The sonnet—
“O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell,”
is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared in The Examiner for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line—
“How many bards gild the lapses of time”
was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed “unhesitating and prompt admiration” of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith, who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as “a well-condensed expression” the contorted and inefficient line—
“That distance of recognizance bereaves,”
i.e. [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation.
“Sleep and Poetry” is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman’s Homer) by far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in Leigh Hunt’s cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed had on one occasion been made up for Keats’s convenience, and the latter lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room. Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of poetry—
“’Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm,”
there are several passages interesting as showing Keats’s enthusiasm for the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept—