That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, And, wherever the beat of her unseen feet, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, And I laugh to see them whirl and flee Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,— Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, The volcanoes are dim, and the Stars reel and swim, From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof; The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of the Earth and Water, I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain, when, with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise, and unbuild it again. LESSON 64. JOHN KEATS. "Keats lies near Shelley, cut off like him ere his genius ripened; not so great, but possessing perhaps greater possibilities of greatness; not so ideal, but for that very reason closer in his grasp of nature than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different from Shelley-he had no care whatever for the great human questions which stirred Shelley; the present was entirely without interest to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement which the ideas of the Revolution in France had started in England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, finding nothing to move him in an age which had now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to Greek and medieval life to find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which has been called the literary poetry of England. His first subject, after some minor poems in 1817, was Endymion, 1818, his last Hyperion, 1820. These, along with Lamia, were poems of Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself like a Titanic torso, and in it the faults of Endymion are repaired and its promise fulfilled. Both are filled with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats, the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power; and, in the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially the artist, and the true father of the latest modern school of poetry. Not content with carrying us into Greek life, he took us back into medieval romance, and in this also he started a new type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this revival-Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes. Isabella is a version of Boccaccio's tale of the Pot of Basil; St. Agnes' Eve is, as far as I know, original; the former is purely medieval, the latter is tinged with the conventional mediævalism of Spenser. Both poems are however modern and individual. The overwrought daintiness of style, the pure sensuousness, the subtle flavor of feeling belong to no one but Keats. Their originality has caused much imitation of them, but they are too original for imitation. In smaller poems, such as the Ode to a Grecian Urn, the poem to Autumn, and some sonnets, he is perhaps at his very best. In these and in all, his painting of Nature is as close and as direct as Wordsworth's; less full of the imagination that links human thought to Nature, but more full of the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. His career was short; he had scarcely begun to write when death took him away from the loveliness he loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there he died almost alone. He lies not far from Shelley, near the pyramid of Caius Cestius." "Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, should be 'simple, sensuous, impassioned.' Keats, as a poet, is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is any thing else. The yearning passion for the Beautiful,' which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. In his last days Keats wrote, 'I have loved the principle of beauty in all things; and, if I had had time, I would have made myself remembered.' He has made himself remembered, and remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be; and he has done it by having 'loved the principle of beauty in all things.' For to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. And with beauty goes not only truth, joy goes with her also; and this too Keats saw and said. It is no small thing to have so loved the principle of beauty as to perceive the necessary relation of beauty with truth, and of both with joy. Let and hindered as he was, and with a short time and imperfect experience, by virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry that in one of the two great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, he ranks with Shakespeare. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. For the second great half of poetic interpretation, for that faculty of moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare, and is informed by him with the same power of beauty as his naturalistic interpretation, Keats was not ripe."-Matthew Arnold. BIBLIOGRAPHY. KEATS.-Milnes' Life, Letters, and Lit. Remains of; De Quincey's Essays; Howitt's Homes and Haunts of Brit. Poets; Ward's Anthology; Lowell's Among My Books, 2d Ser.; S. Phillips' Essays from the Times; Macmillan, Nov., 1860; At. Mo., v. 7, 1861; and 11, 1863; Temple Bar, July, 1873; Ecl, Mag., Feb., 1849; Gent's. Mag., Feb., 1873. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth! That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last, grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards. Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding, mossy ways I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen, and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath. Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vainTo thy high requiem become a sod. |