"Taste these juicy pears,
Sent me by sad Vertumnus; . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . here is cream,
Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam;
Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmed
For the boy Jupiter: and here, undimmed
By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums
Ready to melt between an infant's gums."
The delicate, highly developed sense of taste is accompanied by
an equally delicate and highly developed sense of touch and sense
of smell. Read the passage in _Isabella_--a poem which, following
Boccaccio, treats of the same theme as Hans Andersen's tale of the
"Rose Fairy"--the passage which tells how the young girl took the head
of her murdered lover from the grave:--
"Then in a silken scarf,--sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent pipe refreshfully,
She wrapp'd it up." . . . . . . . . . . .
and the lines in _Lamia_, describing the reception of the guests who
come to take part in the wedding festivities:--
"When in an antechamber every guest
Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd,
By minist'ring slaves, upon his hands and feet,
And fragrant oils with ceremony meet
Pour'd on his hair, they all mov'd to the feast
In white robes, and themselves in order placed
Around the silken couches."
In one of the _Epistles_ occurs a line, about a swan, into which is
compressed an incredible amount of sensuous imagery. It is: "Kissing
thy daily food from Naiads' pearly hands."
It is unnecessary to draw the reader's attention in detail to all
the delicate charms of these fragments. Proceeding to the domain
of the sense of sight, we find that it preeminently is Keats's
territory, although it is never his eye alone which is impressed by
his surroundings. Wordsworth's poetry of nature leads us out into the
open air; following Keats, we enter a hot-house: a soft, moist warmth
meets us; our eyes are attracted by brightly coloured flowers and
juicy fruits; slender palms, amidst whose branches no rough wind ever
blows, beckon gently with their huge fans. His _Ode to Autumn_ is a
characteristic specimen of his descriptions of nature. After telling of
autumn's conspiracy with the sun
"to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel,"
he with a masterly hand portrays autumn as a person:
"Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind:
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers."
It is impossible for Keats to name any conception or any thought
without at once proceeding to represent it in a corporeal, plastic
form. His numerous allegories have the same life and fire as if they
were executed in stone by the best Italian artists of the sixteenth
century. He says of Melancholy:
"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, _whose hand is ever at his lips_
_Bidding adieu_."
He says of Poetry:
"A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme power;
'Tis _might half-slumb'ring on its own right arm_."
We see the scope of Keats's poetic powers steadily increasing. His
point of departure, especially in some of the most beautiful of
his smaller poems (for example, the _Ode to the Nightingale_), is
the description of a purely physical condition, such as weariness,
nervousness, thirst, languor, the drowsiness produced by opium. Upon
this background of sensitiveness the sensuous pictures rise, distinct
and round, like the reliefs upon a shield. The word "welded" comes
involuntarily to one's lips when one thinks of Keats's pictures. There
is something firm and finished about them, as if they were welded on a
metal plate.
Observe how the figures rise gradually into relief in the following
stanzas, the first and third of the beautiful _Ode to Indolence_:
"One morn before me were three figures seen
With bowed necks and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepped serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;
They passed like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first green shades return,
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A third time passed they by, and, passing, turned
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burned
And ached for wings, because I knew the three;
The first was a fair maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful, with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heaped upon her, maiden most unmeek,--
I knew to be my demon, Poesy."
But not until he wrote the two completed books of _Hyperion_ did Keats
attain to absolute mastery over his artistic material, and realise
the ideal of sensuous plasticity which was ever before his eyes. In
this work the relief has been superseded by the statue; and they are
statues, these, which impress us with the feeling that Michael Angelo's
chisel must have played a part in their production. Granted that the
influence of Milton is clearly perceptible--there is more than Milton
here. The nature of the subject demanded the colossal.
We are told of the goddess Thea:
"By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy's height; she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel."
And read this description of the cavern where the Titans are assembled
after their fall:--
"It was a den where no insulting light
Could glimmer on their tears; where their own groans
They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where.
Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem'd
Ever as if just rising from a sleep,
Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns;
And thus in thousand hugest phantasies
Made a fit roofing to this nest of woe.
Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon,
Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge
Stubborn'd with iron. All were not assembled:
Some chain'd in torture, and some wandering.
Cæus, and Gyges, and Briareüs,
Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion,
With many more, the brawniest in assault,
Were pent in regions of laborious breath;
Dungeon'd in opaque element, to keep
Their clenchèd teeth still clench'd, and all their limbs
Locked up like veins of metal, crampt and screw'd;
Without a motion, save of their big hearts
Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls'd
With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse."
Byron, who had been very severe in his criticism of Keats's previous
works, said, and said truly, of _Hyperion_: "It seems actually inspired
by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus."
The specimens of his poetry here quoted afford sufficient proof of
Keats's imaginative power. It is to it, and not to his melodies,
sweet as they are, that he owes his rank among English poets.[2] The
purely artistic character of his verse makes of him the connecting
link between the conservative and the progressive poets. He has a
distinct bias in the direction of progress. Of this his enthusiastic
friendship for the Radical editor of the _Examiner_, Leigh Hunt, is a
striking proof. He felt what he wrote when, in his indignation at the
proceedings of the Liverpool-Castlereagh ministry, he exclaimed (in his
poem _To Hope_):
"O, let me see our land retain her soul,
Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom's shade!"
And William Tell, Wallace, and, chief of all, Kosciuszko, are named
again and again in his verse with the profoundest admiration. What he
might have developed into if he had reached maturity, it is impossible
to tell. When he wrote his last poems he was still but a child,
ignorant of the world.
And it must not be forgotten that while he wrote them he was enduring
great physical suffering, and mental anxiety amounting to torture.
Perhaps it is for this very reason they are so beautiful. Let the
artist keep his private life long enough out of his work--let him, like
Keats, hardly make any allusion in his poetry to his most absorbing
passion--and no work will have such life, such colour, such divine fire
as that executed whilst he not only wrought, but lived and suffered.
Neither the precariousness of Keats's circumstances, nor his hopeless
state of health, nor his passion for Fanny Brawne, set any distinct
mark on his poetry; but from all this poison for himself he drew
nourishment for it.
He sank into his early grave, but hardly had the earth closed over him
before he rose again from the dead in Shelley's great elegy. He ceased
to exist as Keats; he was transformed into a myth, into Adonais, into
the beloved of all the Muses and the elements; and henceforward he had,
as it were, a double existence in the consciousness of the age.
"He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais....
He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird....
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely. He doth bear
His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear....
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought,
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,
Arose . . . . . . . . . . . .
And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry;
'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an heaven of song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'"[3]
We search the history of literature in vain for a parallel to
this elegy. It is instant transfiguration after death--a poetic
transfiguration of a purely naturalistic and purely human kind. To
Shelley, Keats's true apotheosis was what he expresses in the words:
"He is made one with Nature."
[1]
"Death, the immortalising winter, flew
Athwart the stream--and time's printless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name
Of Adonais"
--_Fragment on Keats_: Shelley.
[2] Note the melodiousness of the Fairy Song:
"Shed no tear! O shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more! O weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core," &c.
[3] Shelley: _Adonais_