The Life and Times of John Keats: Complete Personal letters & Two Extensive Biographies. John Keats
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own account of the matter, as given about ten years after the event in his volume, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries:
To Mr Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to write verses of an evening on a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer’s rain at our window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time.
Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer at all, but only after Keats’ return from his holiday at the end of September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June. Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of the next few months. The ‘happy fields’ where he had been rambling when he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt Hunt’s statement that the ‘little hill’ from which Keats drank the summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem I stood tiptoe, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that it was not until after Keats’ return from his summer holiday that the acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find subsisting by the autumn.
For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy of life and happiness of anticipation as would be natural in one who had lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies. To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of youthful modesty, why he has hitherto been shy of addressing any of his own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt passage of autobiography, to declare all he has owed to that friend’s guidance and encouragement.
Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown
Slowly, or rapidly — unwilling still
For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.
Nor should I now, but that I’ve known you long;
That you first taught me all the sweets of song:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o’er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness,
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slenderness.
Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax and then dying proudly?
Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,
Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?
Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,
The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?
Show’d me that epic was of all the king,
Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn’s ring?
You too upheld the veil from Clio’s beauty,
And pointed out the patriot’s stern duty;
The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell;
The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell
Upon a tyrant’s head. Ah! had I never seen,
Or known your kindness, what might I have been?
What my enjoyments in my youthful years,
Bereft of all that now my life endears?
And can I e’er these benefits forget?
And can I e’er repay the friendly debt?
No doubly no; — yet should these rhymings please,
I shall roll on the grass with twofold ease:
For I have long time been my fancy feeding
With hopes that you would one day think the reading
Of my rough verses not an hour misspent;
Should it e’er be so, what a rich content!
Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry of the past. The couplet about Spenser’s vowels could scarcely be happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without at all approaching in craftsmanship, the ‘Me rather all that bowery loneliness’ of Tennyson’s famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.
Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman’s translation of Homer. This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form. The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly, seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was printed in the Examiner for the first of December following, ‘Oct^r 1816, John Keats.’ The doubts expressed have been due partly to the overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke’s account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats’ invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the Borough, Clarke goes on: —
This letter having no date but the week’s day, and no postmark, preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my life’s career. A beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer had been lent me. It was the property of Mr. Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of celebrity to the great reputation of the Times newspaper by the masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of that journal….
Well then, we were put in possession of the Homer of Chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the ‘famousest’ passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope’s version. There was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek Captains; with the Senator Antenor’s vivid portrait of an orator in Ulysses, beginning at the 237th line of the third book: —
But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise,
He stood a little still, and fix’d upon the earth his eyes,
His sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally,
Like one that vainly doth affect. Of wrathful quality,
And frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was;
But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pass,
And words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter’s snow,
None thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for show.
The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune’s passage to the Argive ships, in the thirteenth book: —
The woods and all