The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold

Front matter

V THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN KEATS John Keats was born in London, ijpj, died in Rome, 1821. His juvenile verses, pp. 3-62 of tins edition, were published in 1817, his second volume, the Endymion, pp. 6j-iyj, in 1818, and his third, containing Lamia, Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of St. Agnes, indeed, the greater part of his best work, pp. i8i-2y6, in 1820.

THE POETICAL WORKS OE JOHN KEA TS EDITED BY WILL f AM T. ARNOLD LONDON KEG AN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., I PATERNOSTER SQUARE MDCCCLXXXIUI CONTENTS THE VOLUME OF 1817 To Leigh Hunt, Esq 3 / stood tip-toe upon a little hlll. ... 5 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem . . .12 Calidore ......... 14 To some Ladies 19 On receiving a curious Shell, and a copy of Verses, from the same Ladies 20 To * * * * 22 To Hope 24 Imitation of Spenser 26 Woman! when i behold thee flippant, vain . . 28 EPISTLES To George Felton Mathew 30 To my Brother George 33 To Charles Cowden Clarke 38 SONNETS To my Brother George 42 To * * * * 43 Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison 43 How many Bards gild the lapses of Time . . 44 To a Friend who sent me some Roses ... 44 To G. A. W. 45 0 Solitude ! if i must with thee dwell . . 45 To my Brothers VI CONTENTS Page THE VOLUME OF iS 17 --continued Keen, fitful Gusts are whispering here and there 46 lo One who has been long in City peat . . 47 On first looking into Chapman's Homer . . 47 On leaving some Friends at an early Hour . . 4S Addressed to Hay don . . . . . <8 Addressed to the Same ...... 49 On the Grasshopper and Cricket .... 49 To Kosciusko ........ 50 Happy is England ! 1 could be content ... 50 Sleep and Poetry . . . . . .51 ENDYMION Endymion, Book I ...... . 63 ., // 93 „ III 121 » IV 15° THE VOLUME OF 1S20 Lamia . 181 Isabella ; or, the Pot of Basil .... 201 The Eve of St. Agnes 219 Ode to a Nightingale ...... 232 Ode on a Grecian Urn ...... 235 Ode to Psyche 237 Fancy 240 Ode .......... 243 Lines on the Mermaid Tavern .... 243 Robin Hood 246 To Autumn 248 Ode on Melancholy 250 HYPERION.

A Fragment Book I . . . .252 >> .. >> „ II . . . 262 >i >> .. ., /// . . . 273 POSTHUMOUS POEMS On 279 On seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair . . . 280 The Thrush CONTENTS vii Page POSTHUMOUS POEMS— continued Written from Teignmouth 283 In a Letter to Ha ydon 2S7 From the same Letter to Haydon .... 289 Written on May-Day 290 Meg Merrilies . ...... 291 Walking lv Scotland 293 Staffa ......... 295 A Prophecy 297 Song .......... 299 Faery Song 300 Extracts from an Opera . . . . . .301 La Belle Dame Sans Merci 303 Ode on Indolence ....... 305 The Eve of St. Mark 308 Hyperion. A Vision . . . . . . .312 To Fanny ......... 326 To * * * * 328 SONNETS Spenser! a jealous Honourer of thine . . . 330 Oh! how 1 love, on a fair Summer's Eve . .331 To a young Lady who seat me a Laurel Crown . 331 After dark Vapours have oppress' d our Plains . 332 Written on the blank space of a Leaf at the end of Chaucer's Tale of "The Flowre and the Lefe "........ 332 On Leigh Hunt's Poem, " The Story of Rimini" . 333 On seeing the Elgin Marbles. . . . .333 To Haydon 334 On a Picture of Leander 334 On the Sea ....:... 335 The Human Seasons ....... 335 On sitting down to read "King Lear" once again 336 When i have Fears that i may cease to be . . 336 Answer to a Sonnet by J. H. Reynolds . . .337 To the Nile 337 To Homer ... 33S Written in Burns' Cottage CONTENTS Page POSTHUMOUS POEMS— continued Sonnet on Ailsa Rock 339 Ben Nevis 339 To J. H. Reynolds 34° To * * * * 340 To Sleep 341 On Fame 341 On Fame 342 Why did i laugh to-night?

Introduction

When criticism is confronted by a phenomenon like the poetical work of Keats — -work produced in the brief twenty-six years of a young man's life, but which nevertheless has at its best reached a point of perfection which compels one critic to say that its author " is with Shakspere," and another great master of our tongue to confess that " I have come to that pass of admiration for him now that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work " — it is in a manner called upon to give such explanation of it as may be had. A full explanation is of course im possible. The vision and the faculty divine always remain in the last resort inexplicable and unexplained. But it is possible to consider more closely than has perhaps hitherto been done the external influences that did much to mould the faculty of Keats — the country he knew, the art he studied, the poets whom in his early work he sought to imitate, and whose influence, " full alchemized " and twice distilled, has contributed something to the noble style of his maturer work.

In an article which was to have formed a reply to Bowles strictures on Pope, Lord Byron takes occasion to fall foul of the " Cockney School " to which, in his view, Keats belonged. After speaking of the Lakists, he goes on: "I can understand the pre tensions of the aquatic gentlemen of Windermere to what Mr. B calls entusumusy, for lakes and mountains and daffodils and buttercups ; but I should be glad to be apprized of the foundation of the London propensities of their imitative brethren to the same ' high argument.' Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have rambled over half Europe, and seen Nature in most of her varieties X

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(although I think that they have occasionally not used her very well) ; but what on earth— of earth and sea and Nature have the others seen ? Not a half nor a tenth part so much as Pope. While they sneer at his Windsor Forest, have they ever seen anything of Windsor except its brick ?" Byron here of course puts aside the real question, which is, not so much what a poet sees, but how he sees it — whether, in Wordsworthian phrase, he has had his eye upon the object. But it may be admitted that if poetry of the class to which that of Keats belongs had been composed by a man who had never been beyond the sound of Bow Bells it could not but possess an unreal, bookish, and factitious element. As a matter of fact, Keats was at school for some years at Enfield, made no doubt many an excursion thence into Epping Forest, afterwards lived, during his apprenticeship, in tlie same neighbourhood at Edmonton, and, even after he had come to London and settled in Hampstead, found time for many a flight to Surrey, or Devonshire, or the Isle of Wight, or Oxford, or Winchester, or the English lakes, or the Scotch Highlands.

Moreover die Hampstead of 1816-1820 was not the Hampstead of to-day. The lines to the Thrush were written at an open window in Hampstead, and the Ode to a Nightingale was suggested by the song of the bird that, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Mr. Brown's house in the same old-world suburb. The bird's song " often threw Keats," says his biographer, "into a sort of trance of tranquil pleasure. One morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table, placed it on the grass plot under a plum-tree, and sat there for two or three hours with some scraps of paper in his hands." It was then and there that the ode was written. The neighbourhood of Hampstead also suggested to Keats tlie charming juvenile verses, " I stood tip toe upon a sittle hill," and Mr. Cowden Clarke relates that the passage on the stream and the minnows in that little poem — one of the most delicately touched to be found anywhere in Keats' work — "was the recollection of our having frequently loitered over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned (probably still spans, notwith standing the intrusive and shouldering railroad) a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton." The fact is, that though

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XI Keats did not see anything that could be called a mountain till, late in his short life, he made that tour with his friend Brown through the North of England and Western Scotland, he was yet from his early boyhood familiar with the average, unspoilt country of the southern English Midlands, and must have seen the sea long before his first visit to the Isle of Wight. His biographer gives so few details of his life before the publication of the volume of 1817, that' it is impossible to say where Keats first saw the sea, but it is clear that the man who wrote these lines — As when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er Its rocky marge, and balances once more The patient weeds ; that now unshent by foam Feel all about their urdulating home — or these I see the lark down dropping to his nest And the broad-wing'd sea-gull never at rest ; For when no more he spreads his feathers free, His breast is dancing on the restless sea, — had other than a merely bookish knowledge of what he is describing.

In the same way we may be assured that the poet to whom occurred the simile — Nought more untranquil than the grassy slopes Between two hills — had seen a Surrey or a Sussex down, and the " pigeon tumbling in clear summer air " is not the picture of a man who knew nothing outside of London brick. Before Keats published his Endymion we know that he had stayed, in some cases for weeks, in others for days, in the Isle of Wight, at Leatherhead in Surrey, and at Oxford. He had not penetrated northwards, and the very interesting reference to Skid daw in the third book of the poem is a reminiscence, not of Skiddaw, but of Wordsworth. The first book of Endymion appears to have been written in the Isle of Wight. It was continued at Margate', Oxford, and Hampstead, and finished at Burford Bridge

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in Surrey. Mrs. Owen * rightly suggests a comparison between the first hundred lines of the poem and that delightful description of the island, in a letter to Reynolds from Carisbrooke. " But the sea, Jack, the sea, the little waterfall, then St. Catherine's Hill, ' the sheep in the meadows, the cows in the corn ' . . . I see Carisbrooke Castle from my window, and have found several delightful wood alleys, and copses, and quiet freshes ; as for primroses, the island ought to be called Primrose Island, that is, if the nation of Cowslips agree thereto, of which there are divers clans just beginning to lift up their heads." Perhaps it was in the Isle of Wight that Keats conceived the first idea of that picture of a wave breaking, as it nears the shore, — Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence — which Mr. Ruskin has called " quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner," and perhaps it was in that southern chalk country of bright colour and undulating down that his eye caught the beauty of those — Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs Blue hare bells lightly, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold — or that he — Linger'd in a sloping mead To hear the speckled thrushes, and see feed Our idle sheep.

For the rest, the landscape of Endymion is essentially an English landscape, whether the poet takes us — Through the green evening, quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away ; or tells us how — Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun ; * " Keats. A Study." By F. M. Owen — a charming and enthusiastic book. Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.

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XIII The lark was lost in him ; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass ; or how — Clear summer has forth walk'd Unto the clover-sward, and she has talk'd Full soothingly to every nested finch ; or calls to mind his explorations* of those "sedged brooks" which are "Thames' tributaries," and gives us this picture of the willow — And as a willow keeps A patient watch over the stream that creeps Windingly by it, so the quiet maid Held her in peace : so that a whispering blade Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling Down in the blue bells, or a wren light rustling Among sere leaves and twigs, might all be heard. The flowers of the Endymion are the wild rose and the pansy ; its birds are the lark, the nightingale, the wren, the linnet, and the thrush. In a word, Keats in the Endymion is writing, so far as the background of his story is concerned, about what he knows and not about what he pretends to know, and he both knew and felt the beauty of the English land, and of the sky over it, and of the sea en compassing it, far better than it was ever known or felt by Byron.

Between the publication of Endymion in 1818 and that of the volume containing Lamia, Hyperion, St. Agnes' Eve, and other pieces, in 1820, Keats spent some months in Devonshire, where he was kept in faithful attendance upon his brother Tom, who finally died at Teignmouth. He also stayed at Winchester for the best part of the autumn of 18 19, and spent the spring of the same year with Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight. Winchester is the only one of these places which can certainly be connected * " Life and Letters," i. 55. (Written from Oxford.) "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 some times skim into a bed of rushes, and then become naturalized river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened ' Reynold's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be."

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XIV with any particular poem. He speaks of it as "an exceedingly pleasant town, enriched with a beautiful cathedral, and surrounded by a fresh-looking country." The cathedral is probably partly responsible for the Eve of St. Mark, that strange and beautiful poem which was indeed begun before Keats went to Winchester, but which a casual allusion in one of his Winchester letters shows to have been in his mind while he was staying in the old cathedral city.* The " fresh-looking country" supplied the inspiration of the Ode to Autumn. " How beautiful the season is now," he writes from Winchester, on the 22nd of September, 1819. " How fine the air — a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather — Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much as now — ay, better than the chilly green of the Spring.

Somehow, a stubble field looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it." And then follows the " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." But neither Winchester, nor Teignmouth, nor the Isle of Wight was capable of introducing Keats to country of a kind which he had never seen before. The tour through the English Lakes and the Scotch Highlands was on the other hand an entirely new ex perience. The two friends — Keats and Armitage Brown — walked on foot from Lancaster as far north as Inverness. They saw Winder mere, Grasmere, Derwentwater, the country of Burns, Iona, Staffa, and went up Skiddaw and Ben Nevis. " Mr. Brown has recorded," writes Lord Houghton, " the rapture of Keats, when he became sensible for the first time of the full effect of mountain scenery.

At * See "Life and Letters," ii. 24, where in a letter dated "Winchester, 22nd of September, 1819," Keats uses the words " kepen in solitarinesse" from that poem. It is possible that he had kept the poem by him, and added some touches to it at Winchester. But in the letter to his brother and sister, dated February 14th, 18 19, and written shortly after his return from Chichester, he expressly says that he wrote St. Agnes' Eve in that ancient city, and adds : — "In my next packet I shall send you my Pot of Basil, St. Agnes' Eve, and if I should have finished it, a little thing, called the Eve of St. Mark." This looks as if Chichester had the better claim to be regarded as the place which suggested the background to the poem.

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XV a turn of the road above Bowness, where the Lake of Windermere first bursts on the view, he stopped as if stupefied with beauty." One result of this tour is the amount of purely local poetry — poetry absolutely identified with, and descriptive of, some particular place which it produced. The verses on Meg Merrilies, on Staffa, the sonnets on Ailsa Rock, Ben Nevis, and Burns' Cottage are only some of the instances of this. But the tour left traces in his poetry less obvious, but even more interesting than these. Most readers of Keats are familiar with that passage in which Mr. Ruskin speaks of the Ode to Psyche. " Keats," says Mr. Ruskin, "as is his way, puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work ; but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that marvellous Ode to Psyche.

Here is the piece about pines." Mr. Ruskin then quotes the lines beginning, " Yes, I will be thy priest and let the warm Love in," italicizing the words "fledge the wild-ridged mountains," as those to which he desires to call the reader's particular attention. In a letter from Keswick, Keats describes a clamber he had about Lodore. " There is no great body of water, but the accompani ment is delightful ; for it oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful trees." This is the first occurrence in Keats' work of the use of the verb which so fascinated Mr. Ruskin in the exact sense in which it is used in the passage from the Ode to Psyche, and it is perhaps not fanciful to put the two passages together.* The same letter supplies another interesting parallel to a passage in Hyperion.

"On our return from the circuit," writes Keats, " we set forth about a mile and a half on the Penrith road to see the Druid temple. We had a fag * The etters supply several interesting parallelisms of usage. I have quoted another of these on p. xxxiii., and it is worth while to put the words in a letter to Fanny Brawne, — " The last two years taste like brass upon my palate " — side by side with the " savour of poisonous brass and metal sick " of Hyperion.

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XVI up-hill, rather too near dinner-time, which was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on a gentle rise in the midst of the mountains, which at that time darkened all round, except at the fresh opening of the Vale of St. John." The passage in Hyperion is descriptive of " that sad place Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd." This is Keats' simile for the Titans — Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. It is surely a natural suggestion that the " cirque of Druid stones" which Keats,- ad in mind was that known as the Druidical Stones near Keswick, the position of which has been described as " com manding nearly all the summit ranges of the district detached from the human culture and occupation of their lower slopes, which are wholly out of sight from the high table-ground formed by the field," and which his own letter proves to have made so strong an impression upon his mind.

This is a subject which might easily be continued further. A comparison, for instance, of Keats' letter descriptive of Staffa, with a line n Hyperion — "Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern" — makes it certain that in writing that line Keats was thinking of Fingal's Cave. But enough has perhaps been said to indicate that Keats knew his native land unusually well for a young man in the days before railways, that the touches of natural beauty so frequent in the poems were derived from real impressions of the writer's own, and that the landscape of the poems is a thoroughly English landscape. Keats' impressions of natural beauty were implanted early, and they retained their freshness all his life. Most readers ot Keats will remember that pathetic passage in a letter written just a year before his untimely death, in which he notes " how astonishingly does the chance of leaving this world impress its natural beauties upon us ! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not

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XVII ' babble,' I think of green fields ; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy — their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a super human fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again." But though the landscape which Keats knew, and which he painted in as the background to his poetry, is an English landscape, he does not look at it with purely English eyes. He sees it through the glamour of the Greek mythology. His use of the Greek gods and goddesses, " not dead," as he says himself, " but in old marbles ever beautiful," is not a mere literary affectation.

It is not a tradition picked up from Chaucer, Browne, and Fletcher. It is something vital and personal to Keats himself. He is not content to philosophise about Nature as did Wordsworth ; he is not content with the "something far more deeply interfused;" he demands a conception of Nature such as will satisfy his highest sense of beauty, and touch a chord of almost personal affection. " Scenery is fine," he says, " but human nature is finer ; the sward is richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot ; the eagle's nest is finer for the mountaineer having looked into it." To Keats the highest beauty is that of a beautiful human being. Here he differs from Wordsworth, who feels nothing of Keats' desire to read human into natural beauty, and in a manner to interpenetrate and combine the two.

Wordsworth at his best, reaches a height of spiritual insight, in dealing with the relations of man and Nature, which is beyond Keats; Keats at his best, attains a beauty " full form'd, like Venus rising from the sea," which is beyond Words worth ; the inferior manner of the one is marked by the lapse into mechanical theorising, that of the other by the lapse into a sensuousness over rich and even morbid. If Keats had never heard of the Greek mythology, he would still probably have sought to give a half-human, half-divine personality to the sun, and moon, and sea. But, as a matter of fact, he became acquainted with the c

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whole pantheon of gods and goddesses in his early boyhood. He knew no Greek, but he worked diligently through the Æneid at school, and Tooke, Spence, and Lempriere did the rest. Mr. Cowden Clarke says of Lempriere's Dictionary that Keats " ap peared to learn " that book, and indeed only the most continuous and delighted poring over its pages could have given Keats that familiarity with Greek legend which he displays at every turn. There are occasional slips. Thus Keats makes Venus say, " Visit my Cytherea," when he means " Cythera," and, " Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load," which thus correctly appears in the text of the first edition of Endymion, is altered by the change of " her" to " his " in the list of errata prefixed to the volume. But even this is set right later. We find "Tellus and her briny robes " in the volume of 1820.

These, however, are the only mis takes made in hundreds of allusions to the classical mythology. Keats must indeed have known much of Lempriere positively by heart. It is worth while to put one or two passages side by side. In the second book of Endymion Keats writes — At this, with madden'd stare, And lifted hands, and trembling lips, he stood ; Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood, Or blind Orion hungry for the morn. Lempriere narrates, under "Deucalion," how the vessel in which Deucalion took refuge from the deluge was " tossed about during nine successive days, and at last stopped on the top of Mount Parnassus, where Deucalion remained till the waters had sub sided ; " and under "Orion," how " Œnopion intoxicated his illustrious guest, and put out his eyes on the sea-shore, where he had laid himself down to sleep.

Orion, finding himself blind when he awoke, was conducted by the sound to a neighbouring forge, where he placed one of the workmen on his back, and by his directions went to a place where the rising sun was seen to the greatest advantage. Here he turned his face towards the luminary, and, as it is reported, immediately recovered his eyesight, and hastened to punish the perfidious cruelty of Œnopion." Any one who cares to pursue this subject for himself, and will, for instance,

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XIX look out the Glaucus, Scylla, Hermes of Endymion, or the whole body of the dramatis personæ of Hyperion in Lempriere, will easily convince himself of the far from recondite source of the great majority of Keats' classical allusions. This reliance upon Lempriere descends to small minutiae. Thus it is the Pæon which Keats found in Lempriere — " Endymion married Chromia, daughter of Honus, or, according to some, Hyperipne, daughter of Areas, by whom he had three sons, Pæon, Epeus, and Æolus " — and not, as might conceivably be suggested, the Pæana of Spenser (F. 0_. iv. 8, 49) which in all probability is responsible for his Peona. Was then Byron right in speaking of Keats as " versifying Lempriere ? " He was right in the letter and wrong in the spirit. The remark is true in the sense in which it is true that Shakspere versified Holinshed.

Here is what Lempriere says about Saturn and the golden age. "Saturn, unmindful of his son's kindness, conspired against him when he heard that he raised cabals against him, but Jupiter banished him from his throne, and the father fled for safety into Italy. Janus, who was then King of Italy, received Saturn with every mark of attention, and made him his partner on the throne ; and the King of Heaven occupied himself in civilising the barbarous manners of the people of Italy, and the teaching them agriculture and the useful and liberal arts. His reign there was so mild and popular, so beneficent and virtuous, that mankind have called it the ' golden age,' to intimate the happiness and tranquillity which the earth then enjoyed." The reader who will compare this passage with Hyperion, i. 106-112 will better understand out of what sand Keats sifted the fine gold of his verse.

In the same way a prosy sentence of Lempriere' s about Pan as " the emblem of fecundity," and " the principle of all things," was probably the germ of that great ode to Pan in the first book of Endymion, wherein the poet interprets the Greek idea in a way at once so sympathetic and so modern, and personifies in Pan the spirit that informs the lonely places of the earth, that is half seen in its mysterious sights, and is the — Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds That come a swooning over hollow grounds And wither drearily on barren moors. ,

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XX But this natural bent and instinct of Keats to personify Nature, to see it in the Greek way, is perhaps most clearly traceable in the many passages on the moon scattered throughout his poems. Of course Endymion depends on one long identification of the moon with the "Silver huntress, chaste and fair." But even in the juvenile volume of 1817 the mythological turn which Keats always shows in speaking of the moon is already strongly marked. The single passage in which he is content to dwell on the purely physical appearances of the moon, without importing some idea of personality, is that in which he speaks of— the moon lifting her silver rim Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim Coming into the blue with all her light. The other passages are — 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. and — To see high, golden corn wave in the light When Cynthia smiles upon a summer's night, And peers among the cloudlets jet and white, As though she were reclining in a bed Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed. and — E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write, Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping So scantly that it seems her bridal night, And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.