CHORUS OF FAIRIES

Inclosed in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 25, 1819, and printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

FIRE, AIR, EARTH, AND WATER SALAMANDER, ZEPHYR, DUSKETHA, AND BREAMA

SALAMANDER

HAPPY, happy glowing fire!

ZEPHYR

Fragrant air! delicious light!

DUSKETHA

Let me to my glooms retire!

BREAMA

I to green-weed rivers bright!

SALAMANDER

Happy, happy glowing fire!
Dazzling bowers of soft retire,
Ever let my nourish'd wing,
Like a bat's, still wandering,
Faintly fan your fiery spaces,
Spirit sole in deadly places.
In unhaunted roar and blaze,
Open eyes that never daze,
Let me see the myriad shapes
Of men, and beasts, and fish, and apes,
Portray'd in many a fiery den,
And wrought by spumy bitumen.
On the deep intenser roof,
Arched every way, aloof,
Let me breathe upon my skies,
And anger their live tapestries;
Free from cold, and every care,
Of chilly rain, and shivering air.

ZEPHYR

Spright of Fire! away! away!
Or your very roundelay
Will sear my plumage newly budded
From its quilled sheath, and studded
With the self-same dews that fell
On the May-grown Asphodel.
Spright of Fire away! away!

10

20

BREAMA

Spright of Fire — away! away!
Zephyr, blue-eyed Faery, turn,
And see my cool sedge-shaded urn,
Where it rests its mossy brim
'Mid water-mint and cresses dim;
And the flowers, in sweet troubles,
Lift their eyes above the bubbles,
Like our Queen, when she would please
To sleep, and Oberon will tease.
Love me, blue-eyed Faery! true,
Soothly I am sick for you.

ZEPHYR

Gentle Breama! by the first
Violet young nature nurst,
I will bathe myself with thee,
So you sometime follow me
To my home, far, far, in west,
Far beyond the search and quest
Of the golden-browed sun.
Come with me, o'er tops of trees,
To my fragrant palaces,
Where they ever floating are
Beneath the cherish of a star

Call'd Vesper, who with silver veil
Ever hides his brilliance pale,
Ever gently-drowsed doth keep
Twilight for the Fays to sleep.
Fear not that your watery hair
Will thirst in drouthy ringlets there;
Clouds of stored summer rains
Thou shalt taste, before the stains
Of the mountain soil they take,
And too unlucent for thee make.
I love thee, crystal Faery, true!
Sooth I am as sick for you!

SALAMANDER

Out, ye aguish Faeries, out!
Chilly lovers, what a rout
Keep ye with your frozen breath,
Colder than the mortal death.
Adder-eyed Dusketha, speak,
Shall we leave them, and go seek
In the earth's wide entrails old
Couches warm as theirs is cold?
O for a fiery gloom and thee,

30

40

60

70

ON FAME

'You cannot eat your cake and have it too.' - Proverb.

Sent with the next two to George and Georgiana Keats, April 30, 1819, and printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

How fever'd is that man, who cannot look Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,

Who vexes all the leaves of his life's book, And robs his fair name of its maidenhood:

It is as if the rose should pluck herself,
Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom;
As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf,

Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom.

But the rose leaves herself upon the brier, For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed,

And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire,

The undisturbed lake has crystal space:
Why then should man, teasing the

world for grace,

Spoil his salvation for a fierce miscreed?

ANOTHER ON FAME

FAME, like a wayward girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees,

But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content with

out her;

A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,

Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;

A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,

Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;

Ye lovesick Bards! repay her scorn for

scorn;

Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are !

Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

TO SLEEP

O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine: O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,

In midst of this thine hymn, my willing

eyes,

Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its dewy charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will
shine

Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;

Save me from curious conscience, that

still lords

Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;

Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

ten

ODE TO PSYCHE

'The following poem the last I have writ- is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry. This I have done leisurely — I think it reads the more richly for it, and will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour and perhaps never thought of in the old religion-I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected.' Keats to his Brother and Sister, April 30, 1819. He afterward included the poem in his volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, 1820.

And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at
night,

To let the warm Love in!

SONNET

In copying his 'Ode to Psyche,' Keats added the flourish Here endethe ye Ode to Psyche,' and went on Incipit altera soneta.' 'I have been endeavouring,' he writes, 'to discover a better Sonnet Stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language over well from the pouncing rhymes — the other kind appears too elegiac — and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect-I do not pretend to have succeeded it will explain itself.' The sonnet was printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

IF by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,

And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness; Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of poesy;

Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the

stress

Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd

By ear industrious, and attention meet; Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath

crown:

So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her

own.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

First published in the July, 1819, Annals of the Fine Arts and included in the 1820 volume. It was composed in May, 1819. In the Aldine edition of 1876 Lord Houghton prefixes this note: In the spring of 1819 a nightingale built her nest next Mr. Bevan's house. Keats

took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode.' Haydon in a letter to Miss Mitford says: The death of his brother [in December, 1818] wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely.' It may well be that Tom Keats was in the poet's mind when he wrote line 26.