From a Cornish Window Part 26

Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he considers the Odes to be in many respects the most important division of Keats's poetry.

"Had Keats," he says, "left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets would be not lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at least the six most famous of them."

These famous six are: (1) 'Psyche,' (2) 'Melancholy,' (3) 'Nightingale,'

(4) 'Grecian Urn,' (5) 'Indolence,' (6) 'Autumn'; and Mr. Bridges is not content until he has them arranged in a hierarchy. He draws up a list in order of merit, and in it gives first place--'for its perfection'--to 'Autumn':--

"This is always reckoned among the faultless masterpieces of English poetry; and unless it be objected as a slight blemish that the words 'Think not of them' in the second line of the third stanza are somewhat awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I do not know that any sort of fault can be found in it."

But though 'Autumn' (1) is best as a whole, the 'Nightingale' (2) altogether beats it in splendour and intensity of mood; and, after pointing out its defects, Mr. Bridges confesses, "I could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode." Still, it takes second place, and next comes 'Melancholy' (3).

"The perception in this ode is profound, and no doubt experienced;" but in spite of its great beauty "it does not hit so hard as one would expect.

I do not know whether this is due to a false note towards the end of the second stanza, or to a disagreement between the second and third stanzas."

Next in order come 'Psyche' (4) and, disputing place with it, the 'Grecian Urn' (5). 'Indolence' (6) closes the procession; and I dare say few will dispute her t.i.tle to the last place.

But with these six odes we must rank (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,'

immortal on account of the famous pa.s.sage of inimitable beauty descriptive of the Greek poets--

"'Leaving great verse unto a little clan.'"--

And (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.' Of the latter Mr. Sidney Colvin has written:--

"His later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit.

A mood of tender 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 caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful a.s.sociations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual."

With this Mr. Bridges entirely agrees; but adds:--

"It unfortunately halts in the opening, and the first and fourth stanzas especially are unequal to the rest, as is again the third from the end, 'Young Stranger,' which for its matter would with more propriety have been cast into the previous section; and these impoverish the effect, and contain expressions which might put some readers off. If they would begin at the fifth stanza and omit the third from the end, they would find little that is not admirable."

Now, for my part, when in book or newspaper I come upon references to Isaiah lxi. 1-3, or Shakespeare, K. Henry IV., Pt. ii., Act 4, Sc. 5, l.

163, or the like, I have to drop my reading at once and hunt them up.

So I hope that these references of Mr. Bridges will induce the reader to take his Keats down from the shelf. And I hope further that, having his Keats in hand, the reader will examine these odes again and make out an order for himself, as I propose to do.

Mr. Bridges's order of merit was: (1) 'Autumn,' (2) the 'Nightingale,'

(3) 'Melancholy,' (4) 'Psyche,' (5) 'Grecian Urn,' (6) 'Indolence'; leaving us to rank with these (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' and (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.'

Now of 'Autumn,' to which he gives the first place 'for its perfection,'

one may remark that Keats did not ent.i.tle it an Ode, and the omission may be something more than casual. Certainly its three stanzas seem to me to exhibit very little of that _progression_ of thought and feeling which I take to be one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from an ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to draw: but I suppose that in theory the lyric deals summarily with its theme, whereas the ode treats it in a sustained progressive manner. But sustained treatment is hardly possible within the limits of three stanzas, and I can discover no progression. The first two stanzas elaborate a picture of Autumn; the third suggests a reflection--

"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too--"

And promptly, with a few added strokes, all pictorial, the poet works that reflection into decoration. A sonnet could not well be more summary.

In fact, the poem in structure of thought very closely resembles a sonnet; its first two stanzas corresponding to the octave, and its last stanza to the sestett.

This will perhaps be thought very trivial criticism of a poem which most people admit to be, as a piece of writing, all but absolutely flawless.

But allowing that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express, I yet doubt if it deserve the place a.s.signed to it by Mr. Bridges.

Expression counts for a great deal: but ideas perhaps count for more.

And in the value of the ideas expressed I cannot see that 'Autumn' comes near to rivalling the 'Nightingale' (for instance) or 'Melancholy.'

The thought that Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither the rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the thought that:

"In the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

To test it in another way:--It is perfect, no doubt: but it has not the one thing that now and then in poetry rises (if I may use the paradox) above perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the Odes contain, what I may call the Great Thrill. It nowhere compels that sudden 'silent, upon a peak in Darien' shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 'Nightingale' or before the closing lines of 'Psyche.' Such verse as:

"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn--"

Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy.

Such verse links poetry to Love itself--

"Half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire."

The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of 'Psyche.'

Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height--the mere feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves--gives a poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to 'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it takes two to produce this thrill--the reader as well as the poet.

And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will a.s.sert this of themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,'

'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.

For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'--

"What little town by river or sea-sh.o.r.e, Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"

Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by the three answering ones--

"And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

--Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought; since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations."

But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.'

Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode."

For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision 'of all Olympus's faded hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:

"Too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"

She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some untrodden region of his mind--

"And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a cas.e.m.e.nt ope at night, To let the warm Love in!"

The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche'

a.s.serts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun (as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair att.i.tude!') at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make a forcible close.

(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed.

The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'--the bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the skull of bald Medusa'--in order to make the genuine Melancholy more effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this.

Durer _did_ surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he _did_ evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too, that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his delicate figure of:

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu . . ."--

Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:--