| Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store. |
[16] The Musée Napoléon is a set of four volumes illustrating with outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats’s original tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press edition of Keats’s poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating Keats’s imagination. From that point of view the nearest approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by Paul Wolters, in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, Band xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruling out Roman representations of the Suovetaurilia such as the fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats’s source by the late Mr A. S. Murray and reproduced in The Odes of Keats, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).
| Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing) I do not envy thy sweet carolling, But do admire thee each even and morrow Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow. |
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819.—II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS
Snatches expressive of moods—Ode to Maia—Hyperion: its scheme and scale—Sources: Homer and Hesiod—Pierre Ronsard—Miltonisms—Voices of the Titans—A match and no match for Milton—A great beginning—Question as to sequel—Difficulties and a suggestion—The scheme abandoned—The Eve of St Mark—Chaucer and Morris—Judgement of Rossetti—Dissent of W. B. Scott—The solution—Keats as dramatist—Otho and King Stephen—The Cap and Bells—Why a failure—Flashes of Beauty—Recast of Hyperion—Its leading ideas—Their history in Keats’s mind—Preamble: another feast of fruits—The sanctuary—The admonition—The monitress—The attempt breaks off.
Much of our clearest insight into Keats’s mind and genius is gained from the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood, are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge. Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:—