Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind—just how it took certain tallflowers and plants—and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing tramps, the colour of one woman’s hair, the smile on one child’s face, the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when ‘a wave was billowing through a tree,’ as he described the uplifting surge of air among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he heard the wind coming across woodlands. ‘The tide! the tide!’ he would cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his face glow till he ‘would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths,’ or like ‘a young eagle staring with proud joy before taking flight.’...Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen....The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading, or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie—the only thing, during those country-rambles, that would bring the poet ‘to himself again’ was the motion ‘of the inland sea’ he loved so well, particularly the violent passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.
Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind—just how it took certain tallflowers and plants—and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing tramps, the colour of one woman’s hair, the smile on one child’s face, the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.
Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when ‘a wave was billowing through a tree,’ as he described the uplifting surge of air among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he heard the wind coming across woodlands. ‘The tide! the tide!’ he would cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his face glow till he ‘would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths,’ or like ‘a young eagle staring with proud joy before taking flight.’...
Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen....
The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading, or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....
The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie—the only thing, during those country-rambles, that would bring the poet ‘to himself again’ was the motion ‘of the inland sea’ he loved so well, particularly the violent passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.
In regard to Keats’s social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. ‘In my knowledge of my fellow beings,’ says Cowden Clarke, ‘I never knew one who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness, and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his features—“the form of his visage was changed.”’
In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and nature. ‘Though a quarrel in the streets,’ he says, ‘is a thing to be hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.’ His yearning love for the old polytheism and instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things, let us take Cowden Clarke’s account of the way he could enjoy and re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our refinement no longer tolerates:—
His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having begun, Keats was near to, and watched, ayoung aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical nature to ‘keep back’ began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. ‘My eyes! Bill Soames giv’ me sich a licker!’ evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats’s entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent personification of the baiting, with his position,—his legs and arms bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged—his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.
His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having begun, Keats was near to, and watched, ayoung aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical nature to ‘keep back’ began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. ‘My eyes! Bill Soames giv’ me sich a licker!’ evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats’s entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent personification of the baiting, with his position,—his legs and arms bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged—his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whoseIrish Melodieswere an income to him and who was known to have just received a cheque of £3000 in advance forLalla Rookh. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were as eager thatJohn should become a famous poet as he was himself. So encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related, in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already referred as containing his character of the poet’s mother. The die was cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his convivialalias‘Junkets’) should put forth a volume of his poems. Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnetTo Leigh Hunt Esqr, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:—
Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away;For if we wander out in early morn,No wreathed incense do we see upborneInto the East to meet the smiling day:No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,Roses and pinks, and violets, to adornThe shrine of Flora in her early May.But there are left delights as high as these,And I shall ever bless my destiny,That in a time when under pleasant treesPan is no longer sought, I feel a free,A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the East to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet’s first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.
1These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.2Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats’s first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. Within a week was published the volume ofPoems, with the principal piece,Sleep and Poetry, partly modelled on theFloure and the Lefeitself and headed with a quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does not admitThe Floure and Lefeinto the canon of Chaucer’s works.
1These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
2Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats’s first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. Within a week was published the volume ofPoems, with the principal piece,Sleep and Poetry, partly modelled on theFloure and the Lefeitself and headed with a quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does not admitThe Floure and Lefeinto the canon of Chaucer’s works.
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 PoetryandI stood tiptoe—Analysis ofSleep and Poetry—Double invocation—Vision of the Charioteer—Battle-cry of the new poetry—Its strength and weakness—Challenge and congratulation—Encouragements acknowledged—Analysis ofI stood tiptoe—Intended induction toEndymion—Relation to Elizabethans—Relation to contemporaries—Wordsworth and Greek Mythology—Tintern Abbeyand the three stages—Contrasts of method—EvocationversusExposition.
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 PoetryandI stood tiptoe—Analysis ofSleep and Poetry—Double invocation—Vision of the Charioteer—Battle-cry of the new poetry—Its strength and weakness—Challenge and congratulation—Encouragements acknowledged—Analysis ofI stood tiptoe—Intended induction toEndymion—Relation to Elizabethans—Relation to contemporaries—Wordsworth and Greek Mythology—Tintern Abbeyand the three stages—Contrasts of method—EvocationversusExposition.
Thenote of Keats’s early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:—
What more felicity can fall to creatureThan to enjoy delight with liberty?
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 andaffection, 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; theAddress to Hopeof February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of versesTo some LadiesandOn 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 gayOf old romance,—
—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 theMidsummer Night’s Dreambut through Wieland’sOberon, a romance poem which Sotheby’s translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen aredivided 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’sHomer. 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 onour 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 beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-brow’d Homer rul’d as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe star’d at the Pacific—and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
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 earlier2:—
How many bards gild the lapses of time!A few of them have ever been the foodOf my delighted fancy,—I could broodOver 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 rudeDo 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 heavesWith solemn sound,—and thousand others more,That distance of recognizance bereaves,Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.
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 maininterest 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 worksOf mighty poets.3
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty poets.3
Compare Shelley in the preface toPrometheus 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 beautywith 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 fromParadise 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 leapStartles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
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 sonnetOn theGrasshopper and Cricketwritten 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 hearsMust think on what will be, and what has been.
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,4seem not to have been written (as that on theFloure and the Lefecertainly 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 onLeander? 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 theVita Nuova.5The 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 lightHid 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 lipsFor Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile.O horrid dream! see how his body dipsDead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!6
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’sBritannia’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 ofEpistlesin his volume under that poet’s particular patronage:—
Among the rest a shepheard (though but youngYet hartned to his pipe) with all the skillHis few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.
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’suse, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to Diana in theKnightes Tale:—
O chastë goddesse of the wodës 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 knoweFul many a yeer, and woost what I desire,As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire,That Attheon aboughtë cruelly.Chastë goddessë, wel wostow that IDesire 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 wodës wilde,And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.Noght wol I knowë companye of man.Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can,For tho thre formës that thou hast in thee.And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,This grace I preyë thee with-outë more,As sendë love and pees bitwixte hem two;And fro me turne awey hir hertës so,That al hir hotë love, and hir desyr,And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyrBe queynt, or turnëd in another place;And if so be thou wolt not do me grace,Or if my destinee be shapen so,That I shal nedës have oon of hem two,As sende me him that most desireth me.
O chastë goddesse of the wodës 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 aboughtë cruelly.
Chastë goddessë, 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 wodës wilde,
And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.
Noght wol I knowë companye of man.
Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can,
For tho thre formës that thou hast in thee.
And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,
And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,
This grace I preyë thee with-outë more,
As sendë love and pees bitwixte hem two;
And fro me turne awey hir hertës so,
That al hir hotë love, and hir desyr,
And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr
Be queynt, or turnëd in another place;
And if so be thou wolt not do me grace,
Or if my destinee be shapen so,
That I shal nedës 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 itselffree 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 inMother Hubbard’s Taleand Marlowe inHero and Leanderwere 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 affectOf 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 parlèd by the touch of hands:True love is mute, and oft amazèd 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 uponBreathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid’s day).
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 parlèd by the touch of hands:
True love is mute, and oft amazèd 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 orthird 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 appallèd 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.
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 appallèd 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 grieveFor all this world, yet will I not believeBut that she’s fair and lovely and that sheSo to the period of the world will be;Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all,For that so many sundry mischiefs fallUpon her daily, and so many takeUp arms against her, as it well might makeHer to forsake her nature, and behindTo leave no step for future time behind,As she had never been, for he that nowCan do her most disgrace, him they allowThe time’s chief Champion—.
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 fromBritannia’s Pastoralswhich 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 slipsStill forward steal and hang upon her lips:Whereat she sweetly angry, with her lacesBinds 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 beCall’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.
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 ofafter-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixthOdyssey:—
These, here arriv’d, the mules uncoach’d, and draveUp to the gulfy river’s shore, that gaveSweet grass to them. The maids from coach then tookTheir clothes, and steep’d them in the sable brook;Then put them into springs, and trod them cleanWith cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then,Who should have soonest and most cleanly done.When having throughly cleans’d, they spread them onThe flood’s shore, all in order. And then, whereThe waves the pebbles wash’d, and ground was clear,They bath’d themselves, and all with glittering oilSmooth’d their white skins; refreshing then their toilWith pleasant dinner, by the river’s side;Yet still watch’d when the sun their clothes had dried.Till which time, having dined, NausicaaWith other virgins did at stool-ball play,Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.
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 theMetamorphosesof 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 polluteWith wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruitWeighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire;There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fireMay mollify, milk, honey redolentWith 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 hathEndued with cruelty, and savage wrath(Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) inHot 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!
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 thePharonnidaof 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 lengthThe fair Pharonnida recovers strength,Though sighs each accent interrupted, toReturn this answer:—‘Wilt, oh! wilt thou doOur infant love such injury—to leaveIt ere full grown? When shall my soul receiveA comfortable smile to cherish it,When thou art gone? They’re but dull joys that sitEnthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I couldPart, with a less expense of sorrow, wouldOur rigid fortune only be contentWith absence; but a greater punishmentConspires against us—Danger must attendEach step thou tread’st from hence; and shall I spendThose hours in mirth, each of whose minutes layWait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the dayWherein your battles join, how will my fearWith doubtful pulses beat, until I hearWhom victory adorns! Or shall I restHere without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast,My heart’s exposed to every danger thatAssails thy valour, and is wounded atEach stroke that lights on thee—which absent I,Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.’
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 spokeBy 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 graceIn choice of words fit for the ending place,Which leave impression in the mind as wellAs closing sounds of some delightful bell.
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 collegeVacation 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 weakDidst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,········I have some naked thoughts that rove aboutAnd loudly knock to have their passage out;And wearie of their place do only stayTill thou hast deck’t them in thy best array;That so they may without suspect or fearsFly 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 soareAbove the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns doreLook in, and see each blissful DeitieHow he before the thunderous throne doth lie,Listening to what unshorn Apollo singsTo th’ touch of golden wires, while Hebe bringsImmortal 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 passWhen Beldam Nature in her cradle was;And last of Kings and Queens and Hero’s old,Such as the wise Demodocus once toldIn solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast,While sad Ulisses soul and all the restAre held with his melodious harmonieIn willing chains and sweet captivitie.
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 heatOnly 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 lessBut 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.
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’ poemThe Davideisadmits 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 YearThy 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 seenIn 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 removeThe 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 BreastIs fix’d my Image, and who loves me best.
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.
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 completelydazzled 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 lightPursue 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,—
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,—
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.
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 blunderof 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’sReliques. 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 beholdWith 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.
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 hisPoetical Sketchesof 1784, poured scorn on the still reigning fashion for ‘tinkling rhymes and elegances terse’, and himself struck wonderfullyric 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 theirLyrical 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 Warrioris 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, inThe CorsairandLara, 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 inRimini. He did little more than revive Dryden’s expedients of the occasionaltriplet 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.
Riminiwas 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.7That 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 fromBritannia’s Pastoralsabove 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 theePast each horizon of fine poesy;Fain would I echo back each pleasant noteAs 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 caresBeckon me sternly from soft ‘Lydian airs,’And hold my faculties so long in thrall,That I am oft in doubt whether at allI 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 jubileeWhich every elf and fay had come to see:When bright processions took their airy marchBeneath the curved moon’s triumphal arch.But might I now each passing moment giveTo the coy muse, with me she would not liveIn 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 findSome 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 clustersReflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres,And intertwin’d the cassia’s arms unite,With its own drooping buds, but very white.
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 mediæval 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 hewas metamorphosed into a black-eyed swan fed by Naiads.
The next experiments in this measure, the fragment ofCalidorewith itsInduction, date from a few months later, after the publication ofRimini, 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 ofLycidasin the use of the short six-syllable line:—
Anon he leaps along the oaken floorsOf halls and corridors.
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 brimAnd show their blossoms trim:
So elegantly o’er the waters brim
And show their blossoms trim:
and of
The lamps that from the high-roof’d hall were pendentAnd gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.
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 expressesfrankly, 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 fareWith forehead to the soothing breezes bare,Would he naught see but the dark silent blueWith all its diamonds trembling through and through?Or the coy moon, when in the wavinessOf 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 youSuch tales as needs must with amazement spell you.
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 hisbrother 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 walksWith him who elegantly chats, and talks—The wrong’d Libertas,—who has told you storiesOf laurel chaplets, and Apollo’s glories;Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city,And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.
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 toThe 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 fullstop 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 Poetryand ‘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. InSleep and Poetryhe 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.