A desert fills our seeing's inward span; Nurse of swart nations since the world began, Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil, Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan? O may dark fancies err ! They surely do; 'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste The pleasant sun-rise. Green isles hast thou too, And to the sea as happily dost haste. TO SPENSER Printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains, and undated. Afterward, when Lord Houghton printed it in the Aldine edition of 1876, he noted that he had seen a transcript given by Keats to Mrs. Longmore, a sister of Reynolds, dated by the recipient, February 5, 1818. But Lord Houghton is confident that the sonnet was written much earlier. SPENSER! a jealous honourer of thine, A forester deep in thy midmost trees, Did last eve ask my promise to refine Some English that might strive thine ear to please. But Elfin Poet, 't is impossible For an inhabitant of wintry earth To rise like Phoebus with a golden quill Fire-wing'd and make a morning in his mirth. It is impossible to escape from toil Before it can put forth its blossoming: SONG WRITTEN ON A BLANK PAGE IN BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S WORKS, BETWEEN 'CUPID'S REVENGE ' AND 'THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN First published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains, and undated. SPIRIT here that reignest! My forehead low, All passion-struck Spirit here that laughest ! I join in the glee With a Bacchanal blush Just fresh from the Banquet of FRAGMENT Under the flag Of each his faction, they to battle bring Their embryo atoms. MILTON. Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains, without date. WELCOME joy, and welcome sorrow, I love to mark sad faces in fair weather; And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder; Fair and foul I love together. Meadows sweet where flames are under, And a giggle at a wonder; Visage sage at pantomime; WHAT THE THRUSH SAID In a long letter to Reynolds, dated February 19, 1818, Keats writes earnestly of the sources of inspiration to a poet, and especially of the need of a receptive attitude: 'Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit - Sap will be given us for meat, and dew for drink. I was led into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness. I have not read any Book O THOU whose face hath felt the Winter's wind, Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist, And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars, To thee the spring will be a harvest-time. O fret not after knowledge And yet the Evening listens. He who sad May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can queen the blue bell, and, that Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers Hast thou, as a mere shadow ! But how great, When in an Eye thou art, alive with fate! TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS Undated, but placed by Lord Houghton directly after the preceding in Life, Letters and Literary Remains. O THAT a week could be an age, and we Felt parting and warm meeting every week; Then one poor year a thousand years would be, The flush of welcome ever on the cheek: So could we live long life in little space, So time itself would be annihilate, So a day's journey in oblivious haze To serve our joys would lengthen and dilate. O to arrive each Monday morn from Ind! To land each Tuesday from the rich Levant! In little time a host of joys to bind, And keep our souls in one eternal pant! ENDYMION KEATS began this poem in the spring of 1817 and finished it and saw it through the press in just about a year. It is interesting to follow in his correspondence the growth of the poem. The subject in general had been in his mind at least since the summer of 1816, when he wrote I stood tiptoe upon a little hill, and the poem Sleep and Poetry hints also at the occupation of his mind, though through all the earlier and partly imitative period of his poetical growth he was drawn almost equally by the romance to which Spenser and Leigh Hunt introduced him, and the classic themes which his early studies, Chapman and the Elgin marbles, all conspired to make real. In April, 1817, he writes as one absorbed in the delights of poetry and stimulated by it to production. I find,' he writes to Reynolds from Carisbrooke, April 18, 'I cannot exist without Poetry-half the day I will not do the whole of it - I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan. I had become all in a Tremble from not having written anything of late - the Sonnet overleaf [On the Sea] did me good. I slept the better last night for it this morning, however, I am nearly as bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first lines I saw were these "The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, ... I shall forthwith begin my Endymion, which I hope I shall have got some way with by the time you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle.' He reported progress to his friends from time to time during the summer: the poem 45 was his great occupation, and he had the alternate exhilaration and depression which such an undertaking naturally would produce in a temperament as sensitive as his; indeed, one is not surprised to find him near the end of September expressing himself to Haydon as tired of the poem, and looking forward to a Romance to which he meant to devote himself the next summer, for so did his mind swing back and forth, though in truth romance was always uppermost, whether expressed in terms of Grecian mythology or mediævalism. But the main significance of Endymion, as one traces the growth of Keats's mind, is in the strong impulse which possessed him to try his wings in a great flight. In a letter to Bailey, October 8, 1817, he quotes from his own letter to George Keats in the spring,' and thus at the very time of his setting forth on his great venture, the following notable passage :— 'As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no answer but by saying that the high idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate I have no right to talk until Endymion is finished — it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention, which is a rare thing indeed-by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with Poetry: and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame - it makes me say: God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have heard Hunt say, and I may be asked Why endeavour after a long Poem?" To which I would answer, Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week's stroll in summer? Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most. 'Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails, and Imagination the rudder. Did our great Poets ever write short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales-this same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence But enough of this; I put on no laurels till I shall have finished Endymion.' Keats was drawing near the end of his task when he wrote to Bailey November 22: At present I am just arrived at Dorking-to change the scene, change the air and give me a spur to wind up my Poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' And at the end of the first draft is written' Burford Bridge [near Dorking] November 28, 1817.' Early in January, 1818, Keats gave the first book to Taylor, who 'seemed,' he says, 'more than satisfied with it,' and to Keats's surprise proposed issuing it in quarto if Haydon would make a drawing for a frontispiece. Haydon, when asked, was more eager to paint a picture from some scene in the book, but proposed now to make a finished chalk sketch of Keats's head to be engraved for a frontispiece; for some unmentioned reason, this plan was not carried out. Keats was copying out the poem for the printer, giving it in book by book and reading the proofs until April, when it was ready save the Preface. This with dedication and title-page he had sent to his Publishers March 21. They were as follows: |