I

Critics are generally agreed that the imagery of Keats is "concrete." Robert Bridges, for example, in comparing his "Sleep and Poetry" with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, points out "the extreme difference between Keats' objective treatment and Wordsworth's philosophising," citing to show the contrast the older poet's

The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements

over against Keats's

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.¹

A. C. Bradley declares that Keats tends to "a concrete method of treatment; to the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings."² A. Clutton-Brock contrasts the "concreteness" of Keats with the "abstractness" of Shelley: to the former, he says, "excellence was in minute particularity," the aim of the poet "to draw everything in its peculiarity."³ Sir Sidney Colvin remarks that "Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action."⁴

Keats's bent toward the description of concrete objects is, in point of fact, evident even in his earliest verse; in the midst of the artificiality of the "Imitation of Spenser," his earliest known poem:

There saw the swan his neck of arched snow,
And oar'd himself along with majesty;
Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show
Beneath the waves like Afric's ebony … ,

and in such a juvenile effusion as the "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem," which begins with

Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry,
For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye,

and concludes

… so will I rest in hope
To see wide plains, fair trees and lawny slope:
The morn, the eve, the light, the shade, the flowers;
Clear streams, smooth lakes, and overlooking towers.

His friends have borne witness to this proclivity in the young Keats. "He was fond of imagery," says Henry Stephens, an acquaintance in medical school; "the most trifling similes appeared to please him."⁵ The sentimental George Felton Mathew observes somewhat regretfully that "His eye admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic."⁶

In his later, mature verse Keats also writes customarily about objects. The "Ode on Indolence" is typical of his method. Under his hand three abstractions, Love, Ambition, and Poesy, are powerfully projected into the world of life, form, and movement:

One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced …
(ll. 1-4)

The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" originates, I think, in the intense contemplation of a lovely shape.⁷ The "Ode to Psyche" centers about a static, sensuous image of lovers locked in each other's arms. And the magnificent "To Autumn" is composed of human figures on a background of natural beauty.

In the Letters one sees how powerfully Keats is affected by shapes of physical beauty. A casual meeting with a cousin of his friends, the Reynolds, lives in his memory for weeks.

She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess… . I always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior—I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I forget myself entirely because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not—she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart's might do… .⁸

Of the same lady he says elsewhere, " … the voice and the shape of a Woman has haunted me these two days."⁹ Later, in deeper vein, he tells Fanny Brawne that her beauty is a necessary condition of his love:

Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you. I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart.¹⁰

The forms of Nature and of Art impress themselves upon him with equal force. Much of the early "I Stood Tiptoe" is a joyous catalogue of natural objects. The gorgeous but uneven Endymion is studded with descriptions of Nature unequalled in their kind. "Like poor Falstaff," says Keats, "though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection of every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and coulours [sic] are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy."¹¹ The painter Haydon declared of him, "he was in his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, his mouth quivered."¹²

His response to the forms of Art was no less powerful. "Sleep and Poetry" "originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures."¹³ His two sonnets on the Elgin Marbles evidence his feeling for plastic art: a feeling more notably exemplified in the sculptural Hyperion and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn."¹⁴ He was a lover and connoisseur of painting, and a frequenter of galleries.¹⁵ To Haydon, on the latter's ambitious Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, he wrote enthusiastically,

I am nearer myself to hear your Christ is being tinted into immortality—Believe me Haydon your picture is a part of myself—I have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art (judging from Poetry) ever to think I understood the emphasis of Painting… . I know not you[r] many havens of intenseness—nor ever can know them—but for this I hope no[u]ght you adchieve [sic] is lost upon me… .¹⁶

This preoccupation with human, natural, and artistic objects is, I think, intimately related with certain typical qualities of Keats's poetic technique. He has an unrivalled ability to focus his perceptions upon single things, and to extract from these the last drop of beauty and meaning. He lingers over them, examines them from different aspects, repeats with gradually increasing force, in an effort to achieve the final word, the ultimate completeness of expression. In these terms various peculiarities of Keats's style and imagery are in part explainable.

So apparently trivial a matter as his habitual use of the accented -éd, a practice not followed by any of the other great Romantics, has its significance in this connection.¹⁷ The peculiar effect of this device is a kind of meditative lingering over the object described, an accentuation of the individual quality attributed to it, as in the instances of "globéd peonies" ("Ode on Melancholy"), "warméd jewels" ("The Eve of St. Agnes"), and "wild-ridgéd mountains" ("Ode to Psyche").¹⁸ This seems to be a result partly of the actual semantic value of the suffix thus accented, and partly of the slowing of pace consequent upon the extra syllable. One might further cite such examples as the "light-wingéd Dryad," "deep-delvéd earth," "embalméd darkness," and "muséd rhyme" of the "Ode to a Nightingale," in which the stress calls attention insistently to the essential quality with which Keats has endowed the object.

This focussing intensity of contemplation is also responsible for his close-packed repetition of adjectives or nouns, the "Sanguine, feverous, boiling gurge of pulse" of Hyperion, or the "hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed"¹⁹ of the "Ode to Psyche." In the latter poem this concentrative repetition is present on a larger scale:

… temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grave, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
(ll. 28-35)

A tendency in the same direction is Keats's use of compounds. Drawing again from the "Ode to Psyche" because it is close at hand, we find soft-conched, cool-rooted, fragrant-eyed, silver-white, calm-breathing, soft-handed, pale-mouth 'd, eye-dawn, chain-swung, sapphire-regioned, virgin-choir, dark-cluster'd, moss-lain, and wild-ridged. Such an embarrassment of riches is unusual, but leafing casually through the Odes one comes upon side-faced, deep-disguised, summer-indolence, fever-fit, new-leav'd, and cool-bedded in Indolence, and Lethe-wards, light-winged, full-throated, deep-delved, purple-stained, spectre-thin, and leaden-eyed, in the "Ode to a Nightingale."²⁰

Again, innovations and eccentricities complained of by austere commentators generally represent attempts by Keats to get at the heart of an object, mood, or situation. Admittedly the attempt is not always successful, especially in the earlier poems. Robert Bridges is correct in his assertion that "the melting, fainting, swimming, swooning, and panting words are overfrequent" in these.²¹ Keats is trying to achieve in their use the maximum of intensity and meaning through an expedient too easy, direct, and crude. At the same time, it should be noted how effective these "intense" words are when embedded in the denser fabric of his later work: in

… on a sudden, fainting with surprise …

("Ode to Psyche")

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains …

("Ode to a Nightingale")

Forever panting, and forever young …

("Ode to a Grecian Urn")

Keats's archaisms are often used with this purpose of intensifying and objectifying. Of Thea's plea to the fallen Saturn in Hyperion, "Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round," W. T. Arnold remarks that "A word could hardly be used in a more arbitrary and fantastical manner."²² Nor, be it added, in a manner more effective and satisfying. Saturn is, or has been until now, the ruler of the universe; his eyes are accustomed to piercing immensities. "Sphere them round" has suggestions of enormous grasp and power, appropriate to deity. Sphere coöperates with eterne to evoke ideas of a cosmic system of world beyond world in harmony under the sway of a single hand, that of the now-vanquished Saturn. Arnold objects also to the use of verbs as nouns as "A singular license in Keats' diction." To cite but one example of this usage, however, the "voices of soft proclaim" of Hyperion seems to me to be singularly felicitous.²³ It has the soft, full tone and bursting plangency of a plucked harp string; and this effect is mainly attributable to the nervous terseness of the locution.

The static quality so often noted in Keats's imagery is evidence of this same desire to examine, to contemplate, to pierce to the heart of things. Keats is at once concentrated and leisurely; he will not leave an object until he has caught its essence. Thus the situation at the beginning of Hyperion epitomizes silence and motionlessness; nature and humanity are alike in the grip of a timeless and trancelike moment. This lack of movement is one of the reasons why Hyperion could never have been completed as an epic. Keats is too greatly interested in single objects, effects, and scenes to attend to the imperious demands of action. The massive quietude of the opening lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is another case in point. The urn is the "still unravished bride of quietness," the "foster-child of silence and slow time." The scenes of the sacrifice and the abandoned "little town" have the same movelessness as the urn itself. They live in a never-ending moment, and by this release from the demands of motion, which blurs outlines and hints at change and impermanence, they are preternaturally heightened and solidified.²⁴

Linked closely with the prevailing slowness of Keats's imagery is the leisurely movement of his metres. It has been noted that whereas Shelley sings, Keats generally talks;²⁵ he is too measured of pace, too deep of tone, for the higher notes of lyricism.²⁶ And this slowness both contributes to and results from his power of focussing on the single object in its particularity.

II

The poetic process in Keats generally begins, I think, with deep and intense contemplation of concrete shapes and forms. This contemplation … is enriched by Keats's exquisite and comprehensive sense-perceptions. He is delicately receptive to impressions from Art, Nature, and Humanity in almost equal measure; being more concerned, perhaps, with Nature at the beginning of his career and with Man towards its end.

The unique quality of his poetic experience arises from his wholehearted love of the external world, at first instinctive and spontaneous,²⁷ later conscious, complex, and philosophical. The rapturous enumeration of natural beauties in "I Stood Tiptoe" represents the early mode; the deeper and subtler perceptions of the "Ode to a Nightingale," the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and the "Ode on Melancholy" reflect the later. The power and concentration of the contemplative attitude in Keats are a result of his conviction that appearances can be trusted to the full; that Beauty and Truth reside in the phenomenal world itself and may be found there if one will take the trouble to seek them out. As A. C. Bradley remarks, there is a tendency in Keats working "against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real."²⁸ Nor need one seek the unusual, the recherché, for the secret lies as well close at hand as far off.²⁹ His natural landscapes are homely and English.

I have said that for Keats Beauty and Truth resided in the actual, the world of phenomena. This is true, however, only metaphorically. Human life and the world are not to him the be-all and end-all of existence, but the faithful mirror and reflection of the ideal. The finite is to him intimately related with the infinite.³⁰ The action of Imagination upon the evidence offered by the senses provides us with the only knowledge we can have of that which lies beyond the senses. This correspondence of the Actual and the Real is described in a notable passage from one of Keats's most famous letters:

It is 'a Vision in the form of Youth' a Shadow of reality to come—and this consideration has further convinced me for it has come as auxiliary to another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated… . Adam's dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its Spiritual reflection… . The Protrotype [sic] must be here after.³¹

Since "human Life and its Spiritual reflection" are thus closely related, two aspects of a single unity, then human life must be accepted in its entirety, with all its imperfections on its head. And since the relationship between Imagination and its reflection is the same, then it seems logical that imginative expression, or Poetry, should be the most faithful representation possible to humanity of the spiritual reflection of life, the embodiment of that Imagination whose prototype we shall see only hereafter. What Bradley calls "the real and the ideal" are not identical, and yet are inseparable. The reflection cannot exist without the reality, and it is not clear which is reality and which reflection.

Keats's doctrines of "negative capability" and "passive receptivity" are, I think, akin to this earlier idea.

… it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury—let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but 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.³²

If "real" and "ideal" are inseparable, then we need not search and struggle for the meaning of things, but submit ourselves quietly to their influence, "open our leaves" to them. The visible world is itself a symbol of a higher reality; then wherefore seek to burst its bounds, or rearrange according to our mind's desire an order already profoundly significant? Keats's confidence in the deep meaning of the everyday commonplaces of life and the world appears in his casual comparison of Shakespeare and Byron:

… they are very shallow people who take everything literally. A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative—which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it…³³

The poet's rôle is that of the self-abnegating observer, not of the self-conscious philosopher. He seeks, indeed, to fathom the beauty and meaning of appearances, but this beauty and meaning reside in the appearances themselves and not in the reasoning intellect. He must be negatively capable,

capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.³⁴

Feeling thus, that the poet should subordinate the "irritable reaching" of his ego to what he feels and sees, he was irritated by the elaborate reflectiveness of Wordsworth:

… 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… . We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in 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.³⁵

Believing in the profound significance of man and nature as they are, Keats is a naturalistic poet, as Matthew Arnold and after him J. M. Murry have said. He expresses both his peculiar view of nature and his notion of the deliberate forbearance which the poet must exercise in "When I Have Fears:"

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 …³⁶

Since he has a deep conviction of the importance of human life and visible nature, Keats has also a profound need of acceptance. Nothing is irrelevant, nothing inharmonious, if properly understood. In a sense the history of his life and poetry is the chronicle of his efforts to absorb and assimilate the fullness of experience, under conditions of increasing difficulty, until the waters of adversity finally closed over his head. He sought not only "to see life steadily and see it whole," but also to discern the relations between its parts:

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain;
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
This is the top of sovereignty.


(Hyperion, II, 202-5)

His belief in the necessity of accepting the fullness of experience has its counterpart in what Professor Finney has called "the principles of excess, intensity, and spontaneity"³⁷ in his imagery:

I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of Beauty should never be half way ther[e] by making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural too [sic] him—shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight—but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.³⁸

All should be complete, whole, rounded, and natural. In the reconciliation of elements towards which Keats's poetry tends there are no rough edges. In an early letter to his brothers this reconciliation is stated as the function of art: "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.'³⁹

This is not to deny the reality of evil and pain, but to conquer them by establishing their place in the harmony of life, through imaginative insight. Keats early recognized beneath the smiling face of Nature a savage and fratricidal struggle:

… I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore.—
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction …

… . .

The Shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at pounce,—
The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,
Ravening a worm …

("Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds," ll. 93ff.)

The society of men, furthermore, was in no way different from the society of beasts. There was the same fierce competition, the same selfishness. Yet this was inherent in the nature of things, and had therefore to be accepted. Disinterestedness pushed too far would overturn the system by which we live. "For in wild nature the Hawk would loose [sic] his Breakfast of Robins and the Robin his of worms—the Lion must starve as well as the swallow. The greater part of men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk.⁴⁰

Acceptance is all the more necessary since man and nature are indissolubly connected. Since unalloyed happiness does not exist in nature, it cannot exist in man. Perfectibilitarians and "Godwin-Methodists" like Shelley and Charles Dilke hope in vain for the millennium:

The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the paral[l]el state in inanimate nature and no further—For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning it enjoys itself—but there comes a cold wind, a hot sun—it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances—they are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature.⁴¹

Yet this conclusion is not a gloomy one. The inevitable ills of human existence are to Keats the teachers, not the scourges, of mankind. The world, with all its tribulations, is not a "vale of tears,"⁴² but the "vale of Soul-making." Without its shaping influence man has neither soul nor identity. Says Keats,

I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are—so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, identical Souls of the Sparks of his own essence.⁴³

Thus does he sweeten an acceptance which he has already considered to be not merely desirable but inevitable. This passage marks the high tide of his thought upon the relation of man to his environment, and constitutes his fullest explanation of the existence of evil.

This reconciliation was not easily won, nor was it evenly maintained. Keats's strong political opinions,⁴⁴ the humanitarian feelings⁴⁵ which were in him concomitant with his contemplative and empathie powers, and finally his personal misfortunes at times disturbed the harmonious balance of his hard-bought serenity. In the "ledger-men" passage of "Isabella," for example,⁴⁶ his fiery indignation at the spectacle of social injustice breaks strangely, "like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh," into the delicate romance. Significantly, he falls in the midst of his tirade into a type of verse more Byronic than Keatsian, but without Byron's lucidity and force:

The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired
And pannier'd mules for ducats and old lies—
Quick cat's-paws on the generous stray-away,—
Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay.

(ll. 133-36)

Realizing the incongruity of this interlude, the poet asks pardon of his original, "eloquent and famed Boccaccio,"

For venturing syllables that ill beseem
The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.

He is right to do so; in this instance "disagreeables" are not evaporated by intensity of imagination.

The Fall of Hyperion portrays most searchingly the conflict between the poet and life, the demands of art and of humanitarianism, without being able entirely to resolve it. The resolution must be made:

"None can usurp this height," returned that shade,

"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest …"

(ll. 147-49)

Yet it is not to be found in the tortured complexities of the Induction, nor in Moneta's recounting of the melancholy fate of the dynasty of Saturn. The Fall is deeply and unrelievedly sad: Hyperison's fall is all too clearly foreshadowed, but in this poem, unlike the earlier Hyperion, we hear nothing of the rise of Apollo. Keats broke off before that point was reached.

The Fall of Hyperion was written within the limits of August-December, 1819,⁴⁷ by which time the burden of unhappy love, financial misfortunes, and ill-health had grown too great for equable endurance. The flawless "To Autumn," composed in September, presents the last example of his ability to reconcile the conflicting elements of life.⁴⁸ But in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and in the great Odes, covering a period from January to May, 1819, are to be found the consummate expression of the Keatsian synthesis.

III

In the imagery of these poems Keats's acceptance of and delight in the world of phenomena; his perception of the relationship between this world and its reflection, the imaginative world of Art; the humor and irony⁴⁹ generated by this perception and necessary to it; the close union of thought and sensation typical of him—all are expressed in a peculiarly spontaneous and concrete symbolism, which comes as naturally "as the Leaves to a tree," and as unobtrusively.

"The Eve of St. Agnes" is too often thought of as sheer faery romance, deliberately remote from actuality. It is indeed in the highest degree romantic, but it is erected four-square and solid upon a foundation of materials from the actual world. I would dissent from the verdict of those modern critics who, admitting the perfection of its technique, complain of its slightness.⁵⁰ "St. Agnes" has a rounded fullness, a complexity and seriousness, and a balance which remove it from the realm of mere magnificent tourde-force.

The poem is built upon a carefully arranged series of contrasts.⁵¹ The young lovers, Porphyro and Madeline, are precisely balanced by the Beadsman and Angela, who typify the inexorable demands of time, accident, and death. They are a pair of memento mori's, like the slave in the chariot of the victorious general at a Roman triumph. The poem begins and ends in images of cold and of physical suffering. The Beadsman, "meagre, barefoot, wan," walking slowly along the chapel aisle with his lamp casting pale beams toward the castle, is a strange symbolic curtainraiser to the romantic drama. As the curtain falls the wheel of life comes full circle; the lovers flee to their happiness, but

Angela the old
Died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.⁵²

It is important that Keats in one draft of the poem would have emphasized the irony of this conclusion savagely:

… with face deform
The beadsman stiffen'd, twixt a sigh and laugh
Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.⁵³

To return to the beginning, the drama may be said to commence with

At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,

Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay,
Of old romance.

(ll. 37-41)

This passage is highly self-conscious, ironic, and introspective. On the one hand, there is deliberate emphasis on fairy unreality. Keats is demanding directly of his reader the "willing suspension of disbelief necessary for the success of his play: this is the poet in his rôle of enchanter. Yet the enchanter frankly does not believe in his own magic, as is clearly evident from the overtones of "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily / The brain, new stuff' d, in youth… . " Perhaps "does not believe" is too strong; let us say rather that Keats warns us that these are creatures of imagination, who never were on land or sea. The imagery is deliberately vague; it evokes rather than pictures. "Argent" has almost no denotative force. Obviously it does not mean "silver," but has a value exclusively of emotion and association. Significantly the poet uses an abstract noun, "revelry," to describe the train, so that the individuality of the figures is lost in a dimly realized sense of the whole.

These verses work in a complex and even self-contradictory manner. They are a bridge between reality and romance, furnishing a kind of aesthetic distancing for the story. They impart to the loves of Madeline and Porphyro an ethereal and idealized quality, for the lovers belong to this atmosphere of vague glamour. They are also, however, a contrasting background for the main action, since the lovers are far more human and solid than these shadowy figures. In contrary manner, these figures are menacing, "barbarian hordes" and "hyena foemen" who threaten the happiness and even the existence of the hero and heroine. The passage, indeed, is richly ironic, exhibiting the poet both as spectator and participant, his characters as figures at once of fancy and reality. This is not the poetry of a simple romancer.

"The Eve of St. Agnes" is remarkable for spontaneous and unobtrusive but subtle symbolism, involving constant contrast, yet always resolving at the end into harmony. As the Beadsman and Angela set off Porphyro and Madeline, the cold of the winter night heightens the warmth of young love. The castle is a bulwark of romance against actuality; the lovers flee "into the storm," which is at the same time

… an elfin-storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed …

The "little moonlight room" in which Angela interviews Porphyro is an ironic shadow of Madeline's chamber. "Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb," it contrasts with the warm colors amid which the meeting of the lovers takes place, while it serves also to introduce the "hush'd and chaste" quality of Madeline's surroundings.

Keats's natural and unforced symbolism is at its best in the going-out of the taper as Madeline enters her room:

Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died …
(ll. 199-200)

It is a gesture of finality; by the act of entering she has sealed her fate. Yet as always in Keats this dying of the taper is inseparably part of the naturalistic description of what takes place, and if we press the meaning too hard we lose the effect of the whole. Thus the "casement high and triplearch'd" and the feast "Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd" are symbols of sensuous love, but should be touched upon lightly. The very linen in which Madeline sleeps suggests at once sensuousness and chastity:

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,

while her sleep has a twofold meaning. It is the sleep of unawakened maidenhood, "Impossible to melt as iced stream." Yet Madeline is dreaming ardently of her lover and the joys which the future holds for her.

These motifs conflict yet harmonize. By images of cold and pallor the love of Madeline and Porphyro is restrained from becoming an affair of mere sensuality; the lovers are after all innocent. To be chaste is not to be bloodless, however, or to lack passion. This delicate balance is preserved in the color scheme of "The Eve of St. Agnes," which is for the most part silver and rose. The thread of silver commences faintly with the "argent revellers" and continues in the pale moon-shine with which the whole poem is bathed, until its spell is symbolically broken and the lovers must depart from the enchanted castle:

… the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum patterning the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.

The image of the rose is the counterpart of the silver image. Porphyro's first concrete hope of obtaining Madeline is "like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow." In the description of the casement the two motifs merge. Most striking among the features of this window is "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings." This scutcheon throws "warm gules" and "Rose-bloom" upon Madeline. Yet this warm light originates with "the wintry moon," so that chastity and sensuousness are in this image wedded. Furthermore, she is enveloped not only in rose-bloom, but

… on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven.

The rose image is repeated in the description of Madeline's sleep, which holds her as it were suspended, momentarily apart from life,

Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

In this are mingled implications of virginity and fulfillment. A more definite but still delicate and subtle hint of sexuality is given in

Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet …

Finally, the two elements of sensuousness and restraint are once more mingled in

Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest …

As Keats offers the reader a door into the castle and the poem at the same time, he also clearly indicates the point of exit in

And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm,

which once more draws a line of demarcation between art and life in its raw and unselective actuality. The story belongs to the remote past, the lovers are long dead: but this imaginative projection of the essential values of young love is immortal. And these values are arrived at not by forgetting what everyday existence is like, but by using the mean, sordid, and commonplace as a foundation upon which to build a high romance.

Keats's sense of the fullness and complexity of human modes of experience, the irony begotten of this sense, and his acceptance of experience, are most notably present in the great Odes. Since I have in other connections discussed "To Autumn" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" at some length, and since the "Ode to Psyche" and the "Ode on Indolence" are in my opinion inferior to the others, I take the "Ode to a Nightingale" as my text, omitting the "Ode on Melancholy" for reasons of space.

Douglas Bush remarks of Keats's poetry in general, "From first to last Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of … inner conflicts," and of the Odes he says

At first sight Keats's theme in the Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on a Grecian Urn … is the belief that whereas the momentary experience of beauty is fleeting, the ideal embodiment of that moment in art, in song, or in marble, is an imperishable source of joy. If that were all, these odes should be hymns of triumph, and they are not. It is the very acme of melancholy that the joy he celebrates is joy in beauty that must die.⁵⁴

This is valuable, but misleading in emphasis. There are indeed conflicts in Keats's poetry, but in the Odes cited by Professor Bush these conflicts are reconciled. The Odes do not express "the very acme of melancholy" any more than they express the very acme of joy. They express an exquisite awareness of the existence of joy and melancholy, pleasure and pain, and art and life. They express a feeling that these are inseparable, although not identical, and they express acceptance of this inseparability of the elements of human experience. In the "Ode to a Nightingale" Keats portrays a state of intense aesthetic and imaginative feeling, too poignant for long duration, which arises with the song of a bird and vanishes when the song is done. The poet records his emotion and its passing without comment.

The impossibility of maintaining this mood of exaltation is the condition of its existence, for it is relative, and describable only by comparing it with more commonplace states of mind. Also, no mood is simple and unalloyed by other feelings. Keats begins,

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk …

This is not from grief, or envy of the nightingale, but from "being too happy in thine happiness." As in the "Ode on Melancholy,"⁵⁵ he declares that intense pleasure is almost indistinguishable from numbing pain.

The "Nightingale" moves with the same steady advance and withdrawal as does the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Its motion is circular.⁵⁶ Stanzas II and III represent as it were a false start, after the mood has been established in I. The "draught of vintage" by whose magic power Keats would escape "The weariness, the fever, and the fret" of life is rejected. If the last five lines of stanza III are drawn from Keats's own suffering, that suffering is here sublimated.

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow

has a serenity and ironic undertone not to be found in the poet's relations with Fanny Brawne.

The true beginning comes in stanza IV Keats flies to the nightingale

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

The poem reaches its full intensity in this stanza and the three following. This outpouring of imaginative exaltation is contrasted with the melancholy of the low-pitched stanza III, by itself unremarkable but functioning as an integral part of the poetic whole. As in the "Eve of St. Agnes" Keats uses life at its most unpromising as a point of departure. Only by being aware of sorrow can the poet devote himself wholeheartedly to joy, conscious the while that his respite will be brief. The soft and heavy texture of the imagery in IV and V reflects a spontaneous luxuriance of feeling and perception, a self-abandonment which is merely another aspect of his previous depression.

Stanza VI commences,

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death.

The vivid sensuousness of the two preceding stanzas has been leading toward this. Death itself may offer the fullest sense of Life: "Now more than ever seems it rich to die." If the "Nightingale" is a lament for the brevity of life and joy, as Professor Bush has said, these are sentiments difficult to explain; but if the poem is simply an imaginative reflection of the complexity and intensity of human experience, Death may quite reasonably be viewed as its culmination.⁵⁷

The spell is deepest in stanza VII, of which M. R. Ridley has said that it "would, I suppose, by common consent be taken along with 'Kulba Khan,' as offering us the distilled sorceries of Romanticism."⁵⁸ In these lines the apparent contrast between the immortality of the Bird and the fugitive temporality of its hearers is strongly insisted upon.⁵⁹

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps, the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn …

Yet this opposition is not real. The "sad heart of Ruth" is as enduring as the nightingale, and after the same fashion. The temporal Ruth died long ago, the eternal Ruth lives on in poetry. Nor can one separate the temporal from the eternal, for it is by virtue of her grief, her exposure to accidental circumstance long since passed away, that she remains alive. So with the "magic casements" which follow, but with a difference. Paradoxically, these are immortal because they have long since vanished, or alternatively because they never in cold fact existed. This paradox is the essence of their charm and their reality; viewed faintly across long vistas of time, or created consciously by imagination from diverse materials seized from the actual world, they have a unique being of their own. They exist as fully as the stubbornest, most intractable actuality, but they arise from actuality and cannot live apart from it. In this stanza the notions of temporality and timelessness do not conflict, but are brought together in harmonious relationship.

It is not mere accident that Keats breaks off here, at the peak of imaginative intensity, on the word "forlorn," which has its feet in two worlds. For the value and identity of the imaginative experience depends upon its transience; it is only one mode, albeit the highest, among many. With consummate irony and psychological truth "forlorn" breaks in like the tolling of a bell to signal the end of his emotional exaltation. The "faery lands" were "forlorn" because remote and strange; the word itself is enchanted. The second "forlorn" is homely and familiar, with a half-humerous ruefulness; it dwells upon the common earth, to which the poet now returns.⁶⁰

The final stanza fills out the perfect rondure of the poem in a slow withdrawal, symbolized by the retreat of the bird itself so that objective description and subjective emotion are fused. The fading-away is slow and regular,

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades …

and in the last two verses the process of withdrawal, now solely within the poet, comes to a smooth and quiet end:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Keats does not moralize after the event, nor utter lyric cries of pain, as he might be expected to if he were writing, for example, about the sadness of mutability. He has been writing about a full and rich experience, and having described that experience he stops.

Notes

¹ Introduction, Poems of John Keats, ed. G. Thorn Drury, I, xxxv-xxxvi.

²Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 238.

³ "Keats and Shelley—a Contrast," in The John Keats Memorial Volume, ed. G. Williamson, p. 116.

⁴John Keats, p. 63.

⁵ Quoted by Colvin, op. cit., p. 31.

⁶Ibid., p. 25.

⁷ See above, pp. 172-73.

⁸The Letters of John Keats, pp. 232-33. Hereafter to be referred to as Letters.

⁹Ibid., p. 217.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 357.

¹¹Ibid., p. 465.

¹²The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, I, 301.

¹³ Leigh Hunt, quoted in John Keats: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. C. D. Thorpe, p. 70.

¹⁴ On this point see Colvin, op. cit., especially pp. 414-17; C. D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats, pp. 127-37; S. A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles, pp, 204-32.

¹⁵ See his careful criticism of the work of Haydon's protégé Cripps, and his comment on Benjamin West's Death on the Pale Horse.—Letters, pp. 50-51, 71.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 129.

¹⁷ Ernest de Sélincourt points out that Keats is not entirely consistent in his use of the stressed -éd.—Preface, The Poems of John Keats, p. v. In the great majority of cases, however, the e is either pronounced or else elided.

¹⁸ See W. J. Bate, Negative Capability, p. 62.

¹⁹ Note "fragrant-eyed," an exception to the -éd rule which corroborates de Sélincourt.

²⁰ The compound is peculiarly a feature of Keats's mature style, more especially of the Odes. One finds them earlier, as for example in the impressive "their surly eyes brow-hidden" of Endymion (II, 645), in the "Tall oaks, branch-charmed" of Hyperion (I, 74), and in "sole-thoughted" in The Eve of St. Agnes (1. 42), but not in the same abundance. They are not, on the other hand, particularly prevalent in the late Fall of Hyperion, Prince Otho, or The Cap and Bells.

²¹Op. cit., p. lxxxiv.

²² Introduction, The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. xliii.

²³Loc. cit. I do not assert that Keats's archaisms are invariably happy, but merely that they are concentrative and intensive in purpose and effect. See Arnold's examples, "When this planet's sphering time shall close" (Endymion); "Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered" (Lamia); "no mad assail"; "with glad exclaim," etc.

²⁴ Cf. J. M. Murry, "Beauty is Truth," Studies in Keats, New and Old, pp. 71-92.

²⁵ By A. Clutton-Brock, op. cit., p. 63.

²⁶ See above, pp. 97-99, on the prevalent slowness of Keats's metres. There are exceptions, of course, like the "Song of the Indian Maiden" in Endymion, Fancy, Robin Hood, and the Lines on the Mermaid Tavern. Even the shifting dance of his tetrameters, however, has more of the smooth and weighty roll of L 'Allegro and Il Penseroso than of the speed and lightness so often present in Shelley's verse.

²⁷ "The 'passiveness' of Keats is simply the passiveness of delight … his characteristic attitude is that of the delighted watcher or listener."—John Bailey, "The Poet of Stillness," in The John Keats Memorial Volume, p. 30.

²⁸Op. cit., p. 237.

²⁹ "… another of his chief characteristics … is his close relationship with common nature: he is forever drawing his imagery from common things, which are for the first time represented as beautiful… . "—Bridges, op. cit., p. xcv.

³⁰ Cf. the "Hymn to Pan," Endymion, I, 296-302:

… be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clouded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown …

³¹Letters, p. 68.

³²Ibid., p. 104. Cf. What the Thrush Said, ll. 9-12:

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the Evening listens.

³³Ibid., p. 305.

³⁴Ibid., p. 72.

³⁵Ibid., p. 96.

³⁶ Cf. To Homer:

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,
Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,
As one who sits ashore and longs perchance
To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.
So thou wast blind!—but then the veil was rent;
For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,
And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,
And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;
Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green;
There is a budding morrow in midnight,—
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;
Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befell
To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

See also The Poet, to whose sight

The hush of natural objects opens quite
To the core: and every secret essence there

Reveals the elements of good and fair;
Making him see, where Learning hath no light.
(ll. 4-7)

³⁷ C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, I, 245.

³⁸Letters, p. 108.

³⁹Ibid., p. 71.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 316.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 335.

⁴² Cf. Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, ll. 17-18:

Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

⁴³Letters, p. 336.

⁴⁴ See C. D. Thorpe, "Keats's Interest in Politics and World Affairs," PMLA, XLVI, 1228-45.

⁴⁵ See C. D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats, pp. 74-78ff.

⁴⁶ See G. B. Shaw, "Keats," in The John Keats Memorial Volume, p. 175.

⁴⁷ See J. M. Murry, "The Date of Hyperion," Keats and Shakespeare; C. D. Thorpe, John Keats: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, p. 381n.

⁴⁸ " … for the last time in this world his own free master, he found all his disciplined powers, of observation, of imagination, of craftsmanship, combining in one moment of power to produce the most serenely flawless poem in our language… . "—M. R. Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship, p. 289.

⁴⁹ " … earnestness … may certainly account for his want of humour."—Bridges, op. cit., p. ci. "He had an exquisite sense of humour… . "—Haydon, op. cit., I, 301. I prefer the word of Haydon, who knew Keats, and I find strong corroborative evidence for my preference in the Letters.

⁵⁰ " … in its kind, even though that kind be slight, it is not far short of perfection."—Ridley, op. cit., p. 96.

⁵¹ This element of contrast has of course been recognized. See E. de Sélincourt; "The Warton Lecture on Keats," in The John Keats Memorial Volume, pp. 14-15, Finney, op. cit., II, 549, 559; Amy Lowell, John Keats, II, 170-71.

⁵² "It is the old story of the cruelty of nature. For two who are happy, life demands the insatiable toll of death."—Lowell, op. cit., II, 171.

⁵³ Quoted from Ridley, op. cit., p. 190.

⁵⁴Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry, pp. 82, 107.

⁵⁵ Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine …
(ll. 25-26)

In the Ode on Melancholy Keats emphasizes the close relationships between different modes of experience even more thoroughly than in the Nightingale:

Make not your rosary of yew-berries
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
(ll. 5-10)

Melancholy in its simple state is invisible; it is beheld only by him "whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."

⁵⁶ Olwen Ward Campbell, Shelley and the Unromantics, p. 230.

⁵⁷ Cf. Why Did I Laugh, with its conclusion,

Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser—Death is Life's high meed.

⁵⁸Op. Cit., p. 227.

⁵⁹ One must agree here with Amy Lowell that to object that the nightingale is obviously not immortal (see Bridges, op. cit., p. lxiv) is to miss the point, although her manners in this argument are enough to provoke a saint (John Keats, II, 252). She has certainly provoked H. W. Garrod (Keats, pp. 113-14), whose saintliness as regards Miss Lowell is non-existent.

⁶⁰ Cf. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 31.

Bibliography

I. Texts

Keats, John. John Keats: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Edited by Clarence DeWitt Thorpe. New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, Inc., 1935.

——. The Letters of John Keats, 3rd edition. Edited by Maurice Buxton Forman. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

——. Poems of John Keats. Edited by G. Thorn Drury, with an introduction by Robert Bridges. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 2 vols.

——. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1884.

II. Scholarship and Criticism

Bailey, John. "The Poet of Stillness," The John Keats Memorial Volume, q. v.

Bate, Walter Jackson. Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939.

Bradley, A. C. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1917.

Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1939.

Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937.

Campbell, Olwen Ward. Shelley and the Unromantics. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1924.

Clutton-Brock, Arthur. "Keats and Shelley—a Contrast," The John Keats Memorial Volume, q.v.

Colvin, Sir Sidney. John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917.

Finney, Claude Lee. The Evolution of Keats's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936. 2 vols.

Garrod, H. W. Keats. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1926.

Haydon, Benjamin Robert. The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846). Edited from his journals by Tom Taylor, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 2 vols.

Larrabee, Stephen A. English Bards and Grecian Marbles: The Relationship Between Sculpture and Poetry, Especially in the Romantic Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

Lowell, Amy. John Keats. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925. 2 vols.

Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare: a Study of Keats's Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1925.

——. Studies in Keats: New and Old, 2nd edition. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.

Ridley, M. R. Keats ' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development. Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1933.

Sélincourt, E. de. "The Warton Lecture on Keats," The John Keats Memorial Volume, q. v.

Shaw, Bernard. "Keats," The John Keats Memorial Volume, q. v.

Thorpe, Clarence DeWitt. "Keats's Interest in Politics and World Affairs," PMLA, XLVI (1931), 1228-45.

——. The Mind of John Keats. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1926.