II
We now come to his two greatest odes, the one to the Grecian Urn and the other to the Nightingale. Both were written in the spring of 1819. In both Fanny Brawne is with the poet though there is no direct mention of his love for her or his troubles with her. The lines in the Ode to a Grecian Urn that particularly were written with Fanny in mind are those addressed to the lover of the Grecian Urn.
"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."
Keats saw a resemblance between himself and that youth. He, too, was winning and near the goal, and he no more had her love than did the youth on the urn. He himself knew the passion
"That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead and a parching tongue."
He had to accept his lot and pretend to see some advantage in it as he did in that of the youth on the urn:
"More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young."
The poem is the song of unsatisfied desires. Keats, frustrated in his love, had one resource, to make poetry and create beauty out of his sorrow. To the future he too would be like that lover created by an ancient artist, panting for love ever young. The poem has such great appeal because it strikes a note in us all.
In the Ode to the Nightingale we also see evidence of his love sadness because of Fanny. He expresses a wish to go away with the bird from scenes
"Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."
The nightingale has not known like him
"The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan."
Miss Brawne had embittered his life and hence he must fly at least in fancy through poetry with the bird. Again he finds consolation for his unhappy love in poetry.
He has been half in love with death, he has thought of taking to drink; he expressed both these ideas in previous poems. He is reminded that the nightingale's song was heard by Ruth, because love is uppermost in his mind. But he knows his fancied flight with the bird must end shortly. He will soon come back to his real self with the vexing thoughts of Fanny.
"Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf."
Then the music ceased, and he is back on earth again.
The unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to fly with the nightingale is a further proof of his unsatisfied love.
The motive of both these great poems was then supplied by his unsatisfactory love affair, but critics have not openly asserted the fact. It wasn't a mere walk in the British Museum or in Brown's garden that gave birth to the poems. These events merely incited him to put on paper the poems which had already for some time past fermented in his unconscious and were really produced by his repressed love for Fanny. Had he been happy in love, it is very likely we would never have had these poems. They are as personal as the poems previously mentioned addressed directly to Fanny, as La Belle Dame, and the sonnet written in the fly leaf of Shakespeare. The same unhappy longings gave rise to them all, and they were all written within a few months of each other, though I have no evidence as to the date of the sonnet and the lines to Fanny.
But it is in a long poem where Fanny is chiefly present unconsciously, in Lamia. We have here the tale of Lamia, a beautiful woman, who is a metamorphosed serpent ensnaring Lycius of Corinth by her beauty. Fanny is Lamia the serpent woman, Lycius of Corinth is Keats himself. Lycius is about to marry Lamia, as Keats was also thinking of marrying Fanny. It should, by the way, be borne in mind that the period of the writing of Lamia corresponds with the date of the first published despairing letters of Keats to Fanny, the summer and fall of 1819. It would be a rare miracle if during this time he could have kept thoughts of his sweetheart out of his work. Unconsciously he felt she acted like a serpent, and hence he drew her as such.
Lycius did not want his teacher Apollonius, the philosopher, at the feast. But the preceptor did come, an unbidden guest, and told Lycius who this beautiful woman really was. Lycius died of disappointment. Keats did not wish to be told the truth about Fanny's lack of character, and thus be disillusioned. He felt that he too would die, hence he fears facts and asks: "Do not all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy?" In this question we see already he suspects the nature of Fanny. But he will not believe his uncertain suspicions nor investigate them. It is the voice of his own unconscious that he hears in these words of his preceptor:
"'Fool! Fool!' repeated he, while his eyes still
Relented not, nor moved; 'from every ill
In life have I preserved thee to this day,
And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?'"
He attacks Fanny in his description of Lamia's pleading, whose beauty smote while it guaranteed to save. He tells of the meshes in which he struggled. That he published the poem in his lifetime is evidence that he himself was not altogether aware he was analysing his own love affair and was abusing his fiancée. When he resolved to make a poem of the little tale he read in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy it was his unconscious that chose the theme for him, recognising that he had many affinities in his life with that of the unfortunate Corinthian youth. The poem contains more of himself than any of his long poems.
There are many other poems of Keats where the personal element enters and where he tells us of his unconscious. The affair with Fanny coloured his entire work after he met her. He also knew and admired another girl about the time he met Fanny, whom he calls a Charmian; she was a Miss Cox, but she did not greatly influence him. It is to the intense affection Keats had for his mother, of whom he was deprived in boyhood, and the unfortunate affair with Fanny, that we owe some of his best literary work.