Keats’s 1820 volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, among the major achievements of Romantic poetry, includes three narrative poems – Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes – that focus on questions of imagination and reality, and their many related dualisms.1 In Lamia Keats sought to address an issue he deals with humorously in his review of 21 December 1817 on the acting of Edmund Kean. Kean, for Keats, ‘is a relict of romance; – a Posthumous ray of chivalry’. He is implored at the essay’s end to ‘Cheer us a little in the failure of our days! for romance lives but in books. The goblin is driven from the heath, and the rainbow is robbed of its mystery!’2 The twentieth‐century American poet Amy Clampitt sees Lamia as ‘a weird trophy / hung among the totems of his own ambivalence’, and about nothing is it more ambivalent than its view of romance.3
The heroine is more than the metamorphic monster of Keats’s source, added at the end of the 1820 printing, as though to point up what the poet had done with his originating material. In that note, from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, potential poignancy flickers, but passes into exposure of illusion; after her unmasking as ‘a serpent, a lamia’ by Apollonius, the heroine ‘wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved’.4 In the poem, Keats deepens and complicates ‘Burton’s straightforward account of witchcraft uncovered by the wisdom of philosophy’.5 Questions of judgement are in play throughout.
At the beginning Lamia gains or regains a female form as a result of a questionable bargain with the lascivious Hermes in pursuit of a nymph made invisible by Lamia’s powers. The first prolonged description of her is a fireworks display of ‘dazzling’ contraries and oppositions: ‘She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, / Vermilion‐spotted, golden, green, and blue’ (47–8). This description blinds the reader’s sight with colour and possibility, suggesting as one sombre possibility that Lamia is a ‘Gordian’ knot that only a sword‐cut can untie, as proves to be the case when she is pitilessly unmasked by Apollonius, the rationalist mentor of Lycius, who is beguiled by Lamia into falling in love with her. But this opening passage also includes hints that Lamia may be worthy of sympathy as well as mistrust:
… rainbow‐sided, touched with miseries,
She seemed, at once, some penanc’d lady elf,
The demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. (54–6)
Keats’s Drydenesque couplets allow for doubleness in a phrase such as ‘touched with miseries’. The rhyme of ‘elf’ and ‘self’ suggests the flitting elusiveness of selfhood.6 The phrase ‘rainbow‐sided’ anticipates a narratorial intrusion towards the end of the poem where Keats appears to align himself with his heroine, who is identified with the rainbow, deprived of its capacity to induce ‘awe’ by the malign effect of Newtonian optics: ‘Do not all charms fly’, asks the poet‐narrator,
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender‐personed Lamia melt into a shade. (2.229–38)
Though Keats, like other Romantics, had deep interest in science, a typically Romantic hostility to reason’s murderous, hubristic dissections shows itself here. One detects such hostility in the grimace which the down‐at‐the‐mouth phrasing of ‘We know her woof, her texture’ invites us to imagine. This ‘knowledge’ is a reductive instrument, a foe to ‘mysteries’, an emptying‐out of ‘haunted air’. And yet in ‘We know’ is a hint of complicity in disenchantment. Keats draws his moral from Hazlitt, who suggested in his lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ that one cannot have enlightenment without a diminishment of enchantment, asserting ‘that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry’.7 Lamia is a poem which has sympathy with ‘The tender‐personed Lamia’, who will ‘melt into a shade’ when confronted by Apollonius’ gaze. That this gaze is itself by no means as coolly detached as it would like to be offers little comfort. Apollonius may only behold what he wishes to see – Lamia as merely ‘A serpent’ – but his discourse holds sway in his culture as the imaginings of Lycius do not.
Lamia is a poem in which head and heart conflict; it seems aware that it is unable to do justice to the full reality of either. Something is forcing Keats to see ‘illusion’ as ‘mere illusion’ rather than as possessing its own kind of reality. Arguably, his greatest poems grant ‘dream’, imagination, illusion a fuller sense of worth, even as that granting is rarely unembattled. However, Lamia is still, in its control of tone, its evenhandedness, and its seeing through to the predestined end of its bitter fable, a virtuosic poem that manages to evade imaginative circumscription while confronting forces that would ‘clip the wings of poetry’. Keats’s slightly wry claim for the poem is justified: ‘I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way – give them either pleasurable or unpleasurable sensation. What they want is a sensation of some sort.’8
The Eve of St. Agnes, written at the start of 1819, half a year before Lamia, also treats themes of enchantment, once again focusing on the possibilities of erotic fulfilment. Madeline believes she will dream of (and possibly encounter) her future husband if she obeys the rites and superstitions of St. Agnes’s Eve; Porphyro is determined to win her affections. Both wishes are fulfilled, though whether Madeline is a ‘hoodwinked dreamer’ and Porphyro a ‘ruffian’ seducer has been much debated.9 In his final letter, Keats writes to Charles Brown of ‘the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade’ required by a poem.10 The Eve is among his greatest poems because of the sensuous power with which it makes us feel on our pulses that ‘knowledge of contrast,’ a knowledge which is also connectedness.
If warmth and erotic ardour are at the poem’s centre, haunting its periphery are cold, old age, and death. ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass’ (3), a detail from the poem’s first stanza, helps to introduce this motif, and illustrates Keats’s ability, evident throughout the poem, to be, in his own words, ‘in for – and filling some other Body’.11 Here the rhythm limps in sympathy (the result of a strong stress on ‘limped’) with the trembling animal; the reader experiences a kinetic, quasi‐muscular identification. At the poem’s unsparing close, cold has the last word: ‘The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold’ (377–8), a conclusion that suggests this world is all there is. The poem’s religious imagery is secularized, subordinated to its dreams of erotic fulfilment. Whether these dreams can be realized or represent fantasy is a question that never quite takes centre‐stage, for all its hovering urgency.
What does occupy the mind and imagination are scenes, conveyed through gorgeously descriptive, slow‐paced Spenserian stanzas, in which romance comes alive through the opulent beauty of the writing. Porphyro following Angela, ‘Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ (110); his planning a stratagem to gain access to Madeline’s bedchamber in such a way that ‘a thought came like a full‐blown rose, / Flushing his brow’ (136–7); the description of ‘A casement high and triple‐arched’ (208), of Madeline disrobing as she gets ready for bed and ‘Loosens her fragrant boddice’ (229), and of the feast prepared for her by Porphyro – all these richly figurative moments have an air of entranced but sensuously apprehensible inevitability. True, the reader wonders about Madeline’s good sense and Porphyro’s motivation, but the poetry’s drive is towards a momentary realization of erotic dream, climaxing in the stanza depicting the two figures making love, a stanza that seems, momentarily, hazardously, to bring the poetry to a ‘Solution sweet’ (322). ‘Into her dream he melted’ (320), writes Keats in language that concentrates sexual suggestiveness and thematic coherence. The stanza concludes with a return of the quickened, because temporarily forgotten, threat of the passing moment: ‘Meantime the frost‐wind blows / Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet / Against the window‐panes; St Agnes’ moon hath set’ (322–4). Romance, poetry itself, compete with and take notice of a world indifferent to dream and desire.
Keats’s poetry is at once expressive of the imagination’s yearning for beauty and responsive to the awareness that, as he puts it in his ‘Chamber of Maiden‐Thought’ letter, ‘the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’.12 In his epic fragment Hyperion, more fully discussed in the previous section, Keats brings beauty and sorrow memorably together. The poem recounts the aftermath of the Titans overthrown by the Olympians, an overthrow seen as tragedy and beautiful necessity. After the initial account of the fallen Saturn, a figure utterly motionless and downcast, who in an open‐vowelled music of sumptuous delicacy is rendered ‘Still as the silence round about his lair’ (5), Keats describes the face of Thea, the wife of the still‐unfallen Hyperion, in this way: ‘How beautiful, if sorrow had not made / Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self’ (35–6).
In his revision Keats omitted these lines, as though reacting against them as illustrating ‘the false beauty proceeding from art’,13 as aestheticizing the ugly facts of ‘sorrow’. But they illustrate his attempt in Hyperion to balance the claims of poetic beauty and experiential sorrow, doing so in a post‐Miltonic blank verse that possesses pathos and majesty. F. R. Leavis found in the verse a ‘decorative preoccupation’.14 But in passage after passage the poetry gets beyond decorativeness to imply unfathomable and mysterious depths to the suffering brought about by historical change. Oceanus tries to persuade the other Titans that their fall is part of a progressivist, near‐evolutionary tendency, and that ‘’tis the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might’ (2.228–9), but possibly the deepest note he strikes is one of contemplative acquiescence when, in lines of stoical nobility, he recommends that ‘the top of sovereignty’ (2.205) is ‘to bear all naked truths, / And to envisage circumstance, all calm’ (2.203–4).
Ideas floated in the journal letter of February to May 1819 about the possibility or difficulty of a ‘complete disinterestedness of Mind’ find expression here,15 but Oceanus cannot talk the poem out of its sympathy for Saturn’s loss and pain. Hyperion himself, at the close of Book 1, also alerts us to the poem’s ‘transcendental cosmopolitics’, in Leigh Hunt’s fine phrase;16 he is urged by Coelus to ‘Be … in the van / Of circumstance’ (1.343–4). But action, in this poem that contemplates revolution without fully endorsing it, yet again gives way to contemplation as Hyperion, before his plunge towards the earth, and hearing his father’s ‘region‐whisper’ (1.349), ‘on the stars / Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide / Until it ceased; and still he kept them wide; / And still they were the same bright, patient stars’ (1.350–3). Prefiguring the dynamics of the sonnet ‘Bright star’, the passage reaches out to a domain beyond suffering, that of ‘the bright, patient stars’, whose ‘patience’ commends itself as an ethical virtue and poetic ideal. The poem breaks off as it tries to imagine the deification of Apollo, Hyperion’s destined successor: ‘Knowledge enormous make a God of me’ (3.113); he asserts to the muse‐figure Mnemosyne, but the claim seems premature, even presumptuous, as is registered by the indecent haste with which the fragment rushes to bestow godhead upon him. Apollo sketches what Keats feels a poet of epic tragedy requires, and The Fall of Hyperion (not published until 1856) begins by reverting directly to the question of poetic authenticity: ‘Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse / Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known / When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave’ (1.16–18). The Fall, subtitled ‘A Dream’, contains the view that ‘The poet and the dreamer are distinct’ (1.199), spoken by Moneta, but the poet’s investment in ‘dream’, understood as poetic imagining, is still strong. As ever in Keats, though with deepened force, poetic dream in The Fall is in vigorous dialogue with the nervous reality suggested by that startlingly held‐towards‐us ‘warm scribe my hand’.
The first major Ode, ‘Ode to Psyche’, also dwells on the limits and possibilities associated with being a modern poet, who, like the goddess he hymns (herself a part of the poet, his ‘psyche’), is ‘Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, / When holy were the haunted forest boughs’ (37–8). Initially in the poem, Keats longs for unmediated mythical vision, of a kind briefly rehearsed in the opening stanza, when he imagines coming upon Cupid and Psyche. But he redefines vision as a matter of subjective inspiration: ‘I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired’ (43). This line serves as a springboard for the final stanza’s embracing of the modern poet’s role as an imaginative ‘priest’ (50), a role involving internalization of worship, with its double‐edged emphasis on the breakthroughs made possible by ‘all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign’ (62), where ‘feign’ chimes to ambivalent effect with the ‘fane’ (50) being built by the poet for Psyche; comparable equivocations surround the ‘soft delight / That shadowy thought can win’ (64–5), where ‘shadowy’ quivers with oscillating suggestions. As Miriam Allott puts it, shadowy might mean ‘either musing thought that evolves obscurely or, perhaps, thought that is shadowy as the mere ghost of sensation’.17 Keats is not prepared simply to yield up the external world in favour of the internal, as is shown by the ambiguity here, the thrown‐open casement at the poem’s end in order ‘To let the warm Love in’ (67), and the way in which mindscape and landscape merge in details such as the metaphorical ‘dark‐clustered trees’ (55) and ‘wild‐ridgèd mountains’ (56).
In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, placed first in the section marked ‘Poems’ in the 1820 volume, the ‘sole self’ (72) of the poet is also to the fore. As in all the great odes, the poem’s stanzaic form, normally ten lines consisting of a Shakespearean quatrain followed by a Petrarchan sestet (with in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ one shorter line), reaps the harvest of his experimentation with the sonnet. Keats expressed witty dismay at the constraints imposed by the sonnet in his meta‐sonnet ‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d’, expressing his hope in that poem that he might find ‘Sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poetry’ (5–6). In the odes he develops a form that sustains the impressions of change of direction and transition associated with the sonnet, but condenses that effect in stanzaic units that, for all their fluctuations, come across as ‘interwoven and complete’. This technical discovery goes hand in hand with Keats’s ability, especially in evidence in this ode and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, to create lyric poetry out of the ebb and flow of conflicting feelings. Leavis speaks of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as ‘an extremely subtle and varied interplay of motions, directed now positively, now negatively’.18 This movement outwards in the odes results in moments of intense empathy with something beyond the self, whether bird, goddess, season, or urn. The poetry’s moving outwards can result in recoils back to the ‘sole self’, even as it speaks of the desires of the self to move beyond itself.
An example is provided by the crucial stanzas 7 and 8 of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Stanza 7 begins with an assertion of the bird’s immortality as Keats seeks to discover a permanence which he can set against the transience of human life. In effect, this immortality is the birdsong’s transhistorical continuance, which leads Keats to think of those who have listened to it, a movement that turns the poem away from the trope of immortal song to the thought of suffering human auditors, as when Keats comments that the song is ‘Perhaps the self‐same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn’ (65–7). Ruth reminds the poet, ‘stationed’ amongst ‘the alien corn’, of the human condition of being ‘sick for home’.19 She detains us as an image of abiding human sorrow, open to the consolations of a song that ‘found a path / Through [her] sad heart’, lines that suggest the connection yet distance between longing human being and mysteriously potent song. In a final effort to reimagine the relationship between song and listener, Keats wins too ‘perilous’ a victory as he thinks of the song as having ‘Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’ (69–70). The ‘faery lands forlorn’ expose the poet to a world where the air, though beautiful, is too rarefied to breathe, and the journey homeward to habitual self begins. That it is catalysed by the poet’s own hearing in the poem of a word he has just spoken – ‘Forlorn!’, he writes, ‘the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’ (71–2) – brings out the metapoetic immediacy of Keatsian transitions. Throughout, there are shiftings of ground as the imagination outruns some initial impulse, complicating it, evolving an experience whose value and meaning remain richly in doubt, even at the very end, with its wondering questions: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?’ (79–80).
The poem’s fifth stanza begins, ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet’ (41), seeming to announce sensory deprivation. In fact, it encourages an outward‐going sensuousness. In his attempt to ‘guess each sweet’ (43), Keats uses his imagination to come to terms with process, picturing not only ‘Fast fading violets’ (47), but also ‘The coming musk‐rose’ (49), things fading and growing held in the same act of imaginative apprehension. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the moment will pass into the poet’s own state of being ‘half in love with easeful Death’ (52), from which he will subsequently recoil. But stanza 5 might be seen as heralding the later ode ‘To Autumn’, a poem from which the self is markedly absent.
In ‘To Autumn’, Keats, having emerged as one of the major subjective lyricists in the language, writes a poem which will exercise great influence over later poets as it seeks a language that comes to terms with existence in itself. Imagination here is less the vehicle for imagined transcendence than the means by which – finely and implicitly – poetry can address the fact and mystery of being. It is a world in which beauty and sorrow coalesce in an act of restrained acceptance, caught in the line, ‘While barrèd clouds bloom the soft‐dying day’ (25), where ‘bloom’ and ‘soft‐dying’ enter into a contrapuntal relationship. Throughout, the poem reaches for hyphenated formulations as though to build bridges between different states. The season, from the start, is associated with the near‐antithetical ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ (1); it is at once addressed as ‘Close bosom‐friend of the maturing sun’ (2), allegorized as a figure with ‘hair soft‐lifted by the winnowing wind’ (15), and noted as a time when ‘full‐grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn’ (30). The phrases encourage intensified awareness of dualities and mergings: that the ‘lambs’ are ‘full‐grown’, for example, hints at the equivocal nature of the maturing processes typical of the season.
The poem’s stanza form has an extra line (eleven rather than the ten in the ‘Nightingale’, ‘Grecian Urn’, and ‘Melancholy’ odes) which creates effects of lingering arrest, contemplation, and acceptance. At the poem’s close, there is, implicit in the choice of verbs, a refusal to project meaning on to the landscape, a chastening of earlier elegiac hints in words such as ‘mourn’, applied to ‘small gnats’ (27), and ‘lives or dies’, applied to the ‘light wind’ (29).20 As ‘Hedge‐crickets sing’ (31), a ‘red‐breast whistles’ (32), and ‘gathering swallows twitter’ (33), there is a Keatsian steadfastness of recognition; what this poem presents us with is the cyclical life of nature, our apprehension of which undergoes revivifying aid within and through the elegantly constructed stanzas.
‘To Autumn’ proves in its own way the provisional validity of the Grecian Urn’s identification of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, written some months earlier, is a poem of eternal Spring whereas the later ode is a poem of an autumn doomed to pass yet prolonged for our contemplation through a wealth of devices: the extra line in each stanza, the contemplative attitude struck, in particular, at the close of stanza 2 where the personified season watches ‘the last oozings hours by hours’ (22). In ‘Grecian Urn’, the poet, addressing the carved lovers and even vegetation, cheats himself into believing they enjoy a happiness that is ‘All breathing human passion far above’ (28). The very ‘boughs’ are ‘happy’ (21) in that they ‘cannot’ (21) ‘ever bid the Spring adieu’ (22). But, in this poem, that ‘cannot’ begins to sound like limitation rather than transcendence, and resistance to change sounds like frozen arrest. For all its asserted inferiority, ‘breathing human passion’ recommends itself, the two adjectives fighting against the airlessness of art’s triumph over time.
Subtly, almost in an unnoticed way, the poem forgets the hypothesis that ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter’ (11–12). Even when it is first stated, the use of the word ‘soft’ in ‘therefore, ye soft pipes, play on’ (12) threatens to undo the speaker’s certainty since it implies a residual attachment to the sound which is supposedly being foresworn. In stanza 4, the poet turns to a procession of figures ‘coming to the sacrifice’ (31), until, as if blurring the worlds of urn and historical reality that gave rise to the urn’s representations, the speaker wishes to locate a ‘little town’ (35) not to be found on the urn’s surface. The pathos of his subsequent realization that the town is unpopulated, gone for ever, ‘desolate’ (40), is intense.
It leads, in the final stanza, to an initial disenchantment with the urn, now merely an artwork, an ‘Attic shape’ (41), the object of veiled scorn as it withstands a series of barbed puns aimed at its removal from generation and sexuality; it may be ‘overwrought’ (42) ‘with brede / Of marble men and maidens’ (41–2), but it cannot ‘breed’ and is incapable of housing ‘overwrought’ passion. Yet, said to ‘tease us out of thought / As doth eternity’ (44–5), the urn continues to vex, unsettle, fascinate. ‘Cold Pastoral!’ (45) is the nearest Keats comes to fixing the urn in a near‐oxymoronic phrase, at once a vessel of idealized beauty and ‘Cold’. That outcry gives way to a six‐line sentence, concluding with the famous equation of ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’, and full of supple weighings and reservations.
Keats, above all, finds his way to a balance – between the fact that ‘old age shall this generation waste’ (46) and the real if not wholly adequate consolation offered by the fact of the urn’s longevity, and the witness it bears to the human need to believe that art offers a knowledge, truth, and beauty superior to the life from which they spring and to which they seek to bring comfort. Art may be ‘a friend to man’ (48), for Keats, but it cannot offset the fact that, in the world as we know it, change and transience have the final word. ‘She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die’ (21), Keats writes of the mistress in ‘Ode on Melancholy’, holding in tension the longing for abiding presence in ‘dwells’ and the awareness of the perishable nature of beauty in ‘must die’. His great odes found themselves on the ‘lyric debate’, in Walter Jackson Bate’s phrase, to which this tension gives rise.21