He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had
him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers.
him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers.
Keats
_As Proserpine .
.
.
air.
_ Proserpine, gathering flowers
in the Vale of Enna, in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, the king of
the underworld, to be his queen. Cf. _Winter's Tale_, IV. iii, and
_Paradise Lost_, iv. 268, known to be a favourite passage with Keats.
l. 75. _his throbbing . . . moan. _ Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 81.
l. 77. _as morning breaks_, the freshness and splendour of the youthful
god.
PAGE 8. l. 78. _Phoebean dart_, a ray of the sun, Phoebus being the god
of the sun.
l. 80. _Too gentle Hermes. _ Cf. l. 28 and note.
l. 81. _not delay'd_: classical construction. See Introduction to
Hyperion.
_Star of Lethe. _ Hermes is so called because he had to lead the souls of
the dead to Hades, where was Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Lamb
comments: '. . . Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one of
those prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem
in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a
picture, all the dim regions and their habitants, and the sudden coming
of a celestial among them. '
l. 91. The line dances along like a leaf before the wind.
l. 92. Miltonic construction and phraseology.
PAGE 9. l. 98. _weary tendrils_, tired with holding up the boughs, heavy
with fruit.
l. 103. _Silenus_, the nurse and teacher of Bacchus--a demigod of the
woods.
PAGE 10. l. 115. _Circean. _ Circe was the great enchantress who turned
the followers of Ulysses into swine. Cf. _Comus_, ll. 46-54, and
_Odyssey_, x.
PAGE 11. l. 132. _swoon'd serpent. _ Evidently, in the exercise of her
magic, power had gone out of her.
l. 133. _lythe_, quick-acting.
_Caducean charm. _ Caduceus was the name of Hermes' staff of wondrous
powers, the touch of which, evidently, was powerful to give the serpent
human form.
l. 136. _like a moon in wane. _ Cf. the picture of Cynthia, _Endymion_,
iii. 72 sq.
l. 138. _like a flower . . . hour. _ Perhaps a reminiscence of Milton's
'at shut of evening flowers. ' _Paradise Lost_, ix. 278.
PAGE 12. l. 148. _besprent_, sprinkled.
l. 158. _brede_, embroidery. Cf. _Ode on a Grecian Urn_, v. 1.
PAGE 13. l. 178. _rack. _ Cf. _The Tempest_, IV. i. 156, 'leave not a
rack behind. ' _Hyperion_, i. 302, note.
l. 180. This gives us a feeling of weakness and weariness as well as
measuring the distance.
PAGE 14. l. 184. Cf. Wordsworth:
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
ll. 191-200. Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_, where Keats tells us that
melancholy lives with Beauty, joy, pleasure, and delight. Lamia can
separate the elements and give beauty and pleasure unalloyed.
l. 195. _Intrigue with the specious chaos_, enter on an understanding
with the fair-looking confusion of joy and pain.
l. 198. _unshent_, unreproached.
PAGE 15. l. 207. _Nereids_, sea-nymphs.
l. 208. _Thetis_, one of the sea deities.
l. 210. _glutinous_, referring to the sticky substance which oozes from
the pine-trunk. Cf. _Comus_, l. 917, 'smeared with gums of glutinous
heat. '
l. 211. Cf. l. 63, note.
l. 212. _Mulciber_, Vulcan, the smith of the Gods. His fall from Heaven
is described by Milton, _Paradise Lost_, i. 739-42.
_piazzian_, forming covered walks supported by pillars, a word coined by
Keats.
PAGE 16. l. 236. _In the calm'd . . . shades. _ In consideration of
Plato's mystic and imaginative philosophy.
PAGE 17. l. 248. Refers to the story of Orpheus' attempt to rescue his
wife Eurydice from Hades. With his exquisite music he charmed Cerberus,
the fierce dog who guarded hell-gates, into submission, and won Pluto's
consent that he should lead Eurydice back to the upper world on one
condition--that he would not look back to see that she was following.
When he was almost at the gates, love and curiosity overpowered him, and
he looked back--to see Eurydice fall back into Hades whence he now might
never win her.
PAGE 18. l. 262. _thy far wishes_, your wishes when you are far off.
l. 265. _Pleiad. _ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation.
Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night. '
ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres. _ Refers to the music which the
heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf.
_Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60.
PAGE 20. l. 294. _new lips. _ Cf. l. 191.
l. 297. _Into another_, i. e. into the trance of passion from which he
only wakes to die.
PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast. _ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved
of Venus.
He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had
him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf.
_Endymion_, ii. 387.
PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the
fallen angels.
ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the
influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of
The two divinest things the world has got--
A lovely woman and a rural spot.
It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own
character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing.
l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles. _ There is a legend that, after the flood,
Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus
re-peopling the world.
PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us
in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something
remote from the chief actors.
l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came
later to mean dissolute.
PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade. _ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix,
'Buttress'd from moonlight. '
ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of
Apollonius.
PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams. _ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion
even whilst he yields himself up to it.
l. 386. _Aeolian. _ Aeolus was the god of the winds.
PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged. _ Imagining the poem winging its way
along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat.
PART II.
PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a passage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps
the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led
him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about
love.
ll. 7-9. i. e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have
either contradicted or corroborated this saying.
PAGE 28. l. 27. _Deafening_, in the unusual sense of making inaudible.
ll. 27-8. _came a thrill Of trumpets. _ From the first moment that the
outside world makes its claim felt there is no happiness for the man
who, like Lycius, is living a life of selfish pleasure.
PAGE 29. l. 39. _passing bell. _ Either the bell rung for a condemned man
the night before his execution, or the bell rung when a man was dying
that men might pray for the departing soul.
PAGE 31. ll. 72-4. _Besides . . . new. _ An indication of the selfish
nature of Lycius's love.
l. 80. _serpent. _ See how skilfully this allusion is introduced and our
attention called to it by his very denial that it applies to Lamia.
PAGE 32. l. 97. _I neglect the holy rite. _ It is her duty to burn
incense and tend the sepulchres of her dead kindred.
PAGE 33. l. 107. _blushing. _ We see in the glow of the sunset a
reflection of the blush of the bride.
PAGE 34. ll. 122-3. _sole perhaps . . . roof. _ Notice that Keats only
says 'perhaps', but it gives a trembling unreality at once to the magic
palace. Cf. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_:
With music loud and long
I would build that dome in air.
PAGE 36. l. 155. _demesne_, dwelling. More commonly a domain.
_Hyperion_, i. 298. _Sonnet_--'On first looking into Chapman's Homer. '
PAGE 38. l. 187. _Ceres' horn. _ Ceres was the goddess of harvest, the
mother of Proserpine (_Lamia_, i. 63, note). Her horn is filled with the
fruits of the earth, and is symbolic of plenty.
PAGE 39. l. 200. _vowel'd undersong_, in contrast to the harsh, guttural
and consonantal sound of Teutonic languages.
PAGE 40. l. 213. _meridian_, mid-day. Bacchus was supreme, as is the sun
at mid-day.
ll. 215-29. Cf. _The Winter's Tale_, IV. iv. 73, &c. , where Perdita
gives to each guest suitable flowers. Cf. also Ophelia's flowers,
_Hamlet_, IV. v. 175, etc.
l. 217. _osier'd gold. _ The gold was woven into baskets, as though it
were osiers.
l. 224. _willow_, the weeping willow, so-called because its branches
with their long leaves droop to the ground, like dropping tears. It has
always been sacred to deserted or unhappy lovers. Cf. _Othello_, IV.
iii. 24 seq.
_adder's tongue. _ For was she not a serpent?
l. 226. _thyrsus. _ A rod wreathed with ivy and crowned with a fir-cone,
used by Bacchus and his followers.
l. 228. _spear-grass . . . thistle. _ Because of what he is about to do.
PAGE 41. ll. 229-38. Not to be taken as a serious expression of Keats's
view of life. Rather he is looking at it, at this moment, through the
eyes of the chief actors in his drama, and feeling with them.
PAGE 43. l. 263. Notice the horror of the deadly hush and the sudden
fading of the flowers.
l. 266. _step by step_, prepares us for the thought of the silence as a
horrid presence.
ll. 274-5. _to illume the deep-recessed vision. _ We at once see her dull
and sunken eyes.
PAGE 45. l. 301. _perceant_, piercing--a Spenserian word.
INTRODUCTION TO ISABELLA AND THE EVE OF ST. AGNES
In _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_, as in _Endymion_, we find Keats inspired by
classic story, though the inspiration in each case came to him through
Elizabethan writers. Here, on the other hand, mediaeval legend is his
inspiration; the 'faery broods' have driven 'nymph and satyr from the
prosperous woods'. Akin to the Greeks as he was in spirit, in his
instinctive personification of the lovely manifestations of nature, his
style and method were really more naturally suited to the portrayal of
mediaeval scenes, where he found the richness and warmth of colour in
which his soul delighted.
The story of _Isabella_ he took from Boccaccio, an Italian writer of the
fourteenth century, whose _Decameron_, a collection of one hundred
stories, has been a store-house of plots for English writers. By
Boccaccio the tale is very shortly and simply told, being evidently
interesting to him mainly for its plot. Keats was attracted to it not so
much by the action as by the passion involved, so that his enlargement
of it means little elaboration of incident, but very much more dwelling
on the psychological aspect. That is to say, he does not care so much
what happens, as what the personages of the poem think and feel.
Thus we see that the main incident of the story, the murder of Lorenzo,
is passed over in a line--'Thus was Lorenzo slain and buried in,' the
next line, 'There, in that forest, did his great love cease,' bringing
us back at once from the physical reality of the murder to the thought
of his love, which is to Keats the central fact of the story.
In the delineation of Isabella, her first tender passion of love, her
agony of apprehension giving way to dull despair, her sudden wakening to
a brief period of frenzied action, described in stanzas of incomparable
dramatic force, and the 'peace' which followed when she
Forgot the stars, the moon, the sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not--
culminating in the piteous death 'too lone and incomplete'--in the
delineation of all this Keats shows supreme power and insight.
In the conception, too, of the tragic loneliness of Lorenzo's ghost we
feel that nothing could be changed, added, or taken away.
Not quite equally happy are the descriptions of the cruel brothers, and
of Lorenzo as the young lover. There is a tendency to exaggerate both
their inhumanity and his gentleness, for purposes of contrast, which
weakens where it would give strength.
_The Eve of St. Agnes_, founded on a popular mediaeval legend, not being
a tragedy like _Isabella_, cannot be expected to rival it in depth and
intensity; but in every other poetic quality it equals, where it does
not surpass, the former poem.
in the Vale of Enna, in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, the king of
the underworld, to be his queen. Cf. _Winter's Tale_, IV. iii, and
_Paradise Lost_, iv. 268, known to be a favourite passage with Keats.
l. 75. _his throbbing . . . moan. _ Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 81.
l. 77. _as morning breaks_, the freshness and splendour of the youthful
god.
PAGE 8. l. 78. _Phoebean dart_, a ray of the sun, Phoebus being the god
of the sun.
l. 80. _Too gentle Hermes. _ Cf. l. 28 and note.
l. 81. _not delay'd_: classical construction. See Introduction to
Hyperion.
_Star of Lethe. _ Hermes is so called because he had to lead the souls of
the dead to Hades, where was Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Lamb
comments: '. . . Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one of
those prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem
in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a
picture, all the dim regions and their habitants, and the sudden coming
of a celestial among them. '
l. 91. The line dances along like a leaf before the wind.
l. 92. Miltonic construction and phraseology.
PAGE 9. l. 98. _weary tendrils_, tired with holding up the boughs, heavy
with fruit.
l. 103. _Silenus_, the nurse and teacher of Bacchus--a demigod of the
woods.
PAGE 10. l. 115. _Circean. _ Circe was the great enchantress who turned
the followers of Ulysses into swine. Cf. _Comus_, ll. 46-54, and
_Odyssey_, x.
PAGE 11. l. 132. _swoon'd serpent. _ Evidently, in the exercise of her
magic, power had gone out of her.
l. 133. _lythe_, quick-acting.
_Caducean charm. _ Caduceus was the name of Hermes' staff of wondrous
powers, the touch of which, evidently, was powerful to give the serpent
human form.
l. 136. _like a moon in wane. _ Cf. the picture of Cynthia, _Endymion_,
iii. 72 sq.
l. 138. _like a flower . . . hour. _ Perhaps a reminiscence of Milton's
'at shut of evening flowers. ' _Paradise Lost_, ix. 278.
PAGE 12. l. 148. _besprent_, sprinkled.
l. 158. _brede_, embroidery. Cf. _Ode on a Grecian Urn_, v. 1.
PAGE 13. l. 178. _rack. _ Cf. _The Tempest_, IV. i. 156, 'leave not a
rack behind. ' _Hyperion_, i. 302, note.
l. 180. This gives us a feeling of weakness and weariness as well as
measuring the distance.
PAGE 14. l. 184. Cf. Wordsworth:
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
ll. 191-200. Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_, where Keats tells us that
melancholy lives with Beauty, joy, pleasure, and delight. Lamia can
separate the elements and give beauty and pleasure unalloyed.
l. 195. _Intrigue with the specious chaos_, enter on an understanding
with the fair-looking confusion of joy and pain.
l. 198. _unshent_, unreproached.
PAGE 15. l. 207. _Nereids_, sea-nymphs.
l. 208. _Thetis_, one of the sea deities.
l. 210. _glutinous_, referring to the sticky substance which oozes from
the pine-trunk. Cf. _Comus_, l. 917, 'smeared with gums of glutinous
heat. '
l. 211. Cf. l. 63, note.
l. 212. _Mulciber_, Vulcan, the smith of the Gods. His fall from Heaven
is described by Milton, _Paradise Lost_, i. 739-42.
_piazzian_, forming covered walks supported by pillars, a word coined by
Keats.
PAGE 16. l. 236. _In the calm'd . . . shades. _ In consideration of
Plato's mystic and imaginative philosophy.
PAGE 17. l. 248. Refers to the story of Orpheus' attempt to rescue his
wife Eurydice from Hades. With his exquisite music he charmed Cerberus,
the fierce dog who guarded hell-gates, into submission, and won Pluto's
consent that he should lead Eurydice back to the upper world on one
condition--that he would not look back to see that she was following.
When he was almost at the gates, love and curiosity overpowered him, and
he looked back--to see Eurydice fall back into Hades whence he now might
never win her.
PAGE 18. l. 262. _thy far wishes_, your wishes when you are far off.
l. 265. _Pleiad. _ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation.
Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night. '
ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres. _ Refers to the music which the
heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf.
_Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60.
PAGE 20. l. 294. _new lips. _ Cf. l. 191.
l. 297. _Into another_, i. e. into the trance of passion from which he
only wakes to die.
PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast. _ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved
of Venus.
He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had
him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf.
_Endymion_, ii. 387.
PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the
fallen angels.
ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the
influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of
The two divinest things the world has got--
A lovely woman and a rural spot.
It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own
character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing.
l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles. _ There is a legend that, after the flood,
Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus
re-peopling the world.
PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us
in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something
remote from the chief actors.
l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came
later to mean dissolute.
PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade. _ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix,
'Buttress'd from moonlight. '
ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of
Apollonius.
PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams. _ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion
even whilst he yields himself up to it.
l. 386. _Aeolian. _ Aeolus was the god of the winds.
PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged. _ Imagining the poem winging its way
along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat.
PART II.
PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a passage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps
the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led
him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about
love.
ll. 7-9. i. e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have
either contradicted or corroborated this saying.
PAGE 28. l. 27. _Deafening_, in the unusual sense of making inaudible.
ll. 27-8. _came a thrill Of trumpets. _ From the first moment that the
outside world makes its claim felt there is no happiness for the man
who, like Lycius, is living a life of selfish pleasure.
PAGE 29. l. 39. _passing bell. _ Either the bell rung for a condemned man
the night before his execution, or the bell rung when a man was dying
that men might pray for the departing soul.
PAGE 31. ll. 72-4. _Besides . . . new. _ An indication of the selfish
nature of Lycius's love.
l. 80. _serpent. _ See how skilfully this allusion is introduced and our
attention called to it by his very denial that it applies to Lamia.
PAGE 32. l. 97. _I neglect the holy rite. _ It is her duty to burn
incense and tend the sepulchres of her dead kindred.
PAGE 33. l. 107. _blushing. _ We see in the glow of the sunset a
reflection of the blush of the bride.
PAGE 34. ll. 122-3. _sole perhaps . . . roof. _ Notice that Keats only
says 'perhaps', but it gives a trembling unreality at once to the magic
palace. Cf. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_:
With music loud and long
I would build that dome in air.
PAGE 36. l. 155. _demesne_, dwelling. More commonly a domain.
_Hyperion_, i. 298. _Sonnet_--'On first looking into Chapman's Homer. '
PAGE 38. l. 187. _Ceres' horn. _ Ceres was the goddess of harvest, the
mother of Proserpine (_Lamia_, i. 63, note). Her horn is filled with the
fruits of the earth, and is symbolic of plenty.
PAGE 39. l. 200. _vowel'd undersong_, in contrast to the harsh, guttural
and consonantal sound of Teutonic languages.
PAGE 40. l. 213. _meridian_, mid-day. Bacchus was supreme, as is the sun
at mid-day.
ll. 215-29. Cf. _The Winter's Tale_, IV. iv. 73, &c. , where Perdita
gives to each guest suitable flowers. Cf. also Ophelia's flowers,
_Hamlet_, IV. v. 175, etc.
l. 217. _osier'd gold. _ The gold was woven into baskets, as though it
were osiers.
l. 224. _willow_, the weeping willow, so-called because its branches
with their long leaves droop to the ground, like dropping tears. It has
always been sacred to deserted or unhappy lovers. Cf. _Othello_, IV.
iii. 24 seq.
_adder's tongue. _ For was she not a serpent?
l. 226. _thyrsus. _ A rod wreathed with ivy and crowned with a fir-cone,
used by Bacchus and his followers.
l. 228. _spear-grass . . . thistle. _ Because of what he is about to do.
PAGE 41. ll. 229-38. Not to be taken as a serious expression of Keats's
view of life. Rather he is looking at it, at this moment, through the
eyes of the chief actors in his drama, and feeling with them.
PAGE 43. l. 263. Notice the horror of the deadly hush and the sudden
fading of the flowers.
l. 266. _step by step_, prepares us for the thought of the silence as a
horrid presence.
ll. 274-5. _to illume the deep-recessed vision. _ We at once see her dull
and sunken eyes.
PAGE 45. l. 301. _perceant_, piercing--a Spenserian word.
INTRODUCTION TO ISABELLA AND THE EVE OF ST. AGNES
In _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_, as in _Endymion_, we find Keats inspired by
classic story, though the inspiration in each case came to him through
Elizabethan writers. Here, on the other hand, mediaeval legend is his
inspiration; the 'faery broods' have driven 'nymph and satyr from the
prosperous woods'. Akin to the Greeks as he was in spirit, in his
instinctive personification of the lovely manifestations of nature, his
style and method were really more naturally suited to the portrayal of
mediaeval scenes, where he found the richness and warmth of colour in
which his soul delighted.
The story of _Isabella_ he took from Boccaccio, an Italian writer of the
fourteenth century, whose _Decameron_, a collection of one hundred
stories, has been a store-house of plots for English writers. By
Boccaccio the tale is very shortly and simply told, being evidently
interesting to him mainly for its plot. Keats was attracted to it not so
much by the action as by the passion involved, so that his enlargement
of it means little elaboration of incident, but very much more dwelling
on the psychological aspect. That is to say, he does not care so much
what happens, as what the personages of the poem think and feel.
Thus we see that the main incident of the story, the murder of Lorenzo,
is passed over in a line--'Thus was Lorenzo slain and buried in,' the
next line, 'There, in that forest, did his great love cease,' bringing
us back at once from the physical reality of the murder to the thought
of his love, which is to Keats the central fact of the story.
In the delineation of Isabella, her first tender passion of love, her
agony of apprehension giving way to dull despair, her sudden wakening to
a brief period of frenzied action, described in stanzas of incomparable
dramatic force, and the 'peace' which followed when she
Forgot the stars, the moon, the sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not--
culminating in the piteous death 'too lone and incomplete'--in the
delineation of all this Keats shows supreme power and insight.
In the conception, too, of the tragic loneliness of Lorenzo's ghost we
feel that nothing could be changed, added, or taken away.
Not quite equally happy are the descriptions of the cruel brothers, and
of Lorenzo as the young lover. There is a tendency to exaggerate both
their inhumanity and his gentleness, for purposes of contrast, which
weakens where it would give strength.
_The Eve of St. Agnes_, founded on a popular mediaeval legend, not being
a tragedy like _Isabella_, cannot be expected to rival it in depth and
intensity; but in every other poetic quality it equals, where it does
not surpass, the former poem.
