And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skyey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, 15 20 25 Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, 30 The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove. 40 That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, 45 Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, 50 May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, 55 I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, 60 The volcanos are dim, and the stars reel and swim, From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, 65 The triumphal arch, through which I march, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove, While the moist earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, 70 75 80 Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. TO NIGHT I SWIFTLY walk over the western wave, Out of the misty eastern cave, II Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out : Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, III When I arose and saw the dawn, I sighed for thee; When light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, In not a few histories of English poetry the name of KEATS has been linked with the names of Byron and Shelley. This classification is, however, misleading; for, aside from the shortness of his career, his youthful view of life, and the accidental fact that he was an exact contemporary, Keats has little in common with the other two. It is true that, like Shelley, Keats was a thorough artist, entirely devoted to his art, instinct with imagination and the love of beauty. But whereas Shelley is "something remote and afar," and has, therefore, few followers in the development of English poetry, Keats constitutes a very important factor in that development. Stopford Brooke says of him that he "went back to Spenser and especially to Shakespeare's minor poems to find his inspiration; to Greek and mediæval life to find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which has been called the literary poetry of England." And Saintsbury calls Keats "the forerunner of Tennyson, and through Tennyson, of all English poets since; the father of every English poet born within the century, who has not been a mere exception. He, as did no one of his own contemporaries, felt, expressed, and handed on the exact change wrought in English poetry by the great Romantic movement." And thus to link the poetry of the future to the best in the poetic achievements of the past was the mission of John Keats. With him poetry was supreme; it existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine, but for the expression of beauty. Real poetry is not of any school. Its sweetness and its grace are Romantic and Classical alike. Freedom of conception and restraint of style are the twin servitors of the beauty for which poetry exists. This is the æsthetic view of literary art handed down not only to Tennyson, but to Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, and more or less adopted by them from Keats. In these words is well expressed the poetical creed of John Keats, passionate lover of beauty in all her phases, prophet and poet of the senses and their delights. Though his limited conditions shut him out from any direct acquaintance with the beauties of Grecian literature and art, he was nevertheless a Greek to the core of his beauty-worshipping nature. Though he could have known but little of medieval literature, few have grasped better than he the delightful spirit of medieval romance. His genius for the felicitous use of words is no less unerring than his instinct for the beautiful in the world of tastes and smells, sights and sounds. Like Spenser and Shelley, he is one of the most truly poetical of poets; like the former, at any rate, he drew his inspiration from the enchanted regions of the past. It is true that the poetry of Keats is lacking in that deeper thought and spiritual uplift which we associate with the very highest order of poetry. But it is also true that this young poet died when barely twenty-five years of age, before he had fully outgrown his youthful faults, or developed the wisdom and high seriousness which are necessary to one who would rank with the first of poets. And, still, according to Matthew Arnold, "no one in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness." 1795-1817. — Keats was born in London, October, 1795. His father, a livery-stable keeper in humble circumstances, in some way managed to send his son, then seven or eight years old, to a very fair school just outside of London, where the lad secured an elementary knowledge of Latin, and a very fair acquaintance, through dictionaries and translations, with classical mythology. When fifteen years of age, having lost his father and mother, the boy was apprenticed to a surgeon, with whom he worked and studied for five years. He had little love for the profession, however, and, after spending two more years in the hospitals of London, he abandoned it altogether. In his schoolboy days Keats had made friends who first awakened his love for poetry by lending him books, the works of Chaucer, Chapman's Homer, and the Faerie Queene of Spenser; these same friends now introduced young Keats to Leigh Hunt and Shelley and other literary folk of London. About this time, 1817, when twenty-two years old, Keats brought out his first volume of verse - a collection crude and amateurish, as a whole, yet containing one of the finest of all English sonnets, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. |