(228.) 1060. The world's great age begins | anew: the age of liberty, love, and innocence, as in the final passages of "Prometheus Unbound" (pages 198-199). But in this chorus the poet has in mind the ancient glories, real and mythical, of Greece. These, he hopes, will be surpassed in the golden age to come. 1068. Peneus: the chief river of Thessaly, passing through the proverbially beautiful vale of Tempe. 1071. Cyclads: the Cyclades, islands in the Ægean. 1072. Argo: Jason's ship, in which the Golden Fleece was brought. 1077. Calypso: the nymph who sought in vain to retain Ulysses on her island. 1090-1095. Saturn and Love etc.: "Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. 'All who fell,' or the gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt; the 'One who rose,' or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the pagan world were amerced of their worship; and the 'many unsubdued,' or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America" (Shelley's note). 1091-1092. more bright and good .. than One who rose: Shelley's intention here is explained in his note: "The sublime human character of Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a power who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of men has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture.' Cf. "Prometheus Unbound," Act First, line 546 ff. TO JANE: THE RECOLLECTION In Italy Shelley saw much of Jane Williams, “an extremely pretty and gentle woman, apparently not very clever," as he describes her in a letter. Shelley's feeling for Mrs. Williams is given by Dowden as follows: "As a youth his imagination had dwelt chiefly on the heroic qualities in women, the valor of pure love, intellectual courage, strength of character, a passion for reforming the world. . . Now he acknowledged before all else the exquisite charity of woman, the grace of feminine tenderness tenderness not of the heroic kind which can probe a wound to heal it, but that which lulls our pain as with some delightful anodyne, and trances the troubled sense, if only for an hour" (Life, II, 468). While an undergraduate at Oxford, Thomas Lovell Beddoes published the only volumes that appeared during his lifetime. He was then an ardent admirer - and one of the first admirers of Shelley, whose Posthumous Poems were issued in 1824 mainly through his efforts. Always devoted to the Elizabethan dramatic poets, he proceeded to give his energies to the composition of plays in blank verse that are reminiscent of Webster, Tourneur, Marston, and others; the best is "Death's Jest-Book," described in a letter as follows: "In it Despair has married wildest Mirth, And to their wedding-banquet all the earth. Is bade to bring its enmities and loves, Quite unable to construct a plot, he excelled in songs worthy of comparison with those of his masters, the Elizabethans and Shelley. Turning suddenly to the study of medicine, Beddoes went to Göttingen and thoroughly Germanized himself. For some twenty years he lived in Germany and Switzerland, studying, tinkering at his plays, cherishing radical political opinions, becoming more wayward and eccentric, and at length committed suicide. DREAM-PEDLARY (232.) 21. Ill didst thou buy: which thou didst ill buy. THE SWALLOW LEAVES HER NEST This poem may be read as a sequel to the last stanza of the preceding. 3. the rain: i.e., the chill rains of autumn, when the swallow goes. 6. both: "the swallow" and "the soul" (lines 1-2). 10. and: instead of "but," because the poet has felt the hurrying winter wind to be prophetic of spring. Compare this stanza with the first stanza of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (page 181). 12-14. When a storm of ghosts etc. The spirits shall reanimate the dd like rain-storms awakening the seed spring. LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859 Hunt received his schooling at Ch Hospital, London, after Coleridge and Lamb. At the age of twenty-one he began a long career as journalist. For a personal "libel" on the Prince Regent, he was condemned to two years' imprisonment, which he spent pleasantly, receiving his friends, reading the old Italian poets, speculating on versification, and writing a romance his long, leisurely "Story of Rimini," in which the theme came from Dante, the handling was partly suggested by Boccaccio, and the verse-form was a new kind of heroic couplet only distantly akin to Chaucer's, easy, colloquial, verging on the trivial and vulgar. Hunt's best work, however, is in his short pieces; which at times attain beauty, dignity, finish, as in "Abou Ben Adhem" (page 233); or a pleasing facetious humor, as in "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit" (page 233). In his familiar essays he has grace, and good cheer, and spontaneity, together with his characteristic chattiness; less personal than Lamb, he recalls the light periodical essay of the "Spectator" type. The head of the "Cockney School" of writers, he was John Keats was the son of a liverystable keeper, at a London inn, who had married the proprietor's daughter. While still in school, he lost both parents, and his guardians proceeded to apprentice him to a surgeon at Edmonton. After his indenture had been cancelled he went to London, in 1815, to walk the hospitals; it was two years more before he definitely abandoned surgery in favor of poetry. His devotion to poetry had begun in his school-days at Enfield, where he drew the interest and presently the friendship of the junior master, Charles Cowden Clarke, a lover of literature. According to Clarke, he was not only a favorite of all, noted for "terrier courage," but also a voracious reader of history, travel, fiction, and especially books of ancient mythology. him, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, far To from being a dull work of reference, was a realm of golden beauty and high romance. When his systematic schooling came to an abrupt end, he continued to read, translating the whole of the Eneid; and when Clarke presently lent him a copy of The Faerie Queene, “he went thro' it as a young horse thro' a spring meadow ramping.' All of this early ardor for great literature he poured, with an intensifying restraint, into his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (page 234), -one of his lyric masterpieces, published in his first volume of poems in 1817. Less salutary than the contagion of great literature was the influence of a friend whom he met through Clarke, - the poet Leigh Hunt; who, while he enhanced his disciple's fresh delight in beauty, also encouraged in him a tendency to slovenly structure, and to touches of the falsely chatty and the falsely luxuriant. The influence of Hunt may again be seen in Keats's next publication, the long poem "Endymion," an eminently youthful work in its rambling movement, its lack of sureness in style, its exuberance of color and music. Though these traits of the poem in some measure merited the contemptuous critical reviews that appeared in authoritative periodicals, - the review in the Quarterly was once believed to have "killed" John Keats, - it contains fine passages (such as the extracts in the text, pages 235-237) and discloses, to one familiar with Keats's work as a whole, the promise of his later achieve ment. With "Endymion" ends his poetic apprenticeship: in the work of the next year, 1819, he is already a master. Yet "Bitter restraint, and sad occasion dear" compel us to pass almost without pause from the story of his poetic development to the story of his physical decline. "Endymion" was no sooner published than the first warnings of the poet's fatal disease appeared. His brother Tom, afflicted also with consumption, died after Keats had nursed him for several months. About this time, Keats met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne; but the state of his health made marriage impossible; and his illness and frustrated passion merged into one agony. Nevertheless, he contrived to produce, within the single year 1819, a legacy of poems that, like the Grecian urn, will remain, "in midst of other woe" than his and ours, "a friend to man": "The Eve of St. Agnes" (page 242); "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (page 248); a succession of odes including "To Autumn" (page 254), "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (page 251), and "Ode to a Nightingale" (page 252); and the narrative poems "Lamia" (page 269) and "Hyperion" (page 254). Early the next year, 1820, the coughing of arterial blood warned him of the end: in September he sailed for Italy with the artist Severn; in February he was dead in Rome. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER (234.) 3. western islands: British isles, hence British poetry. 8. Chapman: the Elizabethan poet, whose great translation, despite its rough metre and its inaccuracies, gave Keats the stimulation of Homer's pure, clear air ("pure serene," "serene" being a noun). 11. Cortez: It was Balboa, and not Cortez, who, from a mountain in Central America, discovered the Pacific Ocean. ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET This and Hunt's sonnet on the same subject (page 232) were written in a friendly competition. Keats, unlike Hunt, devotes the sestet to description — with what purpose? ON THE SEA (235.) 4. Hecate: the moon, governing the tides. 13-14. Sit ye sea-nymphs quired!: Compare the closing lines of Wordsworth's sonnet "The World is Too Much With Us" (page 45). ENDYMION "The story of Endymion and the moon, as retold by the Elizabethans, had early captivated Keats's imagination: the loveliness of the moon-lit world—even in a London suburb - had become a kind of symbol for all beauty, and he himself a new Endymion, the implicit hero of the story he told; and, by the same symbolism, a lover of all loveliness, so that nothing in the universe of real or imagined beauty was irrelevant to his quest" (Professor Herford, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, XII, 90). 1. A thing · for ever: Cf. the first line of "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" (page 235). (236.) 37-39. each pleasant scene our own valleys: The poem was begun in the month of April and at the Isle of Wight. With his eyes upon the freshening grass and foliage of "our own" valleys, the poet thinks of April in the glens of Mount Latmus (in Asia Minor) — the opening scene and season of his story (see lines 69, 138). 50. daisies, vermeil rimmed and white: The tips of the petals of the Eng lish daisy are red. (Cf. Wordsworth "To the Daisy," line 21, page 34.) 55. let Autumn bold etc.: The poem was actually finished late in the autumn. The last part is touched with autumnal mood and image (e.g., Book IV, lines 294-297). HYMN TO PAN Here "the dreamy pacing of the ve verse gathers into lyric concentration and intensity" (Herford). This hymn is a worthy forerunner of Keats's great odes. 234. Eternal whispers: Cf. the first line of "On the Sea" (page 235). 236. hamadryads: nymphs of trees. The poet has seemed to see their hair when hazel branches, coming together in the wind, make for a moment a thickened patch of foliage. 241. pipy hemlock: This refers to a poisonous European plant with a hollow stem. 242. Syrinx: a nymph loved by Pan. She fled from him and, seeking refuge in a river, was changed into a reed (see line 239). 245. trembling mazes: This phrase (238.) 67-72. O that our dreamings We jostle: O that our dreams and fancies in the night-time would reflect the high and beautiful things of nature, rather than the experiences of our own spirit during the day, for our everyday life is full of conflict. 73. Admiral-staff: the flagstaff of the admiralship. - Keats refers to his own immaturity, as in the preceding poem. 75. High reason, and the love of good and ill: appreciative insight into the conflict of good and evil in the world. 78-82. imagination brought Beyond its proper bound etc.: When the imagination breaks bounds, and yet reaches no high insight (see preceding note), it wanders in a hopeless purgatory between earth and heaven, guided by neither conventional nor spiritual law. lusk. 88. lampit: limpet, a kind of mol This fragment of an ode was written on May Day. The most beautiful of the seven sisters known as the Pleiades, Maia was identified, by the Romans, with an Italian goddess of the Spring. 1. still: ever. 3. As thou wast hymned etc.: Keats refers to the Roman cult of Maia (Baiæ, near Naples, being a favorite Roman watering-place), then to an earlier cult of the goddess in Greek Sicily, and then to the still earlier cult in the isles of Greece. ROBIN HOOD 13. ivory: whistle. 21. seven stars: the Pleiades. 30. pasture Trent: the pasture land along the River Trent, which flows through Nottinghamshire, near the forest haunts of Robin Hood. 33. morris: a popular outdoor dance in which the performers wore fantastic costumes and bells. 34. song of Gamelyn: The reference is to a pseudo-Chaucerian "Tale of Gamelyn" and, generally, to similar tales and songs of outlawry. 36. grenè shawe: green wood. LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN The Mermaid Tavern was a noted resort of poets and wits in the time of Shakespeare. |