If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have
either contradicted or corroborated this saying.
either contradicted or corroborated this saying.
Keats
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.
To be specially noted is the skilful use which Keats here makes of
contrast--between the cruel cold without and the warm love within; the
palsied age of the Bedesman and Angela, and the eager youth of Porphyro
and Madeline; the noise and revel and the hush of Madeline's bedroom,
and, as Mr. Colvin has pointed out, in the moonlight which, chill and
sepulchral when it strikes elsewhere, to Madeline is as a halo of glory,
an angelic light.
A mysterious charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows
inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and
ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks
of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' '_star'd_'
'_eager-eyed_' from the roof of the chapel, and the scutcheon in
Madeline's window '_blush'd_ with blood of queens and kings'.
Keats's characteristic method of description--the way in which, by his
masterly choice of significant detail, he gives us the whole feeling of
the situation, is here seen in its perfection. In stanza 1 each line is
a picture and each picture contributes to the whole effect of painful
chill. The silence of the sheep, the old man's breath visible in the
frosty air,--these are things which many people would not notice, but it
is such little things that make the whole scene real to us.
There is another method of description, quite as beautiful in its way,
which Coleridge adopted with magic effect in _Christabel_. This is to
use the power of suggestion, to say very little, but that little of a
kind to awaken the reader's imagination and make him complete the
picture. For example, we are told of Christabel--
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.
Compare this with stanza xxvi of _The Eve of St. Agnes_.
That Keats was a master of both ways of obtaining a romantic effect is
shown by his _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, considered by some people his
masterpiece, where the rich detail of _The Eve of St. Agnes_ is replaced
by reserve and suggestion.
As the poem was not included in the volume published in 1820, it is
given here.
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing.
Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
So haggard, and so woe begone?
The Squirrel's granary is full
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a Lady in the Meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
She look'd at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend and sing
A Faery's song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream'd, Ah! Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale Kings, and Princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried, La belle dame sans merci,
Thee hath in thrall.
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering;
Though the sedge is withered from the Lake
And no birds sing. . . .
NOTES ON ISABELLA.
_Metre. _ The _ottava rima_ of the Italians, the natural outcome of
Keats's turning to Italy for his story. This stanza had been used by
Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and recently by Hookham Frere in _The
Monks and the Giants_ and by Byron in _Don Juan_. Compare Keats's use of
the form with that of either of his contemporaries, and notice how he
avoids the epigrammatic close, telling in satire and mock-heroic, but
inappropriate to a serious and romantic poem.
PAGE 49. l. 2. _palmer_, pilgrim. As the pilgrim seeks for a shrine
where, through the patron saint, he may worship God, so Lorenzo needs a
woman to worship, through whom he may worship Love.
PAGE 50. l. 21. _constant as her vespers_, as often as she said her
evening-prayers.
PAGE 51. l. 34. _within . . . domain_, where it should, naturally, have
been rosy.
PAGE 52. l. 46. _Fever'd .
_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.
To be specially noted is the skilful use which Keats here makes of
contrast--between the cruel cold without and the warm love within; the
palsied age of the Bedesman and Angela, and the eager youth of Porphyro
and Madeline; the noise and revel and the hush of Madeline's bedroom,
and, as Mr. Colvin has pointed out, in the moonlight which, chill and
sepulchral when it strikes elsewhere, to Madeline is as a halo of glory,
an angelic light.
A mysterious charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows
inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and
ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks
of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' '_star'd_'
'_eager-eyed_' from the roof of the chapel, and the scutcheon in
Madeline's window '_blush'd_ with blood of queens and kings'.
Keats's characteristic method of description--the way in which, by his
masterly choice of significant detail, he gives us the whole feeling of
the situation, is here seen in its perfection. In stanza 1 each line is
a picture and each picture contributes to the whole effect of painful
chill. The silence of the sheep, the old man's breath visible in the
frosty air,--these are things which many people would not notice, but it
is such little things that make the whole scene real to us.
There is another method of description, quite as beautiful in its way,
which Coleridge adopted with magic effect in _Christabel_. This is to
use the power of suggestion, to say very little, but that little of a
kind to awaken the reader's imagination and make him complete the
picture. For example, we are told of Christabel--
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.
Compare this with stanza xxvi of _The Eve of St. Agnes_.
That Keats was a master of both ways of obtaining a romantic effect is
shown by his _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, considered by some people his
masterpiece, where the rich detail of _The Eve of St. Agnes_ is replaced
by reserve and suggestion.
As the poem was not included in the volume published in 1820, it is
given here.
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing.
Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
So haggard, and so woe begone?
The Squirrel's granary is full
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a Lady in the Meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
She look'd at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend and sing
A Faery's song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream'd, Ah! Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale Kings, and Princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried, La belle dame sans merci,
Thee hath in thrall.
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering;
Though the sedge is withered from the Lake
And no birds sing. . . .
NOTES ON ISABELLA.
_Metre. _ The _ottava rima_ of the Italians, the natural outcome of
Keats's turning to Italy for his story. This stanza had been used by
Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and recently by Hookham Frere in _The
Monks and the Giants_ and by Byron in _Don Juan_. Compare Keats's use of
the form with that of either of his contemporaries, and notice how he
avoids the epigrammatic close, telling in satire and mock-heroic, but
inappropriate to a serious and romantic poem.
PAGE 49. l. 2. _palmer_, pilgrim. As the pilgrim seeks for a shrine
where, through the patron saint, he may worship God, so Lorenzo needs a
woman to worship, through whom he may worship Love.
PAGE 50. l. 21. _constant as her vespers_, as often as she said her
evening-prayers.
PAGE 51. l. 34. _within . . . domain_, where it should, naturally, have
been rosy.
PAGE 52. l. 46. _Fever'd .
