Keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with which he has taken even moderate pains. That being so, it is remarkable that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour, till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the ‘gardener Fancy,’ his mind enthralled by the imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and rich, vehemently iterated assonances towards the close:—
| A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, With breeding flowers, will never breed the same; And thither will I bring all soft delights That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at nights, To let the warm Love in! |
The four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated uniformly or with slight variations. Throughout them all each stanza is of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three stresses instead of five.
Let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the poet by works of Greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. In the Ode on Indolence Keats merely revives his memory of a special type of Greek marble urn where draped figures of women, Seasons, it may be, or priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn Bacchus, or priest in the god’s guise (see Plate viii, p. 342),—he merely evokes this memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages have seemed in a day-dream to pass before him and re-pass and again re-pass, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an urn may be made to do by turning it round. From the ‘man and two women’ of the March letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely Love, Ambition, and that ‘maiden most unmeek,’ his ‘demon Poesy,’ he for a moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. The longing passes, and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy for him—
| so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence. |
They come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart without a tear.
Keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or else too intimately personal. But writing to Miss Jeffrey a few weeks after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed writing this year. It is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous March. It contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses—shall we say lazinesses—in the execution, as where the need for rimes to ‘noons’ and ‘indolence’ prompts the all-too commonplace prayer—
| That I may never know how change the moons, Or hear the voice of busy common-sense; |
or where, thinking contemptuously of the old ‘intercoronation’ days with Leigh Hunt, he declines, in truly Cockney rime, to raise his head from the flowery grass in order to be fed with praise and become ‘a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.’
In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is no single or actually existing specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly analyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a ‘leaf-fringed legend’ Keats will have remembered that the necks and shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found, will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of which in the Musée Napoléon there actually exists a tracing by his hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the tumult and ‘wild ecstasy’ of his imagined frieze, the ‘pipes and timbrels,’ the ‘mad pursuit,’ he will have had store of visions ready in his mind, from the Bacchanal pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the