in these lines we find that the poet’s imagination has suddenly and lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,—
| in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— |
thus re-asserting his old doctrine, ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth’; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist—at least to one of Keats’s temper—the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must cleave.
| Pl. XII |
| ‘What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy’ A. FROM THE TOWNLY VASE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM B. FROM THE BORGHESE VASE IN THE LOUVRE |
Let us turn now to the second pair—for as such I regard them—of odes written in May-time, those To a Nightingale and On Melancholy. Like the Ode on Indolence, the nightingale ode begins with the confession of a mood of ‘drowsy numbness,’ but this time one deeper and nearer to pain and heartache. Then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as Mr Bridges has suggested, there may be here an under-reminiscence from William Browne[17]), but to excess of happiness in it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that Keats thus invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage—a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language, of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in dreams. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind’s tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bacchus,—Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. While thus rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. The nightingale would not cease to sing—and by this time, though he calls her ‘immortal bird,’ what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. So thinking, he contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the generations of individual men and women who have listened to it. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words ‘in faery lands forlorn’: and then, catching up his own last word, ‘forlorn,’ with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes.
Throughout this ode Keats’s genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man’s estate on earth, and conjecturing in the ‘embalmed darkness’ the divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of the imagined forest,—to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader’s power to perceive it for himself. Let him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English poetry should, ‘to its depths,’ and let us go on to the last product, as I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the Ode on Melancholy.
The music of the word—its hundred associations derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped—foremost among them no doubt Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, with the beautiful song from Fletcher’s Nice Valour which inspired them—his recent familiarity with Burton’s Anatomy, including those pithy stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it—all these things will have worked together with Keats’s own haunting and deepest mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme, Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, ‘I will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.’ Now that in May the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is—
| a sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain. |
In no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impassioned experience that he writes. The real melancholy, he insists, is not that which belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. Having written two stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending magnificently—