Life of John Keats Part 7

For losing one, two other Crowns remained; Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.

Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less But to that third which she does now possess.

Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know, That seeking her own fame in such a foe, She drest the s.p.a.cious theatre for the fight: And the admiring World call'd to the sight: An army then of mighty sorrows brought, Who all against this single virtue fought; And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows, To her heroic soul they did oppose: But at her feet their vain attempts did fall, And she discovered and subdu'd them all.

Cowley in his long 'heroic' poem _The Davideis_ admits the occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer's prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden's 'translation':--

O G.o.ddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green, To whom both Heav'n and Earth and Seas are seen; Queen of the nether Skies, where half the Year Thy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere; G.o.ddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts, So keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts, Which Niobe's devoted Issue felt, When hissing through the Skies the feather'd Deaths were dealt: As I desire to live a Virgin-life, Nor know the Name of Mother or of Wife.

Thy Votress from my tender Years I am, And love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game.

Like Death, thou know'st, I loath the Nuptial State, And Man, the Tyrant of our s.e.x, I hate, A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate.

Where Love is Duty on the Female Side, On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride.

Now by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen In Heav'n, Earth, h.e.l.l, and ev'ry where a Queen, Grant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease, And make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace: Quench their hot Fire, or far from me remove The Flame, and turn it on some other Love.

Or if my frowning Stars have so decreed, That one must be rejected, one succeed, Make him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast Is fix'd my Image, and who loves me best.

In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and the like, thus:--

I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly.

Sweet Ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; I'm what I was, a little harmless Devil.

For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures, We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.

In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions, all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or rhetorical pa.s.sion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in memory from Ariel's account of the duties of his subordinate elves and fays:--

Some in the fields of purest ether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day: Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky: Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.

Others, on earth, o'er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,--

let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in which Pope congratulates himself

That not in fancy's maze he wandered long, But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song; That not for fame, but virtue's better end, He stood the furious foe, the timid friend, The d.a.m.ning critic, half approving wit, The c.o.xcomb hit, or fearing to be hit; Laughed at the loss of friends he never had, The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad; The distant threats of vengeance on his head, The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed; The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown, The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,--

and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:--

Swearing and supperless the hero sate, Blasphem'd his G.o.ds, the dice, and d.a.m.n'd his fate; Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!

Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair.

Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.

The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred years the settled norm and standard for English 'heroic' verse, the length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost from Pope's own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main unconsciously, in men's minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate. Joseph Warton made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope's death, a formal protest against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and at all times stoutly maintained 'Invention and Imagination' to be the chief qualities of a poet; ill.u.s.trating his views by what he called odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger brother Thomas, with his pa.s.sion for Gothic architecture, his masterly editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what was to come were Chatterton's audaciously brilliant blunder of the Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the enthusiastic reception of Percy's _Reliques_. But current critical taste did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the labour of scholars--even those of pretended scholars--in collecting and publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should conform as a matter of course to the standards established since language and style had been 'polished' and reduced to 'correctness' by Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope's editors, and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play upon the sight of a b.u.t.terfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in this thoroughly Popeian wise:--

Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold With eager eyes thy wings bedropp'd with gold; The purple spots that o'er thy mantle spread, The sapphire's lively blue, the ruby's red, Ten thousand various blended tints surprise, Beyond the rainbow's hues or peac.o.c.k's eyes: Not Judah's king in eastern pomp array'd, Whose charms allur'd from far the Sheban maid, High on his glitt'ring throne, like you could shine (Nature's completest miniature divine): For thee the rose her balmy buds renews, And silver lillies fill their cups with dews; Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes, For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.

William Blake, in his _Poetical Sketches_ of 1784, poured scorn on the still reigning fashion for 'tinkling rhymes and elegances terse', and himself struck wonderful lyric notes in the vein of our older poetry: but n.o.body read or marked Blake: he was not for his own age but for posterity. Even those of the eighteenth century poets who in the main avoided the heroic couplet, and took refuge, like Thomson, in the Spenserian stanza or Miltonic blank verse, or confined themselves to lyric or elegiac work like Gray,--even they continued to be hampered by a strict conventional and artificial code of poetic style and diction.

The first full and effective note of emanc.i.p.ation, of poetical revolution and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge and Wordsworth with the publication and defence of their _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798, 1800). Both these young masters had written in the established mould in their quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost entirely (_The Happy Warrior_ is of course a conspicuous exception); while their contemporary Walter Scott avoided it from the first.

The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from or coloured by the old ballad literature of the country, or helping itself from the simplicities and directnesses of common every-day speech, or going back to Miltonic and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style all these three elements play their part, now rapidly in the face of all opposition, as in the case of Scott with his dashing Border lays. But the heroic couplet on the Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning and official form of verse; and among the most admired poets of Keats's day, Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in the older generation, each in his own manner, still kept sounding the old instrument essentially to the old tune, with Byron in the younger following, in _The Corsair_ and _Lara_, at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but with a beat even more monotonous and hammering than any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt declared his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how he carried out his promise in _Rimini_. He did little more than revive Dryden's expedients of the occasional triplet and Alexandrine, with a sprinkling of Elizabethan double-endings; failing withal completely to catch any touch either of the imaginative pa.s.sion of the Elizabethans or of Dryden's fine virile energy and worldly good-breeding.

_Rimini_ was not yet published, nor had Keats yet met its author, when Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the case, his strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little in the same manner as Hunt's, it is that there was really as he himself said on another occasion, something in common between them. At the same time it should be remembered that some of Keats's most Huntian-seeming rimes and phrases contain really an echo of the older masters.[7] That William Browne was his earliest model in the handling of the metre will, I think, be apparent to any reader who will put the pa.s.sage from _Britannia's Pastorals_ above quoted (p. 98), with its easily flowing couplets varied at intervals by whole cl.u.s.ters or bunches of double endings, alongside of the following from Keats's first Epistle:--

Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee Past each horizon of fine poesy; Fain would I echo back each pleasant note As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float 'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted, Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted: But 'tis impossible; far different cares Beckon me sternly from soft 'Lydian airs,'

And hold my faculties so long in thrall, That I am oft in doubt whether at all I shall again see Phoebus in the morning: Or flush'd Aurora in the roseate dawning!

Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream; Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam; Or again witness what with thee I've seen, The dew by fairy feet swept from the green, After a night of some quaint jubilee Which every elf and fay had come to see: When bright processions took their airy march Beneath the curved moon's triumphal arch.

But might I now each pa.s.sing moment give To the coy muse, with me she would not live In this dark city, nor would condescend 'Mid contradictions her delights to lend.

Should e'er the fine-ey'd maid to me be kind, Ah! surely it must be whene'er I find Some flowery spot, sequester'd, wild, romantic, That often must have seen a poet frantic; Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing, And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing; Where the dark-leav'd laburnum's drooping cl.u.s.ters Reflect athwart the stream their yellow l.u.s.tres, And intertwin'd the ca.s.sia's arms unite, With its own drooping buds, but very white.

This is artless enough as writing, but obviously sincere, and interesting as showing how early and instinctively both Greek and mediaeval mythology had become to Keats symbols and incarnations, as living as in the days of their first creation, of the charm and power of nature. The piece ends with a queer Ovidian fancy about his friend, to the effect that he, Mathew, had once been a 'flowret blooming wild'

beside the springs of poetry, and that Diana had plucked him and thrown him into the stream as an offering to her brother Apollo, who had turned him into a goldfinch, from which he was metamorphosed into a black-eyed swan fed by Naiads.

The next experiments in this measure, the fragment of _Calidore_ with its _Induction_, date from a few months later, after the publication of _Rimini_, and express the longing of the young aspirant to follow the example of Hunt, the loved Libertas, and tell, he too, a tale of chivalry. But the longing is seconded by scarce a touch of inspiration.

The Gothic and nature descriptions are quite cheap and external, the figures of knights and ladies quite conventional, the whole thing a matter of plumes and palfreys and lances, shallow graces of costume and sentiment, much more recalling Stothard's sugared ill.u.s.trations to Spenser than the spirit of Spenser himself, whose patronage Keats timorously invokes. He at the same time entreats Hunt to intercede with Spenser on his behalf: and in the result it seems as though Hunt had stepped bodily in between them. In the handling of the metre, indeed, there is nothing of Hunt's diluted Drydenism: there is the same direct though timid following of Elizabethan precedents as before, varied by an occasional echo of _Lycidas_ in the use of the short six-syllable line:--

Anon he leaps along the oaken floors Of halls and corridors.

But in the style and sentiment we trace Leigh Hunt, or those elements in Keats which were naturally akin to him, at every turn. We read, for instance, of trees that lean

So elegantly o'er the waters brim And show their blossoms trim:

and of

The lamps that from the high-roof'd hall were pendent And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.

A few months later, on his August and September holiday at Margate, Keats resumes the measure again, in two familiar epistles, one to his brother George, the other to Cowden Clarke. To his brother he expresses frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspirations of a youth pa.s.sionately and justly conscious of the working of the poetic impulse in him, but not less justly dissatisfied with the present fruits of such impulse, and wondering whether any worth gathering will ever come to ripeness. He tells us of hours when all in vain he gazes at the play of sheet lightning or pries among the stars 'to strive to think divinely,' and of other hours when the doors of the clouds break open and show him visions of the pawing of white horses, the flashing of festal wine cups in halls of gold, and supernatural colours of dimly seen flowers. In such moods, he asks concerning an imagined poet:--

Should he upon an evening ramble fare With forehead to the soothing breezes bare, Would he naught see but the dark silent blue With all its diamonds trembling through and through?

Or the coy moon, when in the waviness Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress, And staidly paces higher up, and higher, Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire?

Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight-- The revelries, and mysteries of night: And should I ever see them, I will tell you Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.

But richer even than these privileges of the poet in his illuminated moments is the reward which he may look for from posterity. In a long pa.s.sage, deeply pathetic considering the after-event, Keats imagines exultingly what must be a poet's deathbed feelings when he foresees how his name and work will be cherished in after times by men and women of all sorts and conditions--warrior, statesman, and philosopher, village May-queen and nursing mother (the best and most of the verses are those which picture the May-queen taking his book from her bosom to read to a thrilled circle on the village green). He might be happier, he admits, could he stifle all these ambitions. Yet there are moments when he already tastes the true delights of poetry; and at any rate he can take pleasure in the thought that his brother will like what he writes; and so he is content to close with an attempt at a quiet description of the Thanet scenery and surroundings whence he writes.

In addressing Cowden Clarke Keats begins with an odd image, likening the way in which poetic inspiration eludes him to the slipping away of drops of water which a swan vainly tries to collect in the hollows of his plumage. He would have written sooner, he tells his correspondent, but had nothing worthy to submit to one so familiar with the whole range of poetry and recently, moreover, privileged to walk and talk with Leigh Hunt,--

One, who, of late, had ta'en sweet forest walks With him who elegantly chats, and talks-- The wrong'd Libertas,--who has told you stories Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo's glories; Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city, And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.

(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to _The Feast of the Poets and Rimini_. The pa.s.sage 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 ident.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sive 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:--