When the lute is broken, Sweet tunes are remembered not; As music and splendour No song when the spirit is mute :— Like the wind through a ruined cell, That ring the dead seaman's knell.11 The mere diction has enchantment in it; and in that respect the specimens I have offered are very far from monopolizing the charms of their class. Many others are their equals. Some, which are too long to be set out at all fully, as well as too familiarly known to need recalling, are their superiors. Mark the dazzling series of glowing, glorious images dedicated to the Skylark. The whole is a golden staircase up which the song winds, step by step, heavenwards.12 As overwhelmingly from the wings of its sister The Cloud, itself 'nursling of the sky', are: shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, Whatever the minstrel's temper of the moment, the music never fails. The wild west wind,' dirge of the dying year ',14 at his 'incantation', becomes an organ to voice his gloom. When the fit shifts, river goddesses dance and carol in sympathy with his instant of gaiety: Gliding and springing In murmurs as soft as sleep; The Earth seemed to love her, As she lingered towards the deep.15 As for the poet himself, I do not suppose that he would even have understood the bestowal of praise for form and symmetry. In hymning Pan or Alpheus he was no more striving consciously to attract by the grace of rhythm than in the grandly intolerant Ode to Liberty.16 Search him through and through for depth, for essence, of thought; you will find nothing to beat the biting irony of the boast of Ozymandias; and where among his words for music is melody more sufficing than in that perfect sonnet? I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone Simply his impulse, the current of his spirit, happened in a song to use the same channel as common human feeling. He desired to express an emotion or conception; and by chance it was definite enough not to need to stretch and strain his native instinct of ear. The uninitiated, who profit by the coincidence, ought not to flatter themselves that the fanatic of ideas meant to sacrifice the least of them for their pleasure. From first to last he has been seeking to embody, to interpret, a vision, a mystery. It has mattered nothing to him whether the text were a flaw in the Universe, or a cloud in the West; the snapping of a lute's chords, or the death of Adonais; 18 an ode to the lark, or a psalm on Intellectual Beauty-not the less profound that it is as lovely also as music by the night-wind sent Thro' strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream! 19 Mere ordinary lovers of poetry must accept Shelley for that he is; be content that he sings for himself, not for them. Happily for them they cannot be inhibited from listening. Though they have not bought the privilege by discovering wisdom in Julian and Maddalo, or by entering into the inner meaning of Epipsychidion, at least they will understand the possibilities of English verse from the pen. of a master; they will be sensible of a rapture of melody. And there may be more; great minds-and Shelley's, with all its freaks, was great-have much to tell even to those who are not their disciples. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Four vols. Reeves and Turner, 1876. 1 To Jane, Invitation to the Pine Forest, vv. 65–7. 2 Lines, Written among the Euganean Hills, vv 286-93. 3 The Sensitive Plant, Part I, vv. 15-16; and Part III, vv. 66–9. 18 Adonais (Elegy on the Death of John Keats). 19 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, st. 3. 17 Ozymandias. JOHN KEATS 1795-1821 ENDYMION surprised and shocked the lingering orthodoxy of late Georgian critics. Its author provoked as much animosity as Wordsworth, and more than Byron. Wordsworth bore no relation to the idols of their youth, Dryden and Pope. Byron, and Scott also, affected to revere both. Reviewers simply did not understand Shelley. Endymion was the worst of rebels. It had borrowed and travestied myths of the Greek Classics, and the metre of English Masters. Many real faults indeed may be found in it. The plot wanders, and perpetually loses itself. The narrative, often the descriptions, are prolix and tedious. The diction is troubled with strange words and phrases. The rhyme tends to lead the sense. Not rarely the ideas are thin in comparison with the parade of the circumstances meant to wait upon them. Occasionally the prosaic will obtrude itself; cotton-backing showing under velvet pile. But then the golden autumnal haze, the delicious uncertainty what visions of romance will next come and go from and into happy Dreamland! The age was one of muddy perturbation-strifes of peoples against kings, and kings against peoples, of mortal struggles between agrarianism and feudalism, labour and capital, political economy and an outworn Faith. Imagine, for the few belated Elizabethans, the joy in this pageant of Olympian goddesses haunting the happy pastures of Arcadian hills ! It is in truth an Elizabethan poet's world. The Elizabethan idea of poetry breathes throughout. Laws of physical nature are suspended. Men ride on eagles' wings, walk the sea, and sojourn in ocean caves. No whisper of wranglings of statesmen, discontents, and hunger of the seething masses, stirs the serene solitude. Fields and woodlands are governed by no human law, and need none. The cares are not of a kind to be inflamed or lulled by the lyre of a Tyrtaeus. The author of Endymion had drunk deep from the fountains of Sidney, Spenser, and William Browne; of Shakespeare-the singer of Venus and Adonis, of Lucrece, and the Sonnets. He had learnt to move in an upper air of his own, as they in theirs. Where, in his models, a tincture of a purpose had intervened, he stopped short. He would have abhorred to enlist, like his beloved Spenser, the Muse in the service of a moral allegory. For him poetry was no minister to duty, as understood outside. No painful requisition of self-denial was imposed upon it by the laws of its being. Endymion, without a sting of the conscience remoulded for poetic use on Hellenic lines, even might wave back to the skies his dream-mistress. He is not liable to a shadow of reproach for wooing and winning, before he was properly off with the old love, a dusky and more tangible mate: No more of dreaming.-Now, For poets in general the one inspiring motto is: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; for the universe, the eternal law, 2 That first in beauty should be first in might; and for himself : Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.4 3 The whole is immature. Had Keats lived, not impossibly |