Keats: Poems Published in 1820 Part 18

The first-written of the four, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, is the most pa.s.sionately human and personal of them all. For Keats wrote it soon after the death of his brother Tom, whom he had loved devotedly and himself nursed to the end. He was feeling keenly the tragedy of a world 'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies', and the song of the nightingale, heard in a friend's garden at Hampstead, made him long to escape with it from this world of realities and sorrows to the world of ideal beauty, which it seemed to him somehow to stand for and suggest. He did not think of the nightingale as an individual bird, but of its song, which had been beautiful for centuries and would continue to be beautiful long after his generation had pa.s.sed away; and the thought of this undying loveliness he contrasted bitterly with our feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to disillusionment.

So in the _Grecian Urn_ he contrasts unsatisfying human life with art, which is everlastingly beautiful. The figures on the vase lack one thing only--reality,--whilst on the other hand they are happy in not being subject to trouble, change, or death. The thought is sad, yet Keats closes this ode triumphantly, not, as in _The Nightingale_, on a note of disappointment. The beauty of this Greek sculpture, truly felt, teaches us that beauty at any rate is real and lasting, and that utter belief in beauty is the one thing needful in life.

In the _Ode on Melancholy_ Keats, in a more bitter mood, finds the presence, in a fleeting world, of eternal beauty the source of the deepest melancholy. To encourage your melancholy mood, he tells us, do not look on the things counted sad, but on the most beautiful, which are only quickly-fading manifestations of the everlasting principle of beauty. It is then, when a man most deeply loves the beautiful, when he uses his capacities of joy to the utmost, that the full bitterness of the contrast between the real and the ideal comes home to him and crushes him. If he did not feel so much he would not suffer so much; if he loved beauty less he would care less that he could not hold it long.

But in the ode _To Autumn_ Keats attains to the serenity he has been seeking. In this unparalleled description of a richly beautiful autumn day he conveys to us all the peace and comfort which his spirit receives. He does not philosophize upon the spectacle or draw a moral from it, but he shows us how in nature beauty is ever present. To the momentary regret for spring he replies with praise of the present hour, concluding with an exquisite description of the sounds of autumn--its music, as beautiful as that of spring. Hitherto he has lamented the insecurity of a man's hold upon the beautiful, though he has never doubted the reality of beauty and the worth of its worship to man. Now, under the influence of nature, he intuitively knows that beauty once seen and grasped is man's possession for ever. He is in much the same position that Wordsworth was when he declared that

Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.

This was not the last poem that Keats wrote, but it was the last which he wrote in the fulness of his powers. We can scarcely help wishing that, beautiful as were some of the productions of his last feverish year of life, this perfect ode, expressing so serene and untroubled a mood, might have been his last word to the world.

NOTES ON THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

In the early months of 1819 Keats was living with his friend Brown at Hampstead (Wentworth Place). In April a nightingale built her nest in the garden, and Brown writes: 'Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the gra.s.s-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours.

When he came into the house I perceived he had some sc.r.a.ps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those sc.r.a.ps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible, and it was difficult to arrange the stanza on so many sc.r.a.ps.

With his a.s.sistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a Nightingale_.'

PAGE 107. l. 4. _Lethe._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 81, note.

l. 7. _Dryad._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 5, note.

PAGE 108. l. 13. _Flora_, the G.o.ddess of flowers.

l. 14. _sunburnt mirth._ An instance of Keats's power of concentration.

The _people_ are not mentioned at all, yet this phrase conjures up a picture of merry, laughing, sunburnt peasants, as surely as could a long and elaborate description.

l. 15. _the warm South._ As if the wine brought all this with it.

l. 16. _Hippocrene_, the spring of the Muses on Mount Helicon.

l. 23. _The weariness . . . fret._ Cf. 'The fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world' in Wordsworth's _Tintern Abbey_, which Keats well knew.

PAGE 109. l. 26. _Where youth . . . dies._ See Introduction to the Odes, p. 230.

l. 29. _Beauty . . . eyes._ Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_, 'Beauty that must die.'

l. 32. _Not . . . pards._ Not wine, but poetry, shall give him release from the cares of this world. Keats is again obviously thinking of t.i.tian's picture (Cf. _Lamia_, i. 58, note).

l. 40. Notice the balmy softness which is given to this line by the use of long vowels and liquid consonants.

PAGE 110. ll. 41 seq. The dark, warm, sweet atmosphere seems to enfold us. It would be hard to find a more fragrant pa.s.sage.

l. 50. _The murmurous . . . eves._ We seem to hear them. Tennyson, inspired by Keats, with more self-conscious art, uses somewhat similar effects, e.g.:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

_The Princess_, vii.

l. 51. _Darkling._ Cf. _The Eve of St. Agnes_, l. 355, note.

l. 61. _Thou . . . Bird._ Because, so far as we are concerned, the nightingale we heard years ago is the same as the one we hear to-night.

The next lines make it clear that this is what Keats means.

l. 64. _clown_, peasant.

l. 67. _alien corn._ Transference of the adjective from person to surroundings. Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, l. 16; _Hyperion_, iii. 9.

ll. 69-70. _magic . . . forlorn._ Perhaps inspired by a picture of Claude's, 'The Enchanted Castle,' of which Keats had written before in a poetical epistle to his friend Reynolds--'The windows [look] as if latch'd by Fays and Elves.'

PAGE 112. l. 72. _Toll._ To him it has a deeply melancholy sound, and it strikes the death-blow to his illusion.

l. 75. _plaintive._ It did not sound sad to Keats at first, but as it dies away it takes colour from his own melancholy and sounds pathetic to him. Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_: he finds both bliss and pain in the contemplation of beauty.

ll. 76-8. _Past . . . glades._ The whole country speeds past our eyes in these three lines.

NOTES ON THE ODE ON A GRECIAN URN.

This poem is not, apparently, inspired by any one actual vase, but by many Greek sculptures, some seen in the British Museum, some known only from engravings. Keats, in his imagination, combines them all into one work of supreme beauty.

Perhaps Keats had some recollection of Wordsworth's sonnet 'Upon the sight of a beautiful picture,' beginning 'Praised be the art.'

PAGE 113. l. 2. _foster-child._ The child of its maker, but preserved and cared for by these foster-parents.

l. 7. _Tempe_ was a famous glen in Thessaly.

_Arcady._ Arcadia, a very mountainous country, the centre of the Peloponnese, was the last stronghold of the aboriginal Greeks. The people were largely shepherds and goatherds, and Pan was a local Arcadian G.o.d till the Persian wars (c. 400 B.C.). In late Greek and in Roman pastoral poetry, as in modern literature, Arcadia is a sort of ideal land of poetic shepherds.

PAGE 114. ll. 17-18. _Bold . . . goal._ The one thing denied to the figures--actual life. But Keats quickly turns to their rich compensations.

PAGE 115. ll. 28-30. _All . . . tongue._ Cf. Sh.e.l.ley's _To a Skylark_:

Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

ll. 31 seq. Keats is now looking at the other side of the urn. This verse strongly recalls certain parts of the frieze of the Parthenon (British Museum).

PAGE 116. l. 41. _Attic_, Greek.

_brede_, embroidery. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 159. Here used of carving.

l. 44. _tease us out of thought._ Make us think till thought is lost in mystery.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ODE TO PSYCHE.

In one of his long journal-letters to his brother George, Keats writes, at the beginning of May, 1819: 'The following poem--the last I have written--is the first and the only one with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry.

This I have done leisurely--I think it reads the more richly for it, and will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a G.o.ddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the G.o.ddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour, and perhaps never thought of in the old religion--I am more orthodox than to let a heathen G.o.ddess be so neglected.' _The Ode to Psyche_ follows.