Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Sidney Colvin
the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the Cricket:—‘The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:—
The poetry of earth is never dead. |
“Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines:—
On a lone winter morning, when the frost Hath wrought a silence— |
“Ah that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!” And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season’s suspension and torpidity.’ The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another’s company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves ‘after the manner of the elder bards.’ Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in—conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, ‘in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,’ and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.9 Here are Hunt’s pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:—
A crown of ivy! I submit my head To the young hand that gives it—young, ’tis true, But with a right, for ’tis a poet’s too. How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread With their broad angles, like a nodding shed Over both eyes! and how complete and new, As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew My sense with freshness—Fancy’s rustling bed! Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks, And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes— And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent, Bacchus—whose bride has of his hand fast hold. It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind, Thus to be topped with leaves;—to have a sense Of honour-shaded thought—an influence As from great Nature’s fingers, and be twined With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind, As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence A head that bows to her benevolence, Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind. ’Tis what’s within us crowned. And kind and great Are all the conquering wishes it inspires— Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods, Love of love’s self, and ardour for a state Of natural good befitting such desires, Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes. |
Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:—
ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT
Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain Into a delphic labyrinth—I would fain Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt I owe to the kind poet who has set Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain. Two bending laurel sprigs—’tis nearly pain To be conscious of such a coronet. Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises Gorgeous as I would have it—only I see A trampling down of what the world most prizes, Turbans and crowns and blank regality; And then I run into most wild surmises Of all the many glories that may be. |
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED
What is there in the universal earth More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree? Haply a halo round the moon—a glee Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth; And haply you will say the dewy birth Of morning roses—ripplings tenderly Spread by the halcyon’s breast upon the sea— But these comparisons are nothing worth. Then there is nothing in the world so fair? The silvery tears of April? Youth of May? Or June that breathes out life for butterflies? No, none of these can from my favourite bear Away the palm—yet shall it ever pay Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes. |
Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats’s mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of the third book of Endymion—
There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel— |
and in its fifth a repetition of the ‘wild surmise’ phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of Sleep and Poetry, Keats’s chief venture in verse this winter.
Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt’s, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo:—
God of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where—where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm—too low crawling, for death? O Delphic Apollo! |
And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of ‘A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.’
1 Another account says Mitchell.
2 In The Asclepiad, April 1884.
3 Houghton MSS.
4 Le Grand: Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781. G. L. Way: Fabliaux or Tales, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.
5 This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.
6 In a review of Keats’s first book written the next year (Examiner, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the ‘Solitude’ sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not yet met Keats personally.