Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their bearing on Keats’s poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable origin of the Ode on Indolence:

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 lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* 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.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like figures on a Greek vase—a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind.[10]

* Especially as I have a black eye.

‘This is the only happiness’—the sentence will surprise no one who has even dipped into Keats’s letters. It expresses a settled conviction. Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. ‘Health and spirits,’ he says, ‘can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.’[11] Shelley might be speaking. ‘To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary. Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime.’[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such ‘dreaming’ poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several recently written poems, and among them the ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say, ‘Here is the record of my love and my despair,’ for on this one subject he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four.

‘Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said “score” without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and a half apiece—a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.’ This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but I dare say the author of Hamlet made such jests about it. Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways Keats’s insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of ‘nonsense,’ rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing ‘three witty people, all distinct in their excellence’; and he goes on:

I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence—A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt—he ought to be wiped up.

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much out of the tune of Falstaff: ‘C, they say, is not his mother’s true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to sell.’[13]