A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt’s release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman’s enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:—‘To one who has been long in city pent’ (this opening comes with only the change of a word from Paradise Lost), ‘O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,’ ‘As late I rambled in the happy fields.’ There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude:—
| Let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. |
Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:—‘Give me a golden pen,’ ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,’ ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’: to which may be added the sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket written in Hunt’s house and in friendly competition with him.
A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea):—
| The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears, Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been. |
Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed ‘As from the darkening gloom a silver dove’ he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,[4] seem not to have been written (as that on the Floure and the Lefe certainly was not) until the book was passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out ‘After dark vapours’ and ‘Who loves to peer,’ and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie’s coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject. ‘Tassie’s gems’ were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova.[5] The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.
| Come hither all sweet maidens soberly, Down-looking aye, and with a chasten’d light Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white, And meekly let your fair hands joined be, As if so gentle that ye could not see, Untouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright, Sinking away to his young spirit’s night,— Sinking bewilder’d ‘mid the dreary sea: ’Tis young Leander toiling to his death; Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile. O horrid dream! see how his body dips Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile: He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath![6] |
More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams) in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely on Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals. Keats, as has been said, was already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following motto chosen from Browne’s work Keats seems to put the group of Epistles in his volume under that poet’s particular patronage:—
| Among the rest a shepheard (though but young Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill. |