\ 7 co © aS x ‘ aUniversity of Virginia Library _ PR;4832;.S9;1907 D Poem ii ee AL ed and with an int | Il X 0 sO LLIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ; FROM THE ESTATE OF EMILY CLARK BALCH a 4Che Golden JOoets EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A.DIANA AND ENDYMIONPOEMS OF KEATS SELECTED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SYMONS WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS BY E. Jj, SULLIVAN PHILADELPHIA ' GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO, | PUBLISHERS + MI bo bw) € aus i aitCONTENTS LIST OF PLATES INTRODUCTION ‘ ; NARRATIVE AND ROMANTIC ee Endymion, Hymn to Pan : ad In Neptune’s Palace Ode to Sorrow oe Hymn to Diana Lamia, Part I. 55 bart Li, : Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil. The Eve of St. Agnes : Hyperion, Book I. a Book II. . - Book III. La Belle Dame Sans Merci The Eve of St. Mark DESCRIPTIVE AND REFLECTIVE POoEMsS— I stood tip-toe upon a little hill Sleep and Poetry =. To Charles Cowden Clarke : Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds . Fragment of the ‘ Castle-Builder’ Sones, &c.— A Song of Opposites I had a dove and the sweet dove died In a drear-nighted December Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode to Psyche . Fancy Ode on blank page of Beaumont and Fletcher's ‘Fair Maid of the Inn’ Lines. on Mermaid Tavern Robin Hood To Autumn ‘ Ode on Melancholy . PAGE Xili 133 140 157 161 163 164 164 165 168 } 170 | 172 | 176 177 180xX See Sn ee : - pee tet ede eee KEATS Sones, &c. (continucd)— Fragment of Ode to Maia. Hymn to oe ine, Boek. . : Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’ s Hair . Ode to Fanny Lines to Fanny Ode on Indolence SONNETS— Why did I laugh A Dream after reading Dante Two Sonnets on Fame On the Sonnet . On Leigh Hunt’s ‘Story of Rimini’ To Spenser : : Ree fitful gusts, &e. : To one who has been long in city pent On first looking into Chapman’s ‘ Homer’ To Haydon . ; On the Grasshopper and Cricket To Kosciusko . To a Friend who sent me Roses HOG AW: - . O Solitude ! if I must dwell with thee To my Brothers After dark vapors have oppre: sed our - plains Written at the end of ‘ The Floure and the Lefe Two Sonnets—To Haydon On the Elgin Marbles On a Picture of Leander : On a blank page of Shakespeare’ rooms ; The day is gone, &c. On sitting down to read ‘ King Lear? again When I have fears, &c. ; ’ To the Nile : To a Lady seen at Vauxhall What the Thrush said The Human Seasons. To Homer Written on Ben Nevis To Sicep . Dedication to Leigh Hunt, Esq. NoTES GLOSSARY INDEX OF FIRST Tans PAGE 183 184 185 186 187 189 IQI 194 194 195 196 197 198 198 199 200 201Diana and Endymion . While her robes flaunted with the daffodils : : And so she pined, and so she died forlorn, Imploring for her Basil to the last Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast : : I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s song , : Untired she read the legend page, Of holy Mark, from youth to age - . on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die : : : LIST OF PLATES e frontispiece Lo face page 50 2) 84 126 130 181Printed in Great BritainINTRODUCTION EATS had the courage of the intellect K and the cowardice of the nerves. That ‘terrier-like resoluteness’ which a school- fellow observed in him as a boy was still strong when the first certainty of his death came to him. ‘ Difficulties nerve the spirit of a man,’ he wrote, with a full sense of the truth to himself of what he was saying; and there is genuine intellectual courage in the quaint summing-up: ‘I never quite despair, and I read Shakespeare.’ When the Quarterly and Blackwood attacked him, he wrote: ‘Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.’ But, at the age of seventeen, he could write, with an equally keen self-knowledge: ‘Truth is, I have a horrid morbidity of temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I have no doubt, the greatest stumbling-block I have to fear; I may surer say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.’ ‘I carry all matters to an ex- xl b Keats and his tem- perament.XIV KEATS The tyr- treme,’ he says elsewhere, ‘so that, when I have any little vexation, it grows, in five minutes, into a theme for Sophocles.’ To the man who has nerves like this, calmness under emotion is impossible ; all that can be asked of him is that he shall realise his own condition, and, as far as may be, make allowances for it. This, until perhaps the very end, when, on his death- bed, he put aside unopened the letters that he dared not read, Keats had always the intel- lectual strength to do; after the event, if not before it, and generally at the very moment of the event. When he writes most frantically to Fanny Brawne, he confesses, in every other sentence, that he does not really mean what he is saying, at the same time that he cannot help. saying it. And are not such letters, written, after all, with so touching a confi- dence in their being understood, seen through, by the woman to whom they were written, really.a kind. ofthinking aloud? A letter, when it is the expression of emotion, is as momentary as a mood, which may come and go indeed while one is in the act of writing it down, so that .a letter of two pages may begin with the bitterest reproaches, and end, just as sincerely, and with no sense of contradiction, in a flood of tenderness. One is loth to believe that Fanny Brawne ever complained of what the critics en } “atINTRODUCTION have been so ready to complain of on her Fanny behalf. She may have understood Keats very ee little as a poet, and the fact that he tells her pathy. nothing of his work seems to show that he was aware of it,.and probably more than half in- different to it; but if she did not understand him as a man, as a lover, if she would have had him change one of his reproaches into a compliment, or wipe out one of the insults of his agony, then she had less of a woman’s ‘intelligence in love’ than it is possible to im- agine in a woman beloved by Keats. That man must have loved very calmly and very contentedly, with a strange excess of either materialism or spirituality, who has not felt much of what Keats expressed with so intense and faithful a truth to nature. Keats was not a celestial lover, nor a sentimentalist, nor a cynic. He was earthly in his love, as in the very essence of his imagination; passion was not less a disease to him than the disease of which he died, or than the act of writing verse. Stirred to the very depths of his soul, it was after all through the senses, and with all the | aching vividness to which he had trained those \) senses, that memory came to him. And he was no less critical of love than of everything else in the world; he had no blind beliefs, and there were moments when even poetry seemedShifting one’s centre. XV1 KEATS to him ‘a mere Jack o’ Lanthorn to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its bril- liance.’ Doubting himself so much, he doubted others, of whose intentions he was less certain ; and, in love, doubt is part of that torture with- out which few persons of imagination would fling themselves quite heartily into the pursuit. Had he been stronger in body, he would have luxuriated in just those lacerating pains which seemed, as it was, to be bringing him daily nearer to the grave. It was always vision that disturbed him, the too keen sense of a physical life going on, perhaps so calmly, so near him, and yet as much beyond his control as if he were at the end of the earth. Have you ever thought of the frightful thing it is to shift one’s centre? That is what it is to love a woman. One’s nature no longer radiates freely, from its own centre; the centre itself is shifted, is put outside oneself. Up to then, one may have been unhappy, one may have failed, many things may seem to have gone wrong. But at least there was this security: that one’s enemies were all outside the gate. With the woman whom one loves one admits all one’s enemies. Think: all one’s happiness to depend upon the will of another, on that other’s fragility, faith, mutability ; on the way life comes to the heart, soul, conscience, nerves of some oneINTRODUCTION else, no longer the quite sufficient difficulties of Keats no a personal heart, soul, conscience, and nerves. It is to call in a passing stranger and to say: Guard all my treasures while I sleep. For there is no certainty in the world, beyond the certainty that I am I, and that what is not I can never draw one breath for me, though I were dying for lack of it. That, or something like it, may well have been Keats’ consciousness of the irreparable loss and gain which came to him with his love. He was no idealist, able to create a world of his own, and to live there, breathing its own sharp and trying air of the upper clouds; he wanted the actual green world in which we live, men and women as they move about us, only more continuously perfect; themselves, but without a flaw. He wanted the year to be always at. the height of summer, and there is no insect / , or_gross animal, a butterfly or a pig, whom # idealist, © ia / / 2 Z| LA QA o PO “AN ME_ S 9 , a I, L Cp BIE ~—tL/3F } 44, VF ie 4 ~~. de does not somewhere envy for its power suing - ’ of annihilating every consciousness but that of Su jus io sensuous delight in the moment. _ Conscious always that his day was to have so few to- morrows, he clung to every inch of daylight which he could capture before night-time. And there was none of to-morrow’s aloofness in his apprehension of human qualities ; in his feeling for women, for instance. He demanded of a eyKeats and women, XVill KEATS woman instant and continuous responsiveness to his mood, with a kind of profound nervous selfish- ness, not entirely under his physical control. ‘I am certain,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘I have no right feeling towards women—at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? ... I have no right to expect more than their reality. ... Is it not extraordinary ?— When among men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, | have evil thoughts, malice, spleen ; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicion, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. . .. 1 must absolutely get over this—but how?’ In all this there is properly no idealism, but rather a very exacting kind of materialism. His goddess must become flesh and blood, and at once put off and retain godhead. To the idealist, living in a world of imagination, which may indeed easily be a truer world, a world more nearly corresponding to unseen realities, there is no shock at finding earth solid under one’s feet, and dust in the earth. He lives with a life so wholly of the spirit that, to him, only the spirit matters. But to Keats every moment mattered, and the warm actual life eae oN)’ it : ).INTRODUCTION XIX of every moment. His imagination was a Keats’s faculty which made the experience of actual Hone things more intense, more subtle, more sensi- tive to pain and pleasure, but it was concerned always with actual things. He had none of that abstract quality of mind which can take refuge from realities, when they become too pressing and too painful, in an idea. Ideas with him were always the servants, never the masters, of sensation. What he most desired, all his life, was strength ‘to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation.’ And he cries: ‘O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!’ On his death-bed he confessed that ‘the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watch- ing the growth of flowers.’ ‘I feel the flowers growing over me,’ he said, at the last, with a last touch of luxuriousness in his apprehension of the earth. ‘Talking of luxuriousness,’ he writes in a letter, ‘this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine. Good Lord, how fine! It went down soft and pulpy, slushy, oozy—all-its delicious embonpornt melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry.’ And, in a much earlier letter, he writes with a not less keen sense of the luxury which lies in discomfort, if only it be apprehendedXx KEATS Sit poignantly enough, to the point at which pain able thirst becomes a pleasure: ‘I lay awake last night oo listening to the rain, with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat.’ In this sensual ecstasy there is something at once childlike and morbid. It is like a direct draught from the earth, taken with violence. And it is part of his unquenchable thirst for beauty. ‘On my word,’ he writes, ‘I think so little, I have not one opinion upon anything except in matters of taste. I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.” But Keats, remember, was not the priest of beauty, he was her very human lover, sighing after her feverishly. With him beauty was always a part of feeling, always a thing to quicken his pulses, and send the blood to his forehead; he could no more be calm in the presence of beauty than he could be calm in the presence of the woman he loved. With Shelley beauty was an ideal thing, not to be touched by human hands; his was ‘the desire of the moth for the star,’ while Keats’, if you like, was sometimes that fatal desire of the moth for the candle-flame. It is char- acteristic that Shelley writes his confession of faith in a ‘ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’; Keats, in an ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ The poetry of Keats is an aspiration towardsINTRODUCTION Xx1 happiness, towards the deliciousness of life, Life in the towards the restfulness of beauty, towards the art. delightful sharpness of sensations not too sharp to be painful. He accepted life in the spirit of art, asking only the simple pleasures, which he seemed to be among the few who could not share, of physical health, the capacity to enjoy sensation without being overcome by it. He- was not troubled about his soul, the “meaning _ of the universe, or any other_metaphysical ques- tions, to to which he shows a happy indifference, or rather, a placid unconsciousness. ‘I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness,’ he notes.. ‘I look’ not for it if it be net im the present hour. Nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part in its existence, and_ pick about the gravel.’ It is here, perhaps, that he is what people choose to call pagan; though it would be both simpler and truer to say that he is the natural animal, to whom the sense of sin has never whispered itself. Only a cloud makes him uneasy in the sunshine. ‘Happy days, or else to die,’ he asks for, not aware of any reason why he should not easily be happy under flawless weather. He knows that ‘ All charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy,’Shake- speare’s negative capa- bility. XX11 KEATS and he is not cursed with that spirit of analysis which tears our pleasures to pieces, as in a child’s hands, to find out, what can never be found out, the secret of their making. In a profound passage on Shakespeare he notes how ‘Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Cole- ridge, for instance, would let go a. fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the penetralium of Mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.’ And so he is willing to linger among imagi- native happinesses, satisfyingly, rather than to wander in uneasy search after perhaps troubling certainties. He had a nature to which happi- ness was natural, until nerves and disease came to disturb it. And so his poetry has only a sort of accidental sadness, reflected back upon it from our consciousness of the shortness of the time he himself had had to enjoy delight. ‘ And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things,’ he says in ‘Sleep and Poetry,’ and, while heXXill INTRODUCTION notes with admiration that Milton ‘devoted him- zne joy rom self rather to the ardours than the pleasures of nature. song, solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine,’ he adds that ‘those are, with some exceptions, the finest parts of the poem.’ To him, poetry was always those ‘cups of old Wille, 4 test in some “leafy lixury’ by wae way. That joy, which is fundamental in Keats, is a quality coming to him straight from nature. But, superadded to this, there is another quality, made up out of unhealthy nerves and some- thing feminine and twisted in the mind, which is almost precisely what it is now the fashion to call decadent. Keats was more than a de- cadent, but he was a decadent, and such a line as ‘One faint eternal eventide of gems,’ might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. He luxuriates, almost lke Baude- laire, in the details of physical discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as where, in sleep- lessness, ‘We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil.’ He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the physical symptoms of hisLove in French and English poetry. XXIV KEATS lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes ‘When her lips and eyes Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small ;’ and, in a line afterwards revised, he writes at first : ‘ By the moist languor of thy breathing face.’ Lycrus, im —24 | KEATS I left poor Scylla in a niche and fled. My fever’d parchings up, my scathing dread Met palsy half way: soon these limbs became Gaunt, wither’d, sapless, feeble, cramp’d, and lame. ‘Now let me pass a cruel, cruel space, Without one hope, without one faintest trace Of mitigation, or redeeming bubble Of colour’d phantasy ; for I fear ’twould trouble Thy brain to loss of reason: and next tell How a restoring chance came down to quell One half of the witch in me. ‘On a day, Sitting upon a rock above the spray, I saw grow up from the horizon’s brink A gallant vessel: soon she seem’d to sink Away from me again, as though her course Had been resum’d in spite of hindering force— So vanish’d: and not long, before arose Dark clouds, and muttering of winds morose. Old A£olus would stifle his mad spleen, But could not: therefore all the billows green Toss’d up the silver spume against the clouds. The tempest came: I saw that vessel’s shrouds In perilous bustle ; while upon the deck Stood trembling creatures. I beheld the wreck ; The final gulphing ; the poor struggling souls: I heard their cries amid loud thunder-rolls. O they had all been sav’d but crazed eld Annull’d my vigorous cravings: and thus quell’d And curb’d, think on’t, O Latmian! did I sit Writhing with pity, and a cursing fitENDYMION Against that hell-born Circe. The crew had gone, By one and one, to pale oblivion ; And I was gazing on the surges prone, With many a scalding tear and many a groan, When at my feet emerg’d an old man’s hand, Grasping this scroll, and this same slender wand. I knelt with pain—reach’d out my hand—had grasp’d These treasures—touch’d the knuckles—they un- clasp’d— I caught a finger: but the downward weight O’erpowered me—it sank. Then ’gan abate The storm, and through chill aguish gloom out- burst The comfortable sun. I was athirst To search the book, and in the warming air Parted its dripping leaves with eager care. Strange matters did it treat of, and drew on My soul page after page, till well-nigh won Into forgetfulness ; when, stupefied, I read these words, and read again, and tried My eyes against the heavens, and read again. O what a load of misery and pain Each Atlas-line bore off !—a shine of hope Came gold around me, cheering me to cope Strenuous with hellish tyranny. Attend! For thou hast brought their promise to an end. ‘“Tn the wide sea there lives a forlorn wretch, Doom’d with enfeebled carcase to outstretch His loath’d existence through ten centuries, And then to die alone. Who can devise A total opposition? Noone. So One million times ocean must ebb and flow,26 KEATS And he oppressed. Yet he shall not die, These things accomplish’d :—If he utterly Scans all the depths of magic, and expounds The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds ; If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences ; He shall not die. Moreover, and in chief, He must pursue this task of joy and grief Most piously ;—all lovers tempest-tost, And in the savage overwhelming lost, He shall deposit side by side, until Time’s creeping shall the dreary space fulfil : Which done, and all these labours ripened, A youth, by heavenly power lov’d and led, Shall stand before him ; whom he shall direct How to consummate all. The youth elect Must do the thing, or both will be destroy’d.” ’— ‘Then,’ cried the young Endymion, overjoy’d, ‘We are twin brothers in this destiny ! Say, I entreat thee, what achievement high Is, in this restless world, for me reserv’d. What ! if from thee my wandering feet had swerv’d, Had we both perish’d ?’—‘ Look!’ the sage reply’d, ‘Dost thou not mark a gleaming through the tide, Of diverse brilliances ? ’tis the edifice I told thee of, where lovely Scylla lies ; And where I have enshrined piously All lovers, whom fell storms have doom’d to die Throughout my bondage.’ Thus discoursing, on They went till unobscur’d the porches shone ; Which hurryingly they gain’d, and enter’d straight. Sure never since king Neptune held his stateENDYMION Was seen such wonder underneath the stars. Turn to some level plain where haughty Mars Has legion’d all his battle ; and behold How every soldier, with firm foot, doth hold His even breast: see, many steeled squares, And rigid ranks of iron—whence who dares One step? Imagine further, line by line, These warrior thousands on the field supine :— So in that crystal place, in silent rows, Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.— The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac’d Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac’d ; Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips All ruddy,—for here death no blossom nips. He mark’d their brows and foreheads; saw their hair Put sleekly on one side with nicest care ; And each one’s gentle wrists, with reverence, Put cross-wise to its heart. ‘Let us commence,’ Whisper’d the guide, stuttering with joy, ‘even now.’ He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough, Began to tear his scroll in pieces small, Uttering the while some mumblings funeral. He tore it into pieces small as snow That drifts unfeather’d when bleak northerns blow ; And having done it, took his dark blue cloak And bound it round Endymion: then struck His wand against the empty air times nine.— ‘What more there is to do, young man, is thine But first a little patience ; first undo This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue.28 KEATS Ah, gentle! ’tis as weak as spider’s skein ; And shouldst thou break it—-What, is it done so clean? A power overshadows thee! O, brave! The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave. Here is a shell; ’tis pearly blank to me, Nor mark’d with any sign or charactery— Canst thou read aught? O read for pity’s sake ! Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.” "Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall Sweet music breath’d her soul away, and sigh’d A lullaby to silence.—‘ Youth! now strew These minced leaves on me, and passing through Those files of dead, scatter the same around, And thou wilt see the issue.’-— Mid the sound Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart, Endymion from Glaucus stood apart, And scatter’d in his face some fragments light. How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight Smiling beneath a coral diadem, Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn’d gem, Appear’d, and, stepping to a beauteous corse, Kneel’d down beside it, and with tenderest force Press’d its cold hand, and wept,—and Scylla sigh’d! Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply’d— The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass’d, each lifted up his head, As doth a flower at Apollo’s touch. Death felt it to his inwards: ’twas too much:ENDYMION Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever’d along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly ; and the rest Felt a high certainty of being blest. They gaz’d upon Endymion. Enchantment Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent. Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers, Budded, and swell’d, and, full-blown, shed full showers Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine. The two deliverers tasted a pure wine Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz’d out. Speechless they ey’d each other, and about The fair assembly wander’d to and fro, Distracted with the richest overflow Of joy that ever pour’d from heaven. ‘Away !’ Shouted the new born god; ‘ Follow, and pay Our piety to Neptunus supreme !’— Then Scylla, blushing sweetly from her dream, They led on first, bent to her meek surprise, Through portal columns of a giant size, Into the vaulted, boundless emerald. We Joyous all follow’d as the leader call’d, Wt Down marble steps ; pouring as easily | As hour-glass sand,—and fast, as you might see Swallows obeying the south summer’s call, Or swans upon a gentle waterfall.30 KEATS Thus went that beautiful multitude, nor far, Ere from among some rocks of glittering spar, Just within ken, they saw descending thick Another multitude. Whereat more quick Mov’d either host. On a wide sand they met, And of those numbers every eye was wet ; For each their old love found. A murmuring rose, Like what was never heard in all the throes Of wind and waters: ’tis past human wit To tell; ’tis dizziness to think of it. This mighty consummation made, the host Mov’d on for many a league; and gain’d, and lost Huge sea-marks ; vanward swelling in array, And from the rear diminishing away,— Till a faint dawn surpris’d them. Glaucus cry’d, ‘Behold! behold, the palace of his pride ! God Neptune’s palaces!’ With noise increas’d, They shoulder’d on towards that brightening east. At every onward step proud domes arose In prospect,—diamond gleams, and golden glows Of amber ’gainst their faces levelling. Joyous, and many as the leaves in spring, Still onward ; still the splendour gradual swell’d. Rich opal domes were seen, on high upheld By jasper pillars, letting through their shafts A blush of coral. Copious wonder-draughts Each gazer drank ; and deeper drank more near : For what poor mortals fragment up, as mere As marble was there lavish, to the vast Of one fair palace, that far far surpass’d, Even for common bulk, those olden three, Memphis, and Babylon, and Nineveh. »ENDYMION As large, as bright, as colour’d as the bow Of Iris, when unfading it doth show Beyond a silvery shower, was the arch Through which this Paphian army took its march, Into the outer courts of Neptune’s state: Whence could be seen, direct, a golden gate, To which the leaders sped; but not half raught Ere it burst open swift as fairy thought, And made those dazzled thousands veil their eyes Like callow eagles at the first sunrise. Soon with an eagle nativeness their gaze Ripe from hue-golden swoons took all the blaze, And then, behold! large Neptune on his throne Of emerald deep: yet not exalt alone ; At his right hand stood winged Love, and on His left sat smiling Beauty’s paragon. Far as the mariner on highest mast Can see all round upon the calmed vast, So wide was Neptune’s hall: and as the blue Doth vault the waters, so the waters drew Their doming curtains, high, magnificent, Aw’d from the throne aloof ;—-and when storm-rent Disclos’d the thunder-gloomings in Jove’s air ; But sooth’d as now, flash’d sudden everywhere, Noiseless, sub-marine cloudlets, glittering Death to a human eye: for there did spring From natural west, and east, and south, and north, A light as of four sunsets, blazing forth A gold-green zenith ’bove the Sea-God’s head. Of lucid depth the floor, and far outspread As breezeless lake, on which the slim canoe Of feather’d Indian darts about, as through eee32 KEATS The delicatest air: air verily, But for the portraiture of clouds and sky : This palace floor breath-air,—but for the amaze Of deep-seen wonders motionless,—and blaze Of the dome pomp, reflected in extremes, Globing a golden sphere. They stood in dreams Till Triton blew his horn. The palace rang ; The Nereids danc’d ; the Syrens faintly sang ; And the great Sea-King bow’d his dripping head. Then Love took wing, and from his pinions shed On all the multitude a nectarous dew. The ooze-born Goddess beckoned and drew Fair Scylla and her guides to conference ; And when they reach’d the throned eminence She kist the sea-nymph’s cheek,—who sat her down A toying with the doves. Then,—‘ Mighty crown And sceptre of this kingdom !? Venus said, ‘Thy vows were on a time to Nais paid: Behold !’— ‘Two copious tear-drops instant fell From the God’s large eyes ; he smil’d delectable, And over Glaucus held his blessing hands.— ‘Endymion! Ah! still wandering in the bands Of love? Now this is cruel. Since the hour I met thee in earth’s bosom, all my power Have I put forth to serve thee. What, not yet Escap’d from dull mortality’s harsh net? A little patience, youth ! ’twill not be long, Or I am skilless quite: an idle tongue, A humid eye, and steps luxurious, Where these are new and strange, are ominous. Aye, I have seen these signs in one of heaven,ENDYMION When others were all blind: and were I given To utter secrets, haply I might say Some pleasant words:—but Love will have his day. So wait awhile expectant. Pr’ythee soon, Even in the passing of thine honey-moon, Visit thou my Cythera: thou wilt find Cupid well-natured, my Adonis kind ; And pray persuade with thee—Ah, I have done, All blisses be upon thee, my sweet son !’— Thus the fair goddess : While Endymion Knelt to receive those accents halcyon. - Meantime a glorious revelry began Before the Water-Monarch. Nectar ran In courteous fountains to all cups outreach’d ; And plunder’d vines, teeming exhaustless, pleach’d New growth about each shell and pendent lyre ; The which, in disentangling for their fire, Pull’d down fresh foliage and coverture For dainty toying. Cupid, empire-sure, Flutter’d and laugh’d, and oft-times through the throng Made a delighted way. Then dance, and song, And garlanding grew wild ; and pleasure reign’d. In harmless tendril they each other chain’d, And strove who should be smother’d deepest in ' Fresh crush of leaves. ta O ’tis a very sin For one so weak to venture his poor verse In such a place as this. O do not curse, High Muses ! let him hurry to the ending.34 KEATS All suddenly were silent. A soft blending Of dulcet instruments came charmingly ; And then a hymn. ‘KiNG of the stormy sea! Brother of Jove, and co-inheritor Of elements! Eternally before Thee the waves awful bow. Fast, stubborn rock, At thy fear’d trident shrinking, doth unlock Its deep foundations, hissing into foam. All mountain-rivers, lost in the wide home Of thy capacious bosom, ever flow. _ Thou frownest, and old A®olus thy foe Skulks to his cavern, ’mid the gruff complaint Of all his rebel tempests. Dark clouds faint When, from thy diadem, a silver gleam Slants over blue dominion. Thy bright team Gulphs in the morning light, and scuds along To bring thee nearer to that golden song Apollo singeth, while his chariot Waits at the doors of heaven. ‘Thou art not For scenes like this: an empire stern hast thou; And it hath furrow’d that large front: yet now, As newly come of heaven, dost thou sit To blend and interknit Subdued majesty with this glad time. O shell-borne King sublime! We lay our hearts before thee evermore— We sing, and we adore! ‘Breathe softly, flutes ; Be tender of your strings, ye soothing lutes ;Nor be the trumpet heard! O vain, O vain ; Not flowers budding in an April rain, Nor breath of sleeping dove, nor river’s flow,— No, nor the AZolian twang of Love’s own bow, Can mingle music fit for the soft ear Of goddess Cytherea ! Yet deign, white On our souls’ sacrifice. ‘ Bright-winged Child ! Who has another care when thou hast smil’d ? Unfortunates on All death-shadows, and glooms that overcast Our spirits, fann’ O sweetest essence! sweetest of all minions ! God of warm pulses, and dishevell’d hair, And panting bosoms bare ! Dear unseen light in darkness ! eclipser Of light in light! delicious poisoner ! Thy venom’d goblet will we quaff until We fill—we fill! And by thy Mother’s lips ; For clamour, when the golden palace door Opened again, and from without, in shone A new magnificence. On oozy throne | Smooth-moving To take a latest Before he went into his quiet cave | To muse for ever—Then a lucid wave, Scoop’d from its trembling sisters of mid-sea, Afloat, and pillowing up the majesty ENDYMION Queen of Beauty, thy fair eyes earth, we see at last d away by thy light pinions. Was heard no more came Oceanus the old, \ glimpse at his sheep-fold,Of Doris, and the Atgean seer, her spouse-— Next, on a dolphin, clad in laurel boughs, Theban Amphion leaning on his lute: ‘His fingers went across it—All were mute To gaze on Amphitrite, queen of pearls, And Thetis pearly too.— The palace whirls Around giddy Endymion ; seeing he Was there far strayed from mortality. He could not bear it—shut his eyes in vain ; Imagination gave a dizzier pain. “OI shall die! sweet Venus, be my stay! Where is my lovely mistress? Well-away ! I die—I hear her voice—I feel my wing—’ At Neptune’s feet he sank. A sudden ring Of Nereids were about him, in kind strife To usher back his spirit into life : But still he slept. At last they interwove Their cradling arms, and purpos’d to convey Towards a crystal bower far away. Lo! while slow carried through the pitying crowd, To his inward senses these words spake aloud ; Written in star-light on the dark above : Dearest Endymion! my entire love | Flow have £ dwelt in fear of fate: *tis done— Lmmortal bliss for me too hast thou won. Arise then! for the hen-dove shall not hatch fer ready eges, before I'M kissing snatch Thee into endless heaven. Awake! awake!ENDYMION The youth at once arose: a placid lake Came quiet to his eyes; and forest green, Cooler than all the wonders he had seen, Lull’d with its simple song his fluttering breast. How happy once again in grassy nest ! Bk. III,, ll. 1-1032, ODE TO SORROW SORROW, Why dost borrow The natural hue of health, from vermeil lips >— To give maiden blushes To the white rose bushes? Or is’t thy dewy hand the daisy tips? ‘O Sorrow, Why dost borrow The lustrous passion from a falcon-eye ?— To give the glow-worm light ? Or, on a moonless night, To tinge, on syren shores, the salt sea-spry ? *O Sorrow, Why dost borrow The mellow ditties from a mourning tongue >— To give at evening pale Unto the nightingale, That thou mayst listen the cold dews among? ‘O Sorrow, Why dost borrow Heart’s lightness from the merriment of May >— D38 A lover would not tread A cowslip on the head, Though he should dance from eve till peep of day— Nor any drooping flower Held sacred for thy bower, Wherever he may sport himself and play. “Vo Sorrow, I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind ; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly ; She is so constant to me, and so kind: I would deceive her And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind. ‘Beneath my palm trees, by the river side, I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide There was no one to ask me why I wept,— And so I kept Brimming the water-lilly cups with tears Cold as my fears. ‘Beneath my palm trees, by the river side, I sat a weeping : what enamour’d bride, Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds, But hides and shrouds Beneath dark palm trees by a river side? ‘And as I sat, over the light blue hills There came a noise of revellers: the rillsENDYMION Into the wide stream came of purple hue— *Twas Bacchus and his crew! The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills From kissing cymbals made a merry din— "Twas Bacchus and his kin! Like to a moving vintage down they came, Crown’d with green leaves, and faces all on flame ; All madly dancing through the pleasant valley, To scare thee, Melancholy ! O then, O then, thou wast a simple name! And I forgot thee, as the berried holly By shepherds is forgotten, when, in June, Tall chesnuts keep away the sun and moon :— I rush’d into the folly ! ‘Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood, Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood, With sidelong laughing ; And little rills of crimson wine imbru’d His plump white arms, and shoulders, enough white For Venus’ pearly bite : And near him rode Silenus on his ass, Pelted with flowers as he on did pass Tipsily quaffing. ‘Whence came ye, merry Damsels! whence came ye! So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your bowers desolate, | Your lutes, and gentler fate Pp— “We follow Bacchus! Bacchus on the wing, | A conquering ! Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide :—4o KEATS Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our wild minstrelsy !” ‘Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! whence came ye! So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft Pp— “ For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree ; For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, And cold mushrooms ; For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth ; Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth !— Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our mad minstrelsy ! ” ‘Over wide streams and mountains great we went, And, save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent, Onward the tiger and the leopard pants, With Asian elephants : Onward these myriads—with song and dance, With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians’ prance, Web-footed alligators, crocodiles, Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files, Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers’ toil : With toying oars and silken sails they glide, Nor care for wind and tide. ‘Mounted on panthers’ furs and lions’ manes, From rear to van they scour about the plains ; A three days’ journey in a moment done: And always, at the rising of the sun,ENDYMION About the wilds they hunt with spear and horn, On spleenful unicorn. ‘I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown Before the vine-wreath crown ! I saw parch’d Abyssinia rouse and sing To the silver cymbals’ ring ! I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce Old Tartary the fierce ! The kings of Inde their jewel-sceptres vail, And from their treasures scatter pearled hail ; Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans ; Before young Bacchus’ eye-wink turning pale.— Into these regions came I following him, Sick hearted, weary—so I took a whim To stray away into these forests drear Alone, without a peer: And I have told thee all thou mayest hear. ‘Young stranger ! I’ve been a ranger In search of pleasure throughout every clime: Alas, ’tis not for me! Bewitch’d I sure must be, To lose in grieving all my maiden prime. ‘Come then, Sorrow ! Sweetest Sorrow! Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast : I thought to leave thee And deceive thee, But now of all the world I love thee best.KEATS ‘There is not one, No, no, not one But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid ; Thou art her mother, And her brother, Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.’ Bk. IV., Il. 146-290. AYN LO DIANA ee HO, who from Dian’s feast would be away? i For all the golden bowers of the day Are empty left? Who, who away would be From Cynthia’s wedding and festivity ? Not Hesperus: lo! upon his silver wings He leans away for highest heaven and sings, Snapping his lucid fingers merrily !— Ah, Zephyrus! art here, and Flora too! Ye tender bibbers of the rain and dew, Young playmates of the rose and daffodil, Be careful, ere ye enter in, to fill Your baskets high With fennel green, and balm, and golden pines, Savory, latter-mint, and columbines, Cool parsley, basil sweet, and sunny thyme ; Yea, every flower and leaf of every clime, All gather’d in the dewy morning: hie Away ! fly, fly !— Crystalline brother of the belt of heaven, Aquarius! to whom king Jove has given Two liquid pulse streams ’stead of feather’d wings, Two fan-like fountains,—thine illuminings For Dian play:ENDYMION Dissolve the frozen purity of air ; Let thy white shoulders silvery and bare Show cold through watery pinions; make more bright The Star-Queen’s crescent on her marriage night : Haste, haste away !— Castor has tam’d the planet Lion, see! And of the Bear has Pollux mastery : A third is in the race! who is the third Speeding away swift as the eagle bird ? The ramping Centaur! The Lion’s mane’s on end: the Bear how fierce! The Centaur’s arrow ready seems to pierce Some enemy: far forth his bow is bent Into the blue of heaven. He’ll be shent Pale unrelentor, When he shall hear the wedding lutes a playing. — Andromeda! sweet woman! why delaying So timidly among the stars: come hither! Join this bright throng, and nimbly follow whither They all are going. Danae’s Son, before Jove newly bow’d, Has wept for thee, calling to Jove aloud. Thee, gentle lady, did he disenthral : Ye shall for ever live and love, for all Thy tears are flowing.— By Daphne’s fright, behold Apoilo !— Bk. IV., ll. 563-610.LAMIA PART & PON a time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, Before king Oberon’s bright diadem, Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem, I'righted away the Dryads and the Fauns From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip’d lawns, The ever-smitten Hermes empty left His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft : From high Olympus had he stolen light, On this side of Jove’s clouds, to escape the sight Of his great summoner, and made retreat Into a forest on the shores of Crete. For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt A nymph, to whom all hooféd Satyrs knelt ; At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured Pearls, while on land they wither’d and adored. Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont, And in those meads where sometime she might haunt, Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse, Though Fancy’s casket were unlock’d to choose. Ah, what a world of love was at her feet! So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat Burnt from his winged heels to either ear, That from a whiteness, as the lilly clear, Blush’d into roses ’mid his golden hair, Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.Breathing upon the flowers his passion new, And wound with many a river to its head, To find where this sweet nymph prepar’d her secret bed : In vain; the sweet nymph might nowhere be found, And so he rested, on the lonely ground, Pensive, and full of painful jealousies Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees. There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice, Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake : ‘When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake! When move in a sweet body fit for life, And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me !’ The God, dove-footed, glided silently Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed, The taller grasses and full-flowering weed, Until he found a palpitating snake, Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake. She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue ; Strip’d like a zebra, freckled like a pard, fiy’d like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d ; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries— So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seem’d, at once, some penanc’d lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew, SURGETS. SES?46 KEATS Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar: Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet ! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls com- plete ; And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair ? As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air. Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake, And thus ; while Hermes on his pinions lay, Like a stoop’d falcon ere he takes his prey. ‘Fair Hermes, crown’d with feathers, fluttering light, I had a splendid dream of thee last night : I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold, Among the Gods, upon Olympus old, The only sad one ; for thou didst not hear The soft, lute-finger’>d Muses chaunting clear, Nor even Apollo when he sang alone, Deaf to his throbbing throat’s long, long melodious moan. I dreamt I saw thee, rob’d in purple flakes, Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks, And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart, Strike for the Cretan isle ; and here thou art! Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid ?’ Whereat the star of Lethe not delay’d His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired : ‘Thou smocth-lipp’d serpent, surely high inspired! Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise,47 | Telling me only where my nymph is fled,— ‘Where she doth breathe!’ ‘Bright planet, thou hast said,’ “Return’d the snake, ‘but seal with oaths, fair God!’ ‘I swear,’ said Hermes, ‘by my serpent rod, “And by thine eyes, and by thy starry crown !’ Light flew his earnest words, among the blossoms blown. | Then thus again the brilliance feminine: ~' Too frail of heart ! for this lost nymph of thine, _Free as the air, invisibly, she strays ‘About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days ‘She tastes unseen ; unseen her nimble feet _Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet ; -From weary tendrils, and bow’d branches green, ‘She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: ‘And by my power is her beauty veil’d |To keep it unaffronted, unassail’d -By the love-glances of unlovely eyes, Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear’d Silenus’ sighs. ‘Pale grew her immortality, for woe ‘Of all these lovers, and she grieved so ‘I took compassion on her, bade her steep ‘Her hair in weird syrops, that would keep ‘Her loveliness invisible, yet free [To wander as she loves, in liberty. |Thou shalt behold her, Hermes, thou alone, , ‘If thou wilt, as thou swearest, grant my boon!’ [Then, once again, the charméd God began ‘An oath, and through the serpent’s ears it ran \Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian. iRavish’d, she lifted her Circean head, i1Blush’d a live damask, and swift-lisping said,48 KEATS ‘I was a woman, let me have once more A woman’s shape, and charming as before. I love a youth of Corinth—O the bliss! Give me my woman’s form, and place me where he is. Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow, And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now.’ The God on half-shut feathers sank serene, She breath’d upon his eyes, and swift was seen Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green. It was no dream; or say a dream it was, Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. One warm, flush’d moment, hovering, it might seem Dash’d by the wood-nymph’s beauty, so he burn’d ; Then, lighting on the printless verdure, turn’d To the swoon’d serpent, and with languid arm, Delicate, put to proof the lythe Caducean charm. So done, upon the nymph his eyes he bent Full of adoring tears and blandishment, And towards her stept: she, like a moon in wane, Faded before him, cower’d, nor could restrain Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower That faints into itself at evening hour: But the God fostering her chilléd hand, She felt the warmth, her eyelids open’d bland, And, like new flowers at morning song of bees, Bloom’d, and gave up her honey to the lees. Into the green-recessed woods they flew ; Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do. Left to herself, the serpent now began To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,LAMIA 49 3 Her mouth foam’d, and the grass, therewith besprent Wither’d at dew so sweet and virulent; Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear, Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colours all inflam’d throughout her train, She writh’d about, convuls’d with scarlet pain: A deep volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder-moonéd body’s grace ; And, as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede ; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars, _ Eclips’d her crescents, and lick’d up her stars : So that, in moments few, she was undrest Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst, _ And rubious-argent : of all these bereft, _ Nothing but pain and ugliness were left. Still shone her crown ; that vanish’d, also she _ Melted and disappear’d as suddenly ; . And in the air, her new voice luting soft, Cry’d, ‘Lycius! gentle Lycius ! ’—Borne aloft With the bright mists about the mountains hoar | These words dissolv’d: Crete’s forests heard no more. Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright, . A full-born beauty new and exquisite ? i She fled into that valley they pass o’er ‘Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas’ shore ; , And rested at the foot of those wild hills, _ The rugged founts of the Perzean rills, , And of that other ridge whose barren back 1 Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack,50 KEATS South-westward to Cleone. There she stood About a young bird’s flutter from a wood, Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, By a clear pool, wherein she passioned To see herself escap’d from so sore ills, While her robes flaunted with the daffodils. Ah, happy Lycius !—for she was a maid More beautiful than ever twisted braid, Or sigh’d, or blush’d, or on spring-flowered lea Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy : A virgin purest lipp’d, yet in the lore Of love deep learned to the red heart’s core: Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain ; Define their pettish limits, and estrange Their points of contact, and swift counterchange ; Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art ; As though in Cupid’s college she had spent Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent, And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment. Why this fair creature chose so faerily By the wayside to linger, we shall see ; But first ’tis fit to tell how she could muse And dream, when in the serpent prison-house, Of all she list, strange or magnificent : How, ever, where she will’d, her spirit went ; Whether to faint Elysium, or where Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair Wind into Thetis’ bower by many a pearly stair ;“While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.’ LAMIALAMIA Or where God Bacchus drains his cups divine, Stretch’d out, at ease, beneath a glutinous pine; Or where in Pluto’s gardens palatine Mulciber’s columns gleam in far piazzian line. And sometimes into cities she would send Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend; And once, while among mortals dreaming thus, She saw the young Corinthian Lycius Charioting foremost in the envious race, Like a young Jove with calm uneager face, And fell into a swooning love of him. Now on the moth-time of that evening dim He would return that way, as well she knew, To Corinth from the shore ; for freshly blew The eastern soft wind, and his galley now Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle Fresh anchor’d ; whither he had been awhile To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare. Jove heard his vows, and better’d his desire ; For by some freakful chance he made retire From his companions, and set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk : Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eve’s star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades. | Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near— , Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green ; So neighbour’d to him, and yet so unseen52 KEATS She stood: he pass’d, shut up in mysteries, His mind wrapp’d like his mantle, while her eyes Follow’d his steps, and her neck regal white Turn’d—syllabling thus, ‘Ah, Lycius, bright, And will you leave me on the hills alone ? Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown.’ He did; not with cold wonder fearingly, But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice ; For so delicious were the words she sung, It seem’d he had lov’d them a whole summer long: And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, And still the cup was full,—while he, afraid Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid Due adoration, thus began to adore; Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure: ‘Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! For pity do not this sad heart belie— Even as thou vanishest so shall I die. Stay ! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! To thy far wishes will thy streams obey : Stay ! though the greenest woods be thy domain, Alone they can drink up the morning rain: Though a descended Pleiad, will not one Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine? So sweetly to these ravish’d ears of mine Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade, Thy memory will waste me to a shade :— For pity do not melt !’—‘ If I should stay,’ Said Lamia, ‘here, upon this floor of clay,LAMIA And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough, What canst thou say or do of charm enough To dull the nice remembrance of my home? Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,— Empty of immortality and bliss ! Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know That finer spirits cannot breathe below In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth, What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe My essence? What serener palaces, Where I may all my many senses please, And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease ? It cannot be—Adieu!’ So said, she rose Tiptoe with white arms spread. He, sick to lose The amorous promise of her lone complain, Swoon’d, murmuring of love, and pale with pain. The cruel lady, without any show Of sorrow for her tender favourite’s woe, But rather, if her eyes ceuld hrighter be, With brighter eyes and slow amenity, Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh | The life she had so tangled in her mesh: And as he from one trance was wakening Into another, she began to sing, Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing, A song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres, } While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting | fires. And then she whisper’d in such trembling tone, As those who, safe together met alone For the first time through many anguish’d days, Use other speech than looks ; bidding him raise E54 KEATS His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt, For that she was a woman, and without Any more subtle fluid in her veins Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his. And next she wonder’d how his eyes could miss Her face so long in Corinth, where, she said, She dwelt but half retir’d, and there had led Days happy as the gold coin could invent Without the aid of love; yet in content Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by, Where ’gainst a column he leant thoughtfully At Venus’ temple porch, ’mid baskets heap’d Of amorous herbs and flowers, newly reap’d Late on that eve, as ’twas the night before The Adonian feast ; whereof she saw no more, But wept alone those days, for why should she adore? Lycius from death awoke into amaze, To see her still, and singing so sweet lays ; Then from amaze into delight he fell To hear her whisper woman’s lore so well ; And every word she spake entic’d him on To unperplex’d delight and pleasure known. Let the mad poets say whate’er they please Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses, There is not such a treat among them all, Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall, As a real woman, lineal indeed From Pyrrha’s pebbles or old Adam’s seed. Thus gentle Lamia judg’d, and judg’d aright, That Lycius could not love in half a fright,So threw the goddess off, and won his heart More pleasantly by playing woman’s part, With no more awe than what her beauty gave, That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save. Lycius to all made eloquent reply, Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh ; And last, pointing to Corinth, ask’d her sweet, If ’twas too far that night for her soft feet. ‘The way was short, for Lamia’s eagerness Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease To a few paces ; not at all surmised By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized. They pass’d the city gates, he knew not how, So noiseless, and he never thought to know. As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, Throughout her palaces imperial, And all her populous streets and temples lewd, Mutter’d, like tempest in the distance brew’d, To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, Shuffled their sandals o’er the pavement white, Companion’d or alone; while many a light Flar’d, here and there, from wealthy festivals, And threw their moving shadows on the walls, Or found them cluster’d in the cornic’d shade Of some arch’d temple door, or dusky colonnade. Muffling his face, of greeting friends in fear, \ Her fingers he press’d hard, as one came near With curl’d gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown, Slow-stepp’d, and rob’d in philosophic gown:KEATS 56 Lycius shrank closer, as they met and past, Into his mantle, adding wings to haste, While hurried Lamia trembled: ‘ Ah,’ said he, ‘Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully P Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew ?’— ‘T’m wearied,’ said fair Lamia: ‘tell me who Is that old man? I cannot bring to mind His features :—Lycius! wherefore did you blind Yourself from his quick eyes?’ Lycius reply’d, “Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide And good instructor ; but to-night he seems The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams.’ While yet he spake they had arriv’d before A pillar’d porch, with lofty portal door, Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow Reflected in the slabbed steps below, Mild as a star in water; for so new, And so unsully’d was the marble’s hue, So through the crystal polish, liquid fine, Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine Could e’er have touch’d there. Sounds A¢olian Breath’d from the hinges, as the ample span Of the wide doors disclos’d a place unknown Some time to any, but those two alone, And a few Persian mutes, who that same year Were seen about the markets: none knew where They could inhabit ; the most curious Were foil’d, who watch’d to trace them to their house : And but the flitter-winged verse must tell, For truth’s sake, what woe afterwards befel, ’Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus, Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.PARRY ii LOVE in a hut, with water and a crust, Is—Love, forgive us !—cinders, ashes, dust ; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast :-— That is a doubtful tale from faery land, Hard for the non-elect to understand. Had Lycius liv’d to hand his story down, He might have given the moral a fresh frown, Or clench’d it quite: but too short was their bliss To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss. Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare, Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair, Hover’d and buzz’d his wings, with fearful roar, Above the lintel of their chamber door, And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor. For all this came a ruin: side by side They were enthroned, in the even tide, Upon a couch, near to a curtaining Whose airy texture, from a golden string, Floated into the room, and let appear Unveil’d the summer heaven, blue and clear, Betwixt two marble shafts :—there they reposed, Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed, Saving a tythe which love still open kept, That they might see each other while they almost slept ; When from the slope side of a suburb hill, Deafening the swallow’s twitter, came a thrill58 KEATS Of trumpets—Lycius started—the sounds fled, But left a thought, a buzzing in his head. For the first time, since first he harbour’d in That purple-lined palace of sweet sin, His spirit pass’d beyond its golden bourn Into the noisy world almost forsworn. The lady, ever watchful, penetrant, Saw this with pain, so arguing a want Of something more, more than her empery Of joys ; and she began to moan and sigh Because he mus’d beyond her, knowing well That but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell. ‘Why do you sigh, fair creature ?’ whisper’d he: ‘Why do you think ?’ return’d she tenderly : ‘You have deserted me ;—where am I now? Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow: No, no, you have dismiss’d me ; and I go From your breast houseless: aye, it must be so.’ He answer’d, bending to her open eyes, Where he was murror’d small in paradise, ‘My silver planet, both of eve and morn! Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn, While I am striving how to fill my heart With deeper crimson, and a double smart ? How to entangle, trammel up and snare Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose? Aye, a sweet kiss—you see your mighty woes. My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then! What mortal hath a prize, that other men May be confounded and abash’d withal, But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinth’s voice. Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar, While through the thronged streets your bridal car Wheels round its dazzling spokes.’—The lady’s cheek Trembled ; she nothing said, but, pale and meek, Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung, To change his purpose. He thereat was stung, Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim Her wild and timid nature to his aim: Besides, for all his love, in self despite, Against his better self, he took delight Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new. His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous as ’twas possible In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell. Fine was the mitigated fury, like Apollo’s presence when in act to strike The serpent—Ha, the serpent! certes, she Was none. She burnt, she lov’d the tyranny, And, all subdu’d, consented to the hour When to the bridal he should lead his paramour, Whispering in midnight silence, said the youth, ‘Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth, | I have not ask’d it, ever thinking thee | Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny, | As still I do. Hast any mortal name, i Fit appellation for this dazzling frame ? | Or friends or kinsfolk on the cited earth, To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth ?’60 KEATS ‘I have no friends,’ said Lamia, ‘no, not one; My presence in wide Corinth hardly known: My parents’ bones are in their dusty urns Sepulchred, where no kindled incense burns, Seeing all their luckless race are dead, save me, And I neglect the holy rite for thee. Even as you list invite your many guests ; But if, as now it seems, your vision rests With any pleasure on me, do not bid Old Apollonius—from him keep me hid.’ Lycius, perplex’d at words so blind and blank, Made close inquiry; from whose touch she shrank, Feigning a sleep; and he to the dull shade Of deep sleep in a moment was betray’d. It was the custom then to bring away The bride from home at blushing shut of day, Veil’d, in a chariot, heralded along By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage song, With other pageants: but this fair unknown Had not a friend. So being left alone (Lycius was gone to summon all his kin), And knowing surely she could never win His foolish heart from its mad pompousness, She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress The misery in fit magnificence. She did so, but ’tis doubtful how and whence Came, and who were her subtle servitors. About the halls, and to and from the doors, There was a noise of wings, till in short space The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade Of palm and plantain, met from either side, High in the midst, in honor of the bride: Two palms and then two plantains, and so on, From either side their stems branch’d one to one All down the aisled place; and beneath all There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall. So canopy’d, lay an untasted feast Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest, Silently pac’d about, and as she went, In pale contented sort of discontent, Mission’d her viewless servants to enrich The fretted splendour of each nook and niche. Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first, Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, And with the larger wove in small intricacies. Approving all, she faded at self-will, And shut the chamber up, close, hush’d and still, Complete and ready for the revels rude, When dreadful guests would come to spoil her soli- tude. The day appear’d, and all the gossip rout. O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister’d hours, And show to common eyes these secret bowers? The herd approach’d ; each guest, with busy brain, Arriving at the portal, gaz’d amain,62 KEATS And enter’d marveling: for they knew the street, Remember’d it from childhood all complete Without a gap, yet ne’er before had seen That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne ; So in they hurried all, maz’d, curious and keen: Save one, who look’d thereon with eye severe, And with calm-planted steps walk’d in austere ; ‘Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh’d, As though some knotty problem, that had daft His patient thought, had now begun to thaw, And solve and melt :—’twas just as he foresaw He met within the murmurous vestibule His young disciple. ‘’Tis no common rule, Lycius,’ said he, ‘for uninvited guest To force himself upon you, and infest With an unbidden presence the bright throng Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong, And you forgive me,’ Lycius blush’d, and led The old man through the inner doors broad-spread ; With reconciling words and courteous mien Turning into sweet milk the sophist’s spleen. Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room, Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each lucid pannel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood, Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerv’d upon the soft Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odorous.LAMIA Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats inspher’d, High as the level of a man’s breast rear’d On libbard’s paws, upheld the heavy gold Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told Of Ceres’ horn, and, in huge vessels, wine Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine. Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood, Each shrining in the midst the image of a God. When in an antichamber every guest Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press’d, By minist’ring slaves, upon his hands and feet, And fragrant oils with ceremony meet Pour’d on his hair, they all mov’d to the feast In white robes, and themselves in order plac’d Around the silken couches, wondering Whence all this mighty cost and blaze of wealth could spring. Soft went the music the soft air along, While fluent Greek a vowel’d undersong Kept up among the guests, discoursing low At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow ; But when the happy vintage touch’d their brains, Louder they talk, and louder come the strains Of powerful instruments :—the gorgeous dyes, The space, the splendour of the draperies, The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer, | Beautiful slaves, and Lamia’s self, appear, Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed, And every soul from human trammels freed, No more so strange; for merry wine, sweet wine, Will make Elysian shades not too fair, too divine.64 KEATS Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height ; Flush’d were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright : Garlands of every green, and every scent From vales deflower’d, or forest-trees branch-rent, In baskets of bright osier’d gold were brought High as the handles heap’d, to suit the thought Of every guest; that each, as he did please, Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillow’d at his ease, What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius ? What for the sage, old Apollonius ? Upon her aching forehead be there hung The leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue ; And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim Into forgetfulness ; and, for the sage, Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage War on his temples. Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. By her glad Lycius sitting, in chief place, Scarce saw in all the room another face, Tul, checking his love trance, a cup he took Full brimm/’d, and opposite sent forth a lookLAMIA ’Cross the broad table, to beseech a glance From his old teacher’s wrinkled countenance, And pledge him. The bald-head philosopher Had fix’d his eye, without a twinkle or stir, Full on the alarméd beauty of the bride, Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride. Lycius then press’d her hand, with devout touch, As pale it lay upon the rosy couch: "Twas icy, and the cold ran through his veins ; Then sudden it grew hot, and all the pains Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart. ‘Lamia, what means this? Wherefore dost thou start P Know’st thou that man?’ Poor Lamia answer’d not. He gaz’d into her eyes, and not a jot Own’d they the lovelorn piteous appeal : More, more he gaz’d: his human senses reel : Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs ; There was no recognition in those orbs. ‘Lamia!’ he cry>d—and no soft-ton’d reply. The many heard, and the loud revelry Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes ; The myrtle sicken’d in a thousand wreaths. By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased ; A deadly silence step by step increased, Until it seem’d a horrid presence there, And not a man but felt the terror in his hair. te ‘Lamia!’ he shriek’d; and nothing but the shriek : With its sad echo did the silence break. ‘Begone, foul dream !’ he cry’d, gazing again In the bride’s face, where now no azure vein66 KEATS Wander’d on fair-spac’d temples ; no soft bloom Misted the cheek ; no passion to illume The deep-recesséd vision :—all was blight ; Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white. ‘Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man! Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images Here represent their shadowy presences, May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn Of painful blindness ; leaving thee forlorn, In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright Of conscience, for their long offended might, For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries, Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. Corinthians! look upon that grey-beard wretch ! Mark how, possess’d, his lashless eyelids stretch Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see ! My sweet bride withers at their potency.’ ‘Fool!’ said the sophist, in an under-tone Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan From Lycius answer’d, as heart-struck and lost, He sank supine beside the aching ghost. ‘Fool! Fool!’ repeated he, while his eyes still Relented not, nor mov’d; ‘from every ill Of life have I preserv’d thee to this day, And shall I see thee made a serpent’s prey ?’ Then Lamia breath’d death breath; the sophist’s eye, Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well As her weak hand could any meaning tell, Motion’d him to be silent ; vainly so, He look’d and look’d again a level—No!ISABELLA ‘A serpent!’ echoed he; no sooner said, Than with a frightful scream she vanished : And Lycius’ arms were empty of delight, As were his limbs of life, from that same night. On the high couch he lay !—his friends came round— Supported him—no pulse, or breath they found, And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound. ISABELLA;: Or, DHE, POL OF BASEL AIR Isabel, poor simple Isabel ! Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye! They could not in the self-same mansion dwell Without some stir of heart, some malady ; They could not sit at meals but feel how well It soothéd each to be the other by ; They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep But to each other dream, and nightly weep. With every morn their love grew tenderer, With every eve deeper and tenderer still ; He might not in house, field, or garden stir, But her full shape would all his seeing fill; And his continual voice was pleasanter To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill; Her lute-string gave an echo of his name, | She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same. i He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch | fi Before the door had given her to his eyes ; And from her chamber-window he would catch Her beauty farther than the falcon spies ;| ' 1 meet | — —eenerengenrenemnain - en i y 68 KEATS And constant as her vespers would he watch, Because her face was turn’d to the same skies ; And with sick longing all the night outwear, To hear her morning-step upon the stair. A whole long month of May in this sad plight Made their cheeks paler by the break of June: ‘To-morrow will I bow to my delight, To-morrow will I ask my lady’s boon,’— ‘O may I never see another night, Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.’— So spake they to their pillows ; but, alas, Honeyless days and days did he let pass; Until sweet Isabella’s untouch’d cheek Fell sick within the rose’s just domain, Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek By every lull to cool her infant’s pain: ‘ How ill she is,’ said he, ‘I may not speak, And yet I will, and tell my love all plain: If looks speak love-laws, I will drink her tears, And at the least ’twill startle off her cares.’ So said he one fair morning, and all day His heart beat awfully against his side ; And to his heart he inwardly did pray For power to speak ; but still the ruddy tide Stifled his voice, and puls’d resolve away Fever’d his high conceit of such a bride, Yet brought him to the meekness of a child: Alas! when passion is both meek and wild! So once more he had wak’d and anguished A dreary night of love and misery,ISABELLA If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed To every symbol on his forehead high ; She saw it waxing very pale and dead, And straight all flush’d ; so, lisped tenderly, ‘Lorenzo !’—here she ceas’d her timid quest, But in her tone and look he read the rest. ‘O Isabella, I can half perceive That I may speak my grief into thine ear ; If thou didst ever anything believe, Believe how I love thee, believe how near My soul is to its doom: I would not grieve Thy hand by unwelcome pressing, would not fear Thine eyes by gazing; but I cannot live Another night, and not my passion shrive. ‘Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold, Lady ! thou leadest me to summer clime, . And I must taste the blossoms that unfold In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.’ So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold, : And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme: Great bliss was with them, and great happiness Grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress. | Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air, | Only to meet again more close, and share Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart The inward fragrance of each other’s heart. - She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair | ] \ Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart ; He with light steps went up a western hill, And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill. F40 KEATS All close they met again, before the dusk Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil, All close they met, all eves, before the dusk Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil, Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk, Unknown of any, free from whispering tale. Ah! better had it been for ever so, Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe. Were they unhappy then ?>—It cannot be— Too many tears for lovers have been shed, Too many sighs give we to them in fee, Too much of pity after they are dead, Too many doleful stories do we see, Whose matter in bright gold were best be read ; Except in such a page where Theseus’ spouse Over the pathless waves towards him bows. But, for the general award of love, The little sweet doth kill much bitterness ; Though Dido silent is in under-grove, And Isabella’s was a great distress, Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove Was not embalm’d, this truth is not the less— Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers, Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers. With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enrichéd from ancestral merchandize, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torchéd mines and noisy factories, And many once proud quiver’d loins did melt In blood from stinging whip ;—with hollow eyesISABELLA Many all day in dazzling river stood, To take the rich-or’d driftings of the flood. For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark ; For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay full of darts ; for them alone did seethe A thousand men in troubles wide and dark : Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel. Why were they proud? Because their marble founts Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears P— Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs p— Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts Were richer than the songs of Grecian years P— Why were they proud? again we ask aloud, Why in the name of Glory were they proud ? Yet were these Florentines as self-retired In hungry pride and gainful cowardice, As two close Hebrews in that land inspired, Pal’d in and vineyarded from beggar-spies ; The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired And pannier’d mules for ducats and old les— Quick cat’s-paws on the generous stray-away,— Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay. How was it these same ledger-men could spy Fair Isabella in her downy nest ? How could they find out in Lorenzo’s eye A straying from his toil? Hot Egypt’s pest72 KEATS Into their vision covetous and sly ! How could these money-bags see east and west ?— Yet so they did—and every dealer fair Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare. O eloquent and famed Boccaccio! Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon, And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow, And of thy roses amorous of the moon, And of thy lillies, that do paler grow Now they can no more hear thy ghittern’s tune, For venturing syllables that ill beseem The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale Shall move on soberly, as it is meet ; There is no other crime, no mad assail To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet: But it is done—succeed the verse or fail— To honour thee, and thy gone spirit greet ; To stead thee as a verse in English tongue, An echo of thee in the north-wind sung. These brethren having found by many signs What love Lorenzo for their sister had, And how she lov’d him too, each unconfines His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad That he, the servant of their trade designs, Should in their sister’s love be blithe and glad, When ’twas their plan to coax her by degrees To some high noble and his olive-trees. And many a jealous conference had they, And many times they bit their lips alone,ISABELLA Before they fix’d upon a surest way To make the youngster for his crime atone; And at the last, these men of cruel clay Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone; For they resolvéd in some forest dim To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him. So on a pleasant morning, as he leant Into the sun-rise, o’er the balustrade Of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent Their footing through the dews; and to him said, ‘You seem there in the quiet of content, Lorenzo, and we are most loth to invade Calm speculation ; but if you are wise, Bestride your steed while cold is in the skies. ‘To-day we purpose, aye, this hour we mount To spur three leagues towards the Apennine ; Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count His dewy rosary on the eglantine.’ Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont, Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine ; And went in haste, to get in readiness, With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman’s dress. And as he to the court-yard pass’d along, Each third step did he pause, and listen’d oft If he could hear his lady’s matin-song, Or the light whisper of her footstep soft ; And as he thus over his passion hung, He heard a laugh full musical aloft ; When, looking up, he saw her features bright Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.74 KEATS ‘Love, Isabel!’ said he, ‘I was in pain Lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow : Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow Of a poor three hours’ absence? but we'll gain Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow. Good bye! I’ll soon be back.’—‘ Good bye!’ said she :— And as he went she chanted merrily. So the two brothers and their murder’d man Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan The brothers’ faces in the ford did seem, Lorenzo’s flush with love.—They pass’d the water Into a forest quiet for the slaughter. There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, There in that forest did his great love cease ; Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win, It aches in loneliness—is ill at peace As the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin: They dipp’d their swords in the water, and did tease Their horses homeward, with convulsed spur, Tach richer by his being a murderer. They told their sister how, with sudden speed, Lorenzo had ta’en ship for foreign lands, Because of some great urgency and need In their affairs, requiring trusty hands.Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed, And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursed bands ; To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow, And the next day will be a day of sorrow. She weeps alone for pleasures not to be; Sorely she wept until the night came on, And then, instead of love, O misery ! She brooded o’er the luxury alone: His image in the dusk she seem’d to see, And to the silence made a gentle moan, Spreading her perfect arms upon the air, And on her couch low murmuring ‘Where? O where ?’ But Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long ~~ Its fiery vigil in her single breast ; She fretted for the golden hour, and hung Upon the time with feverish unrest— Not long—for soon into her heart a throng Of higher occupants, a richer zest, Came tragic ; passion not to be subdu’d, | And sorrow for her love in travels rude. In the mid days of autumn, on their eves The breath of Winter comes from far away, And the sick west continually bereaves i Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay Of death among the bushes and the leaves, | To make all bare before he dares to stray From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel By gradual decay from beauty fell, ISABELLA76 KEATS Because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes She ask’d her brothers, with an eye all pale, Striving to be itself, what dungeon climes Could keep him off so long? They spake a tale Time after time, to quiet her. Their crimes Came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom’s vale ; And every night in dreams they groan’d aloud, To see their sister in her snowy shroud. And she had died in drowsy ignorance, But for a thing more deadly dark than all ; It came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance, Which saves a sick man from the feather’d pall For some few gasping moments; like a lance, Waking an Indian from his cloudy hall With cruel pierce, and bringing him again Sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain. It was a vision.—In the drowsy gloom, The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb Had marr’d his glossy hair which once could shoot Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears Had made a miry channel for his tears. Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake ; For there was striving, in its piteous tongue, To speak as when on earth it was awake, And Isabella on its music hung : Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake, As in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung ;ISABELLA And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song, Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among. Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof From the poor girl by magic of their light, The while it did unthread the horrid woof Of the late darken’d time,—the murderous spite Of pride and avarice,—the dark pine roof In the forest,—and the sodden turfed dell, Where, without any word, from stabs he fell. Saying moreover, ‘Isabel, my sweet ! Red whortle-berries droop above my head, And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet ; Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat Comes from beyond the river to my bed: Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom, And it shall comfort me within the tomb. ‘IT am a shadow now, alas! alas! Upon the skirts of human-nature dwelling Alone: I chant alone the holy mass, While little sounds of life are round me knelling, And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me, Vs And thou art distant in Humanity. | f ‘I know what was, I feel full well what is, And I should rage, if spirits could go mad ;—— Se | at ” 4 dei Sig gee a ii KEATS 78 Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss, That paleness warms my grave, as though I had A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad ; Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel A greater love through all my essence steal.’ The Spirit mourn’d ‘ Adieu !’—dissolv’d and left The atom darkness in a slow turmoil ; As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft, Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil, We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil: It made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache, And in the dawn she started up awake ; ‘Ha! ha!’ said she, ‘I knew not this hard life, I thought the worst was simple misery ; I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife Portion’d us—happy days, or else to die ; But there is crime—a brother’s bloody knife! Sweet Spirit, thou hast school’d my infancy : I'll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes, And greet thee morn and even in the skies.’ When the full morning came, she had devised How she might secret to the forest hie ; How she might find the clay, so dearly prized, And sing to it one latest lullaby ; How her short absence might be unsurmised, While she the inmost of the dream would try. Resolv’d, she took with her an aged nurse, And went into that dismal forest-hearse. eeISABELLA See, as they creep along the river side, How she doth whisper to that aged Dame, And, after looking round the champaign wide, Shows her a knife.—‘ What feverous hectic flame Burns in thee, child ?—What good can thee betide, That thou should’st smile again?’—The evening came, And they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed ; The flint was there, the berries at his head. Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole ; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d, And filling it once more with human soul? Ah! this is holiday to what was felt When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt. She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though One glance did fully all its secrets tell ; Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well ; Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow, Like to a native lilly of the dell: Then with her knife, all sudden, she began To dig more fervently than misers can. Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon Her silk had play’d in purple phantasies, She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone, And put it in her bosom, where it dries80 KEATS And freezes utterly unto the bone Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries: Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care, But to throw back at times her veiling hair. That old nurse stood beside her wondering, Until her heart felt pity to the core At sight of such a dismal labouring, And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar, And put her lean hands to the horrid thing : Three hours they labour’d at this travail Sore. At last they felt the kernel of the grave, And Isabella did not stamp and rave. Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance ? Why linger at the yawning tomb so long ? O for the gentleness of old Romance, The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song! Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance, For here, in truth, it doth not well belong To speak :—O turn thee to the very tale, And taste the music of that vision pale. With duller steel than the Perséan sword They cut away no formless monster’s head, But one, whose gentleness did well accord With death, as life. The ancient harps have said, Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord: If Love impersonate was ever dead, Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d. "Twas love ; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethron’d. In anxious secrecy they took it home, And then the prize was all for Isabel:ISABELLA She calm’d its wild hair with a golden comb, And all around each eye’s sepulchral cell Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam With tears, as chilly as a dripping well, She drench’d away:—and still she comb’d, and kept Sighing all day—and still she kiss’d, and wept. Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby, And divine liquids come with odorous ooze Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,— She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet. And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run, And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze ; She had no knowledge when the day was done, And the new morn she saw not: but in peace Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, And moisten’d it with tears unto the core. And so she ever fed it with thin tears, Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew, So that it smelt more balmy than its peers Of Basil-tufts in Florence ; for it drew | Nurture besides, and life, from human fears, From the fast mouldering head there shut from view :ee a y 82 KEATS So that the jewel, safely casketed, Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread. O Melancholy, linger here awhile! O Music, Music, breathe despondingly ! O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle, Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh! Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile; Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily, And make a pale light in your cypress glooms, Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs. Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe, From the deep throat of sad Melpomene! Through bronzéd lyre in tragic order go, And touch the strings into a mystery ; Sound mournfully upon the winds and low ; For simple Isabel is soon to be Among the dead: She withers, like a palm Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm. O leave the palm to wither by itself; Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour !— It may not be—those Badlites of pelf, Her brethren, noted the continual shower From her dead eyes; and many a curious elf, Among her kindred, wonder’d that such dower Of youth and beauty should be thrown aside By one mark’d out to be a Noble’s bride. And, furthermore, her. brethren wonder’d much Why she sat drooping by the Basil green, And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch ; Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean: eT on ToneISABELLA They could not surely give belief, that such A very nothing would have power to wean Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay, And even remembrance of her love’s delay. Therefore they watch’d a time when they might sift This hidden whim; and long they watch’d in vain ; For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift, And seldom felt she any hunger-pain ; And when she left, she hurried back, as swift As bird on wing to breast its eggs again ; And, patient as a hen-bird, sat her there Beside her Basil, weeping through her hair. Yet they contriv’d to steal the Basil-pot, And to examine it in secret place: The thing was vile with green and livid spot, And yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face: The guerdon of their murder they had got, And so left Florence in a moment’s space, Never to turn again.—Away they went, With blood upon their heads, to banishment. O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away ! O Music, Music, breathe despondingly ! a O Echo, Echo, on some other day, From isles Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh! Spirits of grief, sing not your ‘ Well-a-way !’ | For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die ; Will die a death too lone and incomplete, Now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet.LOE ELS : ie gf Sipe a Mm he 84 KEATS Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things, Asking for her lost Basil amorously ; And with melodious chuckle in the strings Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry After the Pilgrim in his wanderings, To ask him where her Basil was ; and why *T was hid from her; ‘ For cruel ’tis,’ said she, ‘To steal my Basil-pot away from me.’ And so she pin’d, and so she died forlorn, Imploring for her Basil to the last. No heart was there in Florence but did mourn In pity of her love, so overcast. And a sad ditty of this story born From mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d : Still is the burthen sung—‘ O cruelty, To steal my Basil-pot away from me!’ THE EVE OF ST. AGNES T. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold ; The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.And so she pined, and so she died forlorn, Imploring for her Basil to the last.’ ISABELLATHE EVE OF ST. AGNES His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man; Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees: The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze, Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails: Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries, He passeth by ; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails. Northward he turneth through a little door, And scarce three steps, ere Music’s golden tongue Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor ; But no—already had his deathbell rung : The joys of all his life were said and sung: His was harsh penance on St. Agnes’ Eve: Another way he went, and soon among Rough ashes sat he for his soul’s reprieve, And all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve. That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft ; And so it chance’d, for many a door was wide, From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide: The level chambers, ready with their pride, Were glowing to receive a thousand guests: The carved angels, ever eager-ey’d, Star’d, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts. At length burst in the argent revelry, With plume, tiara, and all rich array,KEATS Numerous as shadows haunting faerily The brain, new stuff’d, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance. ‘These let us wish away, And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there, Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care, As she had heard old dames full many times declare. They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve, Young virgins might have visions of delight, And soft adorings from their loves receive Upon the honey’d middle of the night, If ceremonies due they did aright ; As, supperless to bed they must retire, And couch supine their beauties, lilly white ; Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire. Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline : The music, yearning lixe a God in pain, She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine, Fix’d on the floor, saw many a sweeping train Pass by—she heeded not at all: in vain Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier, And back retir’d ; not cool’d by high disdain, But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere : She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year. She danc’d along with vague, regardless eyes, Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short: The hallow’d hour was near at hand: she sighs Amid the timbrels, and the throng’d resortTHE EVE OF Si, AGNES Of whisperers in anger, or in sport ; ’Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn, Hoodwink’d with faery fancy ; all amort, Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn, And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn. So, purposing each moment to retire, She linger’d still. Meantime, across the moors, Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire For Madeline. Beside the portal doors, Buttress’d from moonlight, stands he, and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline, But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen ; Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been. He ventures in: let no buzz’d whisper tell : All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords Will storm his heart, Love’s fev’rous citadel : For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes, Hyena foemen, and hot-blocded lords, Whose very dogs would execrations howl Against his lineage: not one breast affords Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came, Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand, To where he stood, hid from the torch’s flame, Behind a broad hall-pillar, far beyond The sound of merriment and chorus bland:KEATS 88 He startled her ; but soon she knew his face, And grasp’d his fingers in her palsied hand, Saying, ‘ Mercy, Porphyro ! hie thee from this place ; They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race ! ‘Get hence! get hence! there’s dwarfish Hilde- brand ; He had a fever late, and in the fit He curséd thee and thine, both house and land: Then there’s that old Lord Maurice, not a whit More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit! _- Flit like a ghost away.’—‘ Ah, Gossip dear, We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit, And tell me how’—‘ Good Saints! not here, not here ; Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier.’ He follow’d through a lowly arched way, Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume, And as she muttered ‘ Well-a—well-a-day !’ He found him in a little moonlight room, Pale, lattic’d, chill, and silent as a tomb. ‘ Now tell me where is Madeline,’ said he, ‘O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom Which none but secret sisterhood may see, When they St. Agnes’ wool are weaving piously.’ ‘St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes’ Eve— Yet men will murder upon holy days: Thou must hold water in a witch’s sieve, And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays,THE EV OH Si. AGNES To venture so: it fills me with amaze To see thee, Porphyro!—St. Agnes’ Eve! God’s help! my lady fair the conjuror plays This very night: good angels her deceive! But let me laugh awhile, ve mickle time to grieve.’ Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon, While Porphyro upon her face doth look, Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone Who keepeth clos’d a wond’rous riddle-book, As spectacled she sits in chimney nook. But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told His lady’s purpose; and he scarce could brook Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold, And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old. Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart Made purple riot: then doth he propose A stratagem, that makes the beldame start: ‘A cruel man and impious thou art: Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream Alone with her good angels, far apart From wicked men like thee. Go, go!—I deem Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem.’ ‘T will not harm her, by all saints I swear,’ Quoth Porphyro: ‘O may I ne’er find grace When. my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer, If one of her soft ringlets I displace, Or look with ruffian passion in her face:a th TN = y ay er 7 f a i cs: 3235 imi 8 90 KEATS Good Angela, believe me by these tears ; Or I will, even in a moment’s space, Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen’s ears, And beard them, though they be more fang’d than wolves and bears.’ ‘Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul ? A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll ; Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening, Were never miss’d.’—Thus plaining, doth she bring A gentler speech from burning Porphyro ; So woful, and of such deep sorrowing, That Angela gives promise she will do Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe. Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy, Even to Madeline’s chamber, and there hide Him in a closet, of such privacy That he might see her beauty unespy’d, And win perhaps that night a peerless bride, While legion’d faeries pac’d the coverlet, And pale enchantment held her sleepy-ey’d. Never on such a night have lovers met, Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt. ‘Tt shall be as thou wishest,’ said the Dame: ‘ All cates and dainties shall be stored there Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare, For Iam slow and feeble, and scarce dareTHe EVE OF sk AGNES ol On such a catering trust my dizzy head. Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed, Or may I never leave my grave among the dead.’ So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear. The lover’s endless minutes slowly pass’d ; The dame return’d, and whisper’d in his ear To follow her ; with aged eyes aghast From fright of dim espial. Safe at last, Through many a dusky gallery, they gain The maiden’s chamber, silken, hush’d, and chaste ; Where Porphyro took covert, pleas’d amain. His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain. Her falt’ring hand upon the balustrade, Old Angela was feeling for the stair, When Madeline, St. Agnes’ charmed maid, Rose, like a mission’d spirit, unaware : With silver taper’s light, and pious care, She turn’d, and down the aged gossip led To a safe level matting. Now prepare, Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed ; She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray’d and fled. Out went the taper as she hurried in ; Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died : She clos’d the door, she panted, all akin To spirits of the air, and visions wide: No uttered syllable, or, woe betide !92 KEATS But to her heart, her heart was voluble, Paining with eloquence her balmy side ; As though a tongueless nightingale should swell Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell. A casement high and triple-arch’d there was, All garlanded with carven imag’ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings ; And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings. Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon ; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven :—Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees ; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant boddice ; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,ement shone the wintry moon, gules on Madeline’s fair brea TEE HV OH SE:THE EVE OF ST. AGNES 93 In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled. Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest, In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex’d she lay, Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away ; Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day ; Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain ; Clasp’d like a missal where swart Paynims pray ; Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced, Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress, And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced To wake into a slumberous tenderness ; Which when he heard, that minute did he bless, And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept, Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness, And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept, And ’tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo !—how fast she slept. Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet :— O for some drowsy Morphean amulet! The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion, The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet, Affray his ears, though but in dying tone :— The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.94 KEATS And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d, While he from forth the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd ; With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon ; Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon. These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand oa On golden dishes and in baskets bright oe Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand us In the retired quiet of the night, Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— ‘And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite: Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake, Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.’ Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream By the dusk curtains :—’twas a midnight charm Impossible to melt as iced stream : The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam ; Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies: It seem’d he never, never could redeem From such a stedfast spell his lady’s eyes ; So mus’d awhile, entoil’d in wooféd phantasies. Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,— Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be, He play’d an ancient ditty, long since mute,THE EVE OF ST. AGNES 95 In Provence call’d, ‘ La belle dame sans mercy :’ Close to her ear touching the melody ;— Wherewith disturb’d, she utter’d a soft moan: He ceas’d—she panted quick—and suddenly Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone: Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone. Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep: There was a painful change, that nigh expell’d The blisses of her dream so pure and deep At which fair Madeline began to weep, And moan forth witless words with many a sigh ; While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep ; Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, Fearing to move or speak, she look’d so dreamingly. ‘Ah, Porphyro!’ said she, ‘but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, Made tuneable with every sweetest vow ; And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.’ Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose ;96 KEATS Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour 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. Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet : ‘This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!’ Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat : ‘No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine! Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.— : Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring? I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine, Though thou forsakest a deceived thing ;— A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing? “My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride! Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest ? Thy beauty’s shield, heart-shap’d and vermeil dy’d? Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest After so many hours of toil and quest, A famish’d pilgrim,—sav’d by miracle. Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think’st well To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel. ‘Hark! ’tis an elfin-storm from faery land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed: Arise—arise! the morning is at hand ;— The bloated wassaillers will never heed :— Let us away, my love, with happy speed ;THE EVE OF ST. AGNES There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, — Drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be, For o’er the southern moors I have a home for thee.’ She hurried at his words, beset with fears, For there were sieeping dragons all around, At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears— Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.— In all the house was heard no human sound. A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door ; The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound, Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar ; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. They glide, ike phantoms, into the wide hall ; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide :— The chains lie silent on the footworn stones ;— The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmar’d. Angela the old Died palsy-twitch’d, with meagre face deform ; | The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, ° For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold. Jan., Feb, 1819.HYPERION BOOK I EEP in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair ; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips. Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, No further than to where his feet had stray’d, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred ; and his realmless eyes were closed ; While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. It seem’d no force could wake him from his place ; But there came one, who with a kindred hand Touch’d his wide shoulders, after bending low With reverence, though to one who knew it not. She was a Goddess of the infant world ; By her in stature the tall Amazon Pio leeds “hae:HYPERION 99 Had stood a pigmy’s height: she would have ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck ; Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel. Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestal’d haply in a palace court, When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore. But oh! how unlike marble was that face: How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self. There was a listening fear in her regard, As if calamity had but begun ; As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder labouring up. One hand she press’d upon that aching spot Where beats the human heart, as if just there, Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain: The other upon Saturn’s bended neck She laid, and to the level of his ear Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake In solemn tenour and deep organ tone: Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents ; O how frail To that large utterance of the early Gods ! ‘Saturn, look up !though wherefore, poor old King? I have no comfort for thee, no not one: I cannot say, ‘“O wherefore sleepest thou ?” For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God ; And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, Has from thy sceptre pass’d; and all the air Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,100 KEATS Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house ; And thy sharp lightning in unpractis’d hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain. O aching time! O moments big as years! All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Saturn, sleep on :—O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude? Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep.’ As when, upon a tranced summer-night, Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust Which comes upon the silence, and dies off, As if the ebbing air had but one wave; So came these words and went; the while in tears She touch’d her fair large forehead to the ground, Just where her falling hair might be outspread A soft and silken mat for Saturn’s feet. One moon, with alteration slow, had shed Her silver seasons four upon the night, And still these two were postured motionless, Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern ; The frozen God still couchant on the earth, And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet : Until at length old Saturn lifted up His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone, And all the gloom and sorrow of the place, And that fair kneeling Goddess ; and then spake,HYPERION As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard Shook horrid with such aspen-malady : ‘O tender spouse of gold Hyperion, Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face ; Look up, and let me see our doom in it; Look up, and tel! me if this feeble shape Is Saturn’s; tell me, if thou hear’st the voice Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkling brow, Naked and bare of its great diadem, Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power To make me desolate ? whence came the strength? How was it nurtur’d to such bursting forth, While Fate seem’d strangled in my nervous grasp P But it is so; and I am smother’d up, And buried from all godlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonitions to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man’s harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in.—I am gone Away from my own bosom: I have left My strong identity, my real self, Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search ! Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round Upon all space: space starr’d, and lorn of light ; Space region’d with life-air ; and barren void ; Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell.— Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest A certain shape or shadow, making way With wings or chariot fierce to repossess A heaven he lost erewhile: it must—it must Be of ripe progress—Saturn must be King. H102 KEATS Yes, there must be a golden victory ; There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival Upon the gold clouds metropolitan, Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir Of strings in hollow shells ; and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise Of the sky-children ; I will give command: Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?’ This passion lifted him upon his feet, And made his hands to struggle in the air, His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat, His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease. He stood, and heard not Thea’s sobbing deep ; A little time, and then again he snatch’d Utterance thus.—‘ But cannot I create? Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth Another world, another universe, To overbear and crumble this to nought ? Where is another chaos? Where ?’—That word Found way unto Olympus, and made quake The rebel three.—Thea was startled up, And in her bearing was a sort of hope, As thus she quick-voic’d spake, yet full of awe. ‘ This cheers our fallen house: come to our friends, O Saturn! come away, and give them heart ; I know the covert, for thence came I thither.’ Thus brief ; then with beseeching eyes she went With backward footing through the shade a space: He follow’d, and she turn’d to lead the wayHYPERION 103 Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest. Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, More sorrow like to this, and such like woe, Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe: The Titans fierce, self-hid, or prison-bound, Groan’d for the old allegiance once more, And listen’d in sharp pain for Saturn’s voice. But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept His sov’reignty, and rule, and majesty ;— Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire Still sat, still snuff’d the incense, teeming up From man to the sun’s God; yet unsecure: For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he— Not at dog’s howl, or gloom-bird’s hated screech, Or the familiar visiting of one Upon the first toll of his passing-bell, Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp ; But horrors, portion’d to a giant nerve, Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold, And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks, Glar’d a blood-red through all its thousand courts, Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries ; And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds Flush’d angerly: while sometimes eagle’s wings, Unseen before by Gods or wondering men, Darken’d the place ; and neighing steeds were heard, Not heard before by Gods or wondering men. Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths Of incense, breath’d aloft from sacred hills,104 KEATS Instead of sweets, his ample palate took Savour of poisonous brass and metal sick : And so, when harbour’d in the sleepy west, After the full completion of fair day,— For rest divine upon exalted couch And slumber in the arms of melody, He pac’d away the pleasant hours of ease With stride colossal, on from hall to hall; While far within each aisle and deep recess, His winged minions in close clusters stood, Amaz’d and full of fear ; like anxious men Who on wide plains gather in panting troops, When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers. Even now, while Saturn, rous’d from icy trance, Went step for step with Thea through the woods, Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear, Came slope upon the threshold of the west ; Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies ; And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape, In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye, That inlet to severe magnificence Stood full blown, for the God to enter in. He enter’d, but he enteyr’d full of wrath ; His flaming robes stream’d out beyond his heels, And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire, That scar’d away the meek ethereal Hours And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared, From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault, Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,HYPERION And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades, Until he reach’d the great main cupola ; There standing fierce beneath, he stamped his foot, And from the basements deep to the high towers Jarr’d his own golden region; and before The quavering thunder thereupon had ceas’d, His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb, To this result: ‘O dreams of day and night! O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain! O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom! O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools! Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why Is my eternal essence thus distraught To see and to behold these horrors new? Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall? Am I to leave this haven of my rest, This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, This calm luxuriance of blissful light, These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes, Of all my lucent empire? It is left Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine. The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry, | I cannot see—but darkness, death and darkness. Even here, into my cenire of repose, The shady visions come to domineer, Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp.— Fall!—No, by Tellus and her briny robes! | Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove, And bid old Saturn take his throne again.’— He spake, and ceas’d, the while a heavier threat Held struggle with his throat but came not forth ;106 KEATS For as in theatres of crowded men Hubbub increases more they call out ‘Hush!’ So at Hyperion’s words the Phantoms pale Bestirr’d themselves, thrice horrible and cold ; And from the mirror’d level where he stood A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh. At this, through all his bulk an agony Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown, Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular Making slow way, with head and neck convuls’d From over-strained might. Releas’d, he fled To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours Before the dawn in season due should blush, He breath’d fierce breath against the sleepy portals, Clear’d them of heavy vapours, burst them wide Suddenly on the ocean’s chilly streams. The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode Each day from east to west the heavens through, Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds ; Nor therefore veiled quiet, blindfold, and hid, But ever and anon the glancing spheres, Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure, Glow’d through, and wrought upon the muffling dark Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep Up to the zenith,—hieroglyphics old Which sages and keen-ey’d astrologers Then living on the earth, with labouring thought Won from the gaze of many centuries : Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge Of stone, or marble swart ; their import gone, Their wisdom long since fled.—Two wings this orb Possess’d for glory, two fair argent wings, Ever exalted at the God’s approach :HYPERION 104 And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense Rose, one by one, till all outspreaded were ; While still the dazzling globe maintain’d eclipse, Awaiting for Hyperion’s command. Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne And bid the day begin, if but for change. He might not :—No, though a primeval God: The sacred seasons might not be disturb’d. Therefore the operations of the dawn Stay’d in their birth, even as here ’tis told. Those silver wings expanded sisterly, Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide Open’d upon the dusk demesnes of night ; And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes, Unus’d to bend, by hard compulsion bent His spirit to the sorrow of the time ; And all along a dismal rack of clouds, Upon the boundaries of day and night, He stretch’d himself in grief and radiance faint. There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars Look’d down on him with pity, and the voice Of Ccelus, from the universal space, Thus whisper’d low and solemn in his ear. ‘O brightest of my children dear, earth-born And sky-engendered, Son of Mysteries All unrevealed even to the powers Which met at thy creating ; at whose joys hie And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft, I, Ccelus, wonder, how they came and whence ; a And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be, | % Distinct, and visible ; symbols divine, Manifestations of that beauteous life Diffus’d unseen throughout eternal space:108 KEATS Of these new-form’d art thou, oh brightest child! Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses! There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion Of son against his sire. I saw him fall, I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne! To me his arms were spread, to me his voice Found way from forth the thunders round his head ! Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face. Art thou, too, near such doom? vague fear there is: For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods. Divine ye were created, and divine oe In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb’d, i Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv’d and ruled: : Now I behold in you fear, hope, and wrath ; Actions of rage and passion ; even as I see them, on the mortal world beneath, In men who die.—This is the grief, O Son! Sad sign of ruin, sudden dismay, and fall! Yet do thou strive ; as thou art capable, As thou canst move about, an evident God ; And canst oppose to each malignant hour Ethereal presence :—I am but a voice; My life is but the life of winds and tides, No more than winds and tides can I avail :— But thou canst.—Be thou therefore in the van Of circumstance ; yea, seize the arrow’s barb Before the tense string murmur.—To the earth! For there thou wilt find Saturn, and his woes. Meantime I will keep watch on thy bright sun, And of thy seasons be a careful nurse.’— Ere half this region-whisper had come down, Hyperion arose, and on the stars Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wideHYPERION Until it ceas’d ; and still he kept them wide: And still they were the same bright, patient stars. Then with a slow incline of his broad breast, Like to a diver in the pearly seas, Forward he stoop’d over the airy shore, And plung’d all noiseless into the deep night. BOOK II Just at the self-same beat of Time’s wide wings Hyperion slid into the rustled air, And Saturn gain’d with Thea that sad place Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn’d. It was a den where no insulting light Could glimmer on their tears; where their own groans They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where. Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem’d Ever as if just rising from a sleep, Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns ; And thus in thousand hugest phantasies Made a fit roofing to this nest of woe. Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon, Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge Stubborn’d with iron. All were not assembled: Some chain’d in torture, and some wandering. Cceus, and Gyges, and Briareis, Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion, With many more, the brawniest in assault, Were pent in regions of laborious breath ; Dungeon’d in opaque element, to keep110 KEATS Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs Lock’d up like veins of metal, crampt and screw’d ; Without a motion, save of their big hearts Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls’d With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse. Mnemosyne was straying in the world; Far from her moon had Phoebe wandered ; And many else were free to roam abroad, But for the main, here found they covert drear. Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. Each one kept shroud, nor to his neighbour gave Or word, or look, or action of despair. Creiis was one; his ponderous iron mace Lay by him, and a shatter’d rib of rock Told of his rage, ere he thus sank and pined. lapetus another ; in his grasp, A serpent’s plashy neck; its barbed tongue Squeez’d from the gorge, and ail its uncurl’d length Dead ; and because the creature could not spit Its poison in the eyes of conquering Jove. Next Cottus: prone he lay, chin uppermost, As though in pain ; for still upon the flint He ground severe his skull, with open mouth And eyes at horrid working. Nearest him Asia, born of most enormous Caf, Who cost her mother Tellus keener pangs, Though feminine, than any of her sons: More thought than woe was in her dusky face,HYPERION »; For she was prophesying of her glory ; ‘And in her wide imagination stood ;Palm-shaded temples, and high rival fanes, {By Oxus or in Ganges’ sacred isles. ;Even as Hope upon her anchor leans, {So leant she, not so fair, upon a tusk “Shed from the broadest of her elephants. ‘Above her, on a crag’s uneasy shelve, Upon his elbow rais’d, all prostrate else, ‘Shadow’d Enceladus; once tame and mild As grazing ox unworried in the meads ; ‘Now tiger-passion’d, lion-thoughted, wroth, | He meditated, plotted, and even now | Was hurling mountains in that second war, ‘Not long delay’d, that scar’d the younger Gods (To hide themselves in forms of beast and bird. ‘Not far hence Atlas ; and beside him prone }Phorcus, the sire of Gorgons. Neighbour’d close } Oceanus, and Tethys, in whose lap ‘Sobb’d Clymene among her tangled har. |In midst of all lay Themis, at the feet ‘Of Ops the queen all clouded round from sight ; ‘No shape distinguishable, more than when Thick night confounds the pine-tops with the clouds : ; And many else whose names may not be told. | For when the Muse’s wings are air-ward spread, | Who shall delay her flight? And she must chaunt } Of Saturn, and his guide, who now had climb’d / With damp and slippery footing from a depth | More horrid still. Above a sombre cliff Their heads appear’d, and up their stature grew Till on the level height their steps found ease: 'Then Thea spread abroad her trembling armsI12 KEATS Upon the precincts of this nest of pain, And sidelong fix’d her eye on Saturn’s face: There saw she direst strife ; the supreme God At war with all the frailty of grief, Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge, Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair. Against these plagues he strove in vain; for Fate Had pour’d a mortal oil upon his head, A disanointing poison: so that Thea, Affrighted, kept her still, and let him pass First onwards in, among the fallen tribe. As with us mortal men, the laden heart Is persecuted more, and fever’d more, When it is nighing to the mournful house Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise ; So Saturn, as he walk’d into the midst, Felt faint, and would have sunk among the rest, But that he met Enceladus’s eye, Whose mightiness, and awe of him, at once Came like an inspiration ; and he shouted, ‘Titans, behold your God!’ at which some groan’d Some started on their feet ; some also shouted : Some wept, some wail’d, all bow’d with reverence : And Ops, uplifting her black folded veil, Show’d her pale cheeks, and all her forehead wan, Her eye-brows thin and jet, and hollow eyes. There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: 2HYPERION 113 ; Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines : ' Which, when it ceases in this mountain’d world, | No other sound succeeds ; but ceasing here, , Among these fallen, Saturn’s voice therefrom ) Grew up like organ, that begins anew | Its strain, when other harmonies, stopt short, | Leave the dinn’d air vibrating silverly. _ Thus grew it up—‘ Not in my own sad breast, | Which is its own great judge and searcher out, Can I find reason why ye should be thus : Not in the legends of the first of days, ‘Studied from that old spirit-leaved book | Which starry Uranus with finger bright /Sav’d from the shores of darkness, when the waves | Low-ebb’d still hid it up in shallow gloom ;— / And the which book ye know I ever kept | For my firm-based footstool :—Ah, infirm ! ‘Not there, nor in sign, symbol, or portent _Of element, earth, water, air, and fire,— ‘At war, at peace, or inter-quarreling /One against one, or two, or three, or ail ‘Each several one against the other three, ‘As fire with air loud warring when rain-floods |Drown both, and press them both against earth’s face, |Where, finding sulphur, a quadruple wrath /Unhinges the poor world ;—not in that strife, \Wherefrom I take strange lore, and read it deep, ‘Can I find reason why ye should be thus: I ‘No, no-where can unriddle, though I search, ‘And pore on Nature’s universal scroll /Even to swooning, why ye, Divinities, |The first-born of all shap’d and palpable Gods, “Should cower beneath what, in comparison,‘are 114 KEATS Is untremendous might. Yet ye are here, O’erwhelm’d, and spurn’d, and batter’d, ye are here! O Titans, shall I say, “ Arise !”—Ye groan: Shall I say ‘Crouch !”—Ye groan. What can I then? O Heaven wide! O unseen parent dear! What canI? Tell me, all ye brethren Gods, How we can war, how engine our great wrath ! O speak your counsel now, for Saturn’s ear Is all a-hunger’d. Thou, Oceanus, Ponderest high and deep ; and in thy face I see, astonied, that severe content Which comes of thought and musing: give us help!’ So ended Saturn ; and the God of the Sea, Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, But cogitation in his watery shades, Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands. ‘O ye, whom wrath consumes! who, passion-stung, Writhe at defeat, and nurse your agonies! Shut up your senses, stifle up your ears, My voice is not a bellows unto ire. Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop: And in the proof much comfort will I give, If ye will take that comfort in its truth. We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou Hast sifted well the atom-universe ; But for this reason, that thou art the King, And only blind from sheer supremacy, One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,HYPERION Through which I wandered to eternal truth. And first, as thou wast not the first of powers, So art thou not the last ; it cannot be: Thou art not the beginning nor the end. From chaos and parental darkness came Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, And with it light, and light, engendering Upon its own producer, forthwith touch’d The whole enormous matter into life. Upon that very hour, our parentage, The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest : Then thou first born, and we the giant race, Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ’tis pain ; O folly ! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life ; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself ?116 KEATS Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys? We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles golden-feather’d, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof ; for ’tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might: Yea, by that law, another race may drive Our conquerors to mourn as we do now. Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face ? Have ye beheld his chariot, foam’d along By noble winged creatures he hath made ? I saw him on the calmed waters scud, With such a glow of beauty in his eyes, That it enforc’d me to bid sad farewell To all my empire: farewell sad I took, And hither came, to see how dolorous fate Had wrought upon ye; and how I might best Give consolation in this woe extreme. Receive the truth, and let it be your balm.’ Whether through poz’d conviction, or disdain, They guarded silence, when Oceanus Left murmuring, what deepest thought can tell? But so it was, none answer’d for a space, Save one whom none regarded, Clymene ; And yet she answer’d not, only complain’d, With hectic lips, and eyes up-looking mild, Thus wording timidly among the fierce:HYPERION ‘O Father, I am here the simplest voice, And all my knowledge is that joy is gone, And this thing woe crept in among our hearts, There to remain for ever, as I fear: I would not bode of evil, if I thought So weak a creature could turn off the help Which by just right should come of mighty Gods ; Yet let me tell my sorrow, let me tell Of what I heard, and how it made me weep, And know that we had parted from all hope. I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore, Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers. Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief; Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth ; So that I felt a movement in my heart To chide, and to reproach that solitude With songs of misery, music of our woes 5 And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell And murmur’d into it, and made melody— O melody no more! for while I sang, And with poor skill let pass into the breeze The dull shell’s echo, from a bowery strand Just opposite, an island of the sea, There came enchantment with the shifting wind, That did both drown and keep alive my ears. I threw my shell away upon the sand, And a wave fill’d it, as my sense was fill’d With that new blissful golden melody. A living death was in each gush of sounds, "¥ Each family of rapturous hurried notes, | That fell, one after one, yet all at once, Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string : I118 KEATS And then another, then another strain, Each like a dove leaving its olive perch, With music wing’d instead of silent plumes, To hover round my head, and make me sick Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame, And I was stopping up my frantic ears, When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands, A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune, And still it cry’d, “ Apollo! young Apollo! The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo I fled, it follow’d me, and cry’d “‘ Apollo!” O Father, and O Brethren, had ye felt Those pains of mine; O Saturn, hadst thou felt, Ye would not call this too indulged tongue Presumptuous, in thus venturing to be heard.’ {?? So far her voice flow’d on, like timorous brook That, lingering along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder’d ; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow’d it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus, while still upon his arm He lean’d; not rising, from supreme contempt. ‘Or shall we listen to the over-wise, Or to the over-foolish giant, Gods? Not thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till all That rebel Jove’s whole armoury were spent, Not world on world upon these shoulders piled, Could agonize me more than baby-words In midst of this dethronement horrible. Speak! roar! shout! yell! ye sleepy Titans all,HYPERION Do ye forget the blows, the buffets vile? Are ye not smitten by a youngling arm? Dost thou forget, sham Monarch of the Waves, Thy scalding in the seas? What, have I rous’d Your spleens with so few simple words as these ? O joy! for now I see ye are not lost: O joy! for now I see a thousand eyes Wide glaring for revenge ! ’—As this he said, He lifted up his stature vast, and stood, Still without intermission speaking thus: ‘Now ye are flames, I’ll tell you how to burn, And purge the ether of our enemies ; How to feed fierce the crooked stings of fire, And singe away the swollen clouds of Jove, Stifling that puny essence in its tent. O let him feel the evil he hath done ; For though I scorn Oceanus’s lore, Much pain have I for more than loss of realms: The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled ; Those days, all innocent of scathing war, When all the fair Existences of heaven Came open-eyed to guess what we would speak :— That was before our brows were taught to frown, Before our lips knew else but solemn sounds ; That was before we knew the winged thing, Victory, might be lost, or might be won. And be ye mindful that Hyperion, Our brightest brother, still is undisgraced— ) Hyperion, lo! his radiance is here!’ ' All eyes were on Enceladus’s face, And they beheld, while still Hyperion’s name Flew from his lips up to the vaulted rocks,120 KEATS A pallid gleam across his features stern : Not savage, for he saw full many a God Wroth as himself. He look’d upon them all, And in each face he saw a gleam of light, But splendider in Saturn’s, whose hoar locks Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove. In pale and silver silence they remain’d, Till suddenly a splendour, ike the morn, Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps, All the sad spaces of oblivion, And every gulf, and every chasm old, And every height, and every sullen depth, Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams: And all the everlasting cataracts, And all the headlong torrents far and near, Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, Now saw the light and made it terrible. It was Hyperion :—a granite peak His bright feet touch’d, and there he stay’d to view The misery his brilliance had betray’d To the most hateful seeing of itself. Golden his hair of short Numidian curl, Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk Of Memnon’s image at the set of sun To one who travels from the dusking East : Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon’s harp He utter’d, while his hands contemplative He press’d together, and in silence stood. Despondence seiz’d again the fallen Gods At sight of the dejected King of Day, And many hid their faces from the light :HYPERION But fierce Enceladus sent forth his eyes Among the brotherhood ; and, at their glare, Uprose Iapetus, and Crets too, And Phorcus, sea-born, and together strode To where he towered on his eminence. There those four shouted forth old Saturn’s name ; Hyperion from the peak loud answered, ‘Saturn !” Saturn sat near the Mother of the Gods, In whose face was no joy, though all the Gods Gave from their hollow throats the name of ‘Saturn !’ BOOK III Tuus in alternate uproar and sad peace, Amazéd were those Titans utterly. O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes ; For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire: A solitary sorrow best befits Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief. Leave them, O muse! for thou anon wilt find Many a fallen old Divinity Wandering in vain about bewildered shores. Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp, And not a wind of heaven but will breathe In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute ; For lo! ’tis for the Father of all verse. Flush every thing that hath a vermeil hue, Let the rose grow intense and warm the air, And let the clouds of even and of morn Float in voluptuous fleeces o’er the hills ; Let the red wine within the goblet boil, Cold as a bubbling well ; let faint-lipp’d shells,122 KEATS On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn Through all their labyrinths ; and let the maid Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris’d. Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades, Rejoice, O Delos, with thine olives green, And poplars, and lawn-shading palms, and beech, In which the Zephyr breathes the loudest song, And hazels thick, dark-stemm’d beneath the shade: Apollo is once more the golden theme ! Where was he, when the Giant of the Sun Stood bright, amid the sorrow of his peers? Together had he left his mother fair And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower, And in the morning twilight wandered forth Beside the osiers of a rivulet, Full ankle-deep in lillies of the vale. The nightingale had ceas’d, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. He listen’d, and he wept, and his bright tears Went trickling down the golden bow he held. Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood, While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by With solemn step an awful Goddess came, And there was purport in her looks for him, Which he with eager guess began to read Perplex’d, the while melodiously he said: ‘How cam’st thou over the unfooted sea? Or hath that antique mien and robed form Mov’d in these vales invisible till now?HYPE RION Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o’er The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced The rustle of those ample skirts about These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass’d. Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before, And their eternal calm, and all that face, Or I have dream’d.’—‘ Yes,’ said the supreme shape, ‘Thou hast dream’d of me; and awaking up Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side, Whose strings touch’d by thy fingers, all the vast Unwearied ear of the whole universe Listen’d in pain and pleasure at the birth Of such new tuneful wonder. Is't not strange That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth, What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs To one who in this lonely isle hath been The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life, From the young day when first thy infant hand Pluck’d witless the weak flowers, till thine arm Could bend that bow heroic to all times. Show thy heart’s secret to an ancient Power Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones For prophecies of thee, and for the sake Of loveliness new born.’—Apollo then, With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes, Thus answer’d, while his white melodious throat Throbb’d with the syllables. —' Mnemosyne! Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how ; Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest? Why should I strive to show what from thy lipsE24 KEATS Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark, And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes: I strive to search wherefore I am so sad, Until a melancholy numbs my limbs ; And then upon the grass I sit, and moan, Like one who once had wings.—O why should I Feel curs’d and thwarted, when the liegeless air Yields to my step aspirant ? why should I Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet? Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing : Are there not other regions than this isle? What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun! And the most patient brilliance of the moon ! And stars by thousands! Point me out the way To any one particular beauteous star, And I will flit into it with my lyre, And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss. I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power P Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity Makes this alarum in the elements, While I here idle listen on the shores In fearless yet in aching ignorance? O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp, That waileth every morn and eventide, Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves! Mute thou remainest--—Mute ! yet I can read A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wineLA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI ras Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.’—Thus the God, While his enkindled eyes, with level glance Beneath his white soft temples, stedfast kept Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne. Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush All the immortal fairness of his limbs ; Most like the struggle at the gate of death ; Or liker still to one who should take leave Of pale immortal death, and with a pang As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse Die into life: so young Apollo anguish’d : His very hair, his golden tresses famed Kept undulation round his eager neck. During the pain Mnemosyne upheld Her arms as one who prophesied.—At length Apollo shriek’d ;—and lo! from all his limbs Celestial 1818-10. LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI H, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering ; The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, ¥ So haggard and so woe-begone ? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done.KEATS I see a lilly on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew ; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child ; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long ; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone ; She look’d at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew ; And sure in language strange she said, I lave thee true. She took me to her elfin grot, And there she gaz’d and sighed deep, And there I shut her wild sad eyes— So kiss’d to sleep. And there we slumber’d on the moss, And there I dream’d, ah woe betide, The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill side. Te Pose Dohset her on my pacing steed, And nothin else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s :eV Fae rs mn POTN Torco Cfeteaiie TST ane on uw OneTHE EVE OF SAINT MARK I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry’d—‘ La belle Dame sans merci Hath thee in thrall!’ I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill side. And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. 181g. THE EVE OF SAINT MARK PON a Sabbath-day it fell ; Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell, That call’d the folk to evening prayer ; The city streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of April rains ; And, on the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatur’d green vallies cold, Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, Of primroses by shelter’d rills, And daisies on the aguish hills. Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell : The silent streets were crowded well ryKEATS With staid and pious companies, Warm from their fire-side orat’ries ; And moving, with demurest air, To even-song, and vesper prayer. Hach arched porch, and entry low, Was fill’d with patient folk and slow, With whispers hush, and shuffling feet, While play’d the organ loud and sweet. The bells had ceas’d, the prayers begun, And Bertha had not yet half done A curious volume, patch’d and torn, That all day long, from earliest morn, Had taken captive her two eyes, Among its golden broideries ; Perplex’d her with a thousand things,— The stars of Heaven, and angels’ wings, Martyis in a fiery blaze, Azure saints in silver rays, Moses’ breastplate, and the seven Candlesticks John saw in Heaven, The wingéd Lion of St. Mark, And the Covenantal Ark, With its many mysteries, Cherubim and golden mice. Bertha was a maiden fair, Dwelling in th’ old Minster-square ; From her fire-side she could see, Sidelong, its rich antiquity, Far as the Bishop’s garden-wall ; Where sycamores and elm-trees tall,THE EVE OF SAINT MARK 129 Fullleav’d, the forest had outstript, By no sharp north-wind ever nipt, So shelter’d by the mighty pile. Bertha arose, and read awhile, With forehead ’gainst the window-pane. Again she try’d, and then again, Until the dusk eve left her dark Upon the legend of St. Mark. From plaited lawn-frill, fine and thin, She lifted up her soft warm chin, With aching neck and swimming eyes, And daz’d with saintly imageries. All was gloom, and silent all, Save now and then the still foot-fall Of one returning homewards late, Past the echoing Minster-gate. The clamorous daws, that all the day Above tree-tops and towers play, Pair by pair had gone to rest, | Each in its ancient belfry-nest, | | Where asleep they fall betimes, To music of the drowsy chimes. All was silent, all was gloom, Abroad and in the homely room : Down she sat, poor cheated soul! And struck a lamp from the dismal coal ; t Lean’d forward, with bright drooping hair a And slant book, full against the glare. Her shadow, in uneasy guise, Hover’d about, a giant size,es eee i‘. VY ot SP KEATS On ceiling-beam and old oak chair, The parrot’s cage, and panel square ; And the warm angled winter screen, On which were many monsters seen, Call’d doves of Siam, Lima mice, And legless birds of Paradise, Macaw, and tender Avadavat, And silken-furr’d Angora cat. Untir’d she read, her shadow still Glower’d about, as it would fill The room with wildest forms and shades, - As though some ghostly queen of spades — Had come to mock behind her back, And dance, and ruffle her garments black. Untir’d she read the legend page, Of holy Mark, from youth to age, On land, on sea, in pagan chains, Rejoicing for his many pains. Sometimes the learned eremite, With golden star, or dagger bright, Referr’d to pious poesies Written in smallest crow-quill size Beneath the text; and thus the rhyme Was parcell’d out from time to time: ‘ Als writith he of swevenis, Men han beforne they wake in bliss, Whanne that hir friendes thinke hem bound In crimped shroude farre under grounde ; And how a litling child mote be A saint er its nativitie, Gif that the modre (God hex blesse !) Kepen in solitarinesse, And kissen devoute the holy croce.‘tJntired she read the legend page, Of holy Mark, from youth to age.’ THE EVE OF ST. MAREKJanuary 1819. Of Goddes love, and Sathan’s force,— He writith ; and thinges many mo: Of swiche thinges I may not show. Bot I must tellen verilie Somdel of Sainté Cicilie, And chieflie what he auctorethe Of Sainté Markis life and dethe:’ At length her constant eyelids come Upon the fervent martyrdom ; Then lastly to his holy shrine, Exalt amid the tapers’ shine At Venice,— THE EVE OF SAINT ARE 131DESCRITEIVE & REPLECTIVE POEMS ‘Tl STOOD METOE UPON A LIFULE HILL ‘Places of nestling green for Poets made.’ —Story of Rimint. STOOD tip-toe upon a little hill, The air was cooling, and so very still, That the sweet buds which with a modest pride Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, Their scantly leav’d, and finely tapering stems, Had not yet lost those starry diadems Caught from the early sobbing of the morn. The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn, And fresh from the clear brook ; sweetly they slept On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves: For not the faintest motion could be seen Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green. There was wide wand’ring for the greediest eye, To peer about upon variety ; Far round the horizon’s crystal air to skim, And trace the dwindled edgings of its brim ; To picture out the quaint, and curious bending Of a fresh woodland alley, never ending ; 132‘I STOOD TIP-TOE UPON A HILL’ 133 Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves, Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves. I gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free As though the fanning wings of Mercury Had play’d upon my heels: I was light-hearted, And many pleasures to my vision started ; So I straightway began to pluck a posey Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy. A bush of May flowers with the bees about them ; Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them ; And let a lush laburnum oversweep them, And let long grass grow round the roots to keep them Moist, cool and green; and shade the violets, That they may bind the moss in leafy nets. A filbert hedge with wild briar overtwin‘d, And clumps of woodbine taking the soft wind Upon their summer thrones ; there too should be The frequent chequer of a youngling tree, That with a score of light green brethren shoots From the quaint mossiness of aged roots: Round which is heard a spring-head of clear waters Babbling so wildly of its lovely daughters The spreading blue-bells: it may haply mourn That such fair clusters should be rudely torn From their fresh beds, and scatter’d thoughtlessly By infant hands, left on the path to die. Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ve ardent marigolds ! Dry up the moisture from your golden lids, For great Apollo bidsSee 134 KEATS That in these days your praises should be sung On many harps, which he has lately strung ; And when again your dewiness he kisses, Tell him, I have you in my world of blisses : So haply when I rove in some far vale, His mighty voice may come upon the gale. Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight : With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white, And taper fingers catching at all things, To bind them all about with tiny rings. Linger awhile upon some bending planks That lean against a streamlet’s rushy banks, And watch intently Nature’s gentle doings : They will be found softer than ring-dove’s cooings. How silent comes the water round that bend ; Not the minutest whisper does it send To the o’erhanging sallows: blades of grass Slowly across the chequer’d shadows pass. Why, you might read two sonnets, ere they reach To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach A natural sermon o’er their pebbly beds ; Where swarms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness. How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain ; But turn your eye, and they are there again.‘I STOOD: TIP=FORs UPON A ERREIL? ane The ripples seem right glad to reach those cresses, And cool themselves among the em’rald tresses ; The while they cool themselves, they freshness give, And moisture, that the bowery green may live: So keeping up an interchange of favours, Like good men in the truth of their behaviours Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop From low hung branches ; little space they stop ; But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek ; Then off at once, as in a wanton freak : Or perhaps, to show their black, and golden wings, Pausing upon their yellow flutterings. Were I in such a place, I sure should pray That nought less sweet, might call my thoughts away, Than the soft rustle of a maiden’s gown Fanning away the dandelion’s down ; Than the light music of her nimble toes Patting against the sorrel as she goes. How she would start, and blush, thus to be caught Playing in all her innocence of thought. O let me lead her gently o’er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips, and downward look ; O let me for one moment touch her wrist ; Let me one moment to her breathing list ; And as she leaves me may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne. What next? A tuft of evening primroses, O’er which the mind may hover till it dozes ; O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep, But that ’tis ever startled by the leap Of buds into ripe flowers ; or by the flitting Of diverse moths, that aye their rest are quitting 5 5Or by the moon lifting her silver rim Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim Coming into the blue with all her light. O Maker of sweet poets, dear delight Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers ; Spangler of clouds, halo of crystal rivers, Mingler with leaves, and dew and tumbling streams, Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams, Lover of loneliness, and wandering, Of upcast eye, and tender pondering ! Thee must I praise above all other glories That smile us on to tell delightful stories. For what has made the sage or poet write But the fair paradise of Nature’s light P In the calm grandeur of a sober line, We see the waving of the mountain pine; And when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade: When it is moving on luxurious wings, The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings : Fair dewy roses brush against our faces, And flowering laurels spring from diamond vases ; O’er head we see the jasmine and sweet briar, And bloomy grapes laughing from green attire ; While at our feet, the voice of crystal bubbles Charms us at once away from all our troubles: So that we feel uplifted from the world, Walking upon the white clouds wreath’d and curl’d. : So felt he, who first told, how Psyche went On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment ; What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips First touch’d ; what amorous, and fondling nips‘I STOOD TIP-TOE UPON A HILL’ 137 They gave each other’s cheeks ; with all their sighs, And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes : The silver lamp,—the ravishment,—the wonder— The darkness,—loneliness,—the fearful thunder ; Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne. So did he feel, who pull’d the boughs aside, That we might look into a forest wide, To catch a glimpse of Fauns, and Dryades Coming with softest rustle through the trees ; And garlands woven of flowers wild, and sweet, Upheld on ivory wrists, or sporting feet : Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread. Poor nymph,—poor Pan,—how he did weep to find, Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind Along the reedy stream ; a half heard strain, Full of sweet desolation—balmy pain. What first inspir’d a bard of old to sing Narcissus pining o’er the untainted spring ? In some delicious ramble, he had found A little space, with boughs all woven round ; And in the midst of all, a clearer pool Than e’er reflected in its pleasant cool, The blue sky here, and there, serenely peeping Through tendril wreaths fantastically creeping. ' And on the bank a lonely flower he spied, A meek and forlorn flower, with naught of pride, Drooping its beauty o’er the watery clearness, | § To woo its own sad image into nearness : Deaf to light Zephyrus it would not move ; But still would seem to droop, to pine, to love.138 KEATS So while the poet stood in this sweet spot, Some fainter gleamings o’er his fancy shot ; Nor was it long ere he had told the tale Of young Narcissus, and sad Echo’s bale. Where had he been, from whose warm head out-flew That sweetest of all songs, that ever new, That aye refreshing, pure deliciousness, Coming ever to bless The wanderer by moonlight? to him bringing Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing i From out the middle air, from flowery nests, og] And from the pillowy silkiness that rests : Full in the speculation of the stars. Ah! surely he had burst our mortal bars ; Into some wondrous region he had gone, To search for thee, divine Endymion! He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus’ top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below ; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian’s temple ; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling. But though her face was clear as infant’s eyes, Though she stood smiling o’er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate : So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion. Queen of the wide air; thou most lovely queen Of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen!‘I STOOD TIP-TOER UPON A HILL’ As thou exceedest all things in thy shine, So every tale, does this sweet tale of thine. O for three words of honey, that I might Tell but one wonder of thy bridal night! Where distant ships do seem to show their keels, Phcebus awhile delay’d his mighty wheels, And turn’d to smile upon thy bashful eyes, Ere he his unseen pomp would solemnize. The evening weather was so bright, and clear, That men of health were of unusual cheer ; Stepping like Homer at the trumpet’s call, Or young Apollo on the pedestal : And lovely women were as fair and warm, As Venus looking sideways in alarm. The breezes were ethereal, and pure, And crept through half-closed lattices to cure The languid sick ; it cool’d their fever’d sleep, And sooth’d them into slumbers full and deep. Soon they awoke clear ey’d: nor burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting : And springing up, they met the wond’ring sight Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight ; Who feel their arms, and breasts, and kiss and stare, And on their placid foreheads part the hair. Young men, and maidens at each other gaz’d With hands held back, and motionless, amaz’d To see the brightness in each other’s eyes ; And so they stood, fill’d with a sweet surprise, Until their tongues were loos’d in poesy. Therefore no lover did of anguish die: But the soft numbers, in that moment spoken, Made silken ties, that never may be broken.140 KEATS Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses, That follow’d thine, and thy dear shepherd’s kisses : Was there a poet born ?—but now no more, My wand ring spirit must no farther soar.— 1816. SLEEP AND POETRY ‘ As I lay in my bed slepe full unmete Was unto me, but why that I ne might Rest I ne wist, for there n’as erthly wight [As I suppose] had more of hertis ese Than I, for I n’ad sicknesse nor disese.’ CHAUCER. HAT is more gentle than a wind in summer ? What is more soothing than the pretty hummer That stays one moment in an open flower, And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower ? What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men’s knowing ? More healthful than the leafiness of dales ? More secret than a nest of nightingales ? More serene than Cordelia’s countenance ? More full of visions than a high romance ? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies ! Light hoverer around our happy pillows ! Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses ! Most happy listener ! when the morning blesses Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.i; | | SONNETS 198 The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes ; And, seeing it asleep, so fled away— Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies, Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d a day; But to that second circle of sad hell, Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm. April 1819. TWO SONNETS ON FAME I AME, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease ; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her ; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her ; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar ; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you. Sia ecb iendin USTOA ain ane ute conten ae Cee ee eer nite tateen Cena e SieKEATS Of thy wide heaven—Should I rather kneel Upon some mountain-top until I feel A glowing splendour round about me hung, And echo back the voice of thine own tongue ? O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen That am not yet a glorious denizen Of thy wide heaven ; yet, to my ardent prayer, Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air, Smooth’d for intoxication by the breath Of flowering bays, that I may die a death Of luxury, and my young spirit follow The morning sun-beams to the great Apollo Like a fresh sacrifice ; or, if I can bear The o’erwhelming sweets, twill bring tome the fair Visions. of all places: a bowery nook Will be elystum—an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves, and flowers—about the playing Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid ; yAnd many a verse from so strange influence That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came. Also imaginings will hover Round my fire-side, and haply there discover Vistas of solemn beauty, where I’d wander In happy silence, like the clear Meander Through its lone vales ; and where I found a spot Of awfuller shade, or an enchanted grot, Or a green hill o’erspread with chequer’d dress Of flowers, and fearful from its loveliness, Write on my tablets all that was permitted, All that was for our human senses fitted.SLEEP AND POETRY Then the events of this wide world I’d seize Like a strong giant, and my spirit teaze Till at its shoulders it should proudly see Wings to find out an immortality. Stop and consider ! life is but a day ; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moanP Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown ; The reading of an ever-changing tale ; The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil ; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm. © for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed. Then will I pass the countries that I see In long perspective, and continually Taste their pure fountains. First the realm I'll pass Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass, Feed upon apples red, and strawberries, And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees ; Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places, To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,— Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white Into a pretty shrinking with a bite As hard as lips can make it: till agreed, A lovely tale of human life we'll read.144 KEATS And one will teach a tame dove how it best May fan the cool air gently o’er my rest ; Another, bending o’er her nimble tread, Will set a green robe floating round her head, And still will dance with ever varied ease, Smiling upon the flowers and the trees: Another will entice me on, and on Through almond blossoms and rich cinnamon ; Till in the bosom of a leafy world We rest in silence, like two gems upcurl’d In the recesses of a pearly shell. og And can I ever bid these joys farewell ? | Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar, O’ersailing the blue cragginess, a car And steeds with streamy manes—the charioteer Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear : And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly Along a huge cloud’s ridge ; and now with sprightly Wheel downward come they into fresher skies, Tipt round with silver from the sun’s bright eyes. Still downward with capacious whirl they glide ; And now I see them on a green-hill’s side In breezy rest among the nodding stalks. The charioteer with wond’rous gesture talks To the trees and mountains ; and there soon appear Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear, Passing along before a dusky space Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase Some ever-fleeting music on they sweep. Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and Weep:SLEEP AND POETRY Some with upholden hand and mouth severe ; Some with their faces muffled to the ear Between their arms ; some, clear in youthful bloom, Go glad and smilingly athwart the gloom ; Some looking back, and some with upward gaze; Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward—now a lovely wreath of girls Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls ; And now broad wings. Most awfully intent The driver of those steeds is forward bent, And seems to listen: O that I might know All that he writes with such a hurrying glow. The visions all are fled—the car 1s fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness : but I will strive Against all doubtings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey it went. Is there so small a range In the present strength of manhood, that the high Imagination cannot freely fly As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all ? From the clear space of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove’s large eye-brow, to the tender greening Of April meadows? Here her altar shone, E’en in this isle ; and who could paragon146 KEATS The fervid choir that lifted up a noise Of harmony, to where it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound, Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, Eternally around a dizzy void P Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy’d With honors ; nor had any other care Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant’s force They sway’d about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul’d! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bar’d its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious : beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jaccb’s wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task : A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphem’d the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it,—no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepit standard outSLEEP AND POETRY Mark’d with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau ! O ye whose charge It is to hover round our pleasant hills! Whose congregated majesty so fills My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace Your hallowed names, in this unholy place, So near those common folk; did not their shames Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames Delight you? Did ye never cluster round Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound, And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu To regions where no more the laurel grew ? Or did ye stay. to give a welcoming To some lone spirits who could proudly sing Their youth away, and die? “Twas even so: But let me think away those times of woe: Now ’tis a fairer season ; ye have breathed Rich benedictions o’er us ; ye have wreathed Fresh garlands : for sweet music has been heard In many places ;—some has been upstirr’d From out its crystal dwelling in a lake, By a swan’s ebon bill ; from a thick brake, Nested and quiet in a valley mild, Bubbles a pipe ; fine sounds are floating wild | About the earth : happy are ye and glad. | These things are doubtless : yet in truth we’ve had | Strange thunders from the potency of song ; Mingled indeed with what is sweet and strong, From majesty : but in clear truth the themes Are ugly cubs, the Poets PolyphemesKEATS Disturbing the grand sea. A drainless shower Of light is poesy ; ’tis the supreme of power ; *Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm. The very archings of her eye-lids charm A thousand willing agents to obey, And still she governs with the mildest sway : But strength alone though of the Muses born Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn, Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres Delight it ; for it feeds upon the burrs, And thorns of life ; forgetting the great end Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Yet I rejoice: a myrtle fairer than E’er grew in Paphos, from the bitter weeds Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds A silent space with ever sprouting green. All tenderest birds there find a pleasant screen, Creep through the shade with jaunty fluttering, Nibble the little cuppéd flowers and sing. Then let us clear away the choking thorns From round its gentle stem ; let the young fawns, Yeaned in after times, when we are flown, Find a fresh sward beneath it, overgrown With simple flowers : let there nothing be More boisterous than a lover’s bended knee ; Nought more ungentle than the placid look Of one who leans upon a closed book ; Nought more untranquil than the grassy slopes Between two hills. All hail delightful hopes ! As she was wont, th’ imagination : Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone,SLE AND PORTRY And they shall be accounted poet kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. O may these joys be ripe before I die. Will not some say that I presumptuously Have spoken ? that from hastening disgrace ’Twere better far to hide my foolish face ? That whining boyhood should with reverence bow Ere the dread thunderbolt could reach? How! If I do hide myself, it sure shall be In the very fane, the light of Poesy : If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar shade ; And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven ; And there shall be a kind memorial graven. _But_off Despondence ! miserable bane ! They should not know thee, who athirst to gain A noble end, are thirsty every hour. (What though I am not wealthy in the dower ‘Of spanning wisdom ; though I do not know The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow Hither and thither all the changing thoughts Of man: though no great minist’ring reason sorts Out the dark mysteries of human souls To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls A vast idea before me, and I glean Therefrom my liberty ; thence too I’ve seen he The end and aim of Poesy.) ’Tis clear va As anything most true ; as’that the year ot Is made of the four seasons—manifest As a large cross, some old cathedral’s crest, Lifted to the white clouds. Therefore should I Be but the essence of deformity, i150 KEATS A coward, did my very eye-lids wink At speaking out what I have dar’d to think. Ah! rather let me like a madman run Over some precipice; let the hot sun Melt my Dedalian wings, and drive me down Convuls’d and headlong! Stay! an inward frown Of conscience bids me be more calm awhile. An ocean dim, sprinkled with many an isle, Spreads awfully before me. How much toil! How many days! what desperate turmoil ! Ere I can have explored its widenesses. Ah, what a task ! upon my bended knees, I could unsay those—no, impossible ! Impossible ! For sweet relief Ill dwell On humbler thoughts, and let this strange assay Begun in gentleness die so away. E’en now all tumult from my bosom fades : I turn full hearted to the friendly aids That smooth the path of honour ; brotherhood, And friendliness the nurse of mutual good. The hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet Into the brain ere one can think upon it ; The silence when some rhymes are coming out ; And when they’re come, the very pleasant rout : The message certain to be done to-morrow. ’Tis perhaps as well that it should be to borrow Some precious book from out its snug retreat, To cluster round it when we next shall meet. Scarce can I scribble on; for lovely airs Are fluttering round the room like doves in pairs ;SLEEP AND POETRY 151 Many delights of that glad day recalling, When first my senses caught their tender falling. And with these airs come forms of elegance Stooping their shoulders o’er a horse’s prance, Careless, and grand—fingers soft and round Parting luxuriant curls ;—and the swift bound Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye Made Ariadne’s cheek look blushingly. Thus I remember all the pleasant flow Of words at opening a portfolio. Things such as these are ever harbingers To trains of peaceful images : the stirs Of a swan’s neck unseen among the rushes : A linnet starting all about the bushes : A butterfly, with golden wings broad parted, Nestling a rose, convuls’d as though it smarted With over pleasure—many, many more, Might I indulge at large in all my store Of luxuries : yet I must not forget Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet : For what there may be worthy in these rhymes I partly owe to him: and thus, the chimes Of friendly voices had just given place To as sweet a silence, when I ’gan retrace The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease. It was a poet’s house who keeps the keys } Of pleasure’s temple. Round about were hung The glorious features of the bards who sung In other ages—cold and sacred busts Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts To clear Futurity his darling fame! Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim162 KEATS At swelling apples with a frisky leap And reaching fingers, ’mid a luscious heap Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane Of liny marble, and thereto a train Of nymphs approaching fairly o’er the sward : One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward The dazzling sun-rise : two sisters sweet Bending their graceful figures till they meet Over the trippings of a little child: And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping. See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping Cherishingly Diana’s timorous limbs ;— A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims At the bath’s edge, and keeps a gentle motion With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o’er Its rocky marge, and balances once more The patient weeds ; that now unshent by foam Feel all about their undulating home. Sappho’s meek head was there half smiling down At nothing ; just as though the earnest frown Of over thinking had that moment gone From off her brow, and left her al! alone. Great Alfred’s too, with anxious, pitying eyes, As if he always listened to the sighs Of the goaded world ; and Kosciusko’s wom By horrid suffrance—mightily forlorn. Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green, Starts at the sight of Laura ; nor can weanTO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE 153 His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they! For over them was seen a free display Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone The face of Poesy: from off her throne She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell. The very sense of where I was might well Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came Thought after thought to nourish up the flame Within my breast ; so that the morning light Surprised me even from a sleepless night ; And up I rose refresh’d, and glad, and gay, Resolving to begin that very day These lines ; and howsoever they be done, I leave them as a father does his son. TO" CHARLES COWDEN CEARKE FT have you seen a swan superbly frowning, And with proud breast his own white shadow crowning ; He slants his neck beneath the waters bright So silently, it seems a beam of light Come from the galaxy: anon he sports,— With outspread wings the Naiad Zephyr courts, Or ruffles all the surface of the lake In striving from its crystal face to take Some diamond water drops, and them to treasure Vi In milky nest, and sip them off at leisure. 1 But not a moment can he there insure them, Nor to such downy rest can he allure them ; For down they rush as though they would be free, And drop like hours into eternity.— ae 154 KEATS Just like that bird am I in loss of time, Whene’er I venture on the stream of rhyme ; With shatter’d boat, oar snapt, and canvas rent, I slowly sail, scarce knowing my intent ; Still scooping up the water with my fingers, In which a trembling diamond never lingers. By this, friend Charles, you may full plainly see Why I have never penn’d a line to thee: Because my thoughts were never free, and clear, And little fit to please a classic ear ; Because my wine was of too poor a savour For one whose palate gladdens in the flavour Of sparkling Helicon :—small good it were To take him to a desert rude, and bare, - Who had on Baiz’s shore reclin’d at ease, While Tasso’s page was floating in a breeze That gave soft music from Armida’s bowers, Mingled with fragrance from her rarest flowers : Small good to one who had by Mulla’s stream Fondled the maidens with the breasts of cream ; Who had beheld Belphcebe in a brook, And lovely Una in a leafy nook, And Archimago leaning o’er his book : Who had of all that’s sweet tasted, and seen, From silv’ry ripple, up to beauty’s queen ; From the sequester’d haunts of gay Titania, To the blue dwelling of divine Urania: 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:TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE 155 With many else which I have never known. Thus have I thought ; and days on days have flown Slowly, or rapidly—unwilling still For you to try my dull, unlearned quill. Nor should I now, but that I’ve known you long ; That you first taught me all the sweets of song : The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine ; What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine : Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, And float along like birds o’er summer seas ; Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness ; Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slender- ness. Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax and then dying proudly P Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load? Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, The®sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram P Show’d me that epic was of all the king, Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn’s ring P You too upheld the veil from Clio’s beauty, | And pointed out the patriot’s stern duty ; The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell ; The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell Upon a tyrant’s head. Ah! had I never seen, Or known your kindness, what might I have been? | What my enjoyments in my youthful years, Bereft of all that now my life endears? ti And can I e’er these benefits forget ? | And can I e’er repay the friendly debt ? No, doubly no ;—yet should these rhymings please, I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease :156 KEATS For I have long time been my fancy feeding With hopes that you would one day think the reading Of my rough verses not an hour misspent ; Should it e’er be so, what a rich content ! Some weeks have pass’d since last I saw the spires In lucent Thames reflected :—warm desires To see the sun o’erpeep the eastern dimness, And morning shadows streaking into slimness Across the lawny fields, and pebbly water ; To mark the time as they grow broad, and shorter ; To feel the air that plays about the hills, And sips its freshness from the little rills ; To see high, golden corn wave in the light When Cynthia smiles upon a summet’s night, And peers among the cloudlets jet and white, As though she were reclining in a bed Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed. No sooner had I stepp’d into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem’d to say ‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.’ And so I did. When many lines I’d written, Though with their grace I was not oversmitten, Yet, as my hand was warm, I thought I’d better Trust to my feelings, and write you a letter. Such an attempt requir’d an inspiration Of a peculiar sort, —a consummation ;— Which, had I felt, these scribblings might have been Verses from which the soul would never wean: But many days have passed since last my heart Was warm’d, luxuriously by divine Mozart ; By Arne delighted, or by Handel madden’d ; Or by the song of Erin pierc’d and sadden’d:HPISTLE VO JORN HH. REVNOLDS 957 What time you were before the music sitting, And the rich notes to each sensation fitting. Since I have walk’d with you through shady lanes That freshly terminate in open plains, And revel’d in a chat that ceased not When at night-fall among your books we got : No, nor when supper came, nor after that,— Nor when reluctantly I took my hat ; No, nor till cordially you shook my hand Mid-way between our homes :—your accents bland Still sounded in my ears, when I no more Could hear your footsteps touch the grav’ly floor. Sometimes I lost them, and then found again ; You chang’d the footpath for the grassy plain. In those still moments I have wish’d you joys That well you know to honor :—‘ Life’s very toys With him,’ said I, ‘ will take a pleasant charm ; It cannot be that ought will work him harm.’ These thoughts now come o’er me with all their might :— Again I shake your hand,—friend Charles, good night. September 1816. EPISTLE TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS EAR Reynolds! as last night I lay in bed, There came before my eyes that wonted thread Of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances, That every other minute vex and please: Things all disjointed come from north and south,— Two Witch’s eyes above a Cherub’s mouth,158 KEATS Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, | And Alexander with his nightcap on ; Old Socrates a-tying his cravat, And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth’s cat ; And Junius Brutus, pretty well so so, Making the best of’s way towards Soho. Few are there who escape these visitings,— Perhaps one or two whose lives have patent wings, And thro’ whose curtains peeps no hellish nose, No wild-boar tushes, and no Mermaid’s toes ; But flowers bursting out with lusty pride, And young Afolian harps personify’d ; Some Titian colours touch’d into real life,— The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows, The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows : A white sail shows above the green-head cliff, Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff ; The mariners join hymn with those on land. You know the Enchanted Castle,—it doth stand Upon a rock, on the border of a Lake, Nested in trees, which all do seem to shake From some old magic-like Urganda’s Sword. O Pheebus! that I had thy sacred word To show this Castle, in fair dreaming wise, Unto my friend, while sick and ill he lies! You know it well enough, where it doth seem A mossy place, a Merlin’s Hall, a dream ; You know the clear Lake, and the little Isles, The mountains blue, and cold near neighbour rills,EPISTLE LO jJOUN EY REYNOLDS 2150 All which elsewhere are but half animate ; There do they look alive to love and hate, To smiles and frowns; they seem a lifted mound Above some giant, pulsing underground. Part of the Building was a chosen See, Built by a banish’d Santon of Chaldee ; The other part, two thousand years from him, Was built by Cuthbert de Saint Aldebrim, Then there’s a little wing, far from the Sun, Built by a Lapland Witch turn’d maudlin Nun ; And many other juts of aged stone Founded with many a mason-devil’s groan. The doors all look as if they op’d themselves, The windows as if latch’d by Fays and Elves, And from them comes a silver flash of light, As from the westward of a Summer's night ; Or like a beauteous woman’s large blue eyes Gone mad thro’ olden songs and poesies. See! what is coming from the distance dim ! A golden Galley all in silken trim! Three rows of oars are lightening, moment whiles, Into the verd’rous bosoms of those isles ; Towards the shade, under the Castle wall, It comes in silence,—now ’tis hidden all. The Clarion sounds, and from a Postern-gate ee An echo of sweet music doth create Ve A fear in the poor Herdsman, who doth bring | a His beasts to trouble the enchanted spring,— | He tells of the sweet music, and the spot, To all his friends, and they believe him not. a160 KEATS O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, Would all their colours from the sunset take: From something of material sublime, Rather than shadow our own soul’s day-time In the dark void of night. For in the world We jostle,—but my flag is not unfurl’d On the Admiral-staff,—and so philosophize I dare not yet! Oh, never will the prize, High reason, and the love of good and ill, Be my award! Things cannot to the will Be settled, but they tease us out of thought ; Or is it that imagination brought Beyond its proper bound, yet still confin’d, Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind, Cannot refer to any standard law Of either earth or heaven? It is a flaw In happiness, to see beyond our bourn,— it forces us in summer skies to mourn, It spoils the singing of the Nightingale. Dear Reynolds! I have a mysterious tale, And cannot speak it: the first page I read Upon a Lampit rock of green sea-weed Among the breakers ; ’twas a quiet eve, The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave An untumultuous fringe of silver foam Along the flat brown sand ; I was at home And should have been most happy,—but I saw Too far into the sea, where every maw The greater on the less feeds evermore.— But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone.‘THE CASTLE-BUILDER’ Still am I sick of it, and tho’, to-day, T’ve gather’d young spring-leaves, and flowers gay Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, Still do I that most fierce destruction see,— The Shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at pounce,— The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, Rayening a worm,—Away, ye horrid moods! Moods of one’s mind! You know I hate them well. You know I’d sooner be a clapping Bell To some Kamtschatcan Missionary Church, Than with these horrid moods be left i’ the lurch. March 25, 1818. FRAGMENT OF ‘THE CASTLE-BUILDER’ O-NIGHT I'll have my friar—let me think About my room,—I’ll have it in the pink ; It should be rich and sombre, and the moon, Just in its mid-life in the midst of June, Should look thro’ four large windows and display Clear, but for gold-fish vases in the way, Their glassy diamonding on Turkish floor ; The tapers keep aside, an hour and more, To see what else the moon alone can show ; While the night-breeze doth softly let us know ioe My terrace is well bower’d with oranges. | Upon the floor the dullest spirit sees A guitar-ribband and a lady’s glove Beside a crumple-leaved tale of love; A tambour-frame, with Venus sleeping there, All finish’d but some ringlets of her hair ;162 KEATS A viol-bow, strings torn, cross-wise upon A glorious folio of Anacreon ; A skull upon a mat of roses lying, Ink’d purple with a song concerning dying ; An hour-glass on the turn, amid the trails Of passion-flower ;—just in time there sails A cloud across the moon,—the lights bring in ! And see what more my phantasy can win. It is a gorgeous room, but somewhat sad ; The draperies are so, as tho’ they had Been made for Cleopatra’s winding-sheet ; And opposite the stedfast eye doth meet A spacious looking-glass, upon whose face, In letters raven-sombre, you may trace Old ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.’ Greek busts and statuary have ever been Held, by the finest spirits, fitter far Than vase grotesque and Siamesian jar ; Therefore ’tis sure a want of Attic taste That I should rather love a Gothic waste Of eyesight on cinque-coloured potter’s clay, Than on the marble fairness of old Greece. My table-coverlids of Jason’s fleece And black Numidian sheep-wool should be wrought, Gold, black, and heavy, from the Llama brought. My ebon sofas should delicious be With down from Leda’s cygnet progeny. My pictures ail Salvator’s, save a few Of Titian’s portraiture, and one, though new, Of Haydon’s in its fresh magnificence. My wine---O good! ’tis here at my desire, And I must sit to supper with my friar.SONGS, ac A SONG OF OPPOSITES ‘Under the flag Of each his faction, they to battle bring Their embryon atoms,’—MILTON, ELCOME joy, and welcome sorrow, Lethe’s weed and Hermes’ feather ; Come to-day, and come to-morrow, I do love you both together ! I love to mark sad faces in fair weather 5 And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder ; Fair and foul I love together. Meadows sweet where flames are under, And a giggle at a wonder ; Visage sage at pantomime ; | Funeral, and steeple-chime ; Infant playing with a skull ; Morning fair, and shipwreck’d hull ; Nightshade with the woodbine kissing ; Serpents in red roses hissing ; | Cleopatra regal-dress’d With the aspic at her breast ; Dancing music, music sad, | Both together, sane and mad ; Muses bright and muses pale ; Sombre Saturn, Momus hale ;— 163KEATS Laugh and sigh, and laugh again ; Oh the sweetness of the pain! Muses bright, and muses pale, Bare your faces of the veil ; Let me see; and let me write Of the day, and of the night— Both together :—let me slake All my thirst for sweet heart-ache ! Let my bower be of yew, Interwreath’d with myrtles new; Pines and lime-trees full in bloom, And my couch a low grass-tomb. ? TOPS. PAD A DOVE HAD a dove and the sweet dove died ; And I have thought it died of grieving : O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving. Sweet little red feet! why should you die— Why should you leave me, sweet bird, why? You liv’d alone in the forest-tree, Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me? I kiss’d you oft and gave you white peas ; Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees ? STANZAS N a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne’er remember Vheu green felicity.:ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE 165 The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them ; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In a 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? To know the change and feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme. October or December 1818, ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE N | Y heart aches, and a drowsy numbness:pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, /Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk : MKEATS Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage ! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth ! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth ; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim : Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-ey’d despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards :ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE 167 ) Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays ; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. _ I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, _ But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows ' The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves ; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. ' 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 muséd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath ; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy ! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down ; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown :168 KEATS Perhaps the self-same song that 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 casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hillside ; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades : Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music :—Do I wake or sleep? May 1819. ODE ON A GRECIAN URN HOU still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady ? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?ODE ON A GRECIAN URN 169 Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter ; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on ; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve ; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu ; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new ; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young ; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice ? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest ? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn ? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be ; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.170 KEATS O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed ; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral ! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Spring 1819. ODE TO PSYCHE GODDESS! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear : Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes? I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied: Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass ;ODE TO PSYCHE 171 Their arms embraced, and their pinions too ; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew ; . But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true! O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy ! Fairer than Phcebe’s sapphire-region’d star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky ; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap’d with flowers ; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours ; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming ; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. O brightest ! though too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water, and the fire ; Yet even in these days so far retir’d From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours ;172 KEATS Thy voice, thy lute, thy Pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming ; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep ; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; 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 casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! April 1819. RANCY: ae let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth ;FANCY Then let winged Fancy wander 173 Through the thought still spread beyond her’; Open wide the mind’s cage-door, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose ; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming ; Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then? Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Spirit of a winter’s night ; When the soundless earth is muffled, And the caked snow is shuffled From the ploughboy’s heavy shoon ; When the Night doth meet the Noon In a dark conspiracy To banish Even from her sky. Sit thee there, and send abroad, With a mind self-overaw’d, Fancy, high-commission’d :—send her! She has vassals to attend her: She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost ; She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather ; All the buds and bells of May, From dewy sward or thorny spray ; All the heaped Autumn’s wealth, With a still, mysterious stealth :KEATS She will mix these pleasures up Like three fit wines in a cup, And thou shalt quaff it :—thou shalt hear Distant harvest-carols clear ; Rustle of the reaped corn ; Sweet birds antheming the morn: And, in the same moment—hark ! ‘Tis the early April lark, Or the rooks, with busy caw, Foraging for sticks and straw. Thou shalt, at one glance, behold The daisy and the marigold ; White-plum’d lillies, and the first Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst ; Shaded hyacinth, alway Sapphire queen of the mid-May ; And every leaf, and every flower Pearled with the self-same shower. Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep Meagre from its celled sleep ; And the snake all winter-thin Cast on sunny bank its skin ; Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see Hatching in the hawthorn-tree, When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest Quiet on her mossy nest ; Then the hurry and alarm When the bee-hive casts its swarm : Acorns ripe down-pattering, While the autumn breezes sing. Oh, sweet Fancy ! let her loose ; Every thing is spoilt by use:FANCY Where’s the cheek that doth not fade, To much gaz’d at? Where’s the maid Whose lip mature is ever new? Where’s the eye, however blue, Doth not weary? Where’s the face One would meet in every place? Where’s the voice, however soft, One would hear so very oft? At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth Like to bubbles when rain pelteth. Let, then, winged Fancy find Thee a mistress to thy mind: Dulcet-ey’d as Ceres’ daughter, Ere the God of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide ; With a waist and with a side White as Hebe’s, when her zone Slipt its golden clasp, and down Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet, And Jove grew languid. Break the mesh Of the Fancy’s silken leash ; Quickly break her prison-string And such joys as these she'll bring.— Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home. Winter 1818-19.ODE [WRITTEN ON THE BLANK PAGE BEFORE BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER’S TRAGI-COMEDY ‘THE FAIR MAID OF THE INN.’] ARDS of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-liv’d in regions new ? Yes, and those of heaven commune With the spheres of sun and moon ; With the noise of fountains wondrous, And the parle of voices thund’rous ; With the whisper of heaven’s trees And one another, in soft ease Seated on Elysian lawns Brows’d by none but Dian’s fawns ; Underneath large blue-bells tented, Where the daisies are rose-scented, And the rose herself has got Perfume which on earth is not ; Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth ; Philosophic numbers smooth ; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries. Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again ;LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN And the souls ye left behind you Teach us, here, the way to find you, Where your other souls are joying, Never slumber’d, never cloying. Here, your earth-born souls still speak To mortals, of their little week ; Of their sorrows and delights ; Of their passions and their spites ; Of their glory and their shame ; What doth strengthen and what maim. Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-liv’d in regions new! January 1819. LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN OULS of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host’s Canary wine ? Or are fruits of Paradise Sweeter than those dainty pies Of venison? O generous food ! Drest as though bold Robin HoodKEATS Would, with his maid Marian, Sup and bowse from horn and can. T have heard that on a day Mine host’s sign-board flew away, Nobody knew whither, till An astrologer’s old quill To a sheepskin gave the story, Said he saw you in your glory, Underneath a new old sign Sipping beverage divine, And pledging with contented smack The Mermaid in the Zodiac. Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? February 1818, ROB EN HOOD TO A FRIEND O! those days are gone away, And their hours are old and gray And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Many times have winter’s shears, Frozen North, and chilling East, Sounded tempests to the feast 3ROBIN HOOD Of the forest’s whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more ; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz’d to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you ; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold; Never one, of all the clan, Thrumming on an empty can Some old hunting ditty, while He doth his green way beguile To fair hostess Merriment, Down beside the pasture Trent ; For he left the merry tale Messenger for spicy ale. Gone, the merry morris din ; Gone, the song of Gamelyn ; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the ‘ grené shawe’ ; All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be castKEATS Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall’n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas ; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her—strange! that honey Can’t be got without hard money ! So it is: yet let us sing, Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn ! Honour to the woods unshorn ! Honour to the Lincoln green! Honour to the archer keen ! Honour to tight little John, And the horse he rode upon! Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood ! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan ! Though their days have hurried by Let-us two a burden try. February 1818, ZO AUTUMN EASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun ; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run ;i on a half-reap’d furrow sound aslee p, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, Spares the next swath and while thy hook all its twined flowers TO AUTUMNTO AUTUMN To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core ; To swell the gourd, and piump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel ; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers : And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook ; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue ; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ; Hedge-crickets sing ; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft ; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. September 19, 1819.ODE ON MELANCHOLY O, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine ; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine ; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be ae Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl gy A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries ; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hillin an April shroud ; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies ; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die ; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips ;: : 3 She dwells with Beauty— Beauty that must die.’ ODE ON MELANCHOLYODE TO MAIA 183 Ay, 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. Spring 1819. FRAGMENT OF AN ODE TO MAIA, WRITTEN,ON MAY DAY: xéxe OTHER of Hermes! and still youthful Maia! May I sing to thee As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiz? Or may I woo thee In earlier Sicilian ? or thy smiles Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, By bards who died content on pleasant sward, Leaving great verse unto a little clan? O, give me their great vigour, and unheard Save of the quiet Primrose, and the span Of heaven and few ears, Rounded by thee, my song should die away Content as theirs, ie Rich in the simple worship of a day. cyHYMN TO APOLLO OD of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where—where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm—too low crawling, for death? O Delphic Apollo! The Thunderer grasp’d and grasp’d, The Thunderer frown’d and frown’d ; The eagle’s feathery mane For wrath became stiffen’d—the sound Of breeding thunder Went drowsily under, Muttering to be unbound. O why didst thou pity, and for a worm Why touch thy soft lute Till the thunder was mute, Why was not I crush’d—such a pitiful germ ? O Delphic Apollo! The Pleiades were up, Watching the silent air ; The seeds and roots in the Earth Were swelling for summer fare ;THE POET. The Ocean, its neighbour, Was at its old labour, When, who—who did dare To tie, like a madman, thy plant round his brow, And grin and look proudly, And blaspheme so loudly, And live for that honour, to stoop to thee now? O Delphic Apollo! february 1815. THE POLE A FRAGMENT HERE’S the Poet? show him! show him, Muses nine! that I may know him! ’Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he King, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be ’twixt ape and Plato ; ’Tis the man who with a bird, Wren or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts ; he hath heard The Lion’s roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the Tiger’s yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue. 1818?LINES ON SEEING A LOCK OF MILTON’S HAIR HIEF of organic numbers! Old Scholar of the Spheres ! Thy spirit never slumbers, But rolls about our ears, For ever, and for ever ! O what a mad endeavour Worketh he, Who to thy sacred and ennobled hearse Would offer a burnt sacrifice of verse And melody. How heavenward thou soundest, Live Temple of sweet noise, And Discord unconfoundest, Giving Delight new joys, And Pleasure nobler pinions! O, where are thy dominions ? Lend thine ear To a young Delian oath,—aye, by thy soul, By all that from thy mortal lips did roll, And by the kernel of thine earthly love, Beauty, in things on earth, and things above I swear ! When every childish fashion Has vanished from my rhyme, Will I, grey-gone in passion, Leave to an after-time,ODE TO, BANNY Hymning and harmony Of thee, and of thy works, and of thy life ; But vain is now the burning and the strife, Pangs are in vain, until I grow high-rife With old Philosophy, And mad with glimpses of futurity. For many years my offering must be hush’d ; When I do speak, I’ll think upon this hour, Because I feel my forehead hot and flush’d, Even at the simplest vassal of thy power,— A lock of thy bright hair,— Sudden it came, And I was startled, when I caught thy name Coupled so unaware ; Yet, at the moment, temperate was my blood. I thought I had beheld it from the flood. January 1818. ODE TO FANNY HYSICIAN Nature! let my spirit blood! O ease my heart of verse and let me rest ; Throw me upon thy Tripod, till the flood Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast. A theme! a theme! great nature! give a theme ; Let me begin my dream. I come—I see thee, as thou standest there, Beckon me not into the wintry air. Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears, To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,—KEATS A smile of such delight, As brilliant and as bright, As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes, Lost in soft amaze, I gaze, I gaze! Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast? What stare outfaces now my silver moon ! Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least ; Let, let, the amorous burn— But, pr’ythee, do not turn The current of your heart from me so soon. O! save, in charity, The quickest pulse for me. Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe Voluptuous visions into the warm air; Though swimming through the.dance’s dangerous wreath, Be like an April day, Smiling and cold and gay, A temperate lilly, temperate as fair ; Then, Heaven! there will be A warmer June for me. Why, this—you’ll say, my Fanny ! is not true: Put your soft hand upon your snowy side, Where the heart beats: confess—’tis nothing new— Must not a woman be A feather on the sea, Sway’d to and fro by every wind and tide? Of as uncertain speed As blow-ball from the mead?LINES TO FANNY 189 I know it—and to know it is despair To one who loves you as I love, sweet Fanny! Whose heart goes fluttering for you everywhere, Nor, when away you roam, Dare keep its wretched home, Love, love alone, his pains severe and many: Then, loveliest! keep me free, From torturing jealousy. Ah ! if you prize my subdu’d soul above The poor, the fading, brief, pride of an hour ; Let none profane my Holy See of love, Or with a rude hand break The sacramental cake : Let none else touch the just new-budded flower ; If not—may my eyes close, Love! on their lost repose. Spring 1819. LENES “EO FANNY HAT can I do to drive away VU Remembrance from my eyes ? for they have seen, Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen! { Touch has a memory. O say, love, say, ae What can I do to kill it and be free ie In my old liberty ? | When every fair one that I saw was fair, Enough to catch me in but half a snare, Not keep me there:190 KEATS When, howe’er poor or particolour’d things, My muse had wings, And ever ready was to take her course Whither I bent her force, Unintellectual, yet divine to me ;— Divine, I say !—What sea-bird o’er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes? How shall I do To get anew Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more Above, above The reach of fluttering Love, And make him cower lowly while I soar? Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love ;— No,—wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,— Where shall I learn to get my peace again ? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck’d and live a wrecked life ; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods ; Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Ic’d in the great lakes, to afflict mankind ; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad ; whose harsh herbag’d meads Make lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds ;ODE ON INDOLENCE IgI There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong. O, for some sunny spell To dissipate the shadows of this hell! Say they are gone,—with the new dawning light Steps forth my lady bright! O, let me once more rest My soul upon that dazzling breast ! Let once again these aching arms be plac’d, The tender gaolers of thy waist! And let me feel that warm breath here and there To spread a rapture in my very hair,— O, the sweetness of the pain! Give me those lips again ! Enough! Enough! it is enough for me To dream of thee! October 1819. ODE ON INDOMENCE ‘ They toil not, neither do they spin.’ NE morn before me were three figures seen, With bowed necks, and joined hands, side- faced ; And one behind the other stepp’d serene, In placid sandals, and in white robes graced ; They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side ; They came again; as when the urn once more Is shifted round, the first seen shades return ; And they were strange to me, as may betide With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.192 KEATS How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not? How came ye muffled in so hush a mask? Was it a silent deep-disguised plot To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour ; The blissful cloud of summer-indolence Benumb’d my eyes ; my pulse grew less and less ; Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower : O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness ? A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d Each one the face a moment whiles to me ; Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d And ach’d for wings because I knew the three ; The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name : The second was Ambition, pale of cheek, And ever watchful with fatigued eye ; The last, whom I love more, the more of blame Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,— I knew to be my demon Poesy. They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings : O folly! What is Love! and where is it? And for that poor Ambition! it springs From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit ; For Poesy !—no,—she has not a joy,— At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep’d in honied indolence ; O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy, That I may never know how change the moons, Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!ODE ON INDOLENCE And once more came they by ;—alas! wherefore ? My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams ; My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er With flowers, and stirring shades, and _ baffled beams: The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May ; The open casement press’d a new-leav’d vine, Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay ; O Shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell ! Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine. Ye cannot raise So, ye three Ghosts, adieu ! My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass ; For I would not be dieted with praise, A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce! Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn ; Farewell ! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store ; Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright, Into the clouds, and never more return! 18109.{ . , : oe mol SS ee — Fe) = mn - a = H SONNETS ‘WHY DID I LAUGH TO-NIGHT??’ HY did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell: | No God, no Demon of severe response, Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell. Then to my human heart I turn at once. Heart! Thou and IJ are here sad and alone ; I say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan, To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain. Why did I laugh? I know this Being’s lease, My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads ; Yet would I on this very midnight cease, And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds ; Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, But death intenser—Death is Life’s high meed. March 1819. A DREAM, AFTER READING DANTE} EPISODE OF PAULO AND FRANCESCA S Hermes once took to his feathers light, | When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and sien So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft 194SONNETS 198 The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes; And, seeing it asleep, so fled away— Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies, Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d a day; But to that second circle of sad hell, Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm. April 1819, TWO SONNETS ON FAME I AME, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease ; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her ; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her ; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar ; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.Il ‘You cannat eat your cake and have it too.’—Prvoverd. OW fever’d is the man, who cannot look Upon his mortal days with temperate blood, Who vexes all the leaves of his life’s book, And robs his fair name of its maidenhood ; It is as if the rose should pluck herself, Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom, As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf, Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom, But the rose leaves herself upon the briar, For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed, And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire, The undisturbed lake has crystal space, Why then should man, teasing the world for grace, 7 Spoil his salvation for a fierce miscreed ? April 30, 1819. ON THE SONNET F by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d, And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness, Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of Poesy:SONNETS 197 Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d By ear industrious, and attention meet : Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown ; So, if we may not let the Muse be free, She will be bound with garlands of her own, May 1819. ON LEIGH HUNTS POEM. ‘THE STORY OF RIMINI’ HO loves to peer up at the morning sun, With half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek, Let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek For meadows where the little rivers run ; Who loves to linger with that brightest one Of Heaven—Hesperus—let him lowly speak These numbers to the night, and starlight meek, Or moon, if that her hunting be begun. He who knows these delights, and too is prone To moralize upon a smile or tear, Will find at once a region of his own, A bower for his spirit, and will steer To alleys where the fir-tree drops its cone, Where robins hop, and fallen leaves are sear. L817.TO SPENSER PENSER! a jealous honourer of thine, A forester deep in thy midmost trees, Did last eve ask my promise to refine Some English that might strive thine ear to please. But Elfin Poet ’tis impossible For an inhabitant of wintry earth To rise like Phcebus with a golden quill Fire-wing’d and make a morning in his mirth. It is impossible to escape from toil O’ the sudden and receive thy spiriting : The flower must drink the nature of the soil Before it can put forth its blossoming : Be with me in the summer days and I Will for thine honour and his pleasure try. February 5, 1818. ‘KEEN, FITFUL GUSTS ARE WHISP’RING HERE AND THERE’ EEN, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there Among the bushes half leafless, and dry ; The stars look very cold about the sky, And I have many miles on foot to fare. Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,SONNETS Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily, Or of those silver lamps that burn on high, Or of the distance from home’s pleasant lair : ¥or I am brimful of the friendliness That in a little cottage I have found ; Of fair-hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress, And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d ; Of lovely Laura in her light green dress, And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown’d. Spring 1816. ‘TO ONE WHO HAS BEEN LONG IN @LEY PENT’ O one who has been long in city pent, ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament. Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair And gentle tale of love and languishment ? Returning home at evening, with an ear Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye Watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career, He mourns that day so soon has glided by : E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear That falls through the clear ether silently. June 1816.KEATS ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER UCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold, M And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer rul’d as his demesne : Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Spring 1815. TO: HADON This sonnet was not originally written with a short thirteenth line, but with the line “Of mighty workings in some distant Mart ?’ Haydon suggested the hiatus; and Keats adopted it. In Tom Keats’s copy-book the sonnet is headed simply ‘Sonnet’ and is dated 1816 merely. There is no variation from the printed text. It is almost superfluous to identify the two men referred to in the first six lines—Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt. REAT spirits now on earth are sojourning ; He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake, Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing :i ee i f SONNETS He of the rose, the violet, the spring, The social smile, the chain for Freedom’s sake : And lo !—whose stedfastness would never take A meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering. And other spirits there are standing apart Upon the forehead of the age to come ; These, these will give the world another heart, And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb. November 19, 1816. ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET HE poetry of earth is never dead : When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead ; That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead In summer luxury,—he has never done With his delights ; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never : On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills. December 30, 1816,KEATS TO KOSCIUSKO OOD Kosciusko, thy great name alone ¥ Isa full harvest whence to reap high feeling ; It comes upon us like the glorious pealing Of the wide spheres—an everlasting tone. And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown, The names of heroes, burst from clouds con- cealing, And changed to harmonies, for ever stealing Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne. It tells me too, that on a happy day, When some good spirit walks upon the earth, Why “name with Alfred’s, and the great on yore Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away To where the great God lives for evermore. TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME SOME ROSES S late I rambled in the happy fields, What time the sky-lark shakes the tremulous dew From his lush clover covert ;—when anew Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields :SONNETS 203 I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields, A fresh-blown musk-rose; ’twas the first that threw Its sweets upon the summer : graceful it grew As is the wand that queen Titania wields. And, as I feasted on its fragrancy, I thought the garden-rose it far excell’d: But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me, My sense with their deliciousness was spell’d : Soft voices had they, that with tender plea Whisper’d of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d. June 29, 1816, TOG. A. W. YMPH of the downward smile and sidelong glance, In what diviner moments of the day Art thou most lovely >—when gone far astray Into the labyrinths of sweet utterance, Or when serenely wand’ring in a trance Of sober thought ?—or when starting away With careless robe to meet the morning ray Thou spar’st the flowers in thy mazy dance? Haply ’tis when thy ruby lips part sweetly, And so remain, because thou listenest : But thou to please wert nurtured so completely That I can never tell what mood 1s best. I shall as soon pronounce which Grace more neatly Trips it before Apollo than the rest.204 KEATS ‘O SOLITUDE! IF I MUST WITH THEE DWELL’ SOLITUDE! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings ; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span ; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavilion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure ; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. TO MY BROTHERS Se busy flames play through the fresh laid coals, And their faint cracklings o’er our silence creep Like whispers of the household gods that keep A gentle empire o’er fraternal souls. And while, for rhymes, I search around the poles, Your eyes are fix’d, as in poetic sleep, Upon the lore so voluble and deep, That aye at fall of night our care condoles.SONNETS This is your birth-day, Tom, and I rejoice That thus it passes smoothly, quietly. Many such eves of gently whisp’ring noise May we together pass, and calmly try What are this world’s true joys, —ere the great Voice, From its fair face, shall bid our spirits fly ? November 18, 1816. ‘AFTER DARK VAPORS HAVE OPPRESS’D OUK PLAINS? FTER dark vapors have oppress’d our plains For a long dreary season, comes a day Born of the gentle South, and clears away From the sick heavens all unseemly stains. The anxious month, relieved of its pains, Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May ; The eyelids with the passing coolness play Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains. The.calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves— Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath— a The gradual sand that through an _ hour-glass a runs— | A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death. January 31, 1817.KEATS WRITTEN At) Tee BND OF SHE PEOURT, ANID, IE titi HIS pleasant tale is like a little copse : The honied lines do freshly interlace To keep the reader in so sweet a place, So that he here and there full-hearted stops ; And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops Come cool and suddenly against his face, And by the wandering melody may trace Which way the tender-legged linnet hops. Oh! what a power hath white Simplicity! What mighty power has this gentle story! I that for ever feel athirst for glory Could at this moment be content to lie Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings Were heard of none beside the mournful robins. february 1817. TWO SONNETS I TO HAYDON, WITH A SONNET WRITTEN ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES AYDON! forgive me that I cannot speak Definitively on these mighty things ; Forgive me that I have not Eagle’s wings— That what I want I know not where to seek:SONNETS And think that I would not be over meek In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings, Even to the steep of Heliconian springs, Were I of ample strength for such a freak— Think too, that all those numbers should be thine : Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem? For when men star’d at what was most divine With browless idiotism—o’erwise phlegm— Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them. Il ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES \ { Y spirit is too weak—mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye. Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud ; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. S17,KEATS ON A PICTURE OF LEANDER OME hither all sweet maidens soberly, Down-looking aye, and with a chasten’d light, Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white, And meekly let your fair hands joined be, As if so gentle that ye could not see, Untouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright, Sinking away to his young spirit’s night,— Sinking bewilder’d ’mid the dreary sea: Tis young Leander toiling to his death ; Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile. O horrid dream! see how his body dips Dead-heavy ; arms and shoulders gleam awhile : He’s gone ; up bubbles all his amorous breath ! Summer 1817. WRITTEN ON A BLANK PAGE IN SHAKE- SPEARE’S POEMS, FACING ‘A LOVER’S COMPLAINT’ RIGHT star, would I were stedfast as thou Ci rs Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,SONNETS The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, * And so live ever—or else swoon to death. September 1820. ‘THE DAY 8 GONE, AND AE Tes SWEETS ARE GONE!’ HE day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone, Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist ! Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Iaded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise— Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk holiday—or holinight Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight ; But, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day, He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray. October 1819.ON SITTING DOWN TO READ ‘KING LEAR ONCE AGAIN GOLDEN tongued Romance, with serene lute! Fair,plumed Syren, Queen of far-away ! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay Must I burn through ; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit : Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme! When through the old oak Forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But, when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phcenix wings to fly at my desire. ‘WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I! MAY CHASE VO BE" HEN I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain ;SONNETS When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance ; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love ;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. January 1818. TO THE NILE ON of the old moon-mountains African! Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile! We call thee fruitful, and, that very while, A desert fills our seeing’s inward span ; Nurse of swart nations since the world began, Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil, Rest for a space ’twixt Cairo and Decan?P O may dark fancies err! they surely do ; ’Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste Of all beyond itself, thou dost bedew Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste The pleasant sun-rise, green isles hast thou too, And to the sea as happily dost haste. February 4, 1818. et ;KEATS TO A LADY SEEN FOR A FEW MOMENTS A VO eR AT, Chass sea hath been five years at its slow ebb, Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand, Since I was tangled in thy beauty’s web, And snared by the ungloving of thine hand. And yet I never look on midnight sky, But I behold thine eyes’ well memory’d light ; I cannot look upon the rose’s dye, But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight. 1 cannot look on any budding flower, But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour Its sweets in the wrong sense:—Thou dost eclipse Every delight with sweet remembering, And grief unto my darling joys dost bring. february 4, 1818, WHAT THE THRUSH ‘SAPD LINES FROM A LETTER TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS THOU whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind, Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist, And the black elm tops ’mong the freezing stars, To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.SONNETS O thou, whose only book has been the light Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on Night after night when Phcebus was away, To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn. O fret not after knowledge—I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge—I have none, And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens At thought of idleness cannot be idle, And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep. February 19, 1818. THE HUMAN SEASONS OUR Seasons fill the measure of the year ; There are four seasons in the mind of man : He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh His nearest unto heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close ; contented so to look On mists in idleness—to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature. March 1818.KEATS TO HOMER TANDING aloof in giant ignorance, Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas. So thou wast blind;—but then the veil was rent, For Jove uncurtain’d Heaven to let thee live, And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent, And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive ; Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, And precipices show untrodden green, There is a budding morrow in midnight, There is a triple sight in blindness keen ; Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell. 1818. WRITTEN UPON LHE TOP OF BEN NEVIS EAD mea lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist! I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vapourous doth hide them,—just so much 1! wistSONNETS Mankind do know of hell; T look o’erhead, And there is sullen mist,—even so much Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread Before the earth, beneath me,—even such, Even so vague is man’s sight of himself! Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,— Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them,—that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might! August 2, 1818, TO SLEEP SOFT embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting with careful fingers and benign Our gloom-pleased eyes, embowered from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine : O soothest Sleep ! if so it please thee, close In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes, Or wait the ‘ Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws Around my bed its lulling charities. Then save me, or the passed day will shine Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,— Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole ; Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul. April 1819,DEDICATION TO LEIGH HUNT, Eso. LORY and loveliness have pass’d away ; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the east, to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft voic’d and young, and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May. But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time, when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings, a man like thee. 18i7 phar re «|ce loeeie - NOTES Lhe numbers refer to page and line of the text THE text of this selection from the poems of Keats is printed from the edition of Mr. H. Buxton Forman issued by Messrs. Gowans & Gray in 1900; and I am indebted to Mr. Forman for his kiad permission to use so scrupulous and faithful a text. In arranging my selections, I have been guided by a sug- gestion made in passing by Mr. Swinburne in the dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems. ‘It might,’ he says, “be thought pedantic or pretentious in a modern poet to divide his poems after the old Roman fashion into sections and classes. J must confess that I should like to see this method applied, were it but by way of experiment in a single edition, to the work of the leading poets of our own country and cen- tury : to see, for instance, their lyrical and elegiac works ranged and registered apart, each kind in a class of its own, such as is usually reserved, I know not why, for sonnets only.’ This method, it seems to me, is peculiarly appropriate in the case of Keats, whose whole work is comprised within so few years, and whose whole work, it may be added, was written with so definite a sense of the formal qualities and distinctions of poetry. I confess that I had never realised the whole force and splendour (irregular as it is and may well be) of the sonnets until I saw the best of them set together in some kind of order or harmony. On the other hand, I had never realised, as this division into classes forces one to realise, how little of the singing quality Keats possessed, and how wholly his lyrical faculty had given itself up to the building of harmonies. I have found only two songs which seem to me worth giving. _ What surprises me is that so serious a lack should mean so little in our estimate of his genius. In the notes which follow I have referred to a few important 217218 variations of text, but for the most part have confined myself to giving some indication of the suggestion and origin of the poems, when possible from Keats’ letters, or from the notes of contemporaries. Most of them I have found to my hand in Mr. Forman’s rich, appropriate, and abundant notes, and I have not scrupled to make full use of them. Some, and some additions to and corrections of the dates of the poems given by Mr. Forman, I have found in Mr. E. de Sélincourt’s recent and admirable edition, which contains, in its introduction and notes, the most valuable contributions which have yet been made to the study of what might be called the poetic evolution of Keats. NARRATIVE AND ROMANTIC POEMS Page 1, 1. 1. Aymn to Pan.—This ‘very pretty piece of Paganism,’ as Wordsworth, who heard Keats recite it at the house of Haydon, is said to have called it, follows line 221 (which the first line rhymes with) of Book I. of Endymion. What I have called Phebe’s Roundelay— ‘Then she, Sitting beneath the midmost forest tree, For pity sang this roundelay,’ follows line 145 of Book IV. What I have called the Song of Cynthia’s Wedding follows, and its first couplet rhymes with line 562 of Book IV. It ends abruptly, and the line goes on— ‘More Endymion heard not.’ P. 44, 1. 1. Lamta.—The origin of Lamia is given in the quotation which Keats inserted after the poem in the original edition of 1820 :— ‘Philostratus, in his fourth book de Vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth,NOTES 219 and told him she was a Pheenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him ; but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philoso- pher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who, by some probable con- jectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus’ gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions. When she saw herself de- scried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.’— Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III. Sect. iis Memb. 1, Subs. I. P. 67, 1.8. JZsabella.—The poem is founded on the fifth tale of the fourth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron ; and the allusion to the ‘sad ditty of this story born,’ in the last stanza, has been cleared up by Mr. Forman, who, in the Appendix to the second volume of his library edition of Keats, gives a Sicilian song which once ‘from mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d,’ with a translation of it by Mr. John Payne. P. 84,1. 17. The Eve of St. Agnes—Mr. de Sélincourt quotes the following passage from Burton’s Anatomy of Melan- choly (Part II., sect. ii., mem. 3, subs. 1) as the probable sug- gestion to Keats of the subject : ‘ Tis their only desire if it may be done by Art, to see their husbands picture in a glass, they'll give anything to know when they shall be married, how many husbands they shall have, by Crommyomaniza, a kind of divina- tion with onions laid on the Altar on Christmas Eve, or by fasting on S¢. Agnes’ Eve or Night, to know who shall be their first husband,’ P. 98, 1. 1. Ayperton.—It seems probable that Wyperzon was not begun earlier than November 1818, or continued later than April 1819. Mr. de Sélincourt, in his admirable and detailed account of the poem, points out that its sources were220 KEATS probably to be found not in Lempriére and Horne Tooke, as has generally been asserted, but in passages of Chapman’s //ad (vili, 420-24, and xiv. 230), of Spenser’s /aerze Queene (iii. 7, 47), of Milton’s Paradise Lost (i. 510 e¢ seg.), and of Chapman’s flestod. He also shows, with great probability, that ‘ Keats had modified his scheme of the poem considerably since his discussion of it with his friends, and that during the actual time of composition he had no intention whatever of writing an epic in ten books.’ He conjectures that the poem ‘ would not have reached more than 1200-1500 lines, or four books of the length of the first and second,’ and suggests the probable course it would have taken. The main reason of Keats for giving up the poem is stated in his letter to Reynolds of Sept. 22, 1819: ‘I have given up Hyperion ; there are too many Miltonic inver- sions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up.’ It was at this time that Keats was most under the influence of Chatterton, of whom he wrote to George Keats in the same month: ‘The purest English, I think—or what ought to be purest—is Chatterton’s. . » « I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s, cut by feet. I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.’ In the letter to Reynolds, immediately before the passage just quoted, he had said of Chatterton: ‘ He is the purest writer in the English language.’ The influence of Chat- terton had already become visible in Keats’ work, especially in the exquisite fragment Zhe Eve of St. Mark, probably written in January 1819. It was in his endeavour to get away from Milton, and to return to a style more really characteristic of himself, that Keats, in the last months of 1819, set himself to recast A/yferton in the form of a vision, of which some five hundred lines remain, originally published by Lord Houghton as the first draft, under the name Zhe Fall of Hyperion: a Viston. It has only gradually become clear that this is a recast and not a first draft, and only in 1904 were the original MSS. of Hyperion and the Woodhouse transcript of Zhe Fall of Hyperion discovered. Both were published, the former inNOTES 221 facsimile, by the Clarendon Press, under the editorship of Mr. de Sélincourt, who also gives in his edition of Keats a clear and exhaustive account, analysis, and interpretation of both poems, and of their significance in the development of Keats. No one has ever before made it so evident that, though as they both stand Wyferzon is immeasurably superior as a poem to The Fall of Hyperion, there is in the latter a principle of growth which is not in the other, and which only mortal sickness may have struck down before it could ripen. P. 125, 1.19. La Belle Dame sans Merci.—There are two versions of this poem, one published by Leigh Hunt in the Indicator of May 10, 1820, and the other by Lord Houghton in the Leterary Remains of 1848, besides the copy made by Keats in a letter, in April 1819, and that made by Woodhouse in his commonplace-book. It seems evident that the /dzcaror text, here followed, contains Keats’ latest revision, and as such we are bound to respect it. But I cannot help thinking that Keats was wrong in altering the ‘kisses four’ of the eighth stanza into the tamer if safer version by which he replaced them. This stanza originally read :— ‘ She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four.’ The next stanza began— ‘ And there she lulled me asleep,’ which was altered to avoid the repetition of the rhyme. There are other changes, not altogether for the better. P. 127,1. 13. The Eve of St. Mark.—In a letter to George Keats, dated September 20, 1819, Keats writes from Win- chester: ‘The great beauty of poetry is that it makes every- thing, every place, interesting. The palatine Venice and the abbotine Winchester are equally interesting. Some time since I began a poem called the ve of St. Mark, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening. I know not whether I shall finish it; I will give it as far as I oe222 KEATS have gone.’ Rossetti, in a letter to Mr. Forman, described this unfinished poem of Keats, with justice, as ‘perhaps, with Za Belle Dame sans Merct, the chastest and choicest example of his maturing manner.’ He copies an extract from Zhe Unseen World (1853), which seems to embody ‘the superstition in accord- ance with which Keats meant to develop his poem.’ This is the passage: ‘It was believed that if a person, on St. Mark’s Eve, placed himself near the church-porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year, go into the church. If they remained there it signi- fied their death; if they came out again it portended their recovery ; and the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness.’ Rossetti conjectured that ‘ the heroine—remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover—might make her way to the minster-porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return.’ DESCRIPTIVE AND REFLECTIVE POEMS P. 132, lL. 1. ‘JZ stood tip-toe.’—In this poem, apparently written in 1816, and originally referred to by Keats as Zudy- mion, we see him preparing for the ‘romance’ of that name which was to be begun in the following year, and published in 1818. P. 140, 1.5. Sleep and Poetry—Cowden Clarke tells us that ‘the framework and many of the lines of this poem were written by Keats in the library at Hunt’s cottage, where an extem- porary bed had been made up for him on the sofa.’ In one of his letters Hunt says: ‘ Keats’s Sleep and Poetry is a de- scription of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion’s closet.’ P. 161,1.12. Zhe Castle-Builder.—This wild fragment, like a lunatic Eve of St. Agnes in some of its details, has enough spirit and fantasy to justify its presence among Keats’ more serious work.NOTES SONGS P, 164, 1.13. ‘Z had a dove. —Keats speaks of this song as ‘a little thing I wrote off to some music, as it was playing.’ There are many evidences of Keats’ sensitiveness to music. ODES P. 165, 1. 21. Ode to a Nightingale.—A facsimile of the original MS. was published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in the Monthly Review of March 1903, in which it is interesting to note the first version of the two lines which seem to sum up the ‘magic’ of Keats. They were first written :— ‘Charmed the wide casements, opening on the foam Of keelless seas, in faery lands forlorn ;’ and the correction of the former made after the whole line had been written down, that of the latter ‘instantly after the epithet ‘‘keelless” had been tried and found wanting.’ The origin of the poem is thus described, with slight in- accuracies in detail (two half-sheets, not four or five scraps) by Charles Brown, with whom Keats was living at the time (May 1819) at Wentworth Place, Hampstead: ‘In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song ; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was dificult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode to a Nightingale.’ P. 168,1. 17. Ode on a Grectan Urn.—Mr. Colvin, in his Life of Keats, p. 174, says: ‘It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland House, an um wrought with just such a scene of pastoral224 KEATS sacrifice as is described in his fourth stanza: and of course no subject is commoner in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of ancient art; and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi’s etchings. Lord Holland’s urn is duly figured in the Vast e Candelabré of that admirable master.’ Mr. de Sélin- court aptly quotes, in parallel with the main idea on which the poem is based, the immortal sentence of Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Cosa bella mortal passa e non d’arte.’ P. 170, 1.11. Ode to Psyche.—In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, dated April 15, 1819, Keats writes: ‘The following poem, the last I have written, is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains ; I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry; this one I have done leisurely ; I think it reads the more richly for it, and it will, I hope, encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit.’ P. 178, 1.17. Robin Hood.—This poem is a reply to three sonnets by John Hamilton Reynolds, apparently inscribed to Keats, in The Garden of Florence, 1821, which were originally printed in Zhe Yellow Dwarf of February 21, 1818. In a letter dated February 3, 1818, Keats writes to Reynolds: ‘ Let us have the old poets and Robin Hood. Vour letter and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the Fourth Book of Childe Harold and the whole of anybody’s life and opinions, In return for your dish of filberts, I have gathered a few catkins,’ He then copies the lines, and adds: ‘I hope you will like them —they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry.’ The same letter contains the Lines on the Mermaid Tavern. P. 180, 1. 25. Zo Autumn.—Keats writes to Reynolds from Winchester, September 22, 1819: ‘How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air—a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies. I never liked stubble-fields so much as now—aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. ThisNOTES 226 struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’ P. 182, 1. 1. Ode on Melancholy.—The original manuscript, printed by Lord Houghton, contained the following intro- ductory stanza, which Keats omitted, we are told, lest ‘the coarseness of the contrast should destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the object of the poem to produce’ :— ‘Though you should build a bark of dead men’s bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast, Although your rudder be a dragon’s tail Long sever’d, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy—whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.’ How much of Beddoes seems to be anticipated in this stanza ! P. 184, 1. 1. Hymn to Apollo.--Mr. de Sélincourt, in the’ notes to his edition, says: ‘ Every one will agree with the margin notes of Rossetti (quoted Manchester Quarterly, 1883) that the Ode is ‘ very poor and puffy,’ and the Aymmn ‘ wretched but fora sense of metre. They are interesting chiefly as a record of the passing influence of the eighteenth century upon the form and diction of Keats.’ With this, so far as it applies to the Ode fo Apollo, 1 quite agree ; but by no means in regard to the Hymn. The difference between them (even if they were, as they may have been, written near together) seems to me to be essential. The Ode is thoroughly archaic and conventional, but the ym, though violently faulty, is alive, and with a queer attractive personal quality. P. 186, 1. 1. Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair.— Keats writes in a letter to Bailey, dated January 23, 1818: ‘I was at Hunt’s the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of J/i/ton’s hair. 1 know you would like what I wrote thereon, so here it is—as they say of a sheep in the Nursery Book.’ He adds, after copying it: ‘ This I did at226 Hunt’s, at his request—perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.’ The lock of hair, or a very small portion of it, was given by Leigh Hunt to Mr.and Mrs, Brown- ing on July 13, 1856, at Hampstead. ‘He detached it with trembling fingers,’ says Browning in a letter to Mr. Forman, printed in the library edition of Keats, ‘and wrote on the envelope: “A bit of a lock of the hair of Milton. To Robert and E. B. Browning, from Leigh Hunt. God bless them.”’ P. 187, 1.17. Ode to Fanny.—Mr. Forman conjectures that this poem was written when Keats was at Chichester in January 1819; and that the Lzzes to Fanny were written about the 12th of October in that year, ‘the day before that on which Keats posted a letter at Westminster to Miss Brawne, saying inter alia that he had set himself to copy some verses out fair, and adding, ‘‘I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dis- missing you from my mind for ever so short atime.”’ It seems more probable, however, that Mr. de Sélincourt is right in thinking that the former poem belongs more properly to the spring of 1819. The sonnet, ‘The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,’ is no doubt addressed to Fanny Brawne, and Mr. Forman couples it, with some probability, with a letter written in October 1819. Not many of Keats’ poems are definitely addressed to Fanny Brawne, as these three are ; but the importance of her influence on his life and on his poetry can hardly be over-estimated. The letters to Fanny Brawne have been called unmanly, and their publication harshly and vehemently criticised. These letters, it seems to me, are of great importance in any consideration of the temperament of Keats, and their value as human documents would justify their publication even if they deserved all the harsh things that have been said of them. But they do not. They are the letters of an agony, written by a man dying feverishly to a woman whom he loves with a feverish kind of passion. They are morbid, if you will, they are distressing, infinitely pathetic. They show us the Keats of those passages in which Porphyro grows ‘ unnerved,’ and Endymion ‘swoons,’ and Lycius is ‘pale with pain.” They show us a nature aching with imagination, to which only two things exist: the desire ofNOTES 227 ideal beauty, which is art, and the desire of human loveliness, concentrated upon one woman, ‘You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart—I am greedy of you,’ he writes, with precisely the same ecstasy grown painful through excess of itself that gives the poems those excessive, overcoming heats by which they move us. When Madeline ‘ Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one,’ when ‘ JBzea’s isle was wondering at the moon,’ when, even, Endymion tells the sisterly moon ‘No apples would I gather from the tree Till thou hadst cooled their cheeks deliciously,’ there is, in all these instances of sensitiveness to sensation, whether, as in the first, warm and bodily, or, in the second, cold and abstract, or, in the third, childlike in the innocence of its voluptuousness, a certain intoxication of the imagination. Keats, rather than Shelley, might have said ‘I amas a nerve,’ and, to one whose whole life was imagination, and imagination like the continual touching of a nerve, only such a passion as the passion expressed in the letters to Fanny Brawne was possible. Those letters are the outcry of one whose soul was formed for suffering, as ingeniously as his body was formed for suffering; they are the other side of his poetry, where his poetry was most personal and most impressive. P. 191, 1.17. Ode on Jndolence.—In the journal-letter, under date March 10, 1819, Keats writes: ‘This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless—I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence—my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies, I should call it languor, but as I am [Keats notes in the margin: “ Especially as I have a black eye”] I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as228 they pass by me ; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase, a man and two women whom no one but myself could dis- tinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpower- ing the mind.’ SONNETS P. 194, 1.1. ‘Why did I laugh to-night ?’—In the journal- letter to George and Georgiana Keats, under date March 19, 1819, Keats writes: ‘I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament con- tinually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet—but look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance ; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point, though the first steps to it were through my human passions—they went away and I wrote with my Mind—and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart.’ The sonnet follows, and he adds: ‘I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane I arose.’ P. 194, 1. 16. Sonnet on a Dream, after reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca.—This sonnet, which Rossetti looked on as, with that on Chapman’s Homer, ‘ by far the finest of Keats’s sonnets,’ is given by Keats in his journal-letter, dated April 15, 1819, together with the dream which led to it: ‘The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is that one in which he meets with Paolo and Francesca. I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about in the whirling atmosphere as it is described with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, as it seemed for an age—and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm—even flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud,NOTES 229 till the wind blew us away again. I tried a sonnet upon it— there are fourteen lines but nothing of what I felt in it—O that I could dream it every night.’ The sonnet follows. P. 196, 1.16. On the Sonnet.—In a letter finished on May 3, Keats writes: ‘I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes; the other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded. It will explain itself.” The sonnet follows. P, 198, 1. 16. ‘ Keen, jitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there. —Cowden Clarke tells us that this sonnet was written on the cccasion of Keats’ first visit to Leigh Hunt at his cottage in the Vale of Health, which seems to have been in the early spring of 1816. P. 199, 1. 10. ‘ Zo one who has been long in city pent.'— We learn that this sonnet was written in the fields, June 1816, The first line was perhaps unconscious in its echo of Milton’s ‘ As one who long in populous city pent.’ P. 200, 1. 1. On first looking into Chapman's Homer.— Cowden Clarke, in his ‘ Recollections of John Keats’ in the Gentleman's Magazine of February 1874, says: ‘A beautiful folio edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer had been lent me. .. . Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, Ov first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Wehad parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, maybe, two miles by ten o’clock.’ It was really, as Tennyson pointed out to F. T. Palgrave, Balboa, and not Cortez, of whom the story embodied in the Jast lines is told. Keats no doubt found it in a book which was a favourite of his at school, Robertson’s History of America. Wt has been clearly shown by Mr. de Sélincourt that the sonnet, which has been attributed to the year 1816 on the authority of Tom Keats, could not have been written later than the spring of 1815. The ‘symposium’ at Q230 which Keats and Clarke made the acquaintance of Chapman was preceded by an invitation from Keats at 8 Dean Street to Clarke, who had lodgings in Clerkenwell; and Keats left Dean Street in the summer of 1815. P. 200, 1. 16. Zo Haydon.—In a letter to Haydon, dated November 20, 1816, Keats writes: ‘Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the following.’ In the sonnet as it then reads the last line but one ended ‘in some distant Mart.’ In a second letter, written on the afternoon of the same day, Keats acknowledges an answer already received from Haydon, and says: ‘Your letter has filled me with a proud pleasure, and shall be kept by me as a stimulus to exer- tion—I begin to fix my eye upon one horizon. My feelings entirely fall in with yours in regard to the Ellipsis, and I glory in it. The Idea of your sending it to Wordsworth put me out of breath—you know with what Reverence I would send my Well-wishes to him.’ Lord Houghton says that ‘Haydon, in his acknowledgment, suggested the omission of a part’ of the sonnet; and it will be seen that Keats accepted the suggestion. P. 201, 1.11. On the Grasshopper and Cricket.—This sonnet was written in competition with Leigh Hunt, and the lovely rivals both printed in the 2xamzner of September 21, 1817. Cowden Clarke, who was present, says: ‘I cannot say how long the trial lasted. I was not proposed umpire; and had no stop-watch for the occasion. The time, however, was short for such a performance, and Keats won as to time.’ P. 202, 1.16. Zoa Friend who sent me some Roses.—A copy of this sonnet, made by Tom Keats, is headed Zo Charles Wells on recewwing a Bunch of Roses, and dated June 29, 1816. The writer of Joseph and his Brethren has even yet received little of the recognition which is his due. ‘This work affords,’ says Rossetti, ‘ perhaps the solitary instance, within our period, of poetry of the very first class falling quite unrecognised and remaining so for a long space of time.’ The reprint, with Mr. Swinburne’s introduction, of 1876 has been long out of print; and it is to be hoped that a new edition may some day be printed from the fuller text in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman.NOTES 231 P. 206, 1.1. Sonnet written at the end of ‘The Floure and the Lefe.’—‘It happened at the period when Keats was about publishing his first little volume of poems (in the year 1817); he was then living on the second floor of a house in the Poultry, at the corner of the court leading to the Queen’s Arms tavern— that corner nearest to Bow church. The author had called upon him here, and finding his young friend much engaged, took possession of a sofa, and commenced reading from his then pocket-companion, Chaucer’s Flower and the Leaf. The fatigue of a long walk, however, prevailed over the fascination of the verses, and he fell asleep. Upon awakening the book was still at his side; but the reader may conceive the author’s delight upon finding the following elegant sonnet written in his book at the close of the poem. During my sleep Keats had read it for the first time; and, knowing that it would gratify me, had subjoined a testimony to its merit, that might have delighted Chaucer himself.’.—Charles Cowden Clarke, The Riches of Chaucer (1835), vol. i. pp. 52, 53 (quoted by H. Buxton Forman in the Appendix to vol. ii. of his library edition of Keats). P. 208, 1. 16. Sonnet written on the margin of ‘A Lovers Complaint.’—This sonnet, the last which Keats is known to have written, was written on a blank leaf of a Shakespeare (now in the possession of Sir Charles Dilke), facing the be- ginning of 4 Lover's Complaint. Lord Houghton tells us that it was written after ‘a weary fortnight spent in beating about the Channel,’ on the last voyage to Italy. Keats had landed on the Dorsetshire coast, and spent a bright day there. On September 28, which must be about the date of the sonnet, he had written in a letter to Brown: ‘I wish for death every day and night, to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed.’ P, 211, 1. 11. Zothe Nile.—In a letter dated February 16, 1818, Keats says: ‘ The Wednesday before last, Shelley, Hunt, and I wrote each a sonnet on the River Nile.’ The sonnet ofShelley was only discovered, among the papers of Leigh Hunt, in 1876. TO THe Nice Month after month the gather’d rains descend, Drenching yon secret Aithiopian dells, And from the Desert’s ice-girt pinnacles, Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend. Girt there with blasts and meteors, Tempest dwells By Nile’s aerial urn, with rapid spells Urging its waters to their mighty end. O’er Egypt’s land of memory floods are level, And they are thine, O Nile ! and well thou knowest That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil, And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou flowest. Beware, O man! for knowledge must to thee, Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be. Hunt’s sonnet was published in Foliage. THE NUL It flows through old hush’d Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream; And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands,— Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roam’d through the young world the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world’s great hands, Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along ’Twixt villages, and think how we shall take Our own calm journey on for human sake.’ Whichever sonnet may be the finest as a sonnet, there is no doubt that the finest line is Leigh Hunt’s.NOTES 233 P. 212, 1. 16. What the Thrush said.—This title is Mr. Forman’s. The lines are found in a letter of Keats to Rey- nolds, bearing the postmark ‘ Hampstead, Feb. 19, 1818’: ‘I was led into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness—I have not read any books—the morning said I was right—I had no idea but of the morning, and the thrush said I was right, seeming to say— And then the lines follow. P. 214,1.16. Ox Ben Nevis.—Rossetti described this sonnet as ‘perhaps the most thoughtful of Keats.’ Lord Houghton says: ‘From Fort William Keats mounted Ben Nevis. When on the summit a cloud enveloped him, and sitting on the stones, as it slowly wafted away, showing a tremendous precipice into the valley below, he wrote these lines.’ P. 216, 1.1. Zo Leigh Hunt, Esg.—This sonnet forms the dedication to Keats’ first volume, the oems of 1817. Cowden Clarke relates that ‘on the evening when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer, it was accompanied by the in- formation that if a “dedication to the book was intended it must be sent forthwith.” Whereupon he withdrew to a side table, and in the buzz of a mixed conversation (for there were several friends in the room) he composed and brought to Charles Ollier, the publisher, the Dedication Sonnet to Leigh Hunt.’GLOSSARY The numbers refer to the page of the text and the line wherein the word explained occurs «103 My spirit is too weak—mortality . ‘ : » 204 No, no go not to Lethe, neither twist . : -. se No! those days are gone away : ; ye Nymph of the downward smile and sieibne ance . 208 O Goddess ! hear these tuneless numbers wrung - 170 O golden tongued Romance . : 210 O soft embalmer of the still ion : : ~~ 205 O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell ; ; : < 204 O Sorrow ; oF O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’ S ne ; - 2ie O thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang . : I Oft have you seen a swan superbly frowning . : = 155 One morn before me were three figures seen, : - EOL Physician Nature ! let my spirit blood! . 187 Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud _.. , era Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness . . 1eo Small, busy flames play through the fresh laid coals 20K Son of the old moon-mountains African ! : : (Zur Souls of Poets dead and gone . : : : ‘ og, Spenser ! a jealous honourer of thine ; = 108 St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! . : on Standing aloof in giantignorance . 21a The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! . : = 209 The poetry of earth is never dead . . ‘ 3 1 2OL240 KEATS PAGE There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men : : oe This pleasant tale is like a little copse_. ; | 206 Thou still unravished bride of quietness . 168 Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace Wajer. Bk. Tm ) 12% Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb ; - 202 To-night I’ll have my friar- -let me think : ~ 16k To one who has been long in cit: pent. : 5 FOS Upon a Sabbath-day it fell : . 127 Upon a time, before the faery broods (Lane Pt. LE ; . , 44 Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow . : ; - Ge What can I do to drive away . : - 189 What is more gentle than a wind in summer? . : : 140 When I have fears that I may cease to be ; ; - 210 Where’s the Poet ? show him ! show him Os Who loves to peer up at the morning sun : + 107 Who, who from Dian’s feast would be away? . ‘ 2 he Why did I laugh to-night ?XX 000 341 SOL