Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed
The sea-swell took her hair.
or thus from the love-making of Cynthia: —
Now I swear at once
That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce —
Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown —
O I do think that I have been alone
In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing,
While every eve saw me my hair uptying,
With fingers cool as aspen leaves.
In like manner the unfortunate opening of Book III above cited leads on, as Mr de Sélincourt has justly observed, to a passage in praise of the moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of Keats’ power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own: —
What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move
My heart so potently? When yet a child
I oft have dry’d my tears when thou hast smil’d.
Thou seem’dst my sister: hand in hand we went
From eve to morn across the firmament.
No apples would I gather from the tree,
Till thou hadst cool’d their cheeks deliciously:
No tumbling water ever spake romance,
But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance:
No woods were green enough, no bower divine,
Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine:
In sowing time ne’er would I dibble take,
Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake;
And, in the summer tide of blossoming,
No one but thee hath heard me blythly sing
And mesh my dewy flowers all the night.
No melody was like a passing spright
If it went not to solemnize thy reign.
Yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain
By thee were fashioned in the selfsame end;
And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend
With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen;
Thou wast the mountain-top — the sage’s pen —
The poet’s harp — the voice of friends — the sun;
Thou wast the river — thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion’s blast — thou wast my steed —
My goblet full of wine — my topmost deed: —
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonized tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
In the last two lines of the above Keats gives us the essential master key to his own poetic nature and being. The eight preceding, from ‘As I grew in years’ offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a passage of similar purport in Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe: —
Be kind (quoth he) sweet Nymph unto thy lover,
My soul’s sole essence and my senses’ mover,
Life of my life, pure Image of my heart,
Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art.
My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee,
Thou art that all which ruleth all in me,
Thou art the sap and life whereby I live,
Which powerful vigour doth receive and give.
Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn,
The North whereto my heart’s true touch doth turn.
Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone Drayton’s early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets, — or perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?
In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the ‘silent workings of the dawn’ on the morning of Pan’s festival: —
Rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man’s voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of nature’s lives and wonders puls’d tenfold,
To feel this sunrise and its glories old.
The freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing less than Shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to place and lead up to the word ‘old’ as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient Greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in the opening chorus of Goethe’s Faust, at nature’s eternal miracle of the sun still rising ‘glorious as on creation’s day.’
It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature’s coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well: —
I started up, when lo! refreshfully,
There came upon my face in plenteous showers
Dewdrops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers,
Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight,
Bathing my spirit in a new delight.
Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself —
’Tis the grot
Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot,
Doth her resign; and where her tender hands
She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:
A little later, and
Now he is sitting by a shady spring,
And elbow-deep with feverous fingering,
Stems the upbursting cold.
For many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to Cynthia above quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life and worship which comes floated upon the poet’s inner vision by an imagined strain of music from across the sea: —
It seem’d