ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE. John Keats
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poetry it was sure to be ridiculed and severely handled.
Newmarch was a light-hearted and merry fellow, but I thought he was rather too fond of mortifying Keats, but more particularly his brothers, as their praise of their brother John amounted almost to idolatry, and Newmarch and they frequently quarrelled. Whilst attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another student’s syllabus. In my syllabus of chemical lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper cover. This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on which is the following fragment of doggrel rhyme: —
Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out, ‘hold! enough’
You may do so, sans objection
Until the day of resurrection.
This is all that remains, and is the only piece of his writing which is now in my possession. He was gentlemanly in his manners and when he condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and intelligent. He was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give his attention to any subject. He was a steady quiet and well behaved person, never inclined to pursuits of a low or vicious character.
The last words need to be read in the light of the convivial snatch of verse quoted just above. Keats in these days was no rake, indeed, but neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the general intensity of his being: and his ardent absorption in poetry and study did not save him from the risks and slips incident to appetite and hot blood.
Another fellow student relates:— ‘even in the lecture room of St Thomas’s I have seen Keats in a deep poetic dream; his mind was on Parnassus with the Muses. And here is a quaint fragment which he one evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of Sir Astley Cooper fell unheeded on his ear.’ The fragment tells how Alexander the Great saw and loved a lady of surpassing beauty on his march through India, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of the old French Lai d’Aristote in the style and spelling of an early-printed English prose romance, — possibly the Morte d’Arthure. Into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady’s beauty, Keats works in tags taken direct from Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton, all three. He no doubt knew this favourite mediæval tale — that of the Indian damsel whose charms enslaved first Alexander in the midst of his conquests and then his tutor Aristotle — either in the eighteenth-century prose version of Le Grand or the recent English verse translation by G. L. Way, who turns the tale in couplets of this style: —
At the first glance all dreams of conquest fade
And his first thought is of his Indian maid.
I cannot but think the Indian maiden of this story must have been still lingering in Keats’ imagination when he devised the episode of that other Indian maiden in the fourth book of Endymion.
Besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how Keats’ attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily touched, of a pansy and other flowers.
After the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the dingiest part of London, Keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to Felton Mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle the poetic faculty in him altogether. About the same time he takes pains to get into touch again with Cowden Clarke, who had by this time left Enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. In a letter unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks in London, Keats writes to Clarke:— ‘Although the Borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No 8, Dean Street, is not difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over London Bridge, take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers.’ Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences. Keats’ fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815, as Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is England, may have been written in London at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early summer of the next. For his brother George to send to his fiancée, Miss Georgiana Wylie, on Valentine’s day, Feb. 14, 1816, he wrote the pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning ‘Hadst thou lived in days of old.’ In the same month was published Leigh Hunt’s poem The Story of Rimini, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for Spenser, Keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a chivalrous romance of his own, Calidore; which went no farther than an Induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines.
Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats’ efforts in poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story, both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm fact we have to start with, — that Hunt printed in his paper, the Examiner, for May 5th, 1816, Keats’ sonnet, O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell. This was Keats’ first appearance in print, and a decisive circumstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the ‘Solitude’ sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of Keats to submit to Leigh Hunt for his opinion, and had every reason to be gratified at the result. Here is his story of what happened.
I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions — written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of their merits…. After making numerous and eager inquiries about him personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the Vale of Health.
That was a ‘red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats’ features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The interview, which stretched into three ‘morning calls,’ was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.
In connexion with this, take Hunt’s 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