Halleck's New English Literature Part 52

In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In _The Prelude_ he says:--

"To unorganic natures were transferred My own enjoyments."

Sh.e.l.ley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, _The Cloud_, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:--

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams.

I sift the snow on the mountains below And their great pines groan aghast."

He thus begins the song, _To a Skylark_--

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert,"

and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."

He peoples the garden in his lyric, _The Sensitive Plant_, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Sh.e.l.ley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.

"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew."

The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have imagined that garden.

In the exquisite _Ode to the West Wind_, he calls to that "breath of Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:--

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, * * * * *

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness."

We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in Sh.e.l.ley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.

General Characteristics.--Sh.e.l.ley's is the purest, the most hopeful, and the n.o.blest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature; but Sh.e.l.ley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts.

His _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples_, and, above all, his _Prometheus Unbound_, are some of the works inspired by a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy to Sh.e.l.ley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for experience which mark a time of revolt.

The other subject that Sh.e.l.ley treats most frequently in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. _Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas_, and _Prometheus Unbound_, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."

Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Sh.e.l.ley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Sh.e.l.ley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.

JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN KEATS. _From the painting by Hilton, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translation of much of Vergil's _AEneid_. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read _Macbeth_ at two in the morning.

When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London.

When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he says, "a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray: and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land."

He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary career.

His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and iron in him." He wrote:--

"I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Pa.s.sion."

Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met f.a.n.n.y Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he wrote in less than three hours his wonderful _Ode to a Nightingale_, while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his famous poems were written in the year after meeting her.

In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but she would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne.

Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WENTWORTH PLACE, KEATS'S HOME IN HAMPSTEAD.]

Acting on insistent medical advice, Keats sailed for Italy in September, 1820, accompanied by a stanch friend, the artist Joseph Severn. On this voyage, Keats wrote a sonnet which proved to be his swan song:--

"Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es."

While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said: "I feel the flowers growing over me." In February, 1821, he died, at the age of twenty-five years and four months. On the modest stone which marks his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his request: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His most appropriate epitaph is Sh.e.l.ley's _Adonais_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.]

Poems.--In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent sonnets: _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_ and _On the Gra.s.shopper and Cricket_, which begins with the famous line:--

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:--

"Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown The reading of an ever changing tale."

A year later, his long poem, _Endymion_, appeared. The inner purpose of this poetic romance is to show the search of the soul for absolute Beauty. The first five lines are a beautiful exposition of his poetic creed. _Endymion_, however, suffers from immaturity, shown in boyish sentimentality, in a confusion of details, and in an overabundance of ornament. This poem met with a torrent of abuse. One critic even questioned whether Keats was the real name of the author, adding, "we almost doubt whether any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody." Keats showed himself a better critic than the reviewers. It is unusual for a poet to recognize almost at once the blemishes in his own work. He acknowledged that a certain critic--

"...is perfectly right in regard to the 'slipshod' _Endymion_...

it is as good as I had the power to make it by myself. I have written independently, _without judgement_, I may write independently and _with judgement_ hereafter."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL MS. OF ENDYMION.]

The quickness of his development is one of the most amazing facts in literary history. He was twenty-three when _Endymion_ was published, but in the next eighteen months he had almost finished his life's work. In that brief time, he perfected his art and wrote poems that rank among the greatest of their kind, and that have influenced the work of many succeeding poets, such as Tennyson, Lowell, and Swinburne.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENDYMION. _From mural painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional Library, Washington, D.C._]

Nearly all his greatest poems were written in 1819 and published in his 1820 volume. _The Eve of St. Agnes_ (January, 1819) and the _Ode to a Nightingale_ (May, 1819) are perhaps his two most popular poems; but his other masterpieces are sufficiently great to make choice among them largely a matter of individual preference.

_The Eve of St. Agnes_ is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic in its conception and artistic in its execution. Porphyro, a young lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on that enchanted evening.

The interest in the story, the mastery of poetic language, the wealth and variety of the imagery, the atmosphere of medieval days, combine to make this poem unusually attractive. The following lines appeal to the senses of sight, odor, sound, and temperature,[25] as well as to romantic human feeling and love of the beautiful:--

"...like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odor with the violet,-- Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against the window panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set."

The fact that Keats could write the _Ode to a Nightingale_ in three hours is proof of genius. This poem pleases lovers of music, of artistic expression, of nature, of romance, and of human pathos. Such lines as these show that the strength and beauty of his verse are not entirely dependent on images of sense:--

"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath."