| In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne’er remember Their green felicity: The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne’er remember Apollo’s summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would ‘twere so with many A gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any Writh’d not at passed joy? The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme.[9] |
Keats’s model in this instance is a song from Dryden’s Spanish Fryar, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey’s shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:—
| Farewell ungrateful Traitor, Farewell my perjured swain, Let never injured creature Believe a man again. The pleasure of possessing Surpasses all expressing, But ’tis too short a blessing, And Love too long a pain. |
Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,—do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the Garden of Proserpine?
But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats’s main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months’ task upon Endymion. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:—
| Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finish’d: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. |
The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the ‘drear-nighted December’ lyric:—
| The Carian No word return’d: both lovelorn, silent, wan, Into the vallies green together went. Far wandering, they were perforce content To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree; Nor at each other gaz’d, but heavily Por’d on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves. |