John Keats - The Complete Poems of John Keats

— the pleasant flow

Of words on opening a portfolio.

A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to mention briefly or not at all, — how such and such a descriptive phrase in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation of the Grecian Urn.

On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the Examiner on ‘Young Poets,’ in which the names of Shelley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the Cricket:— ‘The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line: —

The poetry of earth is never dead.

“Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines: —

On a lone winter morning, when the frost

Hath wrought a silence —

“Ah that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!” And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season’s suspension and torpidity.’ The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another’s company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves ‘after the manner of the elder bards.’ Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in — conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, ‘in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,’ and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted. Here are Hunt’s pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed: —

A crown of ivy! I submit my head

To the young hand that gives it, — young, ’tis true,

But with a right, for ’tis a poet’s too.

How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread

With their broad angles, like a nodding shed

Over both eyes! and how complete and new,

As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew

My sense with freshness, — Fancy’s rustling bed!

Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes

Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,

And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old

Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes, —

And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,

Bacchus, — whose bride has of his hand fast hold.

It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,

Thus to be topped with leaves; — to have a sense

Of honour-shaded thought, — an influence

As from great Nature’s fingers, and be twined

With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,

As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence

A head that bows to her benevolence,

Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.

’Tis what’s within us crowned. And kind and great

Are all the conquering wishes it inspires, —

Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,

Love of love’s self, and ardour for a state

Of natural good befitting such desires,

Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest: —

ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet

Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain

Into a delphic labyrinth — I would fain

Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt

I owe to the kind poet who has set

Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.

Two bending laurel sprigs— ’tis nearly pain

To be conscious of such a coronet.

Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises

Gorgeous as I would have it — only I see

A trampling down of what the world most prizes,

Turbans and crowns and blank regality;

And then I run into most wild surmises

Of all the many glories that may be.

TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth

More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?

Haply a halo round the moon — a glee

Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;

And haply you will say the dewy birth

Of morning roses — ripplings tenderly

Spread by the halcyon’s breast upon the sea —

But these comparisons are nothing worth.

Then there is nothing in the world so fair?

The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?

Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?

No, none of these can from my favourite bear

Away the palm — yet shall it ever pay

Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats’ mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of the third book of Endymion, —

There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men

With most prevailing tinsel —

and in its fifth a repetition of the ‘wild surmise’ phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of Sleep and Poetry, Keats’ chief venture in verse this winter.

Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt’s, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo: —

God of the golden bow,

And of the golden lyre,

And of the golden hair,

And of the golden fire,

Charioteer

Of the patient year,

Where — where slept thine ire,

When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,

Thy laurel, thy glory,

The light of thy story,

Or was I a worm — too low crawling, for death?

O Delphic Apollo!

And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of ‘A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.’