Chapter XV: Introduction: To Fancy

This poem, although so much lighter in spirit, bears a certain relation in thought to Keats's other odes. In the _Nightingale_ the tragedy of this life made him long to escape, on the wings of imagination, to the ideal world of beauty symbolized by the song of the bird. Here finding all real things, even the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the fancy, which can escape from reality and is not tied by place or season in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as the extempore character of the poetry indicates. We see more of settled conviction in the deeply-meditative _Ode to Autumn_, where he finds the ideal in the rich and ever-changing real.

This poem is written in the four-accent metre employed by Milton in _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, and we can often detect a similarity of cadence, and a resemblance in the scenes imagined.

NOTES ON FANCY.

PAGE 123. l. 16. _ingle_, chimney-nook.

PAGE 126. l. 81. _Ceres' daughter_, Proserpina. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 63, note.

l. 82. _God of torment._ Pluto, who presides over the torments of the souls in Hades.

PAGE 127. l. 85. _Hebe_, the cup-bearer of Jove.

l. 89. _And Jove grew languid._ Observe the fitting slowness of the first half of the line, and the sudden leap forward of the second.

NOTES ON ODE

['BARDS OF PASSION AND OF MIRTH'].

PAGE 128. l. 1. _Bards_, poets and singers.

l. 8. _parle_, French _parler_. Cf. _Hamlet_, I. i. 62.

l. 12. _Dian's fawns._ Diana was the goddess of hunting.