Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

by Sidney Colvin

No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt’s statement that this description was suggested by a summer’s day when he stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his imagination to the right taking-off place—to plant it, so to speak, on the right spring-board—from which to start on its flight through a whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest vein of Keats’s lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of Enid) how the minnows would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and corresponding moods of poetry,—

In the calm grandeur of a sober line, We see the waving of the mountain pine; And when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,—

and so forth. And then, having in his mind’s eye, as I should guess, some of the mythological prints from Hunt’s portfolios, he asks what moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo, and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,—and for the remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth’s invention are lovely:—

He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus’ top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian’s temple; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling. But though her face was clear as infant’s eyes, Though she stood smiling o’er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate: So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.

Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences diffused on that night about the world:—

The breezes were ethereal and pure, And crept through half-closed lattices to cure The languid sick; it cool’d their fever’d sleep, And soothed them into slumbers full and deep. Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: And springing up, they met the wondering sight Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, And on their placid foreheads part the hair. Young men and maidens at each other gaz’d With hands held back, and motionless, amaz’d To see the brightness in each other’s eyes.

Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, ‘Was there a poet born?’ which he intended that his next year’s work should answer.

In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall find it carried later on, especially in Endymion. The abstract nouns expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination, on the model of those in Chapman’s Hymn to Pan, increase in number, and we get the ‘quaint mossiness of aged roots,’ the ‘hurrying freshnesses’ of a stream running over gravel, the ‘pure deliciousness’ of the Endymion story, the ‘pillow silkiness’ of clouds, the ‘blue cragginess’ of other clouds, and the ‘widenesses’ of the ocean of poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne’s ‘roundly form’ in his mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective ‘boundly’ for ‘bounden.’ In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than Browne: at least in Sleep and Poetry the double endings no longer come in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting its noun follow at the beginning of the next,—‘the high | Imagination,’—‘the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.’ The reader will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages in Sleep and Poetry where these things occur with the Endymion passage he will find quoted later on from the Faithful Shepherdess (p. 168).

As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats’s first volume, enough has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it. That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the Excursion, which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous passage in the fourth book of The Excursion where Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape:—