Life of John Keats

by William Michael Rossetti

And here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of Keats’s poetry. He is a master of imagination in verbal form: he gifts us with things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative impression. The imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the thought, as well as in its wording—as it is in the passage just quoted: sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought expands in the reader, who is made

“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest.”

From wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the expression, he rose into a height of verbal embodiment which has seldom been equalled and seldomer exceeded. His conception of poetry as an ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the Artist is that which marks him most strongly. As one of his own letters says, he “looks upon fine phrases like a lover.”

According to Mr. Swinburne, “the faultless force and profound subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals.” We may safely accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one: yet I should be inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as “faultless” and “absolute.” Beautiful as several of them are, I might hesitate to say that even one poem by Keats exhibits this his special characteristic in a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty of absolute quality. To the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word “taste.” He had done a great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he stands, with those few years denied. Unless perhaps in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Keats has not, I think, come nearer to perfection than in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is with some trepidation that I recur to this Ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged “faultless,” for in so doing I shall certainly lose the sympathy of some readers, and strain the patience of many. The question, however, seems to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it by, and so I persevere. The first point of weakness—excess which becomes weak in result—is a surfeit of mythological allusions: Lethe, Dryad (the nightingale is turned into a “light-wingèd Dryad of the trees”—which is as much as to say, a light-wingèd Oak-nymph of the trees), Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, the Queen-moon (the Queen-moon appears at first sight to be the classical Phœbe, who is here “clustered around by all her starry Fays,” spirits proper to a Northern mythology; but possibly Keats thought more of a Faery-queen than of Phœbe). Then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about the poet’s wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual commune with the nightingale. Some exquisite phrases in this passage have endeared it to all readers of Keats; yet I cannot but regard it as very foreign to the main subject-matter. Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale’s music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation. Taken in detail, to call wine “the true, the blushful Hippocrene”—the veritable fount of poetic inspiration—seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” is (though picturesque) trivial, in the same way as much of Keats’s earlier work. Far worse is the succeeding image, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”—i.e., not under the inspiration of wine: the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard-drawn chariot. Further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its associations, the coming musk-rose is described as “full of dewy wine”—an expression of very dubious appositeness: and the like may be said of “become a sod,” in the sense of “become a corpse—earth to earth.” The renowned address—

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down,”

seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a [palpable] fact that this address, according to its place in the context, is a logical solecism. While “Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies,” while the poet would “become a sod" to the requiem sung by the nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. But this antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment’s reflection. Man, as a race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations, as is the nightingale as a race: while the nightingale as an individual bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an individual. We have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. Here the term “deceiving elf,” applied to “the fancy,” sounds rather petty, and in the nature of a make-rhyme: but this may possibly be a prejudice.

Having thus—in the interest of my reader as a critical appraiser of poetry—burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” I shall quit that superb composition, and the whole quintett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my subject. The “Ode to Indolence,” and the fragment of an “Ode to Maia,” need not detain us; the former, however, is important as indicating a mood of mind—too vaguely open to the influences of the moment for either love, ambition, or poesy—to which we may well suppose that Keats was sufficiently prone. The few poems which remain to be mentioned were all printed posthumously.

There are four addresses to Fanny Brawne, dating perhaps from early till late in 1819; two of them are irregular lyrics, and two sonnets. The best of the four is the sonnet, “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,” which counts indeed among the better sonnets of Keats. Taken collectively, all four supply valuable evidence as to the poet’s love affair, confirmatory of what appears in his letters; they exhibit him quelled by the thought of his mistress and her charms, and jealous of her mixing in or enjoying the company of others.

Keats wrote some half-hundred of sonnets altogether, some of them among his very earliest and most trifling performances, others up to his latest period, including the last of all his compositions. Notwithstanding his marked growth in love of form, and his ultimate surprising power of expression—both being qualities peculiarly germane to this form of verse—his sonnets appear to me to be seldom masterly. A certain freakishness of disposition, and liability to be led astray by some point of detail into side-issues, mar the symmetry and concentration of his work. Perhaps the sonnet on “Chapman’s Homer,” early though it was, remains the best which he produced; it is at any rate pre-eminent in singleness of thought, illustrated by a definite and grand image. It has a true opening and a true climax, and a clear link of inventive association between the thing mentally signified in chief, and the modes of its concrete presentment. In points of this kind Keats is seldom equally happy in his other sonnets; sometimes not happy at all, but distinctly at fault. There is a second Homeric sonnet, “Standing aloof in giant ignorance” (1818), which contains one line which has been very highly praised,

“There is a budding morrow in midnight:”