Life of John Keats Part 31

The four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated uniformly or with slight variations. Throughout them all each stanza is of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three stresses instead of five.

Let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the poet by works of Greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. In the _Ode on Indolence_ Keats merely revives his memory of a special type of Greek marble urn where draped figures of women, Seasons, it may be, or priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn Bacchus, or priest in the G.o.d's guise (see Plate viii, p. 342),--he merely evokes this memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages have seemed in a day-dream to pa.s.s before him and re-pa.s.s and again re-pa.s.s, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an urn may be made to do by turning it round. From the 'man and two women'

of the March letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely Love, Ambition, and that 'maiden most unmeek,' his 'demon Poesy,' he for a moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. The longing pa.s.ses, and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy for him--

so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence.

They come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart without a tear.

Keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or else too intimately personal. But writing to Miss Jeffrey a few weeks after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed writing this year. It is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous March. It contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses--shall we say lazinesses--in the execution, as where the need for rimes to 'noons' and 'indolence' prompts the all-too commonplace prayer--

That I may never know how change the moons, Or hear the voice of busy common-sense;

or where, thinking contemptuously of the old 'intercoronation' days with Leigh Hunt, he declines, in truly c.o.c.kney rime, to raise his head from the flowery _gra.s.s_ in order to be fed with praise and become 'a pet-lamb in a sentimental _farce_.'

In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It is no single or actually existing specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly a.n.a.lyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a 'leaf-fringed legend' Keats will have remembered that the necks and shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found, will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of which in the _Musee Napoleon_ there actually exists a tracing by his hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in his mind, from the Baccha.n.a.l pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the

--heifer lowing at the skies And all her silken flanks in garlands drest,

as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from Claude's 'Sacrifice to Apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial processions in the Parthenon frieze.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL XI

THE SOSIBIOS VASE

PROFILE AND FRIEZE: FROM ENGRAVINGS IN THE MUSeE NAPOLEON]

In the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human scenes of ancient custom and wors.h.i.+p lay behind them, and on the other hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men or G.o.ds are these, what maidens loth?' etc. The second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. The thought thrown by Leonardo da Vinci into a single line--'Cosa bella mortal pa.s.sa e non d'arte'--and expanded by Wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'Praised be the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, 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 pa.s.sion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of pictures,--

What little town by river or sea sh.o.r.e, Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

In the answering lines of the sestet--

And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--

in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and lightly s.h.i.+fted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,--

in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--

thus re-a.s.serting his old doctrine, 'What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of Keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must cleave.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. XII

'What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy'

A. FROM THE TOWNLY VASE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

B. FROM THE BORGHESE VASE IN THE LOUVRE]

Let us turn now to the second pair--for as such I regard them--of odes written in May-time, those _To a Nightingale_ and _On Melancholy_. Like the _Ode on Indolence_, the nightingale ode begins with the confession of a mood of 'drowsy numbness,' but this time one deeper and nearer to pain and heartache. Then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as Mr Bridges has suggested, there may be here an under-reminiscence from William Browne[17]), but to excess of happiness in it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that Keats thus invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language, of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in dreams. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. While thus rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. The nightingale would not cease to sing--and by this time, though he calls her 'immortal bird,' what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. So thinking, he contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the generations of individual men and women who have listened to it. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes.

Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a pa.s.sage like that in the fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. Let him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the _Ode on Melancholy_.

The music of the word--its hundred a.s.sociations derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among them no doubt Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, with the beautiful song from Fletcher's _Nice Valour_ which inspired them--his recent familiarity with Burton's _Anatomy_, including those pithy stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these things will have worked together with Keats's own haunting and deepest mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme, Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, 'I will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.' Now that in May the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier pa.s.sages in his letters to Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the attributes, it will be remembered, which he a.s.signs to his enchantress _Lamia_ is--

a sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.

In no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impa.s.sioned experience that he writes. The real melancholy, he insists, is not that which belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. Having written two stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending magnificently--

Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

One more ode remains, written in a different key and after a lapse of some four months, during which Keats had been away in the country, quieted by absence from the object of his pa.s.sion and working diligently at _Otho the Great_ and _Lamia._ This is the ode _To Autumn_. He was alone at Winchester, rejoicing in perfect September weather and in a mood more serene and contented than he had known for long or was ever to know again. 'How beautiful the season is now,' he writes to Reynolds, 'how fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much as now--aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm.

This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.'

The vein in which he composed is one of simple objectivity, very different from the pa.s.sionate and complex phases of introspective thought and feeling which inspired the spring odes. The result is the most Greek thing, except the fragment _To Maia_, which Keats ever wrote.

It opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the reader as the odes _To a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, or _To Melancholy_, but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of them. In the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and ease. Keats himself has hardly anywhere else written with so fine a subtlety of nature-observation. Students of form will notice a slight deviation from that of the spring odes, by which the second member of the stanza is now a septet instead of a sestet, one of its rimes being repeated three times instead of twice.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel sh.e.l.ls With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Had Keats been destined to know health and peace of mind, who can guess how much more work in this vein and of this quality the world might have owed to him?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet's residence_: the third poem in _Memorials of a Tour in Scotland_.

[2] First printed in Hunt's _Reflector_ and reprinted in the two-volume edition of Lamb's works published in 1818.

[3] A copy of Fairfax's Ta.s.so appears in the list of books left by Keats at his death.

[4] This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman, _Complete Works of J.K._, ii. p. 41, footnote.

[5] I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the identical pa.s.sage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the whole _Lamia_ volume.

[6] That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats's books.

[7] See article by H. n.o.ble M'Cracken in _Philological Journal_ of the Chicago University, 1908. The romance of _Floire and Blancheflor_, which Boccaccio in the _Filocolo_ expands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the 'Admiral of Babylon,' who desires to marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another's arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George Ellis in his _Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance_ (1806).

But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in the _Filocolo_ to which Keats's poem runs most closely parallel.

These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio's own invention and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the _Filocolo_ itself.