Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
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Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly
enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of
humanity,' and by the
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or
less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats's _Sleep and
Poetry_. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human
life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in
clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of
the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the
other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's
three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of
theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative
passage beginning--
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life--
may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage:
only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and
enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's
eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness
or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of
life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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