Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

of that worship of beauty which was the foundation of the poetic creed of Keats.

210 279. And a wave filled it. The image is exquisite.

219. "Lamia leaves on my ear an echo like the delicate richness of Virgil's hexameter in the Eclogues; the note of his magical inner sweetness is, in some degree, reached with a different instrument."PALGRAVE.

'Lamia leaves on the mental palate a rich flavor, if not an absolutely healthy one."-W. M. Rossetti.

Lamia was written in 1819, "after much study of Dryden's versification," according to Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown. The influence of Dryden is especially to be noted in the Alexandrines. Gordian shape. Knotted. See 85 614.

220 47.

220 58. Ariadne's tiar. The crown given by Bacchus to Ariadne became a constellation after her death.

221 60. "The admiration, pity and horror, to be excited by humanity in a brute shape, were never perhaps called upon by a greater mixture of beauty and deformity than in the picture of this creature. Our pity and suspicions are begged by the first word; the profuse and vital beauties with which she is covered seem proportioned to her misery and natural rights; and lest we should lose sight of them in this gorgeousness, the 'woman's mouth' fills us at once with shuddering and compassion." - LEIGH HUNT.

221 81.

The star of Lethe. Hermes is so called in allusion to his office of leading souls to Tartarus.

223 131. Printless verdure. The god hovered so lightly that the grasses did not bend beneath him.

223 133. Caducean charm.

his snake-twined wand.

Hermes touched her with the caduceus,

225 198. Unshent. Unchided because she so well learned the lore taught in 'Cupid's college.'

228 320. Adonian feast. The festival in honor of the dead Adonis.

229 333. Pyrrha's pebbles. After the deluge Deucalion and Pyrrha repeopled the earth by casting over their shoulders stones which became men. The allusion to Adam is an unfortunate anachronism. The same might be said of Fairies and Peris in 1. 329. In mingling myth. ology and fairy lore Keats followed Spenser, but not with the success attained in the Faerie Queene.

239 231. In Haydon's Autobiography it is said that Keats and Lamb once agreed, at the house of Haydon, that Newton "had

destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colors."

242. Isabella; 1818. The story is from Boccaccio. Decamerone, Giorn. iv, nov. 5.

245 95.

Theseus' spouse. Ariadne, deserted at Naxos.

246 121-128. It would perhaps have been no misfortune had this

stanza been lost.

247. st. xvii. The last four lines are not clear. The brothers are called hawks of ship-mast forests as taking advantage of trading vessels in ports; quick cat's-paws, etc., evidently in the sense of waylaying any improvident spendthrift, although the traditional use of 'cat's-paw' does not justify this.

247 140. Hot Egypt's pest. The suggestion of the hot Sahara hardly saves from commonplaceness the idea of sand flung in the eyes.

249 209. Murder'd man. Leigh Hunt says that this "masterly anticipation of his end, conveyed in a single word, has been justly admired."

251 262. Hinnom's vale. The valley of Hinnom, called also Tophet and Gehenna, accursed as the scene of the worship of Moloch, and used as a symbol of hell.

[ocr errors]

253 322. Atom darkness. Perhaps this strange use of atom was suggested by the atom'd mists' of Drayton's Elegies. It is most intelligible on the supposition that Keats had in mind the idea of a misty and therefore atomized gloom.

256 393. Perséan sword. The sword of Perseus with which he slew Medusa.

256 412. Cold serpent pipe. This reference to the practical details of the stillroom is somewhat absurdly out of place.

257 432. Leafits. Apparently this diminutive was coined by Keats. It is used only in this passage.

257. st. lv, lxi. "The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me a fadeur hardly more appropiate than the moneybag's epigram upon the 'dewy rosary.' But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards The Pot of Basil. He thinks it beautiful and pathetic — and so do I."— W. M. ROSSETTI.

[ocr errors]

The poem certainly has faults as conspicuous as Endymion, and in a sense less excusable from the fact that the whole seems more mature; but its beauties are of a riper sort, and the unity of impression — due in

part, no doubt, to the fact that the story was ready made to Keats's hand, places it much in advance of the earlier poem.

258 451.

Baal.

Baälites of pelf. Worshipping pelf as pagans worshipped

"The passage about the tone of her voice,

259 491. -the poor lostwitted coaxing, — the 'chuckle,' . . . is as true and touching an instance of the effect of a happy familiar word, as any in all poetry.” — Leigh HUNT.

261. The Eve of St. Mark.

"The chastest and choicest example of his maturing manner, and shows astonishingly real mediævalism for one not bred an artist." - D. G. RoSSETTI.

"The non-completion of The Eve of St. Mark is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain." W. M. ROSSETTI.

It was believed that if a person placed himself near a church porch in the dusk of St. Mark's eve, he would see go into the building those .of the parish who would during the coming year be smitten with disease. Those who were to recover he would afterward see emerge. The shades of those who must die would not return. It is supposed that Bertha, well and in her love half-careless, was meant to see the shadow of her absent and perhaps ailing lover enter the minster, not to reappear. The choice of such a subject is pathetically probable in connection with the dying poet's keen realization of his own condition in relation to Miss Brawne. From 1. 99 to 1. 114 the attempt is of course to give an imitation of an old chronicle, a trick with which Keats was sufficiently familiar from his admiration of Chatterton. The completeness and harmony of the impression in this fragment are by no means the least of the wonders of Keats's poetry.

265. The Eve of St. Agnes. St. Agnes' Day is the twentyfirst of January, and the Eve of St. Agnes would of course be on the twentieth. The superstition upon which this beautiful poem is founded is that if a maid will on this eve retire fasting, her destined husband will come and feast with her in her dreams. The poem was written in 1819, and the manuscript copies bear evidence of the most careful revision, always with increase of effect. Of the longer poems of Keats this is unquestionably the most completely satisfactory, and it glows with a rich and unfading beauty like some sumptuous magic tapestry wrought by Morgan le Fay and her maids or by the queens watching around the couch of the wounded Arthur in Avalon. 265 2. The owl. "Could he have selected an image more warm and comfortable in itself, and, therefore, better contradicted by the season?

We feel the plump, feathery bird in his nook, shivering in spite of his natural household warmth."- LEIGH HUNT.

265 21. Flattered to tears. The 'golden tongue' of music awoke for a brief instant some thrill of bygone joys, flattering the old man with a delusive shadow of a dream that once again they might be possible; but the reaction described in the following lines comes almost simultaneously.

266 31. Silver, snarling trumpets. I have never been fully reconciled to the use of 'snarling,' the connotation of which has always troubled me a little. The combative, resentful, offensive sense which the word conveys is out of place here, and cannot have been intended unless it is meant to indicate the arrogance of the pomp of the Baron.

267 58. "I do not use train for concourse of passers by, but for skirts sweeping along the floor."-KEATS to TAYLOR.

267 60. Tip-toe. An exceedingly happy word for the expression of the frivolity and affection of the gallants who must infallibly awake the contempt of Madeline. By giving the reader to understand that the heroine was insensible to these flimsy fascinators the poet implies worth and manliness on the part of the lover who had been able to win her heart.

267 70. Amort. The word was borrowed from the Elizabethans. Perhaps the most familiar instance is in Taming of the Shrew, iv, 3: "What, sweeting, all amort?" The meaning, as clearly enough indicated by the derivation, is deadened, spiritless, dazed. Perhaps the most recent instance of the use of the term is in Browning's Sordello. 269 117. St. Agnes' wool. The allusion in st. viii to lambs unshorn and here to St. Agnes' wool is to the rite of offering on St. Agnes' day while the Agnus was chanted in the mass, two lambs, the wool of which was afterward dressed, spun, and woven by the nuns.

271 171. Since Merlin, etc. "The monstrous debt was his monstrous existence, which he owed to a demon and repaid when he died or disappeared through the working of one of his own spells by Viviane."-FORMAN. See Tennyson's Vivian.

272 199-217. These three stanzas would be sufficient to make the reputation of any writer as being at least a poet who shared the qualities of the highest masters of beauty of expression. It seems to me worth while to give here, despite its length, the note on st. xxiv from Harry Buxton Forman's exhaustive edition of Keats. "This sumptuous passage occupied the poet's care very considerably. The following opening stands cancelled in the manuscript :

is

e

1

t

1

1

1

1

A Casement tripple arch'd and diamonded
With many colored glass fronted the moon
In midst w[h]ereof a shi[e]lded scutcheon shed
High blushing gules; she kneeled saintly down
And inly prayed for grace and heavenly boon;
The blood red gules fell on her silver cross
And her white hands devout.

In line 3 of this, of which stands cancelled in favor of wereof; and line 4 originally began with High blushing gules upon. A second fresh

start is

There was a Casement tripple arch'd and high

All garlanded with carven imagries

Of fruits and flowers and sunny corn:

before this was rejected the third line was amended thus,—

Of fruits and flowers and sunny corn ears parch'd:

I presume Keats noticed that corn did not rhyme with high, and meant to transpose the first line thus,

There was a casement high and tripple arched;

but there is no trace of this in the manuscript. In the stanza as finally written there is the following cancelled reading of lines 6, etc., —

As in the wing of evening tiger moths
And in the midst 'mong many heraldries
And dim twilight. . .

[ocr errors]

"Before the present tiger-moth line was arrived at, the epithet rich instead of deep was tried, and deep-damasked in the manuscript stands cancelled in favor of what, though barely legible, I believe to be deep sunset. Presumably Keats reverted to deep-damasked when revising the proofs; and it is certainly the happiest expression imaginable. Of this supreme result of poetic labor Leigh Hunt says, 'Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy, with Titian's and Raphael's aid to boot, go beyond the rich religion of this picture, with its "twilight saints," and its 'scutcheons "blushing with the blood of queens" ? ""

I am not of those who feel it wise to fix the attention of the reader on processes of the literary workshop, but it is not amiss sometimes to have an idea of the care which even genius must use to reach its best results.

273 218. Gules.

"How proper, as well as pretty, the heraldic Red would not have been a

term gules, considering the occasion.
fiftieth part as good."— LEIGH HUNT.

« ZurückWeiter »