Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

poesy. There is no hectic flush about the poetry of this half year, but an increasing firmness of touch and rich, yet reserved imagination.

But great as his products were, he had not found his public, and the little property he had was slipping away, so that he was confronted by the fear of poverty as his weakness grew upon him. Nothing seemed to go well with him; his love affair brought him little else than exquisite pain. It is probable that on Keats's side the pride which was so dominant a chord in his nature forbade a man who could scarce support himself and felt the damp dews of decline chilling his vitality from seeking refuge in marriage with a girl who was in happier circumstance than he. He tried to turn his gifts into money by aiming at fortune with a play for the popular stage. He tried his hand at work for the periodicals. He even considered the possibility of returning to his profession of surgery for a livelihood. But all these projects failed him, and he turned with an almost savage and certainly sardonic humor to a scheme for flinging at the head of the public a popular poem. The Cap and Bells' is a melancholy example of what a great poet can produce who is consumed by a hopeless passion and wasted by disease.

Keats clung to his friends and wrote affectionate letters to his family. His brother George came over from America on a brief business visit, and was disturbed to find John so altered; and scarcely had George returned in January, 1820, than the poet had a sharp attack with loss of blood. He rallied as the spring came on, and early in the summer saw to the publication of his last volume, containing Hyperion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia,' and the 'Odes,' perhaps the most precious cargo carried in a vessel of this size in English literature in this century.

A month after the publication of the volume he was writing to Shelley, who had sent him an invitation to visit him in Pisa: "There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful manner. Therefore, I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery.' In September he put himself into the hands of his cheerful and steadfast friend Severn the artist, and they took passage for Naples. It was when they were detained by winds off the coast of England that Keats wrote his last sonnet, with its veiled homage to Fanny Brawne, and in Naples Harbor he wrote to Mrs. Brawne in a feverish mood: 'I dare not fix my mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver case the hair in a locket - and the pocket-book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more.' And then there is the letter to Brown, with its agony of separation, in which he gives way to the torment of his love, with despair written in every line. It is difficult to say as one thinks of Keats's ashes whether the fire of passion or the fire of physical consumption had most to do with causing them.

[ocr errors]

It was in November, 1820, that the travellers reached Rome, and for a little while Keats could take short strolls on the Pincian Hill; but the fatal disease was making rapid progress, and on the 22d of February, 1821, he died, and three days.

later he was buried in the Protestant cemetery, where upon his gravestone may be read the words which Keats had said of himself: :

'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'

In his first sonnet on Fame, Keats, in a saner mood, puts by the temptation which would withdraw him from the high serenity of conscious worth. In the second, wherein he seems almost to be seeing Fanny Brawne mocking behind the figure of Fame, he shows a more scornful attitude. There is little doubt that notwithstanding his close companionship with poets living and dead Keats never could long escape from the allurements of this wayward girl,' yet it may surely be said that his escape was most complete when he was fulfilling the highest law of his nature and creating those images of beauty which have given him Fame while he sleeps.

H. E. S.

POEMS

EARLY POEMS

In this group are included the contents of the volume Poems by John Keats, published in March, 1817, as well as certain

IMITATION OF SPENSER

Lord Houghton states, on the authority of the notes of Charles Armitage Brown, given to him in Florence in 1832, that this was the earliest known composition of Keats, and that it was written during his residence in Edmonton at the end of his eighteenth year, which would make the date in the autumn of 1813. The poem was included in the 1817 volume, which bore on its title-page this motto:

What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

Fate of the Butterfly. · -SPENSER.

Now Morning from her orient chamber

came,

And her first footsteps touch'd a verdant hill;

Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,

Silv'ring the untainted gushes of its rill; Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distil,

And after parting beds of simple flowers, By many streams a little lake did fill,

Which round its marge reflected woven

bowers,

And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.

There the kingfisher saw his plumage bright,

Vying with fish of brilliant dye below; Whose silken fins, and golden scales' light Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow:

There saw the swan his neck of arched

snow,

poems composed before the publication of Endymion. The order followed is as nearly chronological as the evidence permits.

And oar'd himself along with majesty; Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show Beneath the waves like Afric's ebony, And on his back a fay reclined voluptuously.

Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle That in that fairest lake had placed been, I could e'en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye: It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the cœrulean sky.

And all around it dipp'd luxuriously Slopings of verdure through the glossy tide,

Which, as it were in gentle amity, Rippled delighted up the flowery side; As if to glean the ruddy tears, it tried, Which fell profusely from the rose-tree stem!

Haply it was the workings of its pride, In strife to throw upon the shore a gem Outvying all the buds in Flora's diadem.

ON DEATH

Assigned by George Keats to the year 1814, and first printed in Forman's edition, 1883.

CAN death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

« AnteriorContinuar »