The Life and Times of John Keats: Complete Personal letters & Two Extensive Biographies. John Keats
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very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer’s face — more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter — that delicious face you will see.
There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. Keats speaks of ‘the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.’ Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. Of ‘my last,’ that is of his preceding letter to Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of Keats’ preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his own, are among the number. That beginning ‘Think not of it, sweet one, so,’ dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas ‘Unfelt, unheard, unseen,’ which one at least of Keats’ subtlest critics considers (I cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning —
You say you love, but with a voice
Chaster than a nun’s who singeth
The soft vespers to herself
When the chime-bell ringeth —
O love me truly!
You say you love; but with a smile
Cold as sunrise in September,
As you were St Cupid’s nun,
And kept his week of Ember.
O love me truly! —
and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats’ memory. Listen to the first three stanzas of A Proper Wooing Song, written to the tune of the Merchant’s Daughter and printed in Clement Robinson’s Handful of Pleasant Delites, 1584: —
Maide will ye loue me yea or no?
tell me the trothe and let me go.
It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,
trust me truly,
To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,
in due time duly.
You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,
as Venus and all the Muses nine:
The Father Himselfe when He first made man,
trust me truly,
Made you for his helpe when the world began,
in due time duly.
Then sith God’s will was even so
why should you disdaine your Louer tho?
But rather with a willing heart,
loue him truly;
For in so doing you do your part
let reason rule ye.
The metrical form of Keats’ verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind’s ear.
A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little ‘drear-nighted December’ song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishing Endymion at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats’ verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own handwriting and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown: —
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would ‘twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writh’d not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
Keats’ model in this instance is a song from Dryden’s Spanish Fryar, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey’s shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden: —
Farewell ungrateful Traitor,
Farewell my perjured swain,
Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.
The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing,
But ’tis too short a blessing,
And Love too long a pain.
Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture, — do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the Garden of Proserpine?
But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats’ main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months’ task upon Endymion. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke: —
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish’d: but let