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VIII

JOHN KEATS

(1795-1821)

S the adjective "ethereal' seems to catch the keynote of Shelley, the noun "loveliness seems to represent Keats.

Indeed, Matthew Arnold says:

"No one else in poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness."

Burns wrote of love, Wordsworth of nature, Byron of himself and his stormy life, in terms of beauty. But Keats paid his adoration to beauty itself, not merely beauty of form, and color, and odor, but innate and universal loveliness.

"The truth is," says Matthew Arnold, "that 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. It is, as he again says, 'the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things.' 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, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare."

Mr. Mabie says that in his famous sonnet on Chapman's Homer,

"Keats struck for the first time that rich and mellow note, resonant of a beauty deeper even than its own magical cadence, heard for the first time in English poetry. The sonnet has an amplitude of serene beauty which makes it the fitting prelude of Keats's later works. 'The

Eve of St. Agnes' is a vision of beauty, deep, rich, and glowing as one of those dyed windows in which the heart of the Middle Ages still burns. The beauty of his work has by strange lack of insight been taken as evidence of its defect in range and depth. It is not beauty of form and color alone which gives the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and the ode 'To Autumn' their changeless spell; it is that interior beauty of which Keats was thinking when he wrote those profound lines, the very essence of his creed: Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' The ode' To Autumn' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes' are beautiful to the very heart; they are not clothed with beauty; they are beauty itself."

...

Keats died at twenty-four, with scarcely more of happiness for the stableman's son than was vouchsafed to Burns, the Scotch farmer. “Oh, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers," exclaimed Keats, "then might I hope-but despair is forced upon me as a habit."

Keats, even more than Shelley, is a poet's poet; and perhaps the excessive enthusiasm of poets and lovers of poets, the sorrow at his early death, and the common feeling that we should judge him by his promise rather than by his fulfilment, have caused even so eminent a critic as Matthew

Arnold to pass lightly over the almost total lack in Keats of that dramatic human sympathy which is so perfect in Shakespeare and which prevents any real comparison of the two. It is said that Keats is the almost perfect modern embodiment of the Greek conception of beauty, though, curiously enough, he knew not a word of Greek. That was unnecessary, and no doubt Keats must unite with Milton in preserving for us the excellence of the classics.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme :
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone :
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal― yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth !
O, for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

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 gray 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,
Cluster'd 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,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.