How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him bleeding to the ground!
But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe—the very philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy? Yes—but a Joy drugged from its first pouring forth. We follow. We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!
What an exultant hymn that is,—the one in honour of Pan, which comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spaces of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb vegetable expectancy of young tree-trunks is roused by it into sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood the torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author of Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less "vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days, had he never met "that girl."
"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking, it has a tender yearning pity in it, a gentle melancholy brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.
St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has a beauty so poignant, so sensuously unearthly, that one dare not quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such a spell!
The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"—Miltonian, and yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew—madden the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find him—there we await him—the poet of the tragedy of bodily craving, transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the psychic plane!
For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac—his death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her, this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot "was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild," will know—and only they—the meaning of "the starved lips, through the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing," borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoed wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics, been conveyed to my reader?
But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist. Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such things produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them, every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of sweet Pain!
Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?
Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those "charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam." We may linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze, awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town, "emptied of its folks"—We may "glut our sorrow on the morning rose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies." We may "imprison our mistress's soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes." We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy "oozings" of the rich year's vintage. But across all these things lies, like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart's blood, the knowledge of what it means to have been able to turn all this into poetry!