Keats: Poems Published in 1820 Part 13

l. 265. _Pleiad._ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation.

Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night.'

ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres._ Refers to the music which the heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf.

_Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60.

PAGE 20. l. 294. _new lips._ Cf. l. 191.

l. 297. _Into another_, i.e. into the trance of pa.s.sion from which he only wakes to die.

PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast._ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved of Venus. He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf.

_Endymion_, ii. 387.

PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the fallen angels.

ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of

The two divinest things the world has got-- A lovely woman and a rural spot.

It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing.

l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles._ There is a legend that, after the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus re-peopling the world.

PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something remote from the chief actors.

l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came later to mean dissolute.

PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade._ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix, 'b.u.t.tress'd from moonlight.'

ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of Apollonius.

PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams._ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion even whilst he yields himself up to it.

l. 386. _Aeolian._ Aeolus was the G.o.d of the winds.

PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged._ Imagining the poem winging its way along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat.

PART II.

PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a pa.s.sage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about love.

ll. 7-9. i.e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have either contradicted or corroborated this saying.

PAGE 28. l. 27. _Deafening_, in the unusual sense of making inaudible.

ll. 27-8. _came a thrill Of trumpets._ From the first moment that the outside world makes its claim felt there is no happiness for the man who, like Lycius, is living a life of selfish pleasure.

PAGE 29. l. 39. _pa.s.sing bell._ Either the bell rung for a condemned man the night before his execution, or the bell rung when a man was dying that men might pray for the departing soul.

PAGE 31. ll. 72-4. _Besides . . . new._ An indication of the selfish nature of Lycius's love.

l. 80. _serpent._ See how skilfully this allusion is introduced and our attention called to it by his very denial that it applies to Lamia.

PAGE 32. l. 97. _I neglect the holy rite._ It is her duty to burn incense and tend the sepulchres of her dead kindred.

PAGE 33. l. 107. _blus.h.i.+ng._ We see in the glow of the sunset a reflection of the blush of the bride.

PAGE 34. ll. 122-3. _sole perhaps . . . roof._ Notice that Keats only says 'perhaps', but it gives a trembling unreality at once to the magic palace. Cf. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_:

With music loud and long I would build that dome in air.

PAGE 36. l. 155. _demesne_, dwelling. More commonly a domain.

_Hyperion_, i. 298. _Sonnet_--'On first looking into Chapman's Homer.'

PAGE 38. l. 187. _Ceres' horn._ Ceres was the G.o.ddess of harvest, the mother of Proserpine (_Lamia_, i. 63, note). Her horn is filled with the fruits of the earth, and is symbolic of plenty.

PAGE 39. l. 200. _vowel'd undersong_, in contrast to the harsh, guttural and consonantal sound of Teutonic languages.

PAGE 40. l. 213. _meridian_, mid-day. Bacchus was supreme, as is the sun at mid-day.

ll. 215-29. Cf. _The Winter's Tale_, IV. iv. 73, &c., where Perdita gives to each guest suitable flowers. Cf. also Ophelia's flowers, _Hamlet_, IV. v. 175, etc.

l. 217. _osier'd gold._ The gold was woven into baskets, as though it were osiers.

l. 224. _willow_, the weeping willow, so-called because its branches with their long leaves droop to the ground, like dropping tears. It has always been sacred to deserted or unhappy lovers. Cf. _Oth.e.l.lo_, IV.

iii. 24 seq.

_adder's tongue._ For was she not a serpent?

l. 226. _thyrsus._ A rod wreathed with ivy and crowned with a fir-cone, used by Bacchus and his followers.

l. 228. _spear-gra.s.s . . . thistle._ Because of what he is about to do.

PAGE 41. ll. 229-38. Not to be taken as a serious expression of Keats's view of life. Rather he is looking at it, at this moment, through the eyes of the chief actors in his drama, and feeling with them.

PAGE 43. l. 263. Notice the horror of the deadly hush and the sudden fading of the flowers.

l. 266. _step by step_, prepares us for the thought of the silence as a horrid presence.

ll. 274-5. _to illume the deep-recessed vision._ We at once see her dull and sunken eyes.

PAGE 45. l. 301. _perceant_, piercing--a Spenserian word.

INTRODUCTION TO ISABELLA AND THE EVE OF ST. AGNES

In _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_, as in _Endymion_, we find Keats inspired by cla.s.sic story, though the inspiration in each case came to him through Elizabethan writers. Here, on the other hand, mediaeval legend is his inspiration; the 'faery broods' have driven 'nymph and satyr from the prosperous woods'. Akin to the Greeks as he was in spirit, in his instinctive personification of the lovely manifestations of nature, his style and method were really more naturally suited to the portrayal of mediaeval scenes, where he found the richness and warmth of colour in which his soul delighted.

The story of _Isabella_ he took from Boccaccio, an Italian writer of the fourteenth century, whose _Decameron_, a collection of one hundred stories, has been a store-house of plots for English writers. By Boccaccio the tale is very shortly and simply told, being evidently interesting to him mainly for its plot. Keats was attracted to it not so much by the action as by the pa.s.sion involved, so that his enlargement of it means little elaboration of incident, but very much more dwelling on the psychological aspect. That is to say, he does not care so much what happens, as what the personages of the poem think and feel.