His shoulders were very broad for his size; he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up, an eager power checked and made patient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise […] the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large dark and sensitive.
LEIGH HUNT: Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828)
The first of four children in a family of a well-to-do coachman, Keats is to many the Romantic poet par excellence. Yet in some ways this pugnacious young man, who was stunted in growth – five foot tall – was the antithesis of the beautiful poet of Romanticism: at school in Enfield he initially excelled more at cricket and boxing than academe, and his hedonism showed itself in his love of claret, his delight in good company and his conviction that poetry should be ‘felt on the pulses’. His father died in a riding accident when Keats was eight, and his mother succumbed to tuberculosis when he was fourteen. He left school at the age of fifteen to become apprenticed to an apothecary, but returned regularly to Clarke’s School to pursue his friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s son, who encouraged his interest in literature. Clarke described how Keats ‘ramped through’ Spenser’s Faerie Queen ‘like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow’. He spent four years studying surgery at Guy’s Hospital, where he also started to read widely in English literature. Leigh Hunt published his sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ in 1816; Poems was published in 1817, followed by Endymion in 1818. Despite much negative criticism (Blackwood’s Magazine referred to him as a member of the ‘Cockney School’, and Wordsworth described Endymion as ‘a pretty piece of paganism’), he began work on Hyperion.
When in 1818, the year in which he nursed his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis, he moved to Charles Armitage Brown’s house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he fell obsessively in love with Fanny Brawne, the next-door neighbour – a relationship, never easy, that produced some of the most wonderful (and, at times, agonizing) love letters in the language. In the spring of 1819, in a burst of inspiration that matches that of Shelley at the same period in Italy, and of Hardy during 1912–13, Keats wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and a series of odes by which his name is now best known to lovers of literature: ‘On indolence’, ‘On a Grecian urn’, ‘To Psyche’, ‘To a nightingale’ and ‘On melancholy’. ‘Ode to autumn’ followed in the second half of 1819. His second volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, was published in July 1820, by which time he was ill with tuberculosis. Aware that he might have only a few years to live, he sailed for Italy in September with his friend Joseph Severn, whose portrait of Keats hangs in the National Portrait Gallery; the hope that the warm climate might ease his condition proved illusory. Shelley had invited him to stay with his family, but instead he settled in Rome. He wrote no more poetry and died, aged twenty-five years and four months, in a small apartment above the Spanish Steps. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery, described thus by Shelley in his preface to Adonais (1821): ‘The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.’
Keats is, perhaps, the most sensuous of English poets, even though Byron referred to ‘Johnny Keats’s p-ss a bed poetry’ and his ‘drivelling idiotism’ (letter to John Murray, dated ‘Ravenna, 8bre 12o, 1820’). Few have agreed with his strictures. Keats’s reputation increased after his death; he was admired by Tennyson, who considered him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century; Arnold commended his ‘intellectual and spiritual passion’; and in the twentieth century he has been celebrated by T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Christopher Ricks and Andrew Motion.
O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone2;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.3
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dream’d – Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried – ‘La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
(Bush, Dyson, Gibbs, Goehr, Hindemith, O’Neill, Rubbra)
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
Where be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there i’ the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?
[I love your meads and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly;
But ’hind the door I love kissing more –
Oh, look not so disdainly!]
I love your hills and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating –
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!
I’ll put your basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I hang up on this willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy’s eye
And kiss on a grass-green pillow.
(Argento, Quilter)
Asleep! Oh, sleep a little while, white pearl!
And let me kneel, and let me pray to thee,
And let me call Heaven’s blessing on thine eyes,
And let me breathe into the happy air,
That doth enfold and touch thee all about,
Vows of my slavery, my giving up,
My sudden adoration, my great love!
(Woodforde-Finden)
Many of Holst’s friends, including Clifford Bax, doubted the wisdom of Holst’s decision to edit such celebrated poems by Keats. His daughter Imogen, however, wrote: ‘There is a clear thread of thought linking each movement: it is the conviction that the poet, in the strength of his imagination, can triumph over the shortcomings of material existence.’
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme!
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?2
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve:
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs, that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new!
More happy love, more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young –
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede3
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed –
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! If so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes:
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like the mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than the pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men’s knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?
More serene than Cordelia’s countenance?
More full of visions than a high romance?
What, but thee, Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!
Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!
Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses!
Most happy listener! when the morning blesses
Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes
That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.
[…]
I had a dove and the sweet dove died,
And I have thought it died of grieving;
O what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving:
Sweet little red feet! why would you die?
Why would you leave me, sweet bird, why?
You liv’d alone in the forest tree,
Why, pretty thing! could you not live with me?
I kiss’d you oft and gave you white pease;
Why not live sweetly as in the green trees?
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Head)