Chapter V: April-December 1817: Work on Endymion (2)

On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from _Endymion_ to the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--

You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly
happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked
out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led
away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for
it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the
moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow
come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having
befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the
pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my
dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not
to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I
assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or
affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I
begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other
times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.

Readers of _Endymion_ will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of _Endymion_ in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of _Paradise Lost_, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how 'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:

Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now
Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contain'd
And in her looks, which from that time infus'd
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her Air inspir'd
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
She disappear'd, and left me dark, I wak'd
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable.[5]

It was no doubt this second of Adam's dreams that was chiefly in Keats's mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, 'continually running away from the subject,' or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of 'Sensations' as opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion: what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls 'ethereal musings.' And now let the poet speak for himself:--

O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of
your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am
certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and
the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must
be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea
of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite
speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last,
which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of
operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam's
dream, he awoke and found it truth:--I am more zealous in this affair,
because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be
known for truth by consecutive reasoning--and yet it must be. Can it
be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without
putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of
Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has
further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another
favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves
hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a
finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in
Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will
do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its
empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual
repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have
its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming
continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great
things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old
Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, _felt_ over again
your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on
your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's
face--more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation
of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the
Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be
hereafter--that delicious face you will see.

There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. Keats speaks of 'the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.' Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. Of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his own, are among the number. That beginning 'Think not of it, sweet one, so,' dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas 'Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of Keats's subtlest critics[6] considers (I cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning--

You say you love, but with a voice
Chaster than a nun's who singeth
The soft vespers to herself
When the chime-bell ringeth--
O love me truly!

You say you love; but with a smile
Cold as sunrise in September,
As you were St Cupid's nun,
And kept his week of Ember.
O love me truly!--

and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the first three stanzas of _A Proper Wooing Song_, written to the tune of the _Merchant's Daughter_ and printed in Clement Robinson's _Handful of Pleasant Delites_, 1584:--

Maide will ye loue me yea or no?
tell me the trothe and let me go.
It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,
trust me truly,
To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,
in due time duly.

You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,
as Venus and all the Muses nine:
The Father Himselfe when He first made man,
trust me truly,
Made you for his helpe when the world began,
in due time duly.

Then sith God's will was even so
why should you disdaine your Louer tho?
But rather with a willing heart,
loue him truly;
For in so doing you do your part
let reason rule ye.

The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7]

A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown[8]:--

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writh'd not at passed joy?
The feel of _not_ to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.[9]

Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's _Spanish Fryar_, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:--

Farewell ungrateful Traitor,
Farewell my perjured swain,
Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.
The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing,
But 'tis too short a blessing,
And Love too long a pain.

Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the _Garden of Proserpine_?

But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon _Endymion_. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:--

Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.

The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:--

The Carian
No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan,
Into the vallies green together went.
Far wandering, they were perforce content
To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;
Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily
Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

and again:--

At this he press'd
His hands against his face, and then did rest
His head upon a mossy hillock green,
And so remain'd as he a corpse had been
All the long day; save when he scantly lifted
His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted
With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary
Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary,
Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose,
And slowly as that very river flows,
Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament:
'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent
Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall
Before the serene father of them all
Bows down his summer head below the west.
Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,
But at the setting I must bid adieu
To her for the last time. Night will strew
On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,
And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves
To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river's edge.

Opposite the last line in the manuscript of _Endymion_ Keats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started. _Endymion_ was not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Sad stories' in the original text of _Richard II_. The allusion
is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a
stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether
Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.

[2] 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] _Paradise Lost_, viii, 288-311.

[5] _Ibid._ viii, 452-490.

[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard,
in _Essays and Studies_ (Cambridge, 1912).

[7] If it is objected that _The Handful of Pleasant Delites_ is an
excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the
answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in
_Heliconia_, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park;
and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of
researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been
living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder
fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his
circle.

[8] Crewe MSS.

[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in _The
Gem_, a periodical of the _Keepsake_ type then edited by Thomas Hood,
and in Galignani's collective edition of the poems of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all
versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are
altered and read 'In a drear-nighted December,' and the fifth line is
made to run, 'To know the change and feel it.' The first line thus
gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress,
giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly
does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more
elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive
form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good
enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the
Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day
usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat
blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no
longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for
steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither
so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may
be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to
someone (conceivably, in the case of _The Gem_, Thomas Hood) editing
him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what
must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various
versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript
made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version
the poem is headed _Pain of Memory_, an apt title, and while the
first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs
quite differently, as follows:--

But in the Soul's December
The fancy backward strays,
And darkly doth remember
The hue of golden days,
In woe the thought appalling
Of bliss gone past recalling
Brings o'er the heart a falling
Not to be told in rhyme.

This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats
himself. The 'Fallings from us, vanishings' of Wordsworth's _Ode on
Intimations of Immortality_, may be responsible for the 'falling' in
the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a
common-place phrase little in Keats's manner, it is worth noting that
the word occurs in Bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very
passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).