Keats: Poems Published in 1820
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 Fanny 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, harassed 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 shore, 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
Kirkcudbrightshire crossed over to Ireland for a few days. On their
return they went north as far as Argyleshire, whence they sailed to
Staffa and saw Fingal's cave, which, Keats wrote, 'for solemnity and
grandeur far surpasses 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 associations, 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 passion 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 Fanny 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 Fanny, 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 harassing 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. Shelley, who
knew him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa, but Keats refused. He
had never cared for Shelley, though Shelley 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 Dorsetshire, that Keats