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VERSES TO FANNY BRAWNE

Although these are not the only poems which owe their origin to Keats's consuming passion, they are grouped here because, ap

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parently written in the same period, they stand as a painful witness to the ebbing tide of Keats's life.

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?

When every fair one that I saw was fair,
Enough to catch me in but half a snare,
Not keep me there:

When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things,
My muse had wings,

And ever ready was to take her course
Whither I bent her force,
Unintellectual, yet divine to me;-

Divine, I say!- What sea-bird o'er the

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THE CAP AND BELLS

OR, THE JEALOUSIES

A Faery Tale. Unfinished

In a letter to John Taylor, his publisher, written from Hampstead, November 17, 1819, Keats, who was then in his most restless mood, writes impulsively: 'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now ready written; but, for all that, to publish a poem before long, and that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, I think, be sufficient for a poem. I wish to diffuse the colouring of "St. Agnes' Eve" throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such poems, if God should spare me, written in the course of the

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Lord Houghton quotes from Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown: 'This Poem was written subject to future amendments and omissions; it was begun without a plot, and without any presented laws for the supernatural machinery.' Keats apparently designed publishing the poem with the signature Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and it can only be taken as one of his feverish attempts at using his intellectual powers for self-maintenance, when he was discouraged at the prospect of commercial success with his genuine poetry. Hunt published some of the stanzas in The Indicator August 23, 1820, as written by a very good poetess Lucy V— L' and Lord Houghton included the whole in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

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I

IN midmost Ind, beside Hydaspes cool, There stood, or hover'd, tremulous in the air,

A faery city, 'neath the potent rule
Of Emperor Elfinan; famed ev'rywhere
For love of mortal women, maidens fair,
Whose lips were solid, whose soft hands
were made

Of a fit mould and beauty, ripe and rare, To pamper his slight wooing, warm yet staid:

He loved girls smooth as shades, but hated a mere shade.

II

This was a crime forbidden by the law;
And all the priesthood of his city wept,
For ruin and dismay they well foresaw,
If impious prince no bound or limit kept,
And faery Zendervester overstept;
They wept, he sinn'd, and still he would
sin on,

They dreamt of sin, and he sinn'd while they slept;

In vain the pulpit thunder'd at the throne,

Caricature was vain, and vain the tart lam

poon.

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