Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his brother in the same metre, Fancy. He calls it a rondeau, again rather at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in Endymion a roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line refrain—
| But every poet, born to stray, Still feeds upon the far-away. |
The opening lines run,—
| Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then? |
The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered repetition of its opening couplet,—
| Let the winged Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home. |
I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this poem from the fine passage in Fuller’s Holy State quoted by Lamb in his brief ‘Specimens’ of that author[2]:—
Fancy.—It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul ... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.
At any rate Keats’s poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls The Castle Builder, and again the piece beginning ‘Welcome joy and welcome sorrow,’ to which there has been posthumously given the title A Song of Opposites. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem, Fancy, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the passage quoted above, puts in such places words like ‘sweet,’ ‘rain,’ ‘still,’ ‘cage,’ ‘dart,’ ‘lipp’d.’