C. Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, ‘Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.’ I was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him, when Mr Green said, ‘Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the poet.’ ‘Heavens!’ said I, ‘when I shook him by the hand there was death!’ This was about two years before he died.
F. But what was it?
C. I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]
In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth’s more childishly worded poems and ballads of humble life such as The Idiot Boy and Alice Fell. The announcement of his forthcoming piece, Peter Bell, now drew from John Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to his credit considering his and Wordsworth’s recent estrangement. Keats copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds’s request he has been writing of this skit for the Examiner, taking care to turn it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. ‘You will call it a little politic,’ he says to his brother—‘seeing I keep clear of all parties—I say something for and against both parties—and suit it to the tone of the Examiner—I mean to say I do not unsuit it—and I believe I think what I say—I am sure I do—I and my conscience are in luck to-day—which is an excellent thing.’
At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:—‘I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely’: and again to the same on April 15, ‘I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.’ To his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, ‘so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing—but I must turn over a new leaf.’ Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:—
| Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you. |
The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats’s mind?
| True Fame is ever liken’d to our shade, He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made To overtake her; who so takes his wing, Regardless of her, she’ll be following: Her true proprieties she thus discovers, ‘Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.’[10] |
Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the Fairies of the Four Elements, and as though it were of no greater value, that masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of Love, La Belle Dame sans Merci. This title had already been haunting Keats’s imagination when he wrote the Eve of St Agnes. He calls by it the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline. It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats’s new poem has nothing in common with the French or the Chaucerian Belle Dame. The form, the poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts—with suchlike imagery he invests—all the famine and fever of his private passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from William Browne, ‘Let no bird sing,’ and another from Wordsworth, ‘Her eyes are wild,’ into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be. The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four, whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness—but let us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its magic:—