:--
He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling. But though her face was clear as infant's eyes, Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate: So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.
Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences diffused on that night about the world:--
The breezes were ethereal and pure, And crept through half-closed lattices to cure The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, And soothed them into slumbers full and deep. Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: And springing up, they met the wondering sight Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, And on their placid foreheads part the hair. Young men and maidens at each other gaz'd With hands held back, and motionless, amaz'd To see the brightness in each other's eyes.
Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, 'Was there a poet born?' which he intended that his next year's work should answer.
In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall find it carried later on, especially in Endymion. The abstract nouns expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination, on the model of those in Chapman's Hymn to Pan, increase in number, and we get the 'quaint mossiness of aged roots,' the 'hurrying freshnesses' of a stream running over gravel, the 'pure deliciousness' of the Endymion story, the 'pillow silkiness' of clouds, the 'blue cragginess' of other clouds, and the 'widenesses' of the ocean of poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne's 'roundly form' in his mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for 'bounden.' In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than Browne: at least in Sleep and Poetry the double endings no longer come in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting its noun follow at the beginning of the next,--'the high | Imagination,'--'the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.' The reader will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages in Sleep and Poetry where these things occur with the Endymion passage he will find quoted later on from the Faithful Shepherdess (p. 168).
As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's first volume, enough has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it. That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the Excursion, which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous passage in the fourth book of The Excursion where Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape:--
In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft grass through half a summer's day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed That timely light, to share his joyous sport: And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs, Across the lawn and through the darksome grove, Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes By echo multiplied from rock or cave, Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven, When winds are blowing strong.
Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt, in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he wrote the lines in 'I stood tip-toe,' asking in what mood or under what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt's word for the fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats's company at the time. Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth's interpretations will no doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by native instinct.
Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in Sleep and Poetry run parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey, a poem which we know from other evidence to have been certainly much in Keats's mind a year and a half later. Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey defines three stages of his own emotional and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,--
An appetite, a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye,--
and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of humanity,' and by the
sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats's Sleep and Poetry. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative passage beginning--
And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life--
may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life.
Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke. Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in Tintern Abbey and many passages of The Prelude and Excursion, with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of association and suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal identity was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The lines I mean are--
This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay; Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish, When lovely Titania was far, far away, And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish.
Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and Titania was taken, as is well known, from the French prose romance Huon of Bordeaux translated by Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English romantic movement of the time. There are several passages in Keats, notably in The Cap and Bells, where I seem to catch a strain reminiscent of this Oberon, and one instance where a definite phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory and been turned to gold, thus:--
Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance, When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart!
Oberon, c. vi, st. 17.
No utter'd syllable, or woe betide! But to her heart her heart was voluble.
The Eve of St Agnes, st. 23.
[2] March 1816 according to Woodhouse.
[3] The Prelude, book v.
[4] See above, p. 68.
[5] Particularly Sonnet XII:--
Voi che portate la sembianza umile, Cogli occhi bassi mostrando dolore.
It would have been easy to suppose that Keats had learnt something of the Vita Nuova through Leigh Hunt: but they were not yet acquainted when he wrote the Leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most likely accidental.
[6] In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed On a picture of Leander. A note of Woodhouse (Houghton MSS., Transcripts III) puts the matter right and gives the date. Which particular Leander gem of Tassie's Keats had before him it is impossible to tell. The general catalogue of Tassie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty representing Leander swimming either alone or with Hero looking down at him from her tower. Most of them were not from true antiques but from later imitations.
[7] Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been charged with Cockneyism and Huntism:--
And revelled in a chat that ceased not When at nightfall among our books we got.
The silence when some rimes are coming out, And when they're come, the very pleasant rout.
Well, but had not Drayton written in his Epistle to Henry Reynolds?--
My dearly loved friend how oft have we In winter evenings (meaning to be free) To some well-chosen place used to retire, And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire, Have past the hour contentedly with chat, Now talked of this and then discoursed of that, Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.
And Milton in the Vacation Exercise?--
I have some lively thoughts that rove about, And loudly knock to have their passage out.
[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats prints first the poem he had last written, Lamia.
[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--
This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.
[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including, I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'
V. APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON ENDYMION
'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins Endymion at Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on Endymion--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from Oxford--To his sister Fanny--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted December'--Dryden and Swinburne--Endymion finished--An Autumnal close--Return to Hampstead.
Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these expectations after his manner:--'I have read your Sleep and Poetry--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that will follow.' Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the Floure and the Lefe. Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--
Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire? O no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamed morn Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre Waking long dormant sounds, Keats, thy last born, To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire.
Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it.'
Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the Examiner for June and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle. In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap of
Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream.'
Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at length, Constable's Scots and Edinburgh Magazine, and the Eclectic Review, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' The preachment of the Eclectic is still more pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. Sleep and Poetry, declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure, in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the remembrance.'
Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him, had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers. George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to task pretty roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not by the sonneteer but by James Ollier, his business brother, and alleging of the work that--
By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.'
Meanwhile Keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. These were Messrs Taylor and Hessey of 93 Fleet Street. John Taylor, the chief partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who had come up from Nottinghamshire to open a business in London ten years earlier. He was already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be a little later the editor as well as publisher of the London Magazine, and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the publishing house in Fleet Street) of his most distinguished contributors. How and through whom Keats was introduced to his firm is not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appetite for books Keats wrote when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy. Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like mad. I would not for forty shillings be Coleridge's Lays [i.e. Lay Sermons] in your way.' Bailey was intimate with John Hamilton Reynolds and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister Marianne. In the course of the winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to him enthusiastically of Keats's poetical promise and personal charm. When at the beginning of March Keats's volume came out, Bailey was much struck, and on a visit to London called to make the new poet's acquaintance. Though it was not until a few months later that this acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been Bailey who recommended Keats and Taylor to each other.
Relations of business or friendship with Taylor necessarily involved relations with Richard Woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of Taylor's and at this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm. Woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good linguist in Spanish and Italian and a man of remarkably fine literary taste and judgment. He afterwards held a high position as a solicitor and was one of the founders of the Law Life Insurance Society.
These three new friendships, with Benjamin Bailey, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication of his book (March 3) and the mid-April following, turned out to be among the most valuable of Keats's life, and were the best immediate results the issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and try to get to work upon his great meditated Endymion poem. He writes as much to Reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from Falstaff expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to him--probably his brother Tom and James Rice:--
My brothers are anxious that I should go by myself into the country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh swarm of flies. Banish money--Banish sofas--Banish Wine--Banish Music; but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and banish all the world.
On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice, mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet On the Sea which he has just composed--
It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, etc.--
It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in King Lear beginning 'Do you not hear the sea,' which moved him, he says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with passion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters, not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations, but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being. Having found in the lodging-house passage an engraved head of Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching anniversary, April 23:--
I'll tell you what--on the 23d was Shakespeare born. Now if I should receive a letter from you, and another from my Brothers on that day 'twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times--for instance, the following from the Tempest never struck me so forcibly as at present,
Urchins Shall, for the vast of night that they may work, All exercise on thee--
How can I help bringing to your mind the line--
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
I find I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal Poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan I had become all in a Tremble from not having written anything of late--the Sonnet over-leaf did me good. I slept the better last night for it--this Morning, however, I am nearly as bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first Lines I saw were these--
The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, Can never rest until it forth have brought Th' eternal brood of glory excellent.
'I shall forthwith begin my Endymion,' he adds, and looks forward to reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him, in a nook near the castle which he has already marked for the purpose.
But Haydon's prescription of solitude turned out the worst Keats could well have followed in the then state of his mind, fermenting with a thousand restless thoughts and inchoate imaginations and with the feverish conflict between ambition and self-distrust. The result at any rate was that he passed the time, to use his own words, 'in continual burning of thought, as an only resource,' and what with that and lack of proper food felt himself after a week or ten days 'not over capable in his upper stories' and in need of change and companionship. He made straight for his last year's lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last number of the Examiner, and especially, in his kind-hearted, well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to tell of the critical savagery of Blackwood and the Quarterly, now long since branded and proverbial. But it should be borne in mind, as it by no means always is, that the Tories were far from having the savagery to themselves. When Hazlitt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal side, he could match Gifford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with their own weapons. To realize the controversial atmosphere of the time, here is a passage, and not the fiercest, from the Hazlitt article in which Keats found too venomous a sting. Southey's first love, rails Hazlitt, had been the Republic, his second was Legitimacy, 'her more fortunate and wealthy rival':--
He is becoming uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a murderess, a sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her ends--bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train--infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves--driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she comes, Mr Southey sticks to her in spite of everything, and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and Social Order, takes for his motto,
Be to her faults a little blind, Be to her virtues very kind--
sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh!
It is fair to note that the mistress thus depicted as Southey's is an allegorical being, while the Blackwood scurrilities were often directly personal.
After asking how Hunt's own new poem, The Nymphs, is getting on, Keats tells how he has been writing some of Endymion every day the last fortnight, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a fit of gloom; hinting at such moods of bleak and blank despondency as we shall find now and again figuratively described in the text of Endymion itself.
I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is,... that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaeton ... I see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Now is there anything more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last? But I intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where I hope they will breed storms enough to block up all exit from Russia. Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[1] Tell him there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. Some have died before they were conceived.
The same evening Keats begins to answer a letter of encouragement and advice he had just had from Haydon. This is the letter of Haydon's from which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere and genuinely moved, he can never for a minute continuously steer clear of rant and fustian and self-praise at another's expense.
Never despair, he goes on, while the path is open to you. By habitual exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant companionship; and at every want turn to the Great Star of your hopes with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. I love you like my own brother: Beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend.[2] He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character. I wish you would come up to town for a day or two that I may put your head in my picture. I have rubbed in Wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. God bless you, my dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakespeare, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must.
Keats in answer quotes the opening speech of the King in Love's Labour's Lost,--
Let Fame, that all pant after in their lives Live registered upon our brazen tombs, etc.,
saying that he could not bear to think he had not the right to couple his own name with Haydon's in such a forecast, and acknowledging the occasional moods of depression which have put him into such a state of mind as to read over his own lines and hate them, though he has picked up heart again when he found some from Pope's Homer which Tom read out to him seem 'like Mice' to his own. He takes encouragement also from the notion that has visited him lately of some good genius--can it be Shakespeare?--presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual and prospective. 'You tell me never to despair--I wish it was as easy for me to deserve the saying--truth is I have a horrid morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear--I may even say it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.' Then referring to Haydon's warning in regard to Hunt, he goes half way in agreement and declares he would die rather than be deceived about his own achievements as Hunt is. 'There is no greater sin after the seven deadly,' he says, 'than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great poet: the comfort is, such a crime must bring its own penalty, and if one is a self-deluder indeed accounts must one day be balanced.'
In the same week, moved no doubt by the difficulties George had mentioned about touching the funds due from their grandmother's estate, Keats writes to Taylor and Hessey, in a lively and familiar strain showing the terms of confidence on which he already stood with them, asking them to advance him an instalment of the agreed price for Endymion. He mentions in this letter that he is tired of Margate (he had already to another correspondent called it a 'treeless affair') and means to move to Canterbury. At this point there occurs an unlucky gap in Keats's correspondence. We know that he and Tom went to Canterbury from Margate as planned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly going on with the first book of Endymion), nor what impressions he received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (The Eve of St Mark, The Cap and Bells). The heroine of both was to have been a maiden of Canterbury called Bertha; not, of course, the historic Frankish princess Bertha, daughter of Haribert and wife of Ethelbert king of Kent, who converted her husband and prepared his people for Christianity before the landing of Saint Augustin, and who sleeps in the ancient church of Saint Martin outside the walls: not she, but some damsel of the city, named after her in later days, whom Keats had heard or read of or invented,--I would fain know which; but I have found no external evidence of his studies or doings during this spring stay at Canterbury, and his correspondence is, as I have said, a blank.
Some time in June he returned and the three brothers were together again: not now in City lodgings but in new quarters to which they had migrated in Well Walk, Hampstead. Their landlord was one Bentley the postman, with whom they seem to have got on well except that Keats occasionally complains of the 'young carrots,' his children, now for making a 'horrid row,' now for smelling of damp worsted stockings. The lack of letters continues through these first summer months at Hampstead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic appeal to his new publishers for a further advance of money, dated June 10th and ending with the words,--'I am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.' For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these months as working regularly at Endymion, having now reached the second book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health, and both in his circle and in Haydon's London studio Keats was as welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and Reynolds's sisters in Lamb's Conduit Street almost like sisters of his own. He was scarcely less at home in the family of his sister-in-law that was to be, Georgiana Wylie. The faithful Severn and the faithful Haslam came up eagerly whenever they could to join the Hampstead party. An acquaintance he had already formed at Hunt's with the Charles Dilkes and their friend Charles Brown, who lived as next-door neighbours at Wentworth Place, a double block of houses of their own building in a garden at the foot of the Heath, now ripened into friendship: that with Dilke rapidly, that with Brown, a Scotsman who by his own account held cannily aloof from Keats at first for fear of being thought to push, more slowly.
Charles Wentworth Dilke, by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, by predilection a keen and painstaking literary critic and antiquary, had been stimulated by the charm of Lamb's famous volume of Specimens to work at the old English dramatic poets, and had recently (being now twenty-seven) brought out a set of volumes in continuation of Dodsley's Old Plays. In matters political and social he was something of a radical doctrinaire and 'Godwin-perfectibility man' (the label is Keats's), loving decision and positiveness in all things and being therein the very opposite of Keats, who by rooted instinct as well as choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke's contemporary, schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence from another brother. A lively, cultivated, moderately successful amateur in literature, journalism, and drama, he was in person bald and spectacled, and portly beyond his years though active and robust; in habits much of a trencher-man ('a huge eater' according to the abstemious Trelawny) and something of a viveur within his means; exactly strict in money matters, but otherwise far from a precisian in life or conversation; an ardent friend and genial companion, though cherishing some fixed unreasonable aversions: in a word, a truly Scottish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and 'thrawn' prejudice, of frank joviality and cautious dealing.
It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon after the beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Benjamin Bailey again came to town and sought after and learned to delight in Keats's company. He meant to go back and read at Oxford for the latter part of the vacation, and invited Keats to spend some weeks with him there. Keats accepted, and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memoranda, though not put on paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats's own correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will take Bailey's recollections first, and give them in his own words, seeing that they paint the writer almost as well as his subject; omitting only passages that seem to drag or interrupt. First comes the impression Keats made on him at the time of their introduction in the spring, and then his account of the days they spent together in Oxford.
I was delighted with the naturalness and simplicity of his character, and was at once drawn to him by his winning and indeed affectionate manner towards those with whom he was himself pleased. Nor was his personal appearance the least charm of a first acquaintance with the young poet. He bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much beauty of feature and countenance. His hair was beautiful--a fine brown, rather than auburn, I think, and if you placed your hand upon his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. The eye was full and fine, and softened into tenderness, or beamed with a fiery brightness, according to the current of his thoughts and conversation. Indeed the form of his head was like that of a fine Greek statue:--and he realized to my mind the youthful Apollo, more than any head of a living man whom I have known.
At the commencement of the long vacation I was again in London, on my way to another part of the country: and it was my intention to return to Oxford early in the vacation for the purpose of reading. I saw much of Keats. And I invited him to return with me to Oxford, and spend as much time as he could afford with me in the silence and solitude of that beautiful place during the absence of the numerous members and students of the University. He accepted my offer, and we returned together. I think in August 1817. It was during this visit, and in my room, that he wrote the third book of Endymion.... His mode of composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for one day during the month he visited me at Oxford. He wrote, and I read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for exercise,--generally two or three o'clock. He sat down to his task,--which was about 50 lines a day,--with his paper before him, and wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often: and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day, he usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went for a walk. This was our habit day by day. The rough manuscript was written off daily, and with few erasures.
I remember very distinctly, though at this distance of time, his reading of a few passages; and I almost think I hear his voice, and see his countenance. Most vivid is my recollection of the following passage of the finest affecting story of the old man, Glaucus, which he read to me immediately after its composition:--
The old man raised his hoary head and saw The wildered stranger--seeming not to see, The features were so lifeless. Suddenly He woke as from a trance; his snow white brows Went arching up, _and like two magic ploughs Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large, Which kept as fixedly as rocky marge, Till round his withered lips had gone a smile._
The lines I have italicised, are those which then forcibly struck me as peculiarly fine, and to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky marge.' I remember his upward look when he read of the 'magic ploughs,' which in his hands have turned up so much of the rich soil of Fairyland.
When we had finished our studies for the day we took our walk, and sometimes boated on the Isis.... Once we took a longer excursion of a day or two, to Stratford upon Avon, to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare. We went of course to the house visited by so many thousands of all nations of Europe, and inscribed our names in addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally blackened the walls. We also visited the Church, and were pestered with a commonplace showman of the place.... He was struck, I remember, with the simple statue there, which, though rudely executed, we agreed was most probably the best likeness of the many extant, but none very authentic, of Shakespeare.
His enjoyment was of that genuine, quiet kind which was a part of his gentle nature; deeply feeling what he truly enjoyed, but saying little. On our return to Oxford we renewed our quiet mode of life, until he finished the third Book of Endymion, and the time came that we must part; and I never parted with one whom I had known so short a time, with so much real regret and personal affection, as I did with John Keats, when he left Oxford for London at the end of September or the beginning of October 1817.
Living as we did for a month or six weeks together (for I do not remember exactly how long) I knew him at that period of his life, perhaps as well as any one of his friends. There was no reserve of any kind between us.... His brother George says of him that to his brothers his temper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. But with his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit. Quite the contrary. 'He was gentle but not fearful,' in the chivalric and moral sense of the term 'gentle.' He was pleased with every thing that occurred in the ordinary mode of life, and a cloud never passed over his face, except of indignation at the wrongs of others.
His conversation was very engaging. He had a sweet toned voice, 'an excellent thing' in man as well as 'in woman....' In his letters he talks of suspecting everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew, especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. He had a soul of noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was in the best sense manly.
Our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or boatings, or in the evening. And I have retained a few of his opinions on Literature and criticism which I will detail. The following passage from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of the great imaginative and philosophic Christian Poet, which he really is, and which Keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be.
Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized.
The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often talked of that noble passage in the lines on Tintern Abbey:--
That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened.
And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--But in those exquisite stanzas,
She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Beside the springs of Dove,
ending,--
She lived unknown and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh, The difference to me.
The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect pathos.
Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the Excursion upon the Greek Mythology--where it is said that
Fancy fetched Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun A beardless youth who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
Keats said this description of Apollo should have ended at the 'golden lute,' and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture, how he 'filled the illumined groves.' I think every man of taste will feel the justice of the remark.
Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of Endymion. Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella:--
Come with acorn cup and thorn Drain my hertys blood away; Life and all its good I scorn; Dance by night or feast by day.
The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and in none more than in numerous passages of his Endymion.
Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric character of Achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in the trenches.' One of his favourite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may, Keats's theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]
Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats's theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.
Keats's own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with her and know her feelings and likings:--
Let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way befitting a brother.
We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I know not whether you prefer the History of King Pepin to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress--or Cinderella and her glass slipper to Moor's Almanack. However in a few Letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of Writing from me pretty frequently.--This I feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only, as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend. When I saw you last I told you of my intention of going to Oxford and 'tis now a Week since I disembark'd from his Whipship's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long acquainted, but whom I like very much--we lead very industrious lives--he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.--Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the world--it is full of old Gothic buildings--Spires--towers--Quadrangles--Cloisters--Groves etc and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank God, we have not had a drop of rain these days.
He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up:--
Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.
Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense:--
Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying (tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations.
To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--
For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level.
Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from Bailey's shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, 'the matchless Orinda.' The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those To M. A. at parting, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palaemon, of which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be found in Keats's work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the Caroline age.
Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power had been growing while he worked upon Endymion, and whom moreover the long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:--'You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines--which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low--and I would write the subject thoroughly again--but I am tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer--Rome was not built in a day--and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.'
Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them, Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of Endymion, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly, 'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'
During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth book of Endymion, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to have finished Endymion in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem The Gipsies and also of Hazlitt's criticism of it in the Round Table. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in Blackwood (the Endinburgh Magazine, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it (verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. 'I don't mind the thing much,' says Keats, 'but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might possibly meet--I don't relish his abuse.'
Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended 'to change the scene--change the air---and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of Paradise Lost he gave a friend we find the following:--
'Or have ye chosen this place After the toil of battle to repose Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?'
There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:--
'Others, more mild, Retreated in a silent valley, sing With notes angelical to many a harp Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall By doom of battle.'
How much of the charm is in the valley!
There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon--"you a' seen the Moon"--came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of Endymion. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets--they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working out conceits:' and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from them and from Venus and Adonis. Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Reynolds see a sample of Endymion, 'By the Whim-King! I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.'--The stanza he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not been there indeed, to give his vote contra.
On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from Endymion to the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--
You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.
Readers of Endymion will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of Endymion in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how 'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contain'd And in her looks, which from that time infus'd Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her Air inspir'd The spirit of love and amorous delight. She disappear'd, and left me dark, I wak'd To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure: When out of hope, behold her, not far off, Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow To make her amiable.[5]
It was no doubt this second of Adam's dreams that was chiefly in Keats's mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, 'continually running away from the subject,' or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of 'Sensations' as opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion: what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls 'ethereal musings.' And now let the poet speak for himself:--
O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, he awoke and found it truth:--I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning--and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, felt over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's face--more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter--that delicious face you will see.
There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. Keats speaks of 'the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.' Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. Of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his own, are among the number. That beginning 'Think not of it, sweet one, so,' dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas 'Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of Keats's subtlest critics[6] considers (I cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning--
You say you love, but with a voice Chaster than a nun's who singeth The soft vespers to herself When the chime-bell ringeth-- O love me truly!
You say you love; but with a smile Cold as sunrise in September, As you were St Cupid's nun, And kept his week of Ember. O love me truly!--
and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the first three stanzas of A Proper Wooing Song, written to the tune of the Merchant's Daughter and printed in Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delites, 1584:--
Maide will ye loue me yea or no? tell me the trothe and let me go. It can be no lesse than a sinful deed, trust me truly, To linger a Louer that lookes to speede, in due time duly.
You maides that thinke yourselves as fine, as Venus and all the Muses nine: The Father Himselfe when He first made man, trust me truly, Made you for his helpe when the world began, in due time duly.
Then sith God's will was even so why should you disdaine your Louer tho? But rather with a willing heart, loue him truly; For in so doing you do your part let reason rule ye.
The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7]
A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishing Endymion at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown[8]:--
In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity: The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime.
In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.
Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any Writh'd not at passed joy? The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme.[9]
Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's Spanish Fryar, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:--
Farewell ungrateful Traitor, Farewell my perjured swain, Let never injured creature Believe a man again. The pleasure of possessing Surpasses all expressing, But 'tis too short a blessing, And Love too long a pain.
Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the Garden of Proserpine?
But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon Endymion. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:--
Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end.
The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:--
The Carian No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan, Into the vallies green together went. Far wandering, they were perforce content To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree; Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.
and again:--
At this he press'd His hands against his face, and then did rest His head upon a mossy hillock green, And so remain'd as he a corpse had been All the long day; save when he scantly lifted His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary, Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose, And slowly as that very river flows, Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament: 'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall Before the serene father of them all Bows down his summer head below the west. Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest, But at the setting I must bid adieu To her for the last time. Night will strew On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves, And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'
That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river's edge.
Opposite the last line in the manuscript of Endymion Keats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started. Endymion was not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Sad stories' in the original text of Richard II. The allusion is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.
[2] 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] Paradise Lost, viii, 288-311.
[5] Ibid. viii, 452-490.
[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, in Essays and Studies (Cambridge, 1912).
[7] If it is objected that The Handful of Pleasant Delites is an excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in Heliconia, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his circle.
[8] Crewe MSS.
[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in The Gem, a periodical of the Keepsake type then edited by Thomas Hood, and in Galignani's collective edition of the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are altered and read 'In a drear-nighted December,' and the fifth line is made to run, 'To know the change and feel it.' The first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case of The Gem, Thomas Hood) editing him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version the poem is headed Pain of Memory, an apt title, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:--
But in the Soul's December The fancy backward strays, And darkly doth remember The hue of golden days, In woe the thought appalling Of bliss gone past recalling Brings o'er the heart a falling Not to be told in rhyme.
This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats himself. The 'Fallings from us, vanishings' of Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, may be responsible for the 'falling' in the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a common-place phrase little in Keats's manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in Bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).