Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
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
in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as
though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the
well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives
'deep in the general heart of men,' he goes on to ask what need has the
poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.[1]
Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of
heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A
higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his
brother in the same metre, _Fancy_. He calls it a rondeau, again rather
at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in _Endymion_ a
roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any
set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its
beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with
the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line
refrain--
But every poet, born to stray,
Still feeds upon the far-away.
The opening lines run,--
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer's joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while
Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of
incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a
number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered
repetition of its opening couplet,--
Let the winged Fancy roam
Pleasure never is at home.
I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this
poem from the fine passage in Fuller's _Holy State_ quoted by Lamb in
his brief 'Specimens' of that author[2]:--
_Fancy._--It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul
... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings,
builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding
from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of
omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things
divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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