Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

ge to the moon-A parallel from Drayton-Examples of nature-poetry-Nature and the Greek spirit-Greek mythology revitalized-Its previous deadness-Poetry of love and war-Dramatic promise-Comparison with m

spondences and contrasts-Hymn to Intellectual Beauty-Shelley on Endymion-K

erimenting with new usages. Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental, Italianate fashion of his own. And now came young Keats, not following closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during th

occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with 'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish' (with 'fish'). On the other hand he regularly resolves the 'tion' or 'shion' termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying th

ugh the dancin

softly lulli

visions all

gs, and bursts

more strange, and

gulph'd in a t

thi

ystal place,

y at rest from

the mountains, b

of shut eyes

white feet, a

here death no

rows and forehead

n one side wi

at he compels the breath to hurry on with no chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a line to its object at the beginning of the next ('on | His left,' 'upon | A dreary morning'), or from an auxiliary to its verb ('as might be | Remembered') or from a comparative particle to the thing compared ('sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms'); a practice in which Chapman, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the metre. Keats's musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear too early trained in the 'sweet-slipping' movement of Spenser, to let him fall often into this fault. To the other besetting fault of some of these masters, that of a

nter

, and woods, a

y silver bow

forested? O W

air thy smoothe

u listen to th

d nymphs? Throu

crescent? Whe

ath of heaven:

e can taste it

ess in dism

our green eart

blissfully. A

ysian, how

al, sounds its

t there lives a

't the zephyr

ever parches

e it at the r

a noisy no

more hear the

s thick films a

them with the

ave thy feet an

et to me the fr

ease thy thirst

is dry palate

mber thou dost

should love a

nts of his predicament and prayers for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets, making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth

fittest. Keats in Endymion has not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. He had a gre

lord it o'er t

evailing tin

vanities, t

able green

tures; or, O t

idiot blink, w

foxes to sear

e-ear'd hopes. W

y splendour

n owl's, they

'd nations in e

ns, and

ropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which

ling

breasts went s

rseless as an

inst their eyes

onder

alf-fledg'd lit

wy forest, w

ef, young strang

e the ros

e grasp'd

d clenches wa

e of solemn j

oblivion

ly had h

nkering venom,

ing recol

wand

orehead to ke

hering

the cave i

f Delos. Echo h

gh-warm kisses,

and, the while i

hrough my laby

monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,' etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,' 'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,' 'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,' 'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such li

with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats's treatment of love as an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. Add the propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as 'timid thing!' and Endymion beg for 'one

ndisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? Were so many faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work of the ripest masters? Lost as the reader may often feel himself among the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory insipidities, bewildered by the redundanci

hing's face m

Scylla! Curse

h, hast never

harshest venge

t nip this t

ed her?-Cold,

limbs, and lik

well took

the love-maki

swear

e, that Palla

ve like mine i

k that I ha

es, Pallas has

ve saw me my

s cool as a

ong the very finest and best sustained examples of Keats's power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a second invocation to the moon which

thee, Moon! that

potently? Wh

my tears when t

y sister: hand

morn across

ld I gather f

cool'd their che

water ever s

with thine ther

green enough,

tedst up thine

e ne'er would

, till thou wa

summer tide

e hath heard m

ewy flowers a

s like a pas

ot to solemn

oyhood every

ashioned in th

n years, still

ours: thou wast

mountain-top-t

-the voice of f

river-thou w

rion's blast-tho

l of wine-my

charm of women

ld and harm

uck from all

nature and being. The eight preceding, from 'As I grew in years' offer in their rhetorical

he) sweet Nymph

essence and m

fe, pure Imag

f Conceit, I

receives his s

all which ru

sap and life

vigour doth r

st the flame

o my heart's tru

em had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two passages spring from some innate

loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled.

ented e

sweets to that

st in him; cold

hilliest bubble

on the mountai

es and wonders

un-rise and it

l merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to

n, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three o

, when lo! r

n my face in p

ewy buds, and le

jects from my s

spirit in a

a brook issues from a

the

when Hell, ob

n; and where h

n the cool an

le lat

tting by a s

p with fevero

e upburs

e quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more

flew, the way

ew-born spir

een evening qu

th, through man

aths, where slee

me away. One

t, and, far a

es upon him;

down a sol

s never sound

ps, some snow

lence, when u

k let forth a

itself to

. Do we not feel half the romance of the Odyssey, with the spell that is in the sound of the vowelled place-names of G

was wondering

in the pai

lion mountain'

ion hungry

Mr de Sélincourt is no doubt right in suggesting that in the Orion line Keats's vision has been stimula

ersonifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of im

uced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished

Triton's horn, could for a moment hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination, whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his mind. The c

as

cadencèd, mo

lone lulling

d of love, Keats manages to escape the traditional and the mer

y he s

uell is in hi

ear the lightn

mysterious,

think of it; fro

nge light of var

metimes on hi

on it feel a

run liquid thro

pose in his poem, if only he can f

ng to

d on the battl

these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident of the moonlight spangling t

tent hast thou

yings! Whereve

rie, mountains

loom, in star

t the way, and s

ries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we find, him ab

towers smotherin

ds, far-piercing s

and blood,

manner and variety of promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of power, the dramatic and iron

ainty! there m

aves and thistl

my sweet, and

ty-hard for t

ueeze is but a

ng, it shall

: and it shall

east more li

l not pine, an

retty, trifling

me! Thou

thou art of

e is mine, tha

way from th

destine thee t

ou quickly to

re many days

hall seize the

ot go the wa

ther, cripple a

rs: which gone,

bones to unk

weet lov

cal expression to the same alternating moods of ambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he confides to his friends in his letters.

lies

eming confine

soul to wande

tence, of re

re around it,

fs the spirit

linger weeping

oe it feels m

regions many

es; they are

: the man is

ourneyed in th

ever felt how

had in that d

es not sting; no

es beat ever

till within

Ente

efore: on the s

in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys's Ovid which tells how Cybele, the Earth

ther,

struck them to

ought that puni

s on their smoot

egs; their finge

ondrous strength:

t; their looks a

roar: the woods

ear'd by other

s, and yokes the

e marvels of an act of transformation. Keats's recollection of it-and probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relie

ugged arch, in

r Cybele!

riot; dark fo

esty, and fro

rown'd. Four m

eels; solemn th

yes brow-hidd

owsily, and

tawny brushes

ueen athwart,

her glo

m turn to the passage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,-the same passage from which is derived the famous song in Handel's Acis and Galatea: let him turn to this and compare it with th

to Neptune and Venus at the end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats's very finest achievements. The hym

chief of Hermes

wo-horn'd, amo

fair greens, all

ith Nymphs, who

e foot, that a

accessible

ocks, and ev

ight-haired Go

n and loveless

est mountains cr

ills, and cli

opses, and t

eaches here and

, by allureme

wat'ry softnes

os'd capricci

ocks, and hig

ridges. Ofte

watch-tow'r's

vance. Oft throu

runs upon, an

ead, and flies

heir sla

calls to fold t

closets of hi

h, and joy wit

hadow of thei

se forth so pr

d that in the

es set, makes t

rows, sweeten'd

sions varied

st characteristic strophes

, by him we br

; 'tis he our l

less, and from th

finer fleeces

ay all heat

diseases fr

where the sp

feed, their

rown, the s

s wither, an

lease him then by s

to him, who doth

···

ather of our pea

us all th

allowed troop o

their h

ows to thee the

s receive the

hee the earlie

st of all our

eastning of our

folds dost s

ur fountains

the wolf, the

ermin from

by thee, and tho

fe in shade of t

p, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature's blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes Pan no longer as a shepherd's god but as a symbol of the World-All. Wordswo

mighty palace

trunks, and

, glooms, the bi

wers in heavy

o see the ha

cks where meetin

solemn hours dos

melody of b

ces, where dank

ock to strang

hee, how mel

ose fair Syrin

ove's mi

embling mazes

s, gre

se soul-soothin

voices cooingl

ou wanderest

eadows, that ou

ssed realms:

fig trees eve

fruitage; yell

honeycombs; o

lossom'd beans

linnet its fiv

ee; low creepi

oolness; pent

ings; yea, the f

letions-be q

that nods the

ster d

every faun a

ervice; wheth

re while in hal

ragged pre

ambkins from t

erious ent

epherds to th

athless round t

p all fancif

tumble into

n, laugh at the

thee with fant

pelt each oth

k apples, and f

hoes that abo

, O sat

o the loud cl

nd anon to h

eating: Winde

ild-boars rout

men: Breather r

ldews, and all

trant of unde

wooning over

rearily on b

of the myst

universal k

son of

are come to

s about th

he unimagi

thinkings;

the very bou

aked brain; be s

in this dull an

ouch etherea

symbol of

t reflecte

illing the s

t no more: we

ds our forehead

a shout most

to receive ou

y Mount

irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of northern imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piec

Sor

good-

o leave her f

erly, c

ves me

nstant to me

d dece

o lea

s so constant

lm tree, by t

ng: in the wh

one to ask me

so I

water-lily cu

as my

lm trees, by

ing: what en

adowy wooer f

es and

palm trees by

, varied and new-modulated but in no sen

ce, as holy

h the waning m

ling for her

ruption of Bacchus on his march from India; and then, arranged as if for music,

, merry Damsels

so many, a

left your bo

, and gent

cchus! good o

e him thorough

lady fair,

ild mins

jolly Satyrs!

so many, an

t your forest h

in oak-t

wine we left

t our heath, an

ld mus

low Bacchus thr

athless cups and

lady fair,

mad min

ams and mountai

Bacchus kept

ger and the l

ian ele

myriads-with

ped, and sleek A

alligators,

their scaly b

laughers mimi

d stout galle

s and silken sa

for wind

l

iger and the

ian ele

HAGUS RELIEF

much more like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals, with Indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features of the triumphal processions of Bacchus through India as represented on a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. From direct sight of such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such Keats, I feel sure, must have taken them,4 while the children mounted on crocodiles may have been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the Nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood, from certain reliefs which Keats will have noticed in th

hen, s

est s

be I nurse the

t to lea

eceiv

the world I l

is n

o, no

omfort a poor

rt her

er br

and her wooe

e almost purely English. Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak, hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the summer leafag

ized a special instance in that deep and brooding sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion's prayer to Cynthia from underground in the second book will be fou

ess towards so

urite hamlet

profoundly impressed by the reading of The Excursion, published when Shelley was in his twenty-second year and Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to heart Wordsworth's inculcation, both in that

am, at distance

es to strike us in the second. In interpreting the relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth's poetry is intensely personal and 'subjective,' Keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.' Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by strenuous after-meditati

the two conceptions really ends. In Alastor the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's past' (the words are Shelley's own prose summary of the imagined experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse), is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Shelleyan phrase, 'Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.' The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks.

d not only to the poet in particular but to human beings in general. The passage may have had some influence on Keats when he framed the scheme of Endymion: what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty months later: let us therefore postp

he secr

rk, winding a

d poison,

pride, their

and of gold

nd immeasu

ystal columns, a

hrones radiant

and vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and for its purity, and Keats might have learnt much from him as to what he should avoid. But as we have seen, Keats was firmly on

he Alps and also in the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for Plato, I think Keats would have felt

auty, that d

hues all thou d

n Endymion, as in the speculative passages of the letters we have quoted, his mind has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost uncharted, mysteries of Love and Beauty. He does not as yet conceive himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober phrase, of the imagination towards truth. He does not light, he does not expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems to waver between the Adam's dream idea of finding in some transcendental world all the several modes of earthly happiness 'repeated in a finer tone' but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the Platonic, of a singl

finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.' Nothing can be more just; and in the same spirit eight months later, in May 1820, he writes, 'Keats, I hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured his rising.' About the same time, having heard of Keat

noise of water

ts of death wi

w a thousand f

men that fish

great anchors,

stones, unva

in the botto

g, and in a sense challeng

d he r

ve the hollow v

and at his fe

an Morpheus'

rs, helmets, bre

riors; brazen b

for a hundred

man hand; gold

rgotten stor

had ever d

urn's vintage; m

ngue of heaven

n the earth; and

stone, develo

ox;-then ske

ehemoth, an

, and eagle,

eless

een, and how completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, which he added as an afterthou

ams fl

ear the mela

cles; anchors,

marble; quivers,

aded targes,

ariots, and t

tandards, and

th laughed, sep

ruction, rui

eside of man

on which the e

ut not human;

works, and unc

omes and fanes;

ray annihila

ard, black deep

of unknown w

ch were isles

bony chains,

s, or within

tuous strength o

e iron crags;

alligator,

ulsing behemo

onarch

thing to Endymion here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been Shelley's reading of Endymion that led him at this time to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own two lyrics, Arethusa and the Hymn to Pan (both of 1820); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at

d two pages of Pharonnida. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages of Pharonnida which do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of' followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to' followed by its infinitive,-on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,' and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress o

nseam.' The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who use

d him from the n

y of a track dividing, or as it were r

n's Pantheon, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William Godwin the philosoph

of Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke's agent in the purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot resist