Part 1 (2/2)
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Of the work upon which he was now engaged, the narrative-poem of _Endymion_, we may give his own account to his little sister f.a.n.n.y in a letter dated September 10th, 1817:--
'Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus--he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece.'
On his return to London he and his brother Tom, always delicate and now quite an invalid, took lodgings at Hampstead. Here Keats remained for some time, hara.s.sed by the illness of his brother and of several of his friends; and in June he was still further depressed by the departure of his brother George to try his luck in America.
In April, 1818, _Endymion_ was finished. Keats was by no means satisfied with it but preferred to publish it as it was, feeling it to be 'as good as I had power to make it by myself'.--'I will write independently' he says to his publisher--'I have written independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_ hereafter. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green sh.o.r.e, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.' He published it with a preface modestly explaining to the public his own sense of its imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem--the diffuseness of the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of which it is full.
Directly after the publication of _Endymion_, and before the appearance of these reviews, Keats started with a friend, Charles Brown, for a walking tour in Scotland. They first visited the English lakes and thence walked to Dumfries, where they saw the house of Burns and his grave. They entered next the country of Meg Merrilies, and from Kirkcudbrights.h.i.+re crossed over to Ireland for a few days. On their return they went north as far as Argyles.h.i.+re, whence they sailed to Staffa and saw Fingal's cave, which, Keats wrote, 'for solemnity and grandeur far surpa.s.ses the finest Cathedral.' They then crossed Scotland through Inverness, and Keats returned home by boat from Cromarty.
His letters home are at first full of interest and enjoyment, but a 'slight sore throat', contracted in 'a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the Isle of Mull', proved very troublesome and finally cut short his holiday. This was the beginning of the end. There was consumption in the family: Tom was dying of it; and the cold, wet, and over-exertion of his Scotch tour seems to have developed the fatal tendency in Keats himself.
From this time forward he was never well, and no good was done to either his health or spirits by the task which now awaited him of tending on his dying brother. For the last two or three months of 1818, until Tom's death in December, he scarcely left the bedside, and it was well for him that his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was at hand to help and comfort him after the long strain. Brown persuaded Keats at once to leave the house, with its sad a.s.sociations, and to come and live with him.
Before long poetry absorbed Keats again; and the first few months of 1819 were the most fruitful of his life. Besides working at _Hyperion_, which he had begun during Tom's illness, he wrote _The Eve of St.
Agnes_, _The Eve of St. Mark_, _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, and nearly all his famous odes.
Troubles however beset him. His friend Haydon was in difficulties and tormenting him, poor as he was, to lend him money; the state of his throat gave serious cause for alarm; and, above all, he was consumed by an unsatisfying pa.s.sion for the daughter of a neighbour, Mrs. Brawne.
She had rented Brown's house whilst they were in Scotland, and had now moved to a street near by. Miss f.a.n.n.y Brawne returned his love, but she seems never to have understood his nature or his needs. High-spirited and fond of pleasure she did not apparently allow the thought of her invalid lover to interfere much with her enjoyment of life. She would not, however, abandon her engagement, and she probably gave him all which it was in her nature to give. Ill-health made him, on the other hand, morbidly dissatisfied and suspicious; and, as a result of his illness and her limitations, his love throughout brought him restlessness and torment rather than peace and comfort.
Towards the end of July he went to Shanklin and there, in collaboration with Brown, wrote a play, _Otho the Great_. Brown tells us how they used to sit, one on either side of a table, he sketching out the scenes and handing each one, as the outline was finished, to Keats to write. As Keats never knew what was coming it was quite impossible that the characters should be adequately conceived, or that the drama should be a united whole. Nevertheless there is much that is beautiful and promising in it. It should not be forgotten that Keats's 'greatest ambition' was, in his own words, 'the writing of a few fine plays'; and, with the increasing humanity and grasp which his poetry shows, there is no reason to suppose that, had he lived, he would not have fulfilled it.
At Shanklin, moreover, he had begun to write _Lamia_, and he continued it at Winchester. Here he stayed until the middle of October, excepting a few days which he spent in London to arrange about the sending of some money to his brother in America. George had been unsuccessful in his commercial enterprises, and Keats, in view of his family's ill-success, determined temporarily to abandon poetry, and by reviewing or journalism to support himself and earn money to help his brother. Then, when he could afford it, he would return to poetry.
Accordingly he came back to London, but his health was breaking down, and with it his resolution. He tried to re-write _Hyperion_, which he felt had been written too much under the influence of Milton and in 'the artist's humour'. The same independence of spirit which he had shown in the publication of _Endymion_ urged him now to abandon a work the style of which he did not feel to be absolutely his own. The re-cast he wrote in the form of a vision, calling it _The Fall of Hyperion_, and in so doing he added much to his conception of the meaning of the story. In no poem does he show more of the profoundly philosophic spirit which characterizes many of his letters. But it was too late; his power was failing and, in spite of the beauty and interest of some of his additions, the alterations are mostly for the worse.
Whilst _The Fall of Hyperion_ occupied his evenings his mornings were spent over a satirical fairy-poem, _The Cap and Bells_, in the metre of the _Faerie Queene_. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject; satire was not natural to him, and the poem has little intrinsic merit.
Neither this nor the re-cast of _Hyperion_ was finished when, in February, 1820, he had an attack of illness in which the first definite symptom of consumption appeared. Brown tells how he came home on the evening of Thursday, February 3rd, in a state of high fever, chilled from having ridden outside the coach on a bitterly cold day. 'He mildly and instantly yielded to my request that he should go to bed . . . On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say--”that is blood from my mouth”. I went towards him: he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet.
”Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.” After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face with a calmness of expression that I can never forget, and said, ”I know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of blood is my death warrant;--I must die.”'
He lived for another year, but it was one long dying: he himself called it his 'posthumous life'.
Keats was one of the most charming of letter-writers. He had that rare quality of entering sympathetically into the mind of the friend to whom he was writing, so that his letters reveal to us much of the character of the recipient as well as of the writer. In the long journal-letters which he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America he is probably most fully himself, for there he is with the people who knew him best and on whose understanding and sympathy he could rely. But in none is the beauty of his character more fully revealed than in those to his little sister f.a.n.n.y, now seventeen years old, and living with their guardian, Mr. Abbey. He had always been very anxious that they should 'become intimately acquainted, in order', as he says, 'that I may not only, as you grow up, love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend.' In his most hara.s.sing times he continued to write to her, directing her reading, sympathizing in her childish troubles, and constantly thinking of little presents to please her. Her health was to him a matter of paramount concern, and in his last letters to her we find him reiterating warnings to take care of herself--'You must be careful always to wear warm clothing not only in Frost but in a Thaw.'--'Be careful to let no fretting injure your health as I have suffered it--health is the greatest of blessings--with _health_ and _hope_ we should be content to live, and so you will find as you grow older.' The constant recurrence of this thought becomes, in the light of his own sufferings, almost unbearably pathetic.
During the first months of his illness Keats saw through the press his last volume of poetry, of which this is a reprint. The praise which it received from reviewers and public was in marked contrast to the scornful reception of his earlier works, and would have augured well for the future. But Keats was past caring much for poetic fame. He dragged on through the summer, with rallies and relapses, tormented above all by the thought that death would separate him from the woman he loved. Only Brown, of all his friends, knew what he was suffering, and it seems that he only knew fully after they were parted.
The doctors warned Keats that a winter in England would kill him, so in September, 1820, he left London for Naples, accompanied by a young artist, Joseph Severn, one of his many devoted friends. Sh.e.l.ley, who knew him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa, but Keats refused. He had never cared for Sh.e.l.ley, though Sh.e.l.ley seems to have liked him, and, in his invalid state, he naturally shrank from being a burden to a mere acquaintance.
It was as they left England, off the coast of Dorsets.h.i.+re, that Keats wrote his last beautiful sonnet on a blank leaf of his folio copy of Shakespeare, facing _A Lover's Complaint_:--
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender taken breath, And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
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