Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends. John Keats
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be of the greatest service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first step towards the chief attempt in the drama. The playing of different natures with joy and Sorrow—Do me this favour, and believe me
Your sincere friend
J. Keats.
I hope your next work will be of a more general Interest. I suppose you cogitate a little about it, now and then.
XXXIII.—TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS.
Hampstead, Saturday [January 31, 1818].
My dear Reynolds—I have parcelled out this day for Letter Writing—more resolved thereon because your Letter will come as a refreshment and will have (sic parvis etc.) the same effect as a Kiss in certain situations where people become over-generous. I have read this first sentence over, and think it savours rather; however an inward innocence is like a nested dove, as the old song says. …
Now I purposed to write to you a serious poetical letter, but I find that a maxim I met with the other day is a just one: “On cause míeux quand on ne dit pas causons.” I was hindered, however, from my first intention by a mere muslin Handkerchief very neatly pinned—but “Hence, vain deluding,” etc. Yet I cannot write in prose; it is a sunshiny day and I cannot, so here goes—
Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,
Away with old Hock and Madeira,
Too earthly ye are for my sport;
There’s a beverage brighter and clearer.
Instead of a pitiful rummer,
My wine overbrims a whole summer;
My bowl is the sky,
And I drink at my eye,
Till I feel in the brain
A Delphian pain—
Then follow, my Caius! then follow:
On the green of the hill
We will drink our fill
Of golden sunshine,
Till our brains intertwine
With the glory and grace of Apollo!
God of the Meridian, And of the East and West, To thee my soul is flown, And my body is earthward press’d.— It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill’d with worldly fear. Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in an eagle’s claws— And is not this the cause Of madness?—God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through sights I scarce can bear: O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm’d!
My dear Reynolds, you must forgive all this ranting—but the fact is, I cannot write sense this Morning—however you shall have some—I will copy out my last Sonnet.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled Books in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain—
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting Love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
I must take a turn, and then write to Teignmouth. Remember me to all, not excepting yourself.
Your sincere friend
John Keats.
XXXIV.—TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS.
Hampstead, Tuesday [February 3, 1818].
My dear Reynolds—I thank you for your dish of Filberts—would I could get a basket of them by way of dessert every day for the sum of twopence.[45] Would we were a sort of ethereal Pigs, and turned loose to feed upon spiritual Mast and Acorns—which would be merely being a squirrel and feeding upon filberts, for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert but a sort of archangelical acorn? About the nuts being worth cracking, all I can say is, that where there are a throng of delightful Images ready drawn, simplicity is the only thing. The first is the best on account of the first line, and the “arrow, foil’d of its antler’d food,” and moreover (and this is the only word or two I find fault with, the more because I have had so much reason to shun it as a quicksand) the last has “tender and true.” We must cut this, and not be rattlesnaked into any more of the like. It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that Wordsworth, etc., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a Journey heavenward as well as anybody. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself—but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers!—how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, “Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!” Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this: each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state and knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions, and has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: The ancients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them. I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular—Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh, when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be eagles? Why be teased with “nice-eyed wagtails,” when we have in sight “the Cherub Contemplation”? Why with Wordsworth’s “Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand,” when we can have Jacques “under an oak,” etc.? The secret of the Bough of Wilding will run through your head faster than I can write it. Old Matthew spoke to him some years ago on some nothing, and because he happens in an Evening Walk to imagine the figure of the old Man, he must stamp it down in black and white, and it is henceforth sacred. I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur and Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood. Your letter and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the Fourth Book of Childe Harold and the whole of anybody’s life and opinions. In return for your Dish of Filberts, I have gathered a few Catkins, I hope they’ll look pretty.
TO J. H. R. IN ANSWER TO HIS ROBIN HOOD SONNETS.
No! those days are gone away,
And their hours are old and gray,
And their minutes buried all