JOHN CLARE, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, JOHN KEATS, THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
In John Clare’s poems we are back in a world of physical objects and processes, the minutiae of soil, season, natural and human creatures, the daily impressions of rustic life and rural hardship, yet also a world of shrewd discrimination. Modern readers can get distracted by romantic notions of Clare as untutored, a natural growth misvalued and destroyed by his age. Yes, but he belongs to his literary milieu as much as to his landscape. He watched the funeral cortège of his beloved Byron pass; he understood the genius and the waste of Chatterton; he lamented the cutting through his favorite marshland of the Manchester–London railway line.
Between his birth in Helpston, Northamptonshire, in 1793 and his confinement in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton in 1841 he paid four extended visits to London and spent a few months in Epping Forest, though he remained for the most part in or near his native village, much of the time under his parental roof. His is a landscape of actual heathland, fen, sheep pasture and hamlets, linked by rutted tracks and roads to the market towns. He lived under what Philip Larkin would have called a “tall sky.” So remote, even the upheavals of enclosure touch him less as a social issue than as a personal sadness, a further erosion of the glowing world of childhood that counterpoints his vision of the adult world. Whatever critics make of him as a political symptom, he is not a political poet: he draws few large conclusions about rural change. What exists for his imagination is what is actually before him, so that even categorical words like “beauty” attach to his specific senses. The afflatus of Shelley is entirely alien to him.
He is impatient of Pope’s verse: its smoothness tires him. Keats said that in Clare’s poems “the Description too much prevailed over the sentiment.” Of Keats, whom he pitied and revered and to whom he sent messages through their mutual publisher, Clare said, “He often described Nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described.” Clare witnessed everything from ground level.
“Clare, a labourer’s son,” Graves says, “was mouse-poor and quite without influence or connections. Though his first book of poems (1820) proved immediately successful, it sold well only because poetry happened to come all at once into fashion, for dubious reasons.” He was not quite so without connections as Graves says. Billed as an “English peasant poet” by John Taylor, his canny publisher (who also published Hazlitt; Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante; Keats and Landor), he became more than a nine-day wonder, but his success was the temporary result of astute marketing. His reputation faltered. Visitors to his dwelling at Helpston didn’t pay for the privilege of his company, any more than Milton’s guests did. Because of his weeklong rhyming fits and his growing popularity as a lionized socioliterary aberration, he ceased to get day-laboring jobs from farmers, who found him undependable. He had seven children by his illiterate wife, Patty Turner, whom he married to make an honest woman of her. In 1830 he gave up trying to please others and, Graves declares, commenced his service to the White Goddess.
Graves, like many other poets, appropriates Clare; and yet Clare remains intractable. He can be dressed up in a dozen interpretations but each of them remains partial. What matters is the language with which he sees and makes connection. “No, not a friend on earth had I / But my own kin and poesy.” “The golden furze-blooms burnt the wind,” “hollow trees like pulpits,” “the velvet of the pale hedge-rose”: he sees, touches, hears, smells and tastes precisely, effacing himself in loving contemplation of his subject. His pathos, unheard of elsewhere in English poetry, draws on his sense of the vulnerability of natural things, of the rural order, and, obliquely, his own vulnerability. In the nature poems he is reluctant to speak of himself. “In spite of his individual manner,” says Edmund Blunden, “there is no poet who in his nature poetry so completely subdues self and mood and deals with the topic for its own sake.” He expresses himself in his choice of subject and diction, but such self-expression is not the poem’s purpose. There are few storms in his poems, little embellishment of natural processes. The external world remains external. He chooses insects for their distinctive otherness: “These tiny loiterers in the barley’s beard, / And happy units of a numerous herd / Of playfellows,” or birds, flowers, streams, fields, meadows. “Fairy Things” is characteristic. Most of his work comes into focus in the present tense: “He gives no broad impressions—he saw the kite but not the kite’s landscape,” wrote Edward Thomas. Yet taken together the poems reveal the Northamptonshire countryside that was his world.
From birth he was ill placed for poetry. His father, the bastard son of a wandering fiddler-schoolmaster and the parish clerk’s daughter, worked as a farm laborer. Though poor, he did his best to educate the boy. Clare interspersed farmwork with study. At the age of seven he was tending the geese; before his teens he was helping at the plow. Sundays he spent in the fields, and at sixteen he was writing poems. He was also early in love—with Mary Joyce, whose father eventually forbade their friendship. Later in his madness he came to regard Mary as his first wife, his Muse to whom he addressed his poems. He conversed with her in his head long after she died a spinster.
The poet farmed, gardened, became a soldier, even spent time among gypsies. He read what he could: Thomson’s The Seasons helped him find direction. He was “itching at rhymes” (a favorite expression). When he was twenty-seven Taylor brought out his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. It was a great success, running through four editions in one year, the same year he married. Within a month of the wedding, his first child was born. He visited London and was exhibited in literary and aristocratic circles. The label “peasant poet” limited his scope in ways he came to regret. Success raised his expectations and estranged him from his community, a disaster when his fame proved ephemeral. He hoped for a financial security he never achieved.
The Village Minstrel was published with less success the following year. Clare visited London again, met Charles Lamb and the lively poet Thomas Hood, and began contributing verse and prose to periodicals on a regular basis. His prose articles and letters have a character of their own, natural (or homespun) and frank. His editors had the task of correcting and punctuating his unconventional prose. Verse was his natural medium. They had to correct its orthography and punctuation as well.
In 1823 he began to suffer periodic illnesses connected with his later mental troubles. The next year he spent more than two months in London and met Coleridge and De Quincey, who held him up as an example: here was a man who, without advantages, rose on genuine merit to literary achievement. “His poems were not the mere reflexes of his reading. He had studied for himself in the fields, and in the woods, and by the side of brooks.” His defect as a poet was his assiduous accuracy, which according to De Quincey (and Keats) displaced the emotion. De Quincey notes how Clare was drawn not so much by “the gorgeous display of English beauty, but the French style of beauty, as he saw it amongst the French actresses in Tottenham Court Road.” He recalls Clare’s “rapturous” enthusiasm for Wordsworth, whom he initially resisted reading, and who “depressed his self-confidence.”
The Shepherd’s Calendar appeared belatedly in 1827 and failed. In seven years Clare had experienced his rise and fall. He was breadwinner for nine dependents, including his parents. The strain told on him. The years 1828–29 were almost stable. In 1830 illness returned; he grew haggard and weak. Lord Milton provided him with a new cottage three miles from Helpston, to which he reluctantly moved. His madness began in earnest in 1833. The Rural Muse (1835)—his best book, though it appeared in a form very different from the one he intended—failed, despite good notices. It was the last book published in his lifetime. The Midsummer Cushion—a vast, uneven collection of later work—was not published until 1979. He was committed to an asylum in Epping Forest in 1837. Some months later he ran away, making the four-day journey home on foot with considerable hardship. Eventually he was shut up in the Northampton asylum. The charge was “years addicted to poetical prosings.” There he spent his remaining twenty-three years, dying in 1864.
Early readers compared Clare unfavorably with Burns, whose work he had not read. But Edward Thomas contrasts the two: “Unlike Burns, he had practically no help from the poetry and music of his class. He was a peasant writing poetry, yet cannot be called a peasant poet, because he had behind him no tradition of peasant literature, but had to do what he could with the current forms of polite literature.” Modern critics can forget that fundamental fact. Clare’s work owes little to his class, though scansion, diction and pronunciation are true to his accent. His sense of social issues—unlike William Barnes’s—is parochial. He is harsh on those better placed than he is, who misunderstand and misprize poetry and poets. “An Effusion on Poesy” addresses a “genteel opinionist in poetry”:
Labour! ’cause thou’rt mean and poor,
Learning spurns thee from her door;
But despise me as she will,
Poesy! I love thee still.
In “Impromptu on Winter” he identifies the “petty gentry” with the chilling weather.
Enclosure distressed him for personal reasons. The plight of the peasants is not his concern in his lament for the loss of Swordy Well, where he had played and tended cows. “The Fallen Elm,” on the same theme, is one of his best poems; and “Remembrance,” written during his illness, returns to the theme again:
Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain,
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors, though the brook is running still
It runs a naked stream cold and chill.
Such poems include a general loss but stand clear of the people, apart from those close to him. Poetry, like nature, is a space away from men: “Thou light of the world’s hermitage,” an art that illuminates solitary contemplation.
Clare’s poetic models were literary, his Muse homely,
...who sits her down
Upon the mole hill’s little lap,
Who feels no fear to stain her gown,
And pauses by the hedgerow gap.
This precious figure is out of place in his literal world, one of many conventional blemishes, which include borrowings in diction from Thomson, an excessive use of epithets and superfluous adjectives, a tendency to overwrite, all faults that became less numerous in his later work. They hardly blur the visualization and presentation in such poems as “Evening Schoolboys,” “Hares at Play,” “Rural Scenes,” “The Shepherd’s Tree,” “My Schoolboy Days” or the autobiographical nightmare “The Return” (1841): “So on he lives in glooms and living death, / A shade like night, forgetting and forgot.” In diffuse form this poem expresses the same anguish as “I Am,” his best-loved personal poem, in which isolation is heightened by tempest and sea images, until he witnesses “the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems.” The poem stands without apology beside Cowper’s bleakest work.
Clare’s poetic foe was his facility. He could write poem after poem without blotting a line. Some poems come merely from a joy at utterance. His reluctance to revise means there are many effusions that go on too long, without shape or cogent development. Some open arrestingly:
Leaves from eternity are simple things
To the world’s gaze—whereto a spirit clings
Sublime and lasting. Trampled underfoot,
The daisy lives, and strikes its little root
Into the lap of time...
But this initial precision soon dissipates in prolixity. Clare repeats images and whole lines that he especially likes.
He often starts a poem with “I love”—the leaves, the gusts; or to walk, to hide, to hear. The act of loving description is the poem. If it succeeds, we know why he loves. His primary achievement is nature poetry. The poems that reveal the tensions of mental illness are more popular today, often for other than poetic reasons. The accomplishment of the poet who wrote “The fish were playing in the pool / And turned their milk-white bellies up” is visual and verbal. Clare came to imitate his earlier in his later work. His range of statement is not wide, and he was so prolific as almost to exhaust his subject matter. There is a sameness of tone about his writing—no wonder he loved the wider freedoms traced by Byron, or the more peopled world of Robert Bloomfield, like him a laborer and later a shoemaker in London, whose The Farmer’s Boy, published in 1800, sold 26,000 copies in three years. Clare is not, as some claim, a “great poet.” But his best writing—not his best poems, for the best writing is often contained in uneven poems—his best writing is in a class of its own. Only Edward Thomas, of later poets, learned its abiding lessons.
A new nature and landscape at this time were struggling to find their way into verse forms that the eighteenth century had left full of moral and philosophical starch, the nature of a land that had hitherto been for the most part content to live on imported forms and diction. William Cullen Bryant’s poetic career began when he was ten, with versifications of the book of Job; at thirteen he was writing satire about Thomas Jefferson; but his vocation began in earnest with a meditation on death entitled “Thanatopsis.” It begins:
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty...
The mood soon darkens. If the terms seem precociously to mingle the eighteenth century (“Pope’s celestial fire” and touches of Cowper) with elements of Southey and themes analogous to those of Coleridge and Shelley, the poem is largely original in its combination of strains.
Bryant, born in America of severe Pilgrim stock in Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794, was the first poet to make a point of his Americanness. In essays and lectures he considered what a specifically American literature might look like. Landscape and character deserved a place of their own, and he lamented the fact that “transatlantic approbation” was required before a writer was endorsed at home. European Romanticism itself eased the way for American literary emancipation, the move from Puritan priorities to transcendentalism.
Bryant was a sickly baby with a tyrannical grandfather (the formidable Calvinist-federalist Ebenezer Snell). The baby poet had a huge head, and his father, a doctor, would plunge it into icy water each morning to shrink it. When the boy began to grow up, his father made him work in the fields and take long constitutionals. The cure worked: he lived to be an old man. It was on such walks that he began to see, and what he saw of nature had yet to find a poetic language. Ebenezer stood between him and the education he desired—Harvard or Yale—and his poems developed in a thwarted solitude. On his own terms Bryant attracted an English readership. Arnold thought “To a Waterfowl,” his most anthologized piece, one of the best short poems in the language. He actually saw the bird in flight: it was no figment, no figure, but a flapping creature whose literal motion elicited literal feeling and thought. The poet is making the transition in it from the crabbed world of Ebenezer Snell into the freer realm of nineteenth-century nature (Emerson is just around the corner). The poems of nature and description abandon the deliberate universalizing of his models and acknowledge the actual world. The diction retains its European varnish until gradually and insistently he introduces the American words, effectively in “The Prairies,” with its poised precisions.
Bryant became a big noise in American journalism, a champion of liberal causes and a catalyst. When Dickens arrived in New York, heis reported to have asked on coming down the gangplank, “Where’s Bryant?” It was he who made certain that Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were established. He became a Unitarian. He opposed slavery and advocated free trade and trade unionism. He continued publishing verse, but it is the earlier work, in which he began to discover American priorities, and his essays and lectures, that had abiding impact. In Britain the fact that he was recognized at all is significant: the first American-born poet to be accorded relatively uncondescending recognition. In 1878 he was still in harness: the eighty-four-year-old, having delivered a speech at the unveiling of a statue of Mazzini in Central Park, tripped as he left the podium and died of concussion. Just as he helped to create Central Park, he had also begun to lay the foundations for American poetry.
John Keats’s short life—in span a third of Bryant’s and less than half of Clare’s—passed in a rage of passionate activity. He is a world away from both, yet they share a fascination with the natural world. Clare and Bryant had the task of rendering things seen and loved in a recalcitrant, Augustanized medium, adjusting and extending the medium for their purposes. Keats starts with the medium and brings it to bear on nature.
One evening when he was eighteen he met his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster of Clarke’s School, which Keats had left to undertake a medical apprenticeship. Clarke read him Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” the poem that caused Coleridge such delicious prosodic pain. Astonished, Keats took home the first volume of the Faerie Queene, which (Clarke says) he “ramped through... like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow.” One of his earliest poems, “Imitation of Spenser,” begins “Now Morning from her orient chamber came” and groans with adjectives. The third stanza presages the Keats to be:
Ah! I could tell the wonders of an isle
That in that fairest lake had placèd been,
I should e’en Dido of her grief beguile;
Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen:
For sure so fair a place was never seen,
Of all that ever charmed romantic eye:
It seemed an emerald in the silver sheen
Of the bright waters; or as when on high,
Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the cerulean sky.
His chief concern in his poetry was poetry itself, and, as with many other young poets, “the imagery he chose,” Robert Graves insists, “was predominantly sexual. Poetry for him was not a philosophical theory, as it was for Shelley, but a moment of physical delirium”—a delirium that releases the poet, and the poem, even if only for a moment, from the flow of time.
What can I do to drive away
Remembrance from my eyes? for they have seen,
Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free
In my old liberty?
The language is ambivalent. “Although he was male-minded enough in ordinary sexual business,” Graves notes, “as his letters to Fanny Brawne, and his song ‘Give me women, wine and snuff,’ show, the critics were right: he did mix the sexes in his poems.” The language of sensuous and emotional excess, especially in Endymion and Hyperion, repelled critics who found it mawkish and said so. When Keats died, Byron, referring to a savage review, wrote: “ ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.”
Keats’s early descriptions are unsatisfactory. In his essay “How Poets See,” Graves tells us: “Keats was short-sighted. He did not see landscapes as such, so he treated them as painted cabinets filled with interesting objects... His habit was to allow his eye to be seduced from entire vision by particular objects... He saw little but what moved: the curving, the wreathing, the slanting, the waving—and even then, it seems, not the whole object in motion but only its edge, or highlight.” This “mind-sight” depends less on vision than on a composite impression of the senses and memory. It comes into focus irregularly, with surprising sharpness. Such “mind-sight” could not be conveyed in what Keats mockingly calls “the rocking horse” of the heroic couplet. The eighteenth century is over. We are back with an earlier poetry, the vividness of Chaucer, the allegorical sweetmeats of Spenser.
“Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical luxury,” wrote Keats, “and with that, it appears to me, he would fair have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his self-respect and feeling of duty performed.” But Milton had other passions, religious and social, and thus “devoted himself rather to the ardours than the pleasures of song.” Keats, for his part, was almost content in his passion for poetic luxury. “Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous,” Arnold says, but, “the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else.” Arnold sets out to prove that, though he lacked fixed purpose, Keats in pursuit of Beauty was heading for something moral and wholesome: the “ardours” of song. He quotes from the “Epistle to Reynolds”: “But my flag is not unfurl’d / On the Admiral-staff, and to philosophise / I dare not yet.” The virtue of Keats’s poetry is precisely that he does not emptily “philosophize.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, he evades the systematic distortion of a worldview that, when it recognizes itself, adjusts the world to fit.
Louis MacNeice fancifully calls Keats a “sensuous mystic.” The category blurs into impressionism. Arnold is closer to the truth: Keats’s “yearning passion for the Beautiful” (his own terms) “is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion.” Keats claimed that, had he been strong enough, he would have lived alone and pursued his quest for Beauty through particular experiments: “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
He was born in London in 1795, son of a livery-stable manager who died when the boy was nine, leaving Keats, his brothers Tom and George, and his sister Fanny to the care of their mother. She remarried and sent the children to live with her mother at Edmonton, then a village, now part of London. Mrs. Keats died six years later of consumption, the illness that killed Tom in 1818 and Keats himself three years later. His father’s estate was left in the charge of managers of doubtful integrity: when Keats most needed money, none was to be had.
He attended school at Enfield from 1803 to 1811 and studied Latin, French and history. He began to translate the Aeneid, but only started his “serious” reading after he left school. Apprenticed to a surgeon, when he was twenty he entered Guy’s Hospital as a student and dresser. His poems began to appear in print. Around his twenty-first birthday he composed “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The plan for Endymion (1818) took shape. He met Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to artists and writers and directed his taste. Hunt, though he encouraged Keats’s aestheticism, showed his young protégé connections between poetry and the other arts. Keats’s best work often finds its pretext in art rather than nature. Hunt introduced him to Hazlitt and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, complementary intelligences, the one acerbic and strict, the other expansive and enthusiastic. He met Shelley and Wordsworth.
With Shelley’s help he published his first book of poems in 1817 and followed it with Endymion the next year. Endymion received killing reviews in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review. Keats came to accept that some of the censure was just. But hostility, we now know, resulted from reviewers’ ill-will to the liberal Hunt: Keats was caught in the crossfire. Some poets were quite as hostile as the reviewers, however. Byron at a later date described Keats as “this miserable self-polluter of the human mind.” He despised what he took to be the poet’s effeminacy, passivity and nostalgia. Keats’s sonnet “Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!” might have deserved a warmer response.
Keats’s poetic maturity begins in 1818. He composed “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” saw his brother George off to America, nursed his brother Tom through his final consumption, traveled to Scotland (where he visited the tomb, cottage and landscapes of Burns and poured forth lamenting praises) and Ireland, contracted his own consumption on the Isle of Mull in July, and met Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell precipitately in love and to whom he wrote those love letters that Arnold described as “underbred and ignoble.” They are not his best letters. He also began the composition of Hyperion.
In 1819 he composed the body of work on which his claims on our attention rest: “The Eve of St Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the great odes, “Lamia,” and much else. He completed Hyperion. At the beginning of 1820 his consumption took hold. He sailed to Italy with his friend the painter Joseph Severn in September. On board ship he wrote the final version of the sonnet “Bright Star.” In November, from Rome, he wrote the last of his famous letters. He died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Shelley’s mortal remains joined him the following year. On Keats’s grave appear the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
His last five years brim with human experience; he decided to abandon medicine for poetry and his world opened out. His writing matured in a matter of months. The earliest surviving work reveals skill in phrasemaking: he uncannily snares an image in a memorable phrase or line. “I look upon fine phrases as a lover,” he wrote. “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill” displays this early power and its faults. Volleys of adjectives and occasional mixed metaphors give way to lucid visualizations. The clouds are “pure and white as flocks new shorn” sleeping “On the blue fields of heaven”; we hear “A little noiseless noise among the leaves, / Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.” He decrees himself a poet of praise who watches “intently Nature’s gentle doings”; and if, as Edward Thomas believes, we are given no sense of actual setting, we do experience particular natural phenomena: minnows, flowers, breezes. We meet Apollo, a presiding spirit; images of looking upward to heaven and the gods, of ascent and final soaring are crucial to several poems. In “I stood tiptoe” emotion spills over images but does not fuse with them. In later mature work he contains emotion in particulars: indeed emotion unifies them. The father of poets may still have been the “dear delight / Of this fair world.” But nature he apprehended as isolated phenomena; the countryside was a vast natural gallery; its underlying processes, which Clare and Wordsworth witnessed, were invisible to the casual walker.
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is his first great poem. The sonnet defines a response through analogies: how he felt on reading Chapman’s translation. He responds like an astronomer looking up at a new planet or like a conquistador (a modern Odysseus, a warrior-hero) looking down on a new ocean. Planet and ocean are actually old, but are seen for the first time. “Sleep and Poetry,” also in the 1817 volume, is over four hundred lines long. It defines his “poetics,” such as they were at the time. Apollo glows in his firmament, and there is much concrete imagery. In rather unruly couplets Keats rejects Augustan convention: “musty laws lined out with wretched rules,” the tendency to “inlay, and clip, and fit” till “the verses tallied.” Certainly his verses, with many feminine rhymes, enthusiasm and no clear progression, owe few debts to the eighteenth century. “A drainless shower / Of light is poesy,” he declares.
In Endymion Keats’s rapid development begins. Written in a short time, it is, he concedes, “a feverish attempt” and not “a deed accomplished.” He asks at one point, “Muse of my native land, am I inspired?” Probably not: what is striking, apart from the remarkable anthologized passages, is the evidence of a transition from a poetry that praises to a poetry that feels; from the poet who describes from the outside to the one who employs “negative capability,” effaces his identity and writes as it were from within his images, “becoming” the sparrow on the gravel. Endymion explores the ways in which beautiful forms and figures, myths richly told, might clarify and strengthen the minds of men, not merely for a moment, but for good. Poetry expands and deepens awareness:
Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast,
They alway must be with us, or we die.
This is not portentous: it is true, but a truth expressed without a wink or nudge of irony. What was before mere aesthetic exploration overflows here into a general verity. Such resonance is limited, however, to a few passages. Endymion’s besetting faults are structural. The verse is so delighted with details of setting, nuances of look and movement, its theme and its self-intoxicating cadences, that the narrative is slow. Spenser is partly responsible for the faults, as for the virtues. The weakness is the mode, which also condemns Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion to survive as unsatisfactory contexts for some of Keats’s most brilliant passages.
The narratives “Lamia,” “The Eve of St Agnes” and “Isabella” are compact and dramatic and, despite gothic and magical elements, enact human dramas, romantic in nature but comprehensive in emotional range. The gods move off. Keats ceases to moralize the poem as it progresses and becomes instead an implicit interpreter. In “Lamia” he takes a story from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of his favorite books. Lamia, a sorceress, loves Lycius. She is transformed into a beautiful girl whom he courts and wins. At the wedding, the sage Apollonius, Lycius’s old tutor, recognizes Lamia and names her. She vanishes, and with her all of Lycius’s expectations and dreams. Lycius was deceived but joyful. The sage, representing truth, rescues him from deceit, but kills him.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.
“Lamia” enacts without resolving the disparity between feeling and fact, which fascinated Keats. It is the metaphor of an emotion, like most of the poems of his maturity. It explores dream in the context of fact. “The Eve of St Agnes” sets passion in the context of passing time, a theme of urgency for a poet aware of his impending death; and “Isabella” portrays love thwarted by social circumstances.
“The Eve of St Agnes” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” approach Keats’s main themes from opposite directions. At the opening of “The Eve of St Agnes” he distances us from the narrative, giving a long view, then panning in. The story is enacted; then, in the way that Chaucer taught him to do, he throws it back into the long view: the lovers escape in time, but not from it. Madeline, like Lycius, finds reality inferior to the dream: “And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; / How changed thou art! how pallid, chill and drear!” By contrast, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” we are brought up close to the contemplated object from the very first line, in which it is personified and sexualized as the “still unravished bride of quietness”—both “still” and “still unravished.” The poet would animate the marble figures. But they have escaped time altogether and can anticipate only eternal anticipation without fulfillment. We’re left in the urn’s presence: not distanced or contextualized, it is its own context and fills our perception.
“The Eve of St Agnes” underlines the lovers’ vulnerability: forces from outside penetrate the rooms. Storm beats against inner warmth, moonlight falls ghostly on a closed scene, draughts waft the furnishings. These elements intensify and accelerate passion, only to absorb it when the lovers step out into the night and go to the reality that a realized dream becomes. Age is the backdrop of the drama: old Angela and the beadsman depict youth’s inescapable future. Through the poem we follow the contours of unresolved emotion, not the progression of an idea. The lover Porphyro knows, without acknowledging, the truth of passion: he sings Madeline an “ancient ditty, long since mute” from Provence: “La belle dame sans mercy.” Keats’s poem of that title, written in 1818 but not printed until 1848 in Literary Remains, relates to all the narratives, though it is far more condensed and mysterious.
The three great narratives, rich in detail, idealized characterization, and gothic elements, inspired poets, painters and musicians later in the century. The Pre-Raphaelites in particular drew sustenance from them. “The Eve of St Agnes” radically reconfigures resources of tone and characterization that Keats adapted from Chaucer and Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was not far from his hand when he wrote the poem. And his phrasing owes Shakespeare a debt. Cymbeline suggests the way Madeline’s bedchamber is made solid before our eyes. Keats does not imitate his masters: he has assimilated them.
The odes—“To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” and the lesser “To Psyche” and “On Melancholy”—are incomparable. The charge that he “lacked experience” is fatuous; nor are they “merely sensuous.” They are the step beyond moral romance to the romance of feeling itself, feeling as subject, the “true voice.”
Intoxication precedes the song of the bird in “To a Nightingale”; its voice is not heard until the fifth line, and the creature is never seen. Announced by its effect, it remains effect, a dryad of the trees. The first stanza introduces thematic ingredients: joy, sorrow, music, death, and the rapture that frees the poet into the world of sense. A conflict of desires develops: first, the desire to vie with and equal the dryad in eloquence; then, the desire to die at the height of the ecstasy its song inspires. Every sense apart from sight is engaged: in the darkness there is no light “Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” We see what we cannot see, the green, the gloom, the moss, the path winding in darkness. None of his poems equals this one for evocation, sense drawn to focus by birdsong and night, away from a sordid world the dryad has never known:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies...
Age and death: the death of his brother informs that last line. Recollection of the actual world breaks his reverie. How is he to escape—through poetry? His mind holds back, though imagination is “already with thee” in the light of heaven. Twice his emotion rises to the bird, twice it is recalled, first by the reality of the human condition, then by a sense of his inadequacy. He considers death, but the thought corrects itself with the reflection that in death he would be deaf to the bird’s “high requiem.” The word “forlorn”—like a bell, contrasting with the bird’s song—calls him back again to the world. The bird flies at the word’s tolling, a knell to the feeling and its cause. “Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?” Keats’s deepest feelings weave themselves into the texture of the poem, itself elicited by an actual nightingale the poet heard in a garden. “O for a life of Sensations rather than Thoughts!” he had declared. The odes achieve that life. Thoughts are subservient to the tone of feeling and remain potent because unresolved.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” provides teachers and schoolchildren with an inexhaustible paradox in its closing lines. It is well to remember that the urn, not Keats, declares, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Keats adds, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Is it a statement of faith? Or is the “ye” the human images on the urn? Is he reflecting on its knowledge rather than ours? The way he presents images, the repetitions of “happy” and “ever” and “forever,” with their mournful effect (like “forlorn” in the “Nightingale”), and the poem’s tone balance without contradicting the categorical conclusion. Is the poem different in kind from the other odes and narratives? The conclusion means only in the context of the poem itself.
Each stanza proposes a paradoxical contrast between static portrayal and the activity portrayed. The “still unravished bride of quietness,” child of “silence” and “slow time” is a poignant personification. The poem examines the images on the urn: “maidens loth,” “mad pursuit,” “struggle to escape,” “pipes and timbrels,” “wild ecstasy.” The serene object gives way to the violent passion of its decoration. Sexual tension is strong throughout the first three stanzas, beginning with the “unravished bride,” “panting,” fear and desire—arrested at a point before release. Actions that find fulfillment only in time are translated to a timeless context.
In the fourth stanza Keats turns to the sacrificial procession and the village, which, emptied of its populace, will “evermore” be silent, and never know why it is “desolate,” only that it is. In the last stanza the urn becomes a “Cold Pastoral,” an oxymoron. Having brought the urn to life, revealing through the play of imagination his own intense ambivalence about time and the nature of beauty, he delivers the final lines with a conclusive air that only qualifies the experience of the poem itself.
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity.” In the odes what is dazzling is the fine excess, the wealth of apposite images that, in stanzas of impeccable prosodic development, answer to the poet’s deepest concerns. If Keats lacked the intellectual resources of Coleridge or Shelley, he still came close to solving the same problems of poetic form they wrestled with. The odes indeed appear to the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, “almost a remembrance.” And they answer more than sufficiently the doubts that Clare expressed. “Touch has a memory,” for Clare of the particulars of Northamptonshire, which was his world; for Keats in the odes, where memory brings his whole life into play.
Beyond the charmed circle of poets in the canon is a rather monstrous and melancholy figure, a little absurd and generally overlooked: Thomas Lovell Beddoes, born in Shropshire in 1803, and dead (a suicide after several attempts) in 1849 at the Cigogne Hotel in Basel, Switzerland. Son of a physician—who, legend says, brought home bodies to dissect in the parlor after dinner, and who discovered laughing gas and administered it to Coleridge—Beddoes became a physician himself. He wrote verse from an early age, some of it ghoulish, foreshadowing the manner of his later work. He published very little during his lifetime, certainly not his most important work, Death’s Jest Book, which he began at twenty-two, when he left England, and kept revising until death put an end to blotting and it was published in 1850. His most celebrated poem is “Dream Pedlary,” perhaps devoted to his companion of one year, a Russian Jewish student called Bernhard Reich. John Ashbery suggests he may have been the “loved, longlost boy” of the poem. His later years he spent with a young baker called Konrad Degen.
Beddoes misbehaved—at Oxford, in Göttingen, in Zürich—and his life was mysterious, peripatetic, unobserved. The “poems” that exist are generally fragments, plucked out of his plays and from Death’s Jest Book, which imitate, though not in a spirit of forgery, the Jacobean drama, taking images that unfold in a hugely extended syntax. Death is his theme: “Death is the one condition of our lives,” he says, earning from Ezra Pound the sobriquet “prince of morticians.” His verse pulls up “a mass of algae / (and pearls).” His most eloquent contemporary advocate is John Ashbery, a poet whose syntax is as various and unpredictable as Beddoes’s own, and who revels in the Firbankian elements of the verse. Beddoes is a figure unaccountably omitted—apart from “Dream Pedlary,” “one of the most seamlessly beautiful lyrics in the English language”—from the general feast. It is not only isolated images and cadences that astonish us: “Within the myrtle / Sits a hen-robin, trembling like a star, / Over her brittle eggs”; “If there were dreams to sell / What would you buy?”; “Where in their graves the dead are shut like seeds”; it is the strange exchanges between strange characters. In the Jest Book the Duke asks Isbrand: “How? Do you rhyme too?”
Another madness, hanging over from the Augustan age? Or is this the Romanticism we never quite had, more extreme than the gothic that was yet to come, more candid in its obliquities than many of his great (unknown) contemporaries? Thomas Kelsall, a friend and admirer, wrote a life and published some of the poems.
Kelsall corresponded with Robert Browning and it was hoped that Browning would make a selection of Beddoes’s work. Kelsall upon his death left Browning the manuscripts and other material in a box which, as Browning’s interest cooled, was referred to as “that dismal Box.” Fortunately James Dyke Campell, another partisan, copied the manuscripts around 1886, before they vanished. Edmund Gosse finally edited the texts, which have since been put in rather better order but are hard to obtain. Browning missed his chance to adjust our sense of his century and to make public one of the most curious and still misprized voices of his time, a poet who belongs with Shelley on the one hand, and with Wilde on the other, as a radical presence who gradually gets language on his own terms. Is this, perhaps, in the voice of Isbrand, Beddoes himself?
How I despise
All you mere men of muscle! It was ever
My study to find out a way to godhead,
And on reflection soon I found that first
I was but half created; that a power
Was wanting in my soul to be a soul,
And this was mine to make...