[2] The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word ‘unseam.’ The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it in Macbeth, in a sufficiently different sense and context—
| ‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’ |
The vision in Keats’s mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.
[3] ‘All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural scenery’ (Baldwin’s Pantheon, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry.
[4] Two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads. Now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke’s agent in the purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must have seen them in Haydon’s company some time in the winter of 1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other passages of Endymion. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see plate opposite.
CHAPTER VIII
DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION OF GEORGE KEATS
Hampstead again: stage criticism—Hazlitt’s lectures—Life at Well Walk—Meeting with Wordsworth—The ‘immortal dinner’—Lamb forgets himself—More of Wordsworth—A happy evening—Wordsworth on Bacchus—Disillusion and impatience—Winter letters—Maxims and reflections—Quarrels among friends—Haydon, Hunt and Shelley—A prolific February—Rants and sonnets—A haunting memory—Six weeks at Teignmouth—Soft weather and soft men—Isabella or the Pot of Basil—Rich correspondence—Epistle to Reynolds—Thirst for knowledge—Need of experience—The two chambers of thought—Summer plans—Preface to Endymion—A family break-up—To Scotland with Brown.