From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"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!"

The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche' asserts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun (as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair attitude!') at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make a forcible close.

(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed. The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'—the bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the skull of bald Medusa'—in order to make the genuine Melancholy more effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the composition of Dürer's great drawing may have something to do with this. Dürer did surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he did evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too, that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his delicate figure of:

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu…"—

Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:—

"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."

So prone was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true insight into human passion. The worst trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'—an opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it betrayed him also into occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost rival Leigh Hunt's—

"The two divinest things the world has got—
A lovely woman in a rural spot."