Once, writing to Reynolds, he resumes his habit of a year and a half earlier, and casts his fancies and reflections into rime. Beginning playfully, he tells of an odd jumble of incongruous images that had crossed his brain, a kind of experience expressed by him elsewhere in various strains of verse, e.g. the finished poem Fancy and the careless lines beginning ‘Welcome Joy, and welcome Sorrow.’ He supposes that some people are not subject to such freaks of the mind’s eye, but have it consistently haunted by fine things such as he next proceeds to conjure up from memory,—
| Some Titian colours touch’d into real life,— The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows, The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows; A white sail shows above the green-head cliff, Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff; The mariners join hymn with those on land. |
There exists no such picture of a sacrifice by Titian, and what Keats was thinking of, I feel sure, was the noble ‘Sacrifice to Apollo’ by Claude from the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British Institution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to Titian’s Europa from Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked deeply on his mind. To memory of it is probably due that magic vision of a little town emptied of its folk on a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in the ode on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an altar in front of a temple of Apollo, and about the altar a group including king and priest and a young man holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with baskets and offerings coming up from behind the temple; and to the left tall trees with a priest leading in another victim by the horns, and a woman with a jar bringing in libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats; a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a sea-bay partly encircled by mountains which close the view, and on the edge of the bay the tower and roofs of a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of this Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the famous ‘Enchanted Castle,’ which he partly mixes up with it, and partly transforms by fantasy into something quite different from what it really is. He forgets the one human figure in the foreground, describes figures and features of the landscape which are not there, and remembering that the architecture combines ancient Roman with mediæval castellated and later Palladian elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and associations which in a more careless fashion almost remind one of those invented by Pope for his Temple of Fame. (A year later, all this effervescence of the imagination about the picture had subsided, and the distilled and concentrated essence of its romance was expressed—so at least I conceive—in the famous ‘magic casement’ phrase at the end of the Nightingale ode).[7]
| Pl. VI |
| A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE |
From this play of fancy about two half-remembered pictures Keats turns suddenly to reflections, which he would like to banish but cannot, on the ‘eternal fierce destruction’ which is part of nature’s law:—
| But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone. Still am I sick of it, and tho’, to-day, I’ve gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, Still do I that most fierce destruction see, The Shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at pounce,— The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, Ravening a worm,—Away, ye horrid moods! Moods of one’s mind! |
The letters of this date should be read and re-read by all who want to get to the centre of Keats’s mind or to hold a key to the understanding of his deepest poetry. The richest of them all is that in which he sends the fragments of an ode to Maia written on May day with the (alas! unfulfilled) promise to finish it ‘in good time.’ The same letter contains the re-assertion of a purpose declared in a letter of a week before to Mr Taylor in the phrases, ‘I find I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and thought. I will pursue it.’ The mood of the verses interpreting the song of the thrush a few weeks earlier has passed, the reader will note, clean out of the poet’s mind. To Reynolds his words are:—
An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people—it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered creature—in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear.
Let it never be forgotten that ‘sensations’ contrasted with ‘thoughts’ mean for Keats not pleasures and experiences of the senses as opposed to those of the mind, but direct intuitions of the imagination as opposed to deliberate processes of the understanding; and that by ‘philosophy’ he does not mean metaphysics but knowledge and the fruits of reading generally.