Lamia. John Keats
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A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT
Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet
Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain
Into a delphic labyrinth — I would fain
Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt
I owe to the kind poet who has set
Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.
Two bending laurel sprigs— ’tis nearly pain
To be conscious of such a coronet.
Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises
Gorgeous as I would have it — only I see
A trampling down of what the world most prizes,
Turbans and crowns and blank regality;
And then I run into most wild surmises
Of all the many glories that may be.
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED
What is there in the universal earth
More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?
Haply a halo round the moon — a glee
Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;
And haply you will say the dewy birth
Of morning roses — ripplings tenderly
Spread by the halcyon’s breast upon the sea —
But these comparisons are nothing worth.
Then there is nothing in the world so fair?
The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?
No, none of these can from my favourite bear
Away the palm — yet shall it ever pay
Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.
Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats’ mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of the third book of Endymion, —
There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel —
and in its fifth a repetition of the ‘wild surmise’ phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of Sleep and Poetry, Keats’ chief venture in verse this winter.
Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt’s, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo: —
God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer
Of the patient year,
Where — where slept thine ire,
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,
Thy laurel, thy glory,
The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm — too low crawling, for death?
O Delphic Apollo!
And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of ‘A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.’
Chapter III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY
So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage — for such under the conditions of the time it was — in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all works of the sculptor’s art acknowledged, and their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron’s Curse of Minerva in shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies, had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.
Haydon’s victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and lifelong, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His high-flaming energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His first and second great pictures, ‘Dentatus’ and ‘Macbeth,’ had been dubiously received; his third, the ‘Judgment of Solomon,’ with acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than all, ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ in which it was his purpose to include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence — for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. ‘Never,’ wrote he about this time, ‘have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me…. They came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.’ But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its vision and originality, its gift of ‘heavenly alchemy’ for transmuting and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true great art but of imitative