Chapter IV: The 'poems' of 1817 (2)

(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to _The 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 full stop 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 Poetry_ and '_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. In _Sleep and Poetry_ he 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.

_Sleep and Poetry_ is printed at the end of the volume, '_I stood tip-toe_' at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces was written first.[8] _Sleep and Poetry_ is the longer and more important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak, all of a piece. We know that '_I stood tip-toe_' was not finished until the end of December 1816. _Sleep and Poetry_ cannot well have been written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the new year. What seems likeliest is that _Sleep and Poetry_ was written without break during the first freshness of Keats's autumn intimacy at the Hampstead cottage; while '_I stood tip-toe_' may have been begun in the summer and resumed at intervals until the year's end. I shall take _Sleep and Poetry_ first and let '_I stood tip-toe_' come after, as being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment, _Endymion_, which was to follow.

The scheme of _Sleep and Poetry_ is to some extent that of _The Floure and the Lefe_, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so strongly caught Keats's fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the activities of Sleep personified,--'Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses,' etc.,--in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of sleep are those of something else which he will not name:--

What is it? And to what shall I compare it?
It has a glory, and nought else can share it:
The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy,
Chasing away all worldliness and folly;
Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder,
Or the low rumblings earth's regions under;
And sometimes like a gentle whispering
Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing
That breathes about us in the vacant air;
So that we look around with prying stare,
Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,
And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning;
To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended.
That is to crown our name when life is ended.
Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice,
And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice!
Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things,
And die away in ardent mutterings.

Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation, declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her acceptance he will be admitted to 'the fair visions of all places' and will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things, in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains to 'the events of this wide world,' which it will be given him to seize 'like a strong giant.'

At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the warning and its reply are alike felicitous:--

Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days--_Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores_--certainly with visions from Poussin's Bacchanals in his mind's eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul. Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically. He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while 'with glorious fear,' then swooping downward to alight on a grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, 'awfully intent,' and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, 'shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,' sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind's eye the multitude and variety of figures in this procession--

Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
Flit onward--

contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts,'--and close with the vision of

a lovely wreath of girls
Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,

as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant's mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.

This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats's mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ seventeen years earlier:--

Is there so small a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination cannot freely fly
As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,
Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds
Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,
E'en in this isle; and who could paragon
The fervid choir that lifted up a noise
Of harmony, to where it aye will poise
Its mighty self of convoluting sound,
Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,
Eternally around a dizzy void?
Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd
With honors; nor had any other care
Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair.
Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom,[9] and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye thought a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_ (1816). In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Why should the hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason and 'correctness',--however clearly we may see the weak points of a passage like this, yet we cannot but feel that Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his verse.

So much for the indignant part of the passage. The congratulatory part repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon beginning 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and declares that fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are 'ugly clubs' and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses 'disturbing the grand sea of song' (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus, and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up and hurls after them into the sea).[10] The obvious supposition is that Keats is here referring to Byron's Eastern tales, with their clamour and heat and violence of melodramatic action and passion. Leigh Hunt, indeed, who ought to have known, asserts in his review of the volume that they are aimed against 'the morbidity which taints some of the productions of the poets of the Lake School.' I suspect that Hunt is here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What productions can he mean? Southey's _Curse of Kehama_? Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ or _Christabel_? Wordsworth's relatively few poems, or episodes, of tragic life--as the _Mad Mother_, _Ruth_, _Margaret_? For certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most disliked in Wordsworth's work, could never be called thunders.

But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,

And they shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.

Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will--and then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him, and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friendship and encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt's over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by association a string of the delights ('luxuries' as in Huntian phrase he calls them) of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had been enjoying and the place where he now rested--that is on the couch in Hunt's library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:--

The very sense of where I was might well
Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,
Resolving to begin that very day
These lines; and howsoever they be done,
I leave them as a father does his son.

The best reason for thinking that the poem '_I stood tip-toe_,' though probably finished quite as late as _Sleep and Poetry_, was begun earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had attempted in _Calidore_ and its _Induction_ but gave up in _Sleep and Poetry_, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the _Epithalamion_ and Milton in _Lycidas_,--

Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!

No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt's statement that this description was suggested by a summer's day when he stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his imagination to the right taking-off place--to plant it, so to speak, on the right spring-board--from which to start on its flight through a whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest vein of Keats's lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of _Enid_) how the minnows would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and corresponding moods of poetry,--

In the calm grandeur of a sober line,
We see the waving of the mountain pine;
And when a tale is beautifully staid,
We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,--

and so forth. And then, having in his mind's eye, as I should guess, some of the mythological prints from Hunt's portfolios, he asks what moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo, and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,--and for the remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth's invention are lovely:--

He was a Poet, sure a lover too,
Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew
Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below;
And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow
A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling,
The incense went to her own starry dwelling.
But though her face was clear as infant's eyes,
Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice,
The Poet wept at her so piteous fate,
Wept that such beauty should be desolate:
So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won,
And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.

Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences diffused on that night about the world:--

The breezes were ethereal and pure,
And crept through half-closed lattices to cure
The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep,
And soothed them into slumbers full and deep.
Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting,
Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting:
And springing up, they met the wondering sight
Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight;
Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare,
And on their placid foreheads part the hair.
Young men and maidens at each other gaz'd
With hands held back, and motionless, amaz'd
To see the brightness in each other's eyes.

Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, 'Was there a poet born?' which he intended that his next year's work should answer.

In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall find it carried later on, especially in _Endymion_. The abstract nouns expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination, on the model of those in Chapman's _Hymn to Pan_, increase in number, and we get the 'quaint mossiness of aged roots,' the 'hurrying freshnesses' of a stream running over gravel, the 'pure deliciousness' of the Endymion story, the 'pillow silkiness' of clouds, the 'blue cragginess' of other clouds, and the 'widenesses' of the ocean of poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne's 'roundly form' in his mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for 'bounden.' In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than Browne: at least in _Sleep and Poetry_ the double endings no longer come in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting its noun follow at the beginning of the next,--'the high | Imagination,'--'the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.' The reader will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages in _Sleep and Poetry_ where these things occur with the Endymion passage he will find quoted later on from the _Faithful Shepherdess_ (p. 168).

As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's first volume, enough has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it. That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the _Excursion_, which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous passage in the fourth book of _The Excursion_ where Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape:--

In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave,
Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
When winds are blowing strong.

Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt, in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he wrote the lines in '_I stood tip-toe_,' asking in what mood or under what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt's word for the fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats's company at the time. Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth's interpretations will no doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by native instinct.

Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in _Sleep and Poetry_ run parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_, a poem which we know from other evidence to have been certainly much in Keats's mind a year and a half later. Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_ defines three stages of his own emotional and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,--

An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye,--

and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of humanity,' and by the

sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats's _Sleep and Poetry_. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative passage beginning--

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life--

may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life.

Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke. Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in _Tintern Abbey_ and many passages of _The Prelude_ and _Excursion_, with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of association and suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal identity was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The lines I mean are--

This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay;
Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish,
When lovely Titania was far, far away,
And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish.

Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and Titania was taken, as is well
known, from the French prose romance _Huon of Bordeaux_ translated by
Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded
entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the
marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily
moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's
translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English
romantic movement of the time. There are several passages in Keats,
notably in _The Cap and Bells_, where I seem to catch a strain
reminiscent of this _Oberon_, and one instance where a definite
phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory
and been turned to gold, thus:--

Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance,
When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart!

_Oberon_, c. vi, st. 17.

No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!
But to her heart her heart was voluble.

_The Eve of St Agnes_, st. 23.

[2] March 1816 according to Woodhouse.

[3] _The Prelude_, book v.

[4] See above, p. 68.

[5] Particularly Sonnet XII:--

Voi che portate la sembianza umile,
Cogli occhi bassi mostrando dolore.

It would have been easy to suppose that Keats had learnt something of
the _Vita Nuova_ through Leigh Hunt: but they were not yet acquainted
when he wrote the Leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most
likely accidental.

[6] In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed _On a picture of
Leander_. A note of Woodhouse (Houghton MSS., Transcripts III) puts
the matter right and gives the date. Which particular Leander gem of
Tassie's Keats had before him it is impossible to tell. The general
catalogue of Tassie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty
representing Leander swimming either alone or with Hero looking down
at him from her tower. Most of them were not from true antiques but
from later imitations.

[7] Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been
charged with Cockneyism and Huntism:--

And revelled in a chat that ceased not
When at nightfall among our books we got.

The silence when some rimes are coming out,
And when they're come, the very pleasant rout.

Well, but had not Drayton written in his _Epistle to Henry
Reynolds_?--

My dearly loved friend how oft have we
In winter evenings (meaning to be free)
To some well-chosen place used to retire,
And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire,
Have past the hour contentedly with chat,
Now talked of this and then discoursed of that,
Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not
Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.

And Milton in the _Vacation Exercise_?--

I have some lively thoughts that rove about,
And loudly knock to have their passage out.

[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats
prints first the poem he had last written, _Lamia_.

[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--

This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.

[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including,
I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite
without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'