THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN KEATS. John Keats
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new service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the Examiner on ‘Young Poets,’ in which the names of Shelley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the Cricket:— ‘The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line: —
The poetry of earth is never dead.
“Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines: —
On a lone winter morning, when the frost
Hath wrought a silence —
“Ah that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!” And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season’s suspension and torpidity.’ The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another’s company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves ‘after the manner of the elder bards.’ Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in — conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, ‘in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,’ and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted. Here are Hunt’s pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed: —
A crown of ivy! I submit my head
To the young hand that gives it, — young, ’tis true,
But with a right, for ’tis a poet’s too.
How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread
With their broad angles, like a nodding shed
Over both eyes! and how complete and new,
As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew
My sense with freshness, — Fancy’s rustling bed!
Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes
Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,
And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old
Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes, —
And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,
Bacchus, — whose bride has of his hand fast hold.
It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,
Thus to be topped with leaves; — to have a sense
Of honour-shaded thought, — an influence
As from great Nature’s fingers, and be twined
With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,
As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence
A head that bows to her benevolence,
Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.
’Tis what’s within us crowned. And kind and great
Are all the conquering wishes it inspires, —
Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,
Love of love’s self, and ardour for a state
Of natural good befitting such desires,
Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.
Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest: —
ON RECEIVING 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,