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
Come then, sorrow!
Sweetest sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.
There is not one,
No, no, not one
But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;
Thou art her mother
And her brother,
Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.
An intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense
with scholarship, for the spirit of Greek and Greco-Asiatic myths and
cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the
result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the
nature-images Keats invokes in them are almost purely English.
Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in
moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew
upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak,
hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the
summer leafage of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has
loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help
importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of Pan but
into the regions ranged over by Bacchus with his train of yoked tiger
and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra.
Contemporary influences as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean are
naturally discernible in the poem. The strongest and most permeating is
that of Wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his
words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general
spirit. We have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding
sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the
working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds
expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion's prayer to Cynthia from
underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and
closely parallel with Wordsworth's description of the huntress Diana in
his account of the origin of Greek myths (see above, pp. 125-6). When
Keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of Sleep to
the fog on the top of Skiddaw from which the travellers may
With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale
Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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