by Harold Bloom
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
III
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
The desire for intoxication is knowingly ironic, since Keats is aware to the highest degree that his desire is to be inside the poem he composes, which is to say: within the ecstasy of the nightingale’s song.
IV
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Bacchus, the god of wine, whose chariot is drawn by leopards, is dismissed, and Keats cruises to fly on poetic wings so high as to have no view, in defiance of the mind’s perplexities. Suddenly he is with the nightingale, with a tactile sensation: “tender is the night,” a phrase that captivated F. Scott Fitzgerald. Keats can see nothing, but his other senses open to seasonal expectations and prepare him for an exaltation:
VI
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
In the invocation to book III of Paradise Lost, blind Milton compares himself to the nightingale that “sings darkling.” To be half in love with death, however easeful, is also to be half in love with life, yet the disquieting word “rich” edges toward acceptance of the end. The two final stanzas attain a high place:
VII
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
VIII
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
One hears anticipations of Yeats’s Byzantium poems in stanza VII, where the allusion to the Bible’s book of Ruth may be a screen for Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” The vision of the charmed magic casements and the forlorn faery lands suggest Edmund Spenser. Keats had attended Hazlitt’s lecture “On Chaucer and Spenser,” in which the critic observed that “Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams.” The marvelous repetition of “forlorn,” possibly in the sense of “abandonment,” indeed tolls like a bell returning Keats from the nightingale’s song to his isolate self. Fancy or imagination becomes another Belle Dame sans Merci, who is scarcely responsible for the poet’s self-deception. As the song fades away to deep burial in another valley, Keats asks the unanswerable question: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” Either way, the song has departed and the ambiguous question “Do I wake or sleep?” portends the coming on of finality, only two years away.
John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O 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.
Lines 1–12
This enigmatic opening of the ballad contrasts the starving knight to the full harvest. His reply to the unknown questioner weaves together subtle allusions to Coleridge and to Wordsworth:
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.
The beautiful faery and the knight speak different languages, and neither can understand the other. Her sweet moan, her tears and sighs, may be her helpless sorrow at his misinterpretations. We cannot know whether she declares love or a warning, and his use of the word “sure” is alarming. He indeed has fallen in love and devoured faery fo
od and lost forever any hope of mortal love or human sustenance:
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s 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 starved 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 wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
His dream invokes precursor questers who misread her as he has done. Keats, like his friend William Hazlitt the critic, helped inaugurate a kind of heroic and naturalistic humanism that vivifies the poetry of Wallace Stevens, who taught us again the Keatsian lesson that the greatest poverty is to not live in a physical world, to feel that one’s desire is too difficult to tell from despair. The knight-at-arms, dwindling away to death by starvation, could have been saved had he realized that wisdom.
John Keats, “To Autumn”
SHAKESPEARE, more even than Milton or Wordsworth, was the great influence upon John Keats. As I have aged, I return to Keats’s final ode, “To Autumn,” in a different spirit. I once heard in it apocalyptic overtones, but I was mistaken. Like Shakespeare, Keats affirms natural abundance, and with it the image of an unfallen yet tragic human approaching the necessity of dying.
Keats is so free of Christianity, or indeed of any organized religion, that it always seems superfluous to say that. Northrop Frye, whom I still revere, remarked to me that he found intimations of the communion images of bread and wine in “To Autumn.” I am unable to locate them.
It astonishes me that “To Autumn” summons up a universe in just thirty-three lines. All three eleven-line stanzas are so rich that no reader will ever come to an end of them. The first stanza is perhaps the most Shakespearean:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Keats was fascinated by King Lear, and “ripeness to the core” ultimately alludes to Edgar’s:
Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.
Act 5, Scene 3
Autumn becomes a goddess of Keats’s own creation. She is extraordinarily benign. Her conspiracy with the sun is a blessing. The illusion of the bees is another secular benediction.
The second stanza personifies the goddess as a harvest girl:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
“Careless” is the key word. Such abundance banishes care. The stanza is so exquisite as to be unmatched in its cognitive music. “Patient” is close to being the other key. The earth is enough. Natural process produces such value, such immanent splendor, that no transcendence is required.
After such sublime radiances, one could hardly expect that Keats would surpass himself in the final stanza:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
“Wailful,” “mourn,” “dies”: is that autumn’s crucial music? Keats composes in the autumn of 1819. He knows himself to be dying slowly of tuberculosis. Death came on February 23, 1821, in Rome, when the poet was still only twenty-five. The final line, “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies,” anticipates the close of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and of Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower.”
I do not hear either complaint or even sorrow in the ode “To Autumn.” John Keats certainly had not made friends with the necessity of dying. His loss was also ours. Think of the poems he would have written had he enjoyed a normal life span. In his final sonnet, “Bright Star,” revised before his voyage to death, his regret and ours is expressed with Shakespearean nobility:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen masque
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death—
The naturalistic humanism of John Keats attains apotheosis in a revaluation of what it means for the poet to replace the priest: “The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”
Wordsworth waned. Coleridge despaired. Byron and Shelley, though great poets, strove with the world. The prophet William Blake held on until the end. Of the High Romantics, perhaps only Keats is now admired without reservations. Who could find fault with the ode “To Autumn”? If there can be a humanistic sublime, and that is always problematic, then Keats incarnates it.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
Death’s Jest Book
FOR SEVENTY YEARS I have entertained a passion for the poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49), the most fantastic of Shelley’s disciples. Nineteen years old when Shelley died, Beddoes wrote some lines on a blank leaf of his copy of Prometheus Unbound:
Write it in gold—A spirit of the sun,
An intellect a-blaze with heavenly thoughts,
A soul with all the dews of pathos shining,
Odorous with love, and sweet to silent woe
With the dark glories of concentrate song,
Was sphered in mortal ea
rth. Angelic sounds
Alive with panting thoughts sunned the dim world.
The bright creations of an human heart
Wrought magic in the bosoms of mankind.
A flooding summer burst on poetry;
Of which the crowning sun, the night of beauty,
The dancing showers, the birds, whose anthems wild
Note after note unbind the enchanted leaves
Of breaking buds, eve, and the flow of dawn,
Were centred and condensed in his one name
As in a providence,—and that was SHELLEY.
This is not of any value as a poem, but the Oxford undergraduate later carried Shelley’s lyricism on to a spectral intensity still unmatched in its mode, far surpassing Edgar Allan Poe and his French imitators:
I.
A ghost, that loved a lady fair,
Ever in the starry air
Of midnight at her pillow stood;
And, with a sweetness skies above
The luring words of human love,
Her soul the phantom wooed.
Sweet and sweet is their poisoned note,
The little snakes’ of silver throat,
In mossy skulls that nest and lie,
Ever singing “die, oh! die.”
II.
Young soul, put off your flesh, and come
With me into the quiet tomb,
Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet;
The earth will swing us, as she goes,
Beneath our coverlid of snows,
And the warm leaden sheet.
Dear and dear is their poisoned note,
The little snakes’ of silver throat,
In mossy skulls that nest and lie,
