Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Sidney Colvin
vacant air; So that we look around with prying stare, Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning; To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended. That is to crown our name when life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, And die away in ardent mutterings.
Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation, declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her acceptance he will be admitted to ‘the fair visions of all places’ and will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things, in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains to ‘the events of this wide world,’ which it will be given him to seize ‘like a strong giant.’
At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the warning and its reply are alike felicitous:—
| Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm. |
Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days—Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores—certainly with visions from Poussin’s Bacchanals in his mind’s eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul. Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically. He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while ‘with glorious fear,’ then swooping downward to alight on a grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, ‘awfully intent,’ and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, ‘shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,’ sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind’s eye the multitude and variety of figures in this procession—
| Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward— |
contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, ‘the agonies, the strife of human hearts,’—and close with the vision of
| a lovely wreath of girls Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls, |
as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant’s mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.
This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats’s mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads seventeen years earlier:—
| Is there so small a range In the present strength of manhood, that the high Imagination cannot freely fly As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? From the clear space of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove’s large eye-brow, to the tender greening Of April meadows? Here her altar shone, E’en in this isle; and who could paragon The fervid choir that lifted up a noise Of harmony, to where it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound, Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, Eternally around a dizzy void? Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy’d With honors; nor had any other care Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair. Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant’s force They sway’d about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul’d! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom,9 and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of—were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye thought a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it—no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark’d with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau! |
The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the Biographia Literaria (1816). In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is ‘I green, thou greenest?’ Why should the hair of the muses require ‘soothing’?—if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. And surely ‘foppery’ belongs to civilization and not to ‘barbarism’: and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason and ‘correctness’—however