the Poetical Works of John Keats ... Edited by H. Buxton Forman. Fourth edition. Illustrated

Front matter

KEATS'S POETICAL WORKS. ...there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp :... u Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN KEATS GIVEN FROM HIS OWN EDITIONS AND OTHER AUTHENTIC SOURCES AND COLLATED WITH MANY MANUSCRIPTS EDITED BY H. BUXTON FORMAN FOURTH EDITION ILLUSTRATED LONDON REEVES & TURNER 5 WELLINGTON ST. STRAND CHISWICK PRESS : — CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. CONTENTS. PaE. Preface by the Editor xi Chronology of principal events, compositions, and publications xxix Poems [published in 1817] Dedication. To Leigh Hunt, Esq. 3 "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill" 5 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem 12 CaHdore.

A Fragment ... ... 15 To Some Ladies - ... ... .« ... 20 On receiving a curious Shell, arid a. Copy of Verses, from the same Ladies ... :,. ... 21 To ****[" Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,"] ... 23 To Hope 25 Imitation of Spenser , 27 " Woman ! when I behold thee flippant, vain," 29 Epistles To George Felton Mathew 33 To my Brother George 36 To Charles Cowden Clarke 4° Sonnets I. To my Brother George 47 II. To ***** * [" Had I a man's fair form,"] ... 48 III. Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison 48 IV. " How many bards gild the lapses of time ! " ... 49 V. To a Friend who sent me some Roses 50 VI. To G. A. W. [Georgiana Augusta Wylie] ... 50 VII. " O Solitude ! if I must with thee dwell," ... CONTENTS. VI Page Poems [published in 1817] — continued Sonnets VIII. To my Brothers 52 IX.

" Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there" 52 X. " To one who has been long in city pent," ... 53 XL On first looking into Chapman's Homer 54 XII. On leaving some Friends at an early Hour ... 54 XIII. Addressed to Haydon 55 XIV. Addressed to the same ... ... ... ... 56 XV. On the Grasshopper and Cricket 56 XVI. To Kosciusko 57 XVII. "Happy is England!" 58 Sleep and Poetry 61 Endymion : A Poetic Romance Dedication 75 Preface by Keats 77 Book I ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 79 Book II 108 Book III 138 Book IV 169 Lamia, Isabella, &c. [published in 1820] Advertisement... ... ... ... ... ... ... 203 Lamia. Part I 207 Lamia. Part II ... 219 Isabella ; or, the Pot of Basil. A Story from Boccaccio 231 The Eve of St. Agnes 253 Ode to a Nightingale 269 Ode on a Grecian Urn 272 Ode to Psyche 274 Fancy 276 Ode [" Bards of Passion and of Mirth,"] 279 Lines on the Mermaid Tavern 280 Robin Hood.

Preface

. BY THE EDITOR. THE text and arrangement of the present edition of Keats's poetry are those of the library edition which has recently been published, on the plan of my library edition of Shelley ; and in carrying it out I have followed the same principles of revision as in the other case, namely to gather together everything I could find from the hand of the poet, and to establish the text as nearly as possible in accordance with what the poet wrote or meant to write. The three volumes of poetry printed during Keats's life have been reproduced upon this plan ; and their con tents have been collated with all available manuscripts and printed issues of authority. The posthumous poems in order of date follow the three printed volumes ; and the chronology has only been interrupted wittingly in the matter of Otho tlie Great, King Stephen, and The Cap and Bells.

Here it was impossible to preserve the real order, because Keats had other things in progress at the same time as Otho, and these, if strict chronological order were followed, would have to be interspersed among the acts and scenes of the tragedy. It seemed better therefore to set the dramatic attempts apart as a kind of appendix, to be completed by the less happy EDITOR'S

PREFACE.

. experiment The Cap and Bells, and to leave the real poetical work of Keats to close characteristically with La Belle Dame sans Merci and the beautiful sonnet which was really the last thing he wrote in verse. The manuscripts of Endymion, Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and a portion of Isabella should be men tioned as especially important among a great mass of manuscripts which have been consulted ; and not the least of the fortunate chances attending my efforts to complete my work for Keats's lovers was the un expected discovery of Richard Woodhouse's copy of Endymion, in which were noted, not only the varia tions of the final manuscript from the printed text, but also those of the first draft, which had not itself come to the surface. Woodhouse seems to have been an ardent admirer of Keats and an enthusiastic student of his works, as well as a capital scholar ; for his copy of Endymion was interleaved, seemingly while Keats was still alive, and the textual differences above referred to were noted down in the most business-like and elaborate manner, while the pages bear many remarks and hints of a learned and acute kind, whereof I have not scrupled to avail myself in my library edition.

So far as regards the largest of Keats's poems, this book has been of more service than either of the other printed copies of Endymion I have used, namely Sir Charles Dilke's copy and one in my own possession with a number of autograph corrections. But Sir Charles Dilke's copy has a quantity of manuscript poems bound up at the end ; and these have yielded a good deal of assistance in textual work. It will be seen that I give several poems which are not included by other editors ; and most of these are from manuscript sources. Sharing Eve's Apple and the humorous ballad of The Gadfly are, I think, the most note worthy of the poems I have been able to add to what we already possessed of Keats's work ; but, seeing how great an interest must always attach to even the minor and lighter efforts of such a poet as Keats, I have been glad to rescue from oblivion such versicles as the lines On Death, the Stanzas to Miss Wylie, A Song about My self, the Sonnet to George Keats, written in Sickness, the stanzas On Oxford, A Galloway Song, the dialogue entitled Ben Nevis, that delicate little piece of brotherly trifling which I have extracted from a letter to Keats's sister and headed Two or Three, and the couplets Women, Wine and Snuff, preserved by Keats's fellow-student Henry Stephens.

All these were obtained from manuscript sources — the last, sent to me by Mr. W. H. Doeg too late for the library edition ; and from outlying printed sources I have collected the acrostic, Georgiana Augusta Keats, the Sonnet on hearing the Bagpipe and seeing The Stranger, A Party of Lovers, and the Sonnet on Mrs. Reynolds' s Cat. The beautiful couplets which I have gathered in from The Indicator and placed as a rejected passage of En dymion, at page 566 of the present volume, appeared with the signature " XXX " ; and I am obliged to confess that it was on purely internal evidence that I placed the couplets where they are. Their manner is absolutely identical with that of the best parts of the poem ; and, if Keats did not write it, there were two men living at the time who might, as far as manner goes, have written any page of Endymion — a conclusion which few critics if any will be prepared to adopt.

Not to rest on my own judgment alone in connect ing these verses with Endymion, I sent them to the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was much interested in the scheme and progress of my library edition of Keats ; and in reply to my enquiry what he thought about the extract he wrote to me thus : — "I remember setting eyes in my earliest days on the passage you send me, and doubtless came to the conclusion that it must be by Keats, though it had for me no such charm as attached to the wondrous Belle Dame sans Merci ... I can well understand Keats's rejecting this passage ; since, though replete with a general luscious beauty, it is quite without such supreme value in imaginative treatment as (despite some Cockney syllabification) the passage which I suppose to have preceded it. Is there any language in which X is called anything like Keat?

In such case the XXX might represent Keats." The riddle of the meaning of this signature held out during the exchange of several letters ; and later on Rossetti wrote to me : " I should think that triple X almost certainly stands for Triplex in relation to Diana — Luna — Hecate. Keats's text-book was of course Lempriere, and much bearing that way is to be found under those headings there. Keats speaks of the triple character of Diana at the end of the Sonnet to Homer." To this it should be added that Endymion, when his heart is divided between his Goddess as known to him and the fair Indian in whose form she disguises herself, ex claims " I have a triple soul " ; and that Keats himself had certainly three public names, to wit, John Keats, Caviare, and Lucy Vaughan Lloyd, though how far he had mentally adopted the two pen-names by January 1820, I have no knowledge.

Such an explanation as Rossetti's corresponds precisely in idea with a name applied by Keats's schoolfellow Cowper to Charles Cowden Clarke, in whose Recollections, speaking of Cowper, he says : — " His jocular school-name for me was ' Three hundred,' in allusion to my initials C. C. C." As regards the actual fabric of the couplets, the difficulty is, not to find something there particularly like Keats's work, but to find a single turn or phrase that is not redolent of him. If one particular point is better to rest on than another, I incline to the couplet Like the low voice of Syrinx, when she ran Into the forests from Arcadian Pan : which is identical in manner and phrase with a less excellent couplet retained in the early sketch meant to have been called Endymion (page 10 of this volume) : — Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled Arcadian Pan, with such a horrid dread.

Of work attributed to Keats in former editions and rejected from the present volume there is very little ; but of such rejection as has been necessary an account should be rendered. The poem and sonnet given in Lord Houghton's Aldine edition (and others) as of doubtful authenticity are both omitted because I can not bring myself to think that Keats had anything more to do with the poem than with the sonnet, that beginning with Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem, which is to be found among Laman Blanchard's works, and is assigned to that author in more than one antho logy.1 Lord Houghton has recorded his belief that the sonnet was " one of George Byron's forgeries " (Aldine edition, page 493) ; but at page 326, the poem com mencing with the words What sylph-like form before my eyes, is introduced by a suggestion that there were genuine pieces among the forgeries sold at the George Byron " autograph " auction.

My own belief is that, so far as the actual documents are concerned, all were forged ; but that many of them were copies, in assumed hands, of genuine documents. Some of the Shelley letters certainly were ; and I think it is only a question of time how soon this particular piece of verse shall be traced to the source outside Keats's work from which George Byron copied it. The song Stay, ruby-breasted warbler, stay, given at page 6 of the Aldine edition, was probably 1 As for instance in Leigh Hunt's Book of the Sonnet Dr. Mackay's A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry, and Mr. John Dennis's English Sonnets. sent to Lord Houghton from America, where people go so far as to print sac-similes of George Keats's writing for sac-similes of John's — although there is not the faintest likeness between them.

I omit the song be cause, in a scrap-book in my possession containing a mass of transcripts by George Keats from his brother's poetry, and seemingly at one time the property of Mrs. George Keats, I find this poem not only written in George's hand but signed "G.K." instead of "J.K."; and I confess I think it more likely to be one of the effusions which George is recorded to have produced than an early poem by John. It is impossible to read Keats's poetry closely without being struck by the earnest single-heartedness of his de votion to his art. It is the most salient moral quality which his writings display, and contributes more than any cultivation of thought, study of philosophy, or adherence to the spirit of the Greek mythology, to give to his works that stability which made certain from the first what he half doubtingly ventured to " think " in writing to his brother, — that he should be "among the English poets" after his death.

It was perhaps this great earnestness, over-straining his super sensitive nature, that led to most of the faults of his more youthful productions. The line of his reading was from early times the best calculated to invigorate and inspire his style ; and although he fell at first into some of the laxities of early English poets, the small damage here and there effected in this way is insigni ficant when compared with the good he got from his studies. Spenser very soon gained a great influence over him, as an examination of Endymion shows ; but curiously enough the early poem called an Imita tion of Spenser has very little that is directly Spen serian, and is much more like an imitation of Thomson — an echo from the Spenserian galleries of The Castle of Indolence. In the opening of " I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," Keats makes good use of a mental phase inspired by the earlier poem The Floure and the Lefe, and if, in the same line of reading, he caught the trick of writing such a couplet as And glides into a bed of water lillies : Broad leav'd are they and their white canopies the balance is still very clearly in our favour.

Now and then the debt to classic literature is a little too evident ; but as a rule Keats's works are remarkably free from other men's thoughts. It is quite exceptional to come upon such a household word as was reset for us in the lines To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach A natural sermon o'er their pebbly beds ; which we cannot help placing at a disadvantage beside the lines from As You Like It (Act II, Scene i) And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in every thing. But the real wonder about Keats is what a little way into the land of his poetry the reader carries with him the sense of shortcomings of this kind. Endymion bears us along in a whirl of imaginative creation ; and the beauties with which it is lavishly strewn scarcely leave time for the thought that the construction wants perspicacity — a thought which will intrude at last.

In work later than Endymion there are probably more passages wherein the thought or feeling, whatever it may be, is expressed with an almost absolute felicity than will be found in the like bulk of work by any other modern English poet. The Odes to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, and on Indolence, The Eve of St. Mark, and La Belle Dame sans Merci, may be named among the most sustained examples of this lofty felicity. Per haps it will be objected that the opening of the Ode to a Nightingale is not really clear, — that it is not made evident at a glance how the poet's numbness arose from being too happy in the bird's happiness, — too happy that the bird sang " of summer in full throated ease " ; but I am not sure that the tremulous thickness of utterance arising from intense emotion is not better rendered by the means employed, even if uncon sciously employed and unintentionally rendered, than it would have been if the thought had undergone a little more chastening; while the prismatic line No hungry generations tread thee down is Dantesque in its weird vigour, — a touch of the highest genius, bringing before us visions of many ter rible things, and chiefly of multitudinous keen and cruel faces more awful in the relentless oppressiveness of their onset upon the sensitive among men than anything in the mighty visions of damnation and detestableness seen five hundred years ago in Italy.

The unphilo sophic obliqueness of the analogy drawn — the compari son between the lot of the individual man and that of XX the general nightingale — scarcely detracts from the value, as it certainly does not from the supreme beauty, of the poem — while we know not how much the pathos is enhanced by this very obliqueness of analogy. It was late in Keats's short life before he began to give birth to grand thoughts such as those just glanced at. The mythology and poetry of the moon were perhaps longer uppermost in his thoughts than in any other poet's. Beside the Endymion that he speaks of in his letter to Clarke of the 17th of December 1816, a poem now identified with " I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," there are what we may term lunar traces throughout the early volume of Poems. Even in the poor little poem To Some Ladies, which is not so much as well finished up to its own Tom Moorish standard, seeing that the second quatrain lacks a rhyme, — even in this we have talk of "Cynthia's face, the enthusiast's friend."

In the Epistle to George Felton Mathew we read in happy hour Came chaste Diana from her shady bower, and in the Epistle to George Keats there are the really admirable verses about the poet and what he sees beside the mere moon in heaven — 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. Again in the Epistle to Clarke — When Cynthia smiles upon a summer's night, And peers among the cloudlet's jet and white, As though she were reclining in a bed Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed. Once more in the Sonnet to George Keats — Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping So scantly, that it seems her bridal night, And she her half-discovered revels keeping. And the Hecate character of the moon is clearly enough alluded to in the two lines at the close of the Sonnet ("Q # # * # * * And when the moon her pallid face discloses, I'll gather some by spells, and incantation.

Indeed Keats may almost be said to have made the moon and her lover his own, — so much so that Brown ing, in one of his two tributes to Keats, conveys a whole romanceful of meaning in a word, the word even in those glorious trochaics from One Word More: — What, there's nothing in the moon note-worthy? Nay — for if that moon could love a mortal, Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy) All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos) She would turn a new side to her mortal, Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman — Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, Blind to Galileo on his turret, Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even ! Had Keats never passed out of the lunar phase he would still have produced a book far more remarkable than Chamberlayne's Pharontiida, a poem which bears a certain resemblance to Endymion, and which, I think, had probably been read by the modern poet ; ' and 1 Compare Book III, lines 767-8, of Endymion, Sweet music breath'd his soul away, and sigh'd A lullaby to silence,... with the words much of even the 1S17 volume must perforce have been remembered ; but it is the volume published in 1820 that assures him a seat among the immortals.

Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave refers in his Golden Treasury to Keats as " a poet deserving the title ' mar vellous boy ' in a much higher sense than Chatterton," and says that Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth would have left " poems of less excellence and hope " than Keats has left " had their lives been closed at twenty-five." Such was Keats's enthusiasm for Chat terton that I feel sure he would have been the first to wish Mr. Palgrave to be reminded that the Bristol boy really was a boy in the strictest sense, having won for himself at the hands of Keats the proud title of " the most English of poets except Shakespeare " by a truly prodigious mass of work all done before he was eighteen years old — an age he never attained. The comparison with Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth holds ; but it is only fair to ask on behalf of Chat terton what Keats would have left had he failed to attain eighteen instead of twenty-six years.

I think the real marvel of Keats is best touched on by Mrs. Browning in Book I ol Aurora Leigh: By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young,— (the life of a long life, The glad birds had sung A lullaby to night,... at page 51, volume ii, of the 1820 edition of Chamberlayne's poems. Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn For ever ;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old ; What is really notable is that he who had produced practically nothing as a boy, who between the ages of twenty and twenty-five had been through so much sorrow and anguish tending to stop his work, should yet have written within those five years such a body of poetry, so suddenly rising to the highest excellence of expression and the most startling imaginative capacity, and this out of poetic beginnings scarcely removed from the common-place.

That Keats himself was always at the very antipodes of common-place, we have ample evidence in the various recollections of his childhood, boyhood, and youth ; in the facts of his life ; and in the excellently recorded physiognomy. In every authentic portrait, he is a marked man ; and there is scarcely an act on record that does not express individuality and character. By all who really knew Keats he seems to have been greatly beloved, — one of the surest proofs of the nobility of his character. His devotion to his mother and his brothers, taking practical forms, his paternal solicitude for his young orphan sister, his readiness to assist friends from his own slender resources, his promptness to protect the weak and oppressed, his enthusiasm for the good, the beautiful, and the true, and his contempt for everything that was mean, sordid, or hollow, are all qualities which find, more or less, a balanced expression in his writings and his acts.

His words and his life EDITOR'S preface. speak for him fully in a complete collection of his own writings and of the many reminiscences which his most intimate friends have left ; and truly of a more lovable character it would be hard indeed to find living records such as these. The fluctuation of his nobler qualities under premature physical decay is one of the saddest spectacles in the history of literature; but, although his friends had all somewhat to bear with when the hand of death was upon him, the main stream of his life remained noble and beautiful to the last. In the records that relate to the times when he was between twenty and twenty-three years of age, and in his letters even later than those times, there is a splendid elasticity cor responding with the "fine compactness of person " which he is said to have had.

That his forces were rather volcanic and intermittent than sustained and resistant the melancholy result showed ; and however much or little prophetic truth may have been in Coleridge's well known utterance " there is death in that hand," the final verdict will probably be that this noble nature, with all its male vigour, had not the due proportion of patient stolid resistance to make head against a dire combina tion of misfortunes. Hunt, in his admirable remarks upon The Eve of St. Agnes, points to the fainting of Porphyro at sight of Madeline as the one flaw in the poem, and apologizes for it on the score of the poet's enfeebled state of health at the time. But I think this is rather hard on all three —poem, poet, and disease. If it be so decided a fault, I fear we must acquit bodily disease of any part or lot in it, for Keats's young people always had a way of fainting, whether conceived in his more vigorous or in his less vigorous period.

Endymion after the visit of Diana (page 133) is described as having " Swoon'd drunken from pleasure's nipple" ; and he swoons at the thought of Diana's voice when he is in the palace of Neptune, at the end of Book III of the poem: at the end of Book IV he is represented as kneeling before the goddess "in a blissful swoon," which how ever may not be meant quite literally ; and again, in Book IV, lines 745-7, the disguised Diana tells how as a child she gave kisses "to the void air," and how when she imagined the warm tremble of a devout kiss Even then, that moment, at the thought of this, Fainting I fell into a bed of flowers, And languish'd there three days. Lycius faints when he meets with Lamia at the road side ; Lamia had previously fallen " into a swooning love of him " ; and the idea of swooning lovers was so familiar to the poet that, when his own time came, he wrote to his lady, " all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty."

To me it has always seemed that Keats's attitude to wards women was that of impassioned chivalry not wholly free from a hysterical element. The line in "Woman! when I behold thee" E'en then, elate, my spirit leaps and prances, is not inapt ; and My ear is open like a greedy shark, To catch the tunings of a voice divine expresses the exaggeration of sentiment perfectly. Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair ; Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast, Are things on which the dazzled senses rest Till the fond fixed eyes forget they stare. This is all more or less hysterical ; and, with all its obvious charm for young people, so, very much so, is God ! she is like a milk white lamb that bleats For man's protection. In one of his letters Keats describes the reactionary converse of this exaggerated sentiment, in a passage which is an anticipation of the Ode on Indolence, and in which the phase of feeling is described as " a de lightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness " ; and even in the carefully finished Ode to Psyche, we have the line And on the sudden, fainting with surprise, applied to the mere vision of Cupid and Psyche.

This default of male robustness in one particular is a contradiction in Keats's manly and even pugnacious character ; but I do not think it ought to be regarded with intolerance, even though it helped so valuable a life to fall into a hereditary consumption. The fact of the matter is that, somehow or other, an Oriental as well as a Greek strain had passed into the child of Finsbury parents ; and if we have the supreme advantage of a romantic colour and warmth throughout a great part of the poetry left by this wondrously gifted youth, we must be content to take with it the prevalent temperament of the lovers in Oriental romances and tales, who faint as a matter of course under due provocation, very much to the surprise of a northerly reader not previously acquainted with their customs. Strange and occult things happen now and again in the building up of men of genius ; but I do not know that the presence, in a London child whose parents were unremarkable, of clear emana tions from the spirit of Greek mythology and the spirit of Eastern romance is more wonderful than the trans fusion of the sublimated essence of the French revolu tion into the veins of Shelley, the scion of a long line of Sussex squires, or the perfect intuition of medieval romance life displayed by Thomas Chatterton, the de scendant of a line of Bristol sextons.