Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”
The poets of America have not been slow to recognize the charm and power of Keats. Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell paid homage to him in their verse. Lanier inscribed to his memory a poem called “Clover.” Gilder wrote two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” Robert Underwood Johnson has a lovely lyric on “The Name Writ in Water.”
But I find an even deeper and larger tribute to his influence in the features of resemblance to his manner and spirit which flash out here and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in the poetry of our New World. Emerson was so unlike Keats in his intellectual constitution as to make all contact between them appear improbable, if not impossible. Yet no one can read Emerson’s “May-Day,” and Keats’ exquisitely truthful and imaginative lines on “Fancy,” one after the other, without feeling that the two poems are very near of kin. Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany” has caught, not only the measure, but also the tone and the diction of “Isabella.” The famous introduction to “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” with its often quoted line,
“What is so rare as a day in June?”
finds a parallel in the opening verses of “Sleep and Poetry”—
“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?”
Lowell’s “Endymion,” which he calls “a mystical comment on Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love,’” is full of echoes from Keats, like this:
“My day began not till the twilight fell
And lo! in ether from heaven’s sweetest well
The new moon swam, divinely isolate