Ode on a Grecian Urn. John Keats
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literary movement of the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic manner, Safie, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt’s, the youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, The Naiad (November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third, The Eden of Imagination, showed much more than a quick susceptibility to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour. Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.
The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821 he writes again
As time increases
I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.
In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space at the end of The Floure and the Lefe, a poem with which he was already familiar, the sonnet beginning ‘This pleasant tale is like a little copse.’ Reynolds’s comment after reading it is as follows: —
Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,
Or white flowers pluck’d from some sweet lily bed;
They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed
The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes,
O’er the excited soul. — Thy genius weaves
Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,
And win that coronal for thy young head
Which time’s strange hand of freshness ne’er bereaves.
Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
Be thou companion of the summer day,
Roaming the fields and older woods among: —
So shall thy muse be ever in her May
And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.
Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters with them in absence, and contributing to Jane’s album sets of verses some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a source of great pleasure to him.
Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom Keats also became quickly intimate: this was James Rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in Keats’ words, ‘coming on his legs again like a cat’; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in good offices to those about him: ‘dear noble generous James Rice,’ records Dilke,— ‘the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest men I ever knew.’ It was through Rice that there presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of Hunt’s set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in Blackwood’s Magazine of his rimes on Byron and Keats, as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats’ own later letters. He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments; and for some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the Quarterly proofs.
To turn to other close associates of Keats during the same period, known to him not through Hunt but through his brothers, — a word may suffice for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816 a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small, red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits. Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken, with Hazlitt. Keats’ own regard for Wells was short-lived, being changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary ‘Amena.’ It was after Keats’ death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with the poetic drama Joseph and his Brethren, dead-born in its first anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the lifetime of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of intellect and passion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.
Of far different importance were two other acquaintanceships, which Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it is odd how high a proportion of Keats’ intimates were of this profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable on occasions of practical need or urgency: ‘our oak friend’ he is called in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years Keats’ senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old Gloucestershire stock and having a good connexion in the northern suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son, showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple engraver, but the perpetual task of ‘stabbing copper’ irked him too sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy’s, with whom he was shy and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the stores — infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared — of his reading in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used to enrapture him was Keats’ talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek polytheism as a ‘religion of joy.’ On his own part he was proud to act as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Institution (the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to him the glories of the antique or of Titian and Claude and Poussin.
Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself