Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Sidney Colvin
particularly when ‘a wave was billowing through a tree,’ as he described the uplifting surge of air among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he heard the wind coming across woodlands. ‘The tide! the tide!’ he would cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his face glow till he ‘would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths,’ or like ‘a young eagle staring with proud joy before taking flight.’ …
Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen. …
The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading, or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face. …
The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie—the only thing, during those country-rambles, that would bring the poet ‘to himself again’ was the motion ‘of the inland sea’ he loved so well, particularly the violent passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.
In regard to Keats’s social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. ‘In my knowledge of my fellow beings,’ says Cowden Clarke, ‘I never knew one who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness, and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his features—“the form of his visage was changed.” ’
In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and nature. ‘Though a quarrel in the streets,’ he says, ‘is a thing to be hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.’ His yearning love for the old polytheism and instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things, let us take Cowden Clarke’s account of the way he could enjoy and re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our refinement no longer tolerates:—
His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its comptroller, Mr. William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical nature to ‘keep back’ began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. ‘My eyes! Bill Soames giv’ me sich a licker!’ evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats’s entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent personification of the baiting, with his position—his legs and arms bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged—his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whose Irish Melodies were an income to him and who was known to have just received a cheque of £3000 in advance for Lalla Rookh. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were as eager that John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr. Abbey afterwards related, in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already referred as containing his character of the poet’s mother. The die was cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his convivial alias ‘Junkets’) should put forth a volume of his poems. Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet To Leigh Hunt Esqr, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:—
| Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the East to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May. But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, With these poor offerings, a man like thee. |
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet’s first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.
1 These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
2 Cowden Clarke, writing many years later,