Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the Ode to Psyche. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale and To Melancholy. The Ode to Psyche has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion of complete poetic idleness,—‘the idle fever of two months without any fruit,’—lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the Ode to Psyche represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration—inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative—and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode On Indolence, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of ‘summer indolence’ and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction. But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind.
The ode On a Grecian Urn is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that On Indolence, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, ‘in his low, tremulous under-tone,’ as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon’s suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon’s in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the Annals of the Fine Arts, during the following July. For the date of the Ode on Melancholy the clues are less definite. Burton’s Anatomy has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats’s letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.
Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such small remainder of his grandmother’s legacy as was still unexpended. A lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none—‘he did not,’ says Keats, ‘seem to care much about it, but let me go without my money almost with nonchalance.’ This was too much even for Keats’s patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the other’s interests and endured his exhortations as kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings’s bequest, there was a not inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to have been no thought of John’s anticipating his reversionary share. Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]
In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea, which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss Jeffrey’s of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship the year before:—
Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the finest thing in the world to strengthen them—to be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations of the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster’d them after their deaths. They have in general been trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero’s Horses as Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters—Ben Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew him—For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for example’s sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.
The reader will have noticed in the phrase about ‘versifying Pet-lamb’ a repetition from this very ode On Indolence. Here is another confidence imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and disposition:—
I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a fly—my troubles were all of the Imagination—My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must buffet it—I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight—I must choose between despair and Energy—I choose the latter though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once thought was impossible—
| ‘Nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.’ |
I once thought this a Melancholist’s dream.
His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain, he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend’s genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats’s future than affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with him. In the end the Devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. ‘I have given up the idea of the Indiaman’, Keats writes to his young sister on June 9; ‘I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to his proposal.’