THE DIE IS CAST 83 John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related, in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. The die was cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his convivial alias 'Junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems. Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet To Leigh Hunt Esqr, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion: Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; Into the East to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, 84 FIRST VOLUME GOES TO PRESS With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817. CHAPTER IV THE 'POEMS' OF 1817 Spirit and chief contents of the volume-Sonnets and rimed heroicsThe Chapman sonnet-The 'How many bards' sonnet-The sexchivalry group-The Leigh Hunt group-The Haydon pair-The Leander sonnet-Epistles-History of the 'heroic' couplet-The closed and free systems-Marlowe Drayton-William BrowneChapman and Sandys-Decay of the free system-William Chamberlayne-Milton and Marvell-Waller-Katherine Phillips-DrydenPope and his ascendency-Reaction: The Brothers WartonSymptoms of Emancipation-Coleridge, Wordsworth and ScottLeigh Hunt and couplet reform-Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne-Calidore: influence of Hunt-Epistle to George KeatsEpistle to Cowden Clarke-Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe-Analysis of Sleep and Poetry-Double invocation-Vision of the CharioteerBattle-cry of the new poetry-Its strength and weakness-Challenge and congratulation-Encouragements acknowledged-Analysis of I stood tip-toe-Intended induction to Endymion-Relation to Elizabethans-Relation to contemporaries-Wordsworth and Greek Mythology-Tintern Abbey and the three stages-Contrasts of methodEvocation versus Exposition. THE note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it: What more felicity can fall to creature The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and 86 SONNETS AND RIMED HEROICS affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalised by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser, -truly rather of Spenser's eighteenth-century imitators; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth-century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats's own, -new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance,— especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the Midsummer Night's Dream but through Wieland's Oberon, a romance poem which Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen are THE CHAPMAN SONNET 87 ́divided by a quarrel far deeper and more durable than in Shakespeare's play.1 Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called 'occasional', -records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic, manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote, but I will quote it nevertheless,―on Chapman's Homer. That walk in the morning twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on 1 The lines I mean are This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay; Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish, And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish. Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and Titania was taken, as is well known, from the French prose romance Huon of Bordeaux translated by Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English romantic movement of the time. There are several passages in Keats, notably in The Cap and Bells, where I seem to catch a strain reminiscent of this Oberon, and one instance where a definite phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory and been turned to gold, thus: Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance, No utter'd syllable, or woe betide! Oberon c. vi, st. 17. The Eve of St Agnes, st. 23. |