Dear Milnes,
On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks’ absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character—fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his Cenci, nor united so many powers of the mind as Southey in Kehama—but there is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.—”
[p. 152], note 1. I think there is no doubt that Hyperion was begun by Keats beside his brother’s sickbed in September or October 1818, and that it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of ‘plunging into abstract images,’ and finding a ‘feverous relief’ in the ‘abstractions’ of poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as the translation of Ronsard’s sonnet, Nature ornant Cassandre, which is the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after Tom’s death in December—“It was then he wrote Hyperion”; but these words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to the poem by name, and says he has been ‘going on a little’ with it: and on the 14th of February, 1819, says ‘I have not gone on with Hyperion.’ During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the Odes, and whether he at the same time wrote any more of Hyperion we cannot tell. It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, Works, vol. II. p. 143) that “it contains 2 books and ½—(about 900 lines in all):” the actual length of the piece as published being 883 lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after nearly a year’s interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him in a letter from Winchester in August or September, “I have also been writing parts of my Hyperion,” this must not be taken as meaning that he has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing them,—like Isabella and the Eve of St Agnes, which he mentions at the same time,—since the date of his last letter.
[p. 164], note 1. The version of The Eve of St Agnes given in Woodhouse MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see [p. 133]). The readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton Forman (Works, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, from Woodhouse’s transcript, the following table of the changes in those stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:—
Stanza I.: line 1, for “chill” stood “cold”: line 4, for “was” stood “were”: line 7, for “from” stood “in”: line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), for “prayer” stood “prayers”. Stanza III.: line 7, for “went” stood “turn’d”: line 8, for “Rough” stood “Black”. After stanza III. stood the following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed.
4.
But there are ears may hear sweet melodies,
And there are eyes to brighten festivals,
And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies,
And many a lip that for the red wine calls—
Follow, then follow to the illumined halls,
Follow me youth—and leave the eremite—
Give him a tear—then trophied bannerals
And many a brilliant tasseling of light
Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night.
Stanza V.; line 1, for “revelry” stood “revellers”: lines 3-5, for—
“Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
The brain new-stuff’d in youth with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,”—
stood the following:—
“Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs,
The muse should never make the spirit gay;
Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away.”