By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we know, some time during the period of watching by Tom’s sick-bed. After he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently. Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat trouble and his concern over Haydon’s affairs, which made him postpone a promised visit to Dilke’s relations in Hampshire from Christmas until mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bedhampton, the home of Dilke’s brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke’s father in Chichester, and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at Hyperion, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic quality to Paradise Lost. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the Eve of St Agnes, for its author merely ‘a little poem,’ for us a masterpiece aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.
No word of Keats’s own or of his friends prepares us for this new achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by ‘plunging into abstract images,’ were they images of primeval Greek gods and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of mediæval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time? Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about Boccaccio which resulted in Keats’s Isabella and Reynolds’s Garden of Florence and Ladye of Provence? We shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats’s treatment of the St Agnes’ Eve story, so that the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this story and not, as is commonly assumed, of Hyperion that he was thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from Oxford of the ‘new romance’ he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw much light on such questions when he tells us that ‘the subject was suggested by Mrs Jones.’ This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats. Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark’s day (April 25th), and so become the ‘only begetter’ of that remarkable fragment The Eve of St Mark, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.
Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of the Eve of St Mark, begun and broken off just at this time, may possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy, which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the first version, which has only lately become known, of the ‘Bright Star’ sonnet, and the ode To Fanny published posthumously by Lord Houghton. Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the moving waters,
| Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; |
the ode in the lines,
| I come, I see thee as thou standest there, Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5] |
Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in a strain of verse almost without fault:—
In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three months later, in the ode To a Nightingale, he speaks of having invoked Death by soft names ‘in many a musèd rhyme.’
Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls ‘The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,’ he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To his brother he merely says, ‘Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,’ while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so, packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him ‘a few common dancing steps,’—for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.