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alone have been sufficient to prove Keats a great poet. They have been often quoted, but it is impossible to make them hackneyed.

4. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Written also in the spring of 1819. There is a tradition that the urn which inspired this Ode was one still preserved in the garden of Holland House. The variation in the arrangement of the rhymes of the closing lines is curious, and has the appearance of a want of care in revision. Mr. Palgrave remarks: "Had the first and last stanzas been throughout equal to the second, third, and fourth, this Ode would have had few rivals in our, or any, literature."

6 49. Beauty is truth, etc. "Keats's assertion illustrates itself by injuring the otherwise perfect poem which contains it. So obtrusive a moral lessens the effect of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. In other words, the beauty of the poem would be truer without it. . . . Pedagogic formulas of truth do not convey its essence. The soul of truth... is found in the relation of things to the universal, and its correct expression is beautiful and inspiring.". E. C. STEDMAN, Nature of Poetry.

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6. Ode to Psyche. In April, 1819, Keats' wrote to his brother George of this Ode: "[It] is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains; I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry; this one I have done leisurely; I think it reads the more richly for it, and it will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit."

6 11. Trembled blossoms. Shaken by the wind or by the brooklet below. A characteristic example of Keats's fondness for condensing into a single epithet a whole thought. Here the thought seems perhaps somewhat too remote.

6 14.

Budded Tyrian. Budded in Tyrian purple.

7 54. Far, far around.

Upon the couplet beginning thus Ruskin comments: "Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him, so discontented it makes me with my own work but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that marvelous Ode to Psyche." Modern Painters; vi, 9.

10. Fancy. "I know no other poem which so closely rivals the richness and melody, and that in this very difficult and rare attempted metre, of Milton's Allegro and Penseroso." — PALGRave. Ceres' daughter. Proserpine, who was carried away to Hades by Pluto, the "God of Torment."

13 81.

13. Ode.

Written, according to Mr. Forman, on a blank page before Beaumont and Fletcher's tragi-comedy, The Fair Maid of the Inn, and referring to those authors rather than to poets in general.

Gives the half.

16 16. The idea seems to be that Echo, repeating the words of the traveler, gives the half of the speech which they have together. The passage is a flagrant example of a line forced for the sake of the rhyme. 17 34. Gamelyn. The Tale of Gamelyn is added by Urry to the list of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It is supposed that the latter may have had the idea of using the story, which furnished later the theme of Lodge's Rosalynde, and so of Shakespeare's As You Like It. The version which exists in some manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales is now known not to be Chaucer's.

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17 36. Grenè shaw."

18. I Stood Tip-toe.

Green wood.

Palgrave remarks: "This nameless Poem, to judge by its style and matter, may be safely placed amongst the latest-written pieces in the volume of 1817. . . . We may take it also as a fit preface to the work which his short life enabled him to give us presenting, as it does, two of the leading colors or motives that appear throughout his poetry, the passion for pure nature-painting, and the love of the Hellenic myths, treated, not as the Greeks themselves treated them, but with a lavish descriptiveness which belongs to the English Renaissance movement, as represented by the Faerie Queene, and with a strong tinge of the still more modern movement which is intelligibly summed up under the name Romantic. . . . Already the tale of Endymion had seized on the Poet's imagination." Leigh Hunt, in his review of the volume, observes that in this "and in the other largest poem [Sleep and Poetry] · Mr. Keats is seen to his best advantage, and displays all that fertile power of association and imagery which constitutes the abstract poetical faculty as distinguished from every other."

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18 12. "A fancy," says Leigh Hunt, "founded, as all beautiful fancies are, on a strong sense of what really exists or occurs."

23 180. Echo pined away from unrequited love for Narcissus, while he wasted to death for love of his own reflection in a pool.

25 6. Archimago. The wizard in the first canto of Spenser's

Faerie Queene.

27 61. Libertas. Keats's poetic name for Leigh Hunt.

27. Calidore. Leigh Hunt is authority for considering this a fragment of the poem to which was to have belonged the Induction printed before it. The Induction bears marks of being written at a

later time, but Keats was so rapid in his poetic growth that no great interval is necessarily to be inferred.

29 50. Wild cat's eyes. Country name for the speedwell, Veronica Chamaedrys (Lin.).

32. Woman. Palgrave says: "What union of manly sense and exquisite tenderness, not without amusing boyish candor, — in these three sonnets, which, for chivalrous devotion and picturesqueness, I would class between the best of Dante and Petrarch." I am unable to share this admiration, for the poem seems to me boyish and hardly worth preservation, but I am willing to grant that the fault may be my own.

33 1. Calidore is in the Faerie Queene the type of courtesy, and was modeled on Sir Philip Sidney. Leander is he of Abydos, the lover of Hero.

34. Sleep and Poetry. The yeast which was working in the heart and mind of the young poet bubbles and froths throughout this poem, which is full of fine and significant touches, despite its unevenness and the crudity apparent throughout. From what is said and what is suggested it is possible to gather hints of what might have been the future course of his genius. The sensuous delight in beauty which is so strongly marked in all his earlier work had already begun to give way somewhat to the earnest sympathy with that mystery of life without which no poet is truly great. It is said to have been written in its first draft in the "library of Hunt's cottage," which is the "poet's house" of 1. 354.

35 28. Rumblings. I am sorry to say that I suspect Keats of having been guilty of the pronunciation "rum-bel-lings.”

39 162-229. "Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of the revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause in prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; . . . but neither has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic attention on their faults. . . . But, controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of the instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason, we cannot but feel that Keats touches truly

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At

the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age."— SIDNEY COLVIN. It seems to me that Mr. Colvin attributes too much to Keats. the time the passage referred to was written, the young man had hardly begun to understand the theory of poetry, and was certainly not in a position to reason about it for himself save in a somewhat rudimentary fashion. He had up to this time done little more than to accept the doctrines of Leigh Hunt, while he had probably never read a page of Boileau; and although the tendencies of his genius and the course of his studies certainly led him more and more fully to accept these doctrines, to declare that Keats in his first volume announced original poetic articles of faith would be to convey an impression essentially at variance with the facts of the case. He was by nature in sympathy with the Elizabethans and out of key with the Eighteenth Century poets, but beyond that he was in this passage doing little more than repeating what was the poetic faith of Hunt.

39 173. The Elizabethan poets.

39 181. Here Keats pays his respects to the Eighteenth Century poets, with whom, as led by Pope, he had no sympathy whatever. Boileau (1636-1711) was the noted French poet and critic, upon whose L'Art Poétique were founded the theories which shaped the classical literature of France and those of Pope and his followers.

40 198.

40 202.

Gen. xxx, 37-39.

Apollo.

40 209. Boundly is an ugly word invented by Keats apparently to mean what one is bound to feel.

41 224-235. The conclusion of this passage is hopelessly obscure. The opening lines may be supposed to characterize certain of Keats's contemporaries, the swan being, perhaps, Wordsworth. The mention of the poets whom he has in mind suggests to him that some have chosen themes which he holds to be unfit for imaginative poetry, and in a way which he has not made clear he compares these themes to clubs in the grasp of Polyphemus when he strode into the sea in vain pursuit of Ulysses and his companion.

42 274. Apparently Keats made the pause after reach in this line and after grand in 1. 333 do duty in place of an omitted syllable.

43 303.

Dedalian wings. The allusion is to the wings which Dædalus made for himself and for his son Icarus, and which in the case of the latter were melted by a too near approach to the sun.

45 364. Liny marble. The comment of Palgrave, which seems to me a little precious,' is: "The epithet, if Keats here describes, not the veining, but the sharp, thin flutings and frieze-mouldings of a Greek temple, is singularly felicitous." The fact that the meaning is uncertain seems a sufficient reason for not considering the word felicitous here.

45 379. Unshent. The verb shend means to disgrace, to spoil, to put to shame, and unshent is used here in the sense of unspoiled. Keats probably took the word from Spenser.

46. Stanzas. This poem and those following as far as La Belle Dame sans Merci, were published posthumously. They belong, so far as is known, to 1818 and 1819.

48. Teignmouth. This piece I have retained chiefly on account of the glimpse of a side of Keats which is not generally known to those readers who are familiar with his poetry and not with his personal history. It has, too, graces of rhythm and of fresh out-of-door air which are richly worth preservation. Had it been carefully revised it might easily have held a not unhonored place among Keats's lesser lyrics. The poet was engaged in copying Endymion for the press at the time when these lines were written, in March, 1818; and was full of delight at getting out of doors again after a week of continuous rain which made him, he says, "give Devonshire a good blowing-up." Dack'd haired. Shock-headed. Prickets are two-year-old deer. Of course in a poem seriously meant or carefully revised Keats would never have tolerated such a rhyme as 'critics — prickets.'

50. Ode on Indolence. This poem shows plainly the absence of revision, as in so careless a rhyme as 'grass-farce'; but it is not without the genuine Keats flavor. 'Placid sandals,' 'so hush a mask,' and 'sleep embroidered with dim dreams,' may be cited as among the markedly characteristic touches.

50 10. Phidian lore. A knowledge of the work of Phidias. The comparison is not happy when taken in connection with vases, and the line has an awkward air of having been made for the sake of a rhyme.

52. Song. I have spoken of this song in the Introduction. Dated 1818 in the Literary Remains (1848) in which it was first printed; it was more probably written in 1819.

53. La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Published in The Indicator,

May 10, 1820, with introduction by Leigh Hunt, in which the poem is said to have been suggested by "a translation, under this title, of a poem of the celebrated Alain Chartier, Secretary to Charles the Sixth and Seventh," formerly attributed to Chaucer. The suggestion was entirely in the name, as there is no resemblance between the old

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