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tip-toe’ was not finished until the end of December 1816. Sleep and Poetry cannot well have been written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the new year. What seems likeliest is that Sleep and Poetry was written without break during the first freshness of Keats’ autumn intimacy at the Hampstead cottage; while ‘I stood tip-toe’ may have been begun in the summer and resumed at intervals until the year’s end. I shall take Sleep and Poetry first and let ‘I stood tip-toe’ come after, as being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment, Endymion, which was to follow.

      The scheme of Sleep and Poetry is to some extent that of The Floure and the Lefe, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so strongly caught Keats’ fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the activities of Sleep personified,— ‘Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses,’ etc., — in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of sleep are those of something else which he will not name: —

      What is it? And to what shall I compare it?

      It has a glory, and nought else can share it:

      The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy,

      Chasing away all worldliness and folly;

      Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder,

      Or the low rumblings earth’s regions under;

      And sometimes like a gentle whispering

      Of all the secrets of some wond’rous thing

      That breathes about us in the vacant air;

      So that we look around with prying stare,

      Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,

      And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning;

      To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended.

      That is to crown our name when life is ended.

      Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice,

      And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice!

      Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things,

      And die away in ardent mutterings.

      Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation, declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her acceptance he will be admitted to ‘the fair visions of all places’ and will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things, in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains to ‘the events of this wide world,’ which it will be given him to seize ‘like a strong giant.’

      At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the warning and its reply are alike felicitous: —

      Stop and consider! life is but a day;

       A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way

       From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep

       While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep

       Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?

       Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown;

       The reading of an ever-changing tale;

       The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil;

       A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;

       A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care,

       Riding the springy branches of an elm.

      Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days — Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores — certainly with visions from Poussin’s Bacchanals in his mind’s eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul. Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically. He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while ‘with glorious fear,’ then swooping downward to alight on a grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, ‘awfully intent,’ and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, ‘shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,’ sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind’s eye the multitude and variety of figures in this procession —

      Yes, thousands in a thousand different waysM

       Flit onward —

      contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, ‘the agonies, the strife of human hearts,’ — and close with the vision of

      a lovely wreath of girls

       Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,

      as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant’s mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.

      This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats’ mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of everyday realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads seventeen years earlier: —

      Is there so small a range

       In the present strength of manhood, that the high

       Imagination cannot freely fly

       As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,

       Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds

       Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?

       From the clear space of ether, to the small

       Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning

       Of Jove’s large eyebrow, to the tender greening

       Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,

       E’en in this isle; and who could paragon

       The fervid choir that lifted up a noise

       Of harmony, to where it aye will poise

       Its mighty self of convoluting sound,

       Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,

       Eternally around a dizzy void?

       Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy’d

       With honors; nor had any other care

      

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