Life of John Keats Part 6

Let me thy vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.

Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:--'Give me a golden pen,' 'Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,' 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there': to which may be added the sonnet _On the_ _Gra.s.shopper and Cricket_ written in Hunt's house and in friendly compet.i.tion with him.

A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea):--

The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its s.h.i.+ps, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears, Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been.

Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed 'As from the darkening gloom a silver dove' he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,[4] seem not to have been written (as that on the _Floure and the Lefe_ certainly was not) until the book was pa.s.sing, or had pa.s.sed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out 'After dark vapours' and 'Who loves to peer,'

and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Ta.s.sie's coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject.

'Ta.s.sie's gems' were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a mult.i.tude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the _Vita Nuova_.[5] The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.

Come hither all sweet maidens soberly, Down-looking aye, and with a chasten'd light Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white, And meekly let your fair hands joined be, As if so gentle that ye could not see, Untouch'd, a victim of your beauty bright, Sinking away to his young spirit's night,-- Sinking bewilder'd 'mid the dreary sea: 'Tis young Leander toiling to his death; Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips For Hero's cheek, and smiles against her smile.

O horrid dream! see how his body dips Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile: He's gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath![6]

More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams) in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely on Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_. Keats, as has been said, was already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following motto chosen from Browne's work Keats seems to put the group of _Epistles_ in his volume under that poet's particular patronage:--

Among the rest a shepheard (though but young Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.

But before coming to questions of the special influences which successively shaped Keats's aims both as to style and versification in poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of ill.u.s.tration are pa.s.sages which we know to have been specially familiar to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first consider Chaucer's use, as ill.u.s.trated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to Diana in the _Knightes Tale_:--

O chaste G.o.ddesse of the wodes grene, To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene, Quene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe, G.o.ddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire, As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire, That Attheon aboughte cruelly.

Chaste G.o.ddesse, wel wostow that I Desire to been a mayden al my lyf, Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf.

I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye, A mayde, and love hunting and venerye, And for to walken in the wodes wilde, And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.

Noght wol I knowe companye of man.

Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can, For tho thre formes that thou hast in thee.

And Palamon, that hath swich love to me, And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore, This grace I preye thee with-oute more, As sende love and pees bitwixte hem two; And fro me turne awey hir hertes so, That al hir hote love, and hir desyr, And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr Be queynt, or turned in another place; And if so be thou wolt not do me grace, Or if my destinee be shapen so, That I shal nedes have oon of hem two, As sende me him that most desireth me.

The rime-syllables with which Chaucer ends his lines are as a rule strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of 'I | desire.' The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a line by falling at any point except the end. On the other hand it is as often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the second but of the first line, so that the ear has to wait a moment in expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.

When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the sense or sentence-pattern, which together compose the formal elements in all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system: its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.

Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and Marlowe in _Hero and Leander_ were among the earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate.

Let us take a well known pa.s.sage from Marlowe:--

It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate.

When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect: The reason no man knows; let it suffice, What we behold is censured by our eyes.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, 'Were I the saint he wors.h.i.+ps, I would hear him;'

And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him.

He started up; she blushed as one ashamed; Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.

He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled: Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.

These lovers parled by the touch of hands: True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled; And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day).

The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough.

Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or 'gemells' as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:--

Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny, Nay, I'll affirm and swear, I am not I: Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive, Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave.

And yet, methinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand, Nor seem so much appalled at my hand; For my misfortunes have inur'd thine eye (Long before this) to sights of misery.

No, no, read on, 'tis I, the very same, All thou canst read, is but to read my shame.

Be not dismay'd, nor let my name affright; The worst it can, is but t' offend thy sight; It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm, It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.

But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from one of his epistles:--

O G.o.d, though Virtue mightily do grieve For all this world, yet will I not believe But that she's fair and lovely and that she So to the period of the world will be; Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all, For that so many sundry mischiefs fall Upon her daily, and so many take Up arms against her, as it well might make Her to forsake her nature, and behind To leave no step for future time behind, As she had never been, for he that now Can do her most disgrace, him they allow The time's chief Champion--.

Turning to Keats's next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of Tavistock, here is a pa.s.sage from _Britannia's Pastorals_ which we know to have stuck in his memory, and which ill.u.s.trates the prevailing tendency of the metre in Browne's hands to run in a succession of closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:--

And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste, With naked iv'ry neck, and gown unlaced, Within her chamber, when the day is fled, Makes poor her garments to enrich her bed: First, put she off her lily-silken gown, That shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down; And with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine, Embracing her as it would ne'er untwine.

Her flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders, She next permits to wave about her shoulders, And though she cast it back, the silken slips Still forward steal and hang upon her lips: Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces, Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers, As loth to be enchain'd but with her fingers.

Then on her head a dressing like a crown; Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s all bare, her kirtle slipping down, And all things off (which rightly ever be Call'd the foul-fair marks of our misery) Except her last, which enviously doth seize her, Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure, Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her, And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.

Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties, constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixth _Odyssey_:--

These, here arriv'd, the mules uncoach'd, and drave Up to the gulfy river's sh.o.r.e, that gave Sweet gra.s.s to them. The maids from coach then took Their clothes, and steep'd them in the sable brook; Then put them into springs, and trod them clean With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then, Who should have soonest and most cleanly done.

When having throughly cleans'd, they spread them on The flood's sh.o.r.e, all in order. And then, where The waves the pebbles wash'd, and ground was clear, They bath'd themselves, and all with glittering oil Smooth'd their white skins; refres.h.i.+ng then their toil With pleasant dinner, by the river's side; Yet still watch'd when the sun their clothes had dried.

Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa With other virgins did at stool-ball play, Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.

The other cla.s.sical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,--

Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire; There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire May mollify, milk, honey redolent With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content.

The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food; Affording banquets without death or blood.

Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy: And yet not all; in pastures horses joy: So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath (Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin, That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb!

That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become!

While by one creature's death another lives!

Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul's, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, a.n.a.logous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:--

Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The fair Pharonnida recovers strength, Though sighs each accent interrupted, to Return this answer:--'Wilt, oh! wilt thou do Our infant love such injury--to leave It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive A comfortable smile to cherish it, When thou art gone? They're but dull joys that sit Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would Our rigid fortune only be content With absence; but a greater punishment Conspires against us--Danger must attend Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day Wherein your battles join, how will my fear With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast, My heart's exposed to every danger that a.s.sails thy valour, and is wounded at Each stroke that lights on thee--which absent I, Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.'

The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit--that is the separate couplet--as the completely dominant element in the measure, the 'heroic'

measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:--

In every language now in Europe spoke By nations which the Roman Empire broke, The relish of the Muse consists in rime: One verse must meet another like a chime.

Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace In choice of words fit for the ending place, Which leave impression in the mind as well As closing sounds of some delightful bell.

Milton at nineteen, in a pa.s.sage of his college _Vacation Exercise_, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats's early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled n.o.bly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:--

Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,

I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their pa.s.sage out; And wearie of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck't them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair a.s.sembly's ears; Yet I had rather if I were to chuse, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soare Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav'ns dore Look in, and see each blissful Deitie How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th' touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire: Then pa.s.sing through the Spheres of watchful fire, And mistie Regions of wide air next under, And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder, May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves, In Heav'ns defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pa.s.s When Beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of Kings and Queens and Hero's old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast, While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmonie In willing chains and sweet captivitie.

But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for instance in his n.o.ble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially a.s.sociated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment of the admired quality of 'smoothness' (another name for clipped and even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time, however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine Philips ('the matchless Orinda'), who was a stickler for the strictest form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662):--

Although the most do with officious heat Only adore the living and the great, Yet this Queen's merits Fame so far hath spread, That she rules still, though dispossest and dead.