| Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails. |
Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels supporting the banquet-hall roof the poet strikes life:—
| The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts.[8] |
The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls—
| Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings,— |
a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature’s blazonry.[9] In the last line of the same stanza—
| A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings, |
—the word ‘blush’ makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden’s chamber on thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the separate hues of painted glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it, but fuses them into a kind of neutral or indiscriminate opaline shimmer. Let us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. If any reader wishes to realise how the genius of Elizabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and how much enriched and enhanced, after two hundred years, let him compare all this scene of Madeline’s unrobing with the passage from Brown’s Britannia’s Pastorals which was probably in his memory when he wrote it (see above, p. 98).
When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the wearer,—‘Her warmèd jewels.’ When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered—
| From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon. |