The Life and Times of John Keats: Complete Personal letters & Two Extensive Biographies. John Keats

under the spell of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Spenser and the Spenserians, foremost among them William Browne; Drayton in his pastorals and elegies; Shakespeare, especially in his early poems and comedies; Fletcher and Ben Jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like The Faithful Shepherdess or The Sad Shepherd; Chapman’s version of Homer, especially the Odyssey and the Hymns, and Sandys’s of the Metamorphoses of Ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we feel his mind and ear to be full. In their day the English language had been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages. Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental, Italianate fashion of his own. And now came young Keats, not following closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during the illustrious half century from 1590-1640. He chose the heroic couplet, and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century. He was even more sedulous than any of his Elizabethan or Jacobean masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the intervening age had disallowed. There was a special rashness in his attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages — the marks of what Pope had denounced as ‘our rustic vein And splay-foot verse’ — was bound to bring against him.

      First of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. He no longer uses double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with a profusion like that of Britannia’s Pastorals. They occur, but in moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four books. At the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the unstressed second syllables of words such as ‘dancing’ (rimed with ‘string’), ‘elbow’ (with ‘slow’), ‘velvet’ (with ‘set’), ‘purplish’ (with ‘fish’). On the other hand he regularly resolves the ‘tion’ or ‘shion’ termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying the rime, as— ‘With speed of five-tailed exhalations:’ ‘Before the deep intoxication;’ ‘Vanish’d in elemental passion;’ and the like. He admits closed couplets, but very grudgingly, as a general rule in the proportion of not more than one to eight or ten of the unclosed. He seldom allows himself even so much of a continuous run of them as this: —

      Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole

       A breeze most softly lulling to my soul;

       And shaping visions all about my sight

       Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light;

       The which became more strange, and strange, and dim,

       And then were gulph’d in a tumultuous swim:

       Or this: —

       So in that crystal place, in silent rows,

       Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes. —

       The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac’d

       Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac’d;

       Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips

       All ruddy, — for here death no blossom nips.

       He mark’d their brows and foreheads; saw their hair

       Put sleekly on one side with nicest care.

      The essential principle of his versification is to let sentences, prolonged and articulated as freely and naturally as in prose, wind their way in and out among the rimes, the full pause often splitting a couplet by falling at the end of the first line, and oftener still (in the proportion of two or three times to one) breaking up a single line in the middle or at any point of its course. Sense and sound flow habitually over from one couplet to the next without logical or grammatical pause, but to keep the sense of metre present to the ear Keats commonly takes care that the second line of a couplet shall end with a fully stressed rime-word such as not only allows, but actually invites, at least a momentary breathing-pause to follow it. It is only in the rarest cases that he compels the breath to hurry on with no chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a line to its object at the beginning of the next (‘on | His left,’ ‘upon | A dreary morning’), or from an auxiliary to its verb (‘as might be | Remembered’) or from a comparative particle to the thing compared (‘sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms’); a practice in which Chapman, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the metre. Keats’ musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear too early trained in the ‘sweet-slipping’ movement of Spenser, to let him fall often into this fault. To the other besetting fault of some of these masters, that of a harsh and jolting ruggedness, he was still less prone. Although he chooses to forgo that special effect of combined vigour and smoothness proper to the closed couplet, he always knows how to make a rich and varied music with his vowel sounds; while the same fine natural instinct for sentence-structure as distinguishes the prose of his letters makes itself felt in his verse, so that wherever he has need to place a full stop he can make his sentence descend upon it smoothly and skimmingly, like a seabird on the sea. The long passage quoted from Book III in the last chapter illustrates the narrative verse of Endymion in nearly all its moods and variations. Here is a characteristic example of its spoken or dramatic verse. Endymion supplicates his goddess from underground: —

      O Haunter chaste

       Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste,

       Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen

       Art thou now forested? O Woodland Queen,

       What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos?

       Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos

       Of thy disparted nymphs? Through what dark tree

       Glimmers thy crescent? Wheresoe’er it be,

       ’Tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste

       Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste

       Thy loveliness in dismal elements;

       But, finding in our green earth sweet contents,

       There livest blissfully. Ah, if to thee

       It feels Elysian, how rich to me,

       An exil’d mortal, sounds its pleasant name!

       Within my breast there lives a choking flame —

       O let me cool’t the zephyr-boughs among!

       A homeward fever parches up my tongue —

       O let me slake it at the running springs!

       Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings —

       O let me once more hear the linnet’s note!

       Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float —

       O let me ‘noint them with the heaven’s light!

       Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?

       O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!

       Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice?

       O think how this dry palate would rejoice!

       If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice,

       O think how I should love a bed of flowers! —

      The