he with a masterly hand portrays autumn as a person:
"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,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers."
It is impossible for Keats to name any conception or any thought without at once proceeding to represent it in a corporeal, plastic form. His numerous allegories have the same life and fire as if they were executed in stone by the best Italian artists of the sixteenth century. He says of Melancholy:
"She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
He says of Poetry:
"A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme power;
'Tis might half-slumb'ring on its own right arm."
We see the scope of Keats's poetic powers steadily increasing. His point of departure, especially in some of the most beautiful of his smaller poems (for example, the Ode to the Nightingale), is the description of a purely physical condition, such as weariness, nervousness, thirst, languor, the drowsiness produced by opium. Upon this background of sensitiveness the sensuous pictures rise, distinct and round, like the reliefs upon a shield. The word "welded" comes involuntarily to one's lips when one thinks of Keats's pictures. There is something firm and finished about them, as if they were welded on a metal plate.
Observe how the figures rise gradually into relief in the following stanzas, the first and third of the beautiful Ode to Indolence:
"One morn before me were three figures seen
With bowed necks and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepped serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;
They passed 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 green shades return,
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A third time passed they by, and, passing, turned
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burned
And ached 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 heaped upon her, maiden most unmeek,—
I knew to be my demon, Poesy."
But not until he wrote the two completed books of Hyperion did Keats attain to absolute mastery over his artistic material, and realise the ideal of sensuous plasticity which was ever before his eyes. In this work the relief has been superseded by the statue; and they are statues, these, which impress us with the feeling that Michael Angelo's chisel must have played a part in their production. Granted that the influence of Milton is clearly perceptible—there is more than Milton here. The nature of the subject demanded the colossal.