Collected poems by John Keats - HTML preview

'Psyche, a king's daughter, by her exceeding beauty caused the people to forget Venus; therefore the goddess would fain have destroyed her: nevertheless she became the bride of Love, yet in an unhappy moment lost him by her own fault, and wandering through the world suffered many evils at the hands of Venus, for whom she must

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accomplish fearful tasks. But the gods and all nature helped her, and in process of time she was re-united to Love, forgiven by Venus, and made immortal by the Father of gods and men.'

Psyche is supposed to symbolize the human soul made immortal through love.

NOTES ON THE ODE TO PSYCHE.

Page 117. l. 2. sweet . . . dear. Cf. Lycidas, 'Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear.'

l. 4. soft-conched. Metaphor of a sea-shell giving an impression of exquisite colour and delicate form.

Page 118. l. 13. 'Mid . . . eyed. Nature in its appeal to every sense. In this line we have the essence of all that makes the beauty of flowers satisfying and comforting.

l. 14. Tyrian, purple, from a certain dye made at Tyre.

l. 20. aurorean. Aurora is the goddess of dawn. Cf. Hyperion, i. 181.

l. 25. Olympus. Cf. Lamia, i. 9, note.

hierarchy. The orders of gods, with Jupiter as head.

l. 26. Phoebe, or Diana, goddess of the moon.

l. 27. Vesper, the evening star.

Page 119. l. 34. oracle, a sacred place where the god was supposed to answer questions of vital import asked him by his worshippers.

l. 37. fond believing, foolishly credulous.

l. 41. lucent fans, luminous wings.

Page 120. l. 55. fledge . . . steep. Probably a recollection of what he had seen in the Lakes, for on June 29, 1818, he writes to Tom from Keswick of a waterfall which 'oozes

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out from a cleft in perpendicular Rocks, all fledged with Ash and other beautiful trees'.

l. 57. Dryads. Cf. Lamia, l. 5, note.

INTRODUCTION TO FANCY.

This poem, although so much lighter in spirit, bears a certain relation in thought to Keats's other odes. In the Nightingale the tragedy of this life made him long to escape, on the wings of imagination, to the ideal world of beauty symbolized by the song of the bird. Here finding all real things, even the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the fancy, which can escape from reality and is not tied by place or season in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as the extempore character of the poetry indicates. We see more of settled conviction in the deeply-meditative Ode to Autumn, where he finds the ideal in the rich and ever-changing real.

This poem is written in the four-accent metre employed by Milton in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and we can often detect a similarity of cadence, and a resemblance in the scenes imagined.

NOTES ON FANCY.

Page 123. l. 16. ingle, chimney-nook.

Page 126. l. 81. Ceres' daughter, Proserpina. Cf. Lamia, i. 63, note.

l. 82. God of torment. Pluto, who presides over the torments of the souls in Hades.

Page 127. l. 85. Hebe, the cup-bearer of Jove.

l. 89. And Jove grew languid. Observe the fitting slowness of the first half of the line, and the sudden leap forward of the second.

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NOTES ON ODE

['Bards of Passion and of Mirth'].

Page 128. l. 1. Bards, poets and singers.

l. 8. parle, French parler. Cf. Hamlet, i. i. 62.

l. 12. Dian's fawns. Diana was the goddess of hunting.

INTRODUCTION TO LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN.

The Mermaid Tavern was an old inn in Bread Street, Cheapside. Tradition says that the literary club there was established by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603. In any case it was, in Shakespeare's time, frequented by the chief writers of the day, amongst them Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Donne, and Shakespeare himself. Beaumont, in a poetical epistle to Ben Jonson, writes:

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

So nimble and so full of subtle flame,

As if that any one from whence they came

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And has resolved to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life.

NOTES ON LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN.

Page 131. l. 10. bold Robin Hood. Cf. Robin Hood, p. 133.

l. 12. bowse, drink.

Page 132. ll. 16-17. an astrologer's . . . story. The astrologer would record, on parchment, what he had seen in the heavens.

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l. 22. The Mermaid . . . Zodiac. The zodiac was an imaginary belt across the heavens within which the sun and planets were supposed to move. It was divided into twelve parts corresponding to the twelve months of the year, according to the position of the moon when full. Each of these parts had a sign by which it was known, and the sign of the tenth was a fish-tailed goat, to which Keats refers as the Mermaid. The word zodiac comes from the Greek ζῴδιον, meaning a little animal, since originally all the signs were animals.

INTRODUCTION TO ROBIN HOOD.

Early in 1818 John Hamilton Reynolds, a friend of Keats, sent him two sonnets which he had written 'On Robin Hood'. Keats, in his letter of thanks, after giving an appreciation of Reynolds's production, says: 'In return for your Dish of Filberts, I have gathered a few Catkins, I hope they'll look pretty.' Then follow these lines, entitled, 'To J. H. R. in answer to his Robin Hood sonnets.' At the end he writes: 'I hope you will like them—they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry.'

Robin Hood, the outlaw, was a popular hero of the Middle Ages. He was a great poacher of deer, brave, chivalrous, generous, full of fun, and absolutely without respect for law and order. He robbed the rich to give to the poor, and waged ceaseless war against the wealthy prelates of the church. Indeed, of his endless practical jokes, the majority were played upon sheriffs and bishops. He lived, with his 'merry men', in Sherwood Forest, where a hollow tree, said to be his 'larder', is still shown.

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Innumerable ballads telling of his exploits were composed, the first reference to which is in the second edition of Langland's Piers Plowman, c. 1377. Many of these ballads still survive, but in all these traditions it is quite impossible to disentangle fact from fiction.

NOTES ON ROBIN HOOD.

Page 133. l. 4. pall. Cf. Isabella, l. 268.

l. 9. fleeces, the leaves of the forest, cut from them by the wind as the wool is shorn from the sheep's back.

Page 134. l. 13. ivory shrill, the shrill sound of the ivory horn.

ll. 15-18. Keats imagines some man who has not heard the laugh hearing with bewilderment its echo in the depths of the forest.

l. 21. seven stars, Charles's Wain or the Big Bear.

l. 22. polar ray, the light of the Pole, or North, star.

l. 30. pasture Trent, the fields about the Trent, the river of Nottingham, which runs by Sherwood forest.

Page 135. l. 33. morris. A dance in costume which, in the Tudor period, formed a part of every village festivity. It was generally danced by five men and a boy in girl's dress, who represented Maid Marian. Later it came to be associated with the May games, and other characters of the Robin Hood epic were introduced. It was abolished, with other village gaieties, by the Puritans, and though at the Restoration it was revived it never regained its former importance.

l. 34. Gamelyn. The hero of a tale (The Tale of Gamelyn) attributed to Chaucer, and given in some MSS. as The Cook's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. The

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story of Orlando's ill-usage, prowess, and banishment, in As You Like It, Shakespeare derived from this source, and Keats is thinking of the merry life of the hero amongst the outlaws.

l. 36. 'grenè shawe,' green wood.

Page 136. l. 53. Lincoln green. In the Middle Ages Lincoln was very famous for dyeing green cloth, and this green cloth was the characteristic garb of the forester and outlaw.

l. 62. burden. Cf. Isabella, l. 503.

NOTES ON 'TO AUTUMN'.

In a letter written to Reynolds from Winchester, in September, 1819, Keats says: 'How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble-fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.' What he composed was the Ode To Autumn.

Page 137. ll. 1 seq. The extraordinary concentration and richness of this description reminds us of Keats's advice to Shelley—'Load every rift of your subject with ore.' The whole poem seems to be painted in tints of red, brown, and gold.

Page 138. ll. 12 seq. From the picture of an autumn day we proceed to the characteristic sights and occupations of autumn, personified in the spirit of the season.

l. 18. swath, the width of the sweep of the scythe.

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ll. 23 seq. Now the sounds of autumn are added to complete the impression.

ll. 25-6. Compare letter quoted above.

Page 139. l. 28. sallows, trees or low shrubs of the willowy kind.

ll. 28-9. borne . . . dies. Notice how the cadence of the line fits the sense. It seems to rise and fall and rise and fall again.

NOTES ON ODE ON MELANCHOLY.

Page 140. l. 1. Lethe. See Lamia, i. 81, note.

l. 2. Wolf's-bane, aconite or hellebore—a poisonous plant.

l. 4. nightshade, a deadly poison.

ruby . . . Proserpine. Cf. Swinburne's Garden of Proserpine.

Proserpine. Cf. Lamia, i. 63, note.

l. 5. yew-berries. The yew, a dark funereal-looking tree, is constantly planted in churchyards.

l. 7. your mournful Psyche. See Introduction to the Ode to Psyche, p. 236.

Page 141. l. 12. weeping cloud. l. 14. shroud. Giving a touch of mystery and sadness to the otherwise light and tender picture.

l. 16. on . . . sand-wave, the iridescence sometimes seen on the ribbed sand left by the tide.

l. 21. She, i.e. Melancholy—now personified as a goddess. Compare this conception of melancholy with the passage in Lamia, i. 190-200. Cf. also Milton's personifications of Melancholy in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.

Page 142. l. 30. cloudy, mysteriously concealed, seen of few.

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INTRODUCTION TO HYPERION.

This poem deals with the overthrow of the primaeval order of Gods by Jupiter, son of Saturn the old king. There are many versions of the fable in Greek mythology, and there are many sources from which it may have come to Keats. At school he is said to have known the classical dictionary by heart, but his inspiration is more likely to have been due to his later reading of the Elizabethan poets, and their translations of classic story. One thing is certain, that he did not confine himself to any one authority, nor did he consider it necessary to be circumscribed by authorities at all. He used, rather than followed, the Greek fable, dealing freely with it and giving it his own interpretation.

The situation when the poem opens is as follows:—Saturn, king of the gods, has been driven from Olympus down into a deep dell, by his son Jupiter, who has seized and used his father's weapon, the thunderbolt. A similar fate has overtaken nearly all his brethren, who are called by Keats Titans and Giants indiscriminately, though in Greek mythology the two races are quite distinct. These Titans are the children of Tellus and Coelus, the earth and sky, thus representing, as it were, the first birth of form and personality from formless nature. Before the separation of earth and sky, Chaos, a confusion of the elements of all things, had reigned supreme. One only of the Titans, Hyperion the sun-god, still keeps his kingdom, and he is about to be superseded by young Apollo, the god of light and song.

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In the second book we hear Oceanus and Clymene his daughter tell how both were defeated not by battle or violence, but by the irresistible beauty of their dispossessors; and from this Oceanus deduces 'the eternal law, that first in beauty should be first in might'. He recalls the fact that Saturn himself was not the first ruler, but received his kingdom from his parents, the earth and sky, and he prophesies that progress will continue in the overthrow of Jove by a yet brighter and better order. Enceladus is, however, furious at what he considers a cowardly acceptance of their fate, and urges his brethren to resist.

In Book I we saw Hyperion, though still a god, distressed by portents, and now in Book III we see the rise to divinity of his successor, the young Apollo. The poem breaks off short at the moment of Apollo's metamorphosis, and how Keats inte