Here are two compositions by John Keats (1795-1821)
with a recent audio-recording of the text. These are: Ode on a Grecian Urn (May 1819) and the opening passage of Hyperion (1818, revised 1819), an epic
which remained incomplete. Keats lived a short life and his best creative
period, of a couple of years was, around 1819. Had he lived longer and
completed Hyperion with the original
inspiration he would have been, says Sri Aurobindo, one of the greatest poets
in the world. But alas! it was not. On the other hand, his Endymion published in 1818 was severely criticized which, it is
said, caused rapid deterioration of his health. Along with these two pieces, we
also include Crocker’s attack in the Quarterly
Review, 1818; Crocker became notorious to earn the compliment that, one of his
feats was to kill Keats.
Ode on a
Grecian Urn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gOShpPL3Ds
Opening lines of Hyperion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RwqAQZnRm4
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou
still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What
wild ecstasy?
Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou
kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast
not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah,
happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever
young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching
tongue.
Who
are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious
morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er
return.
O
Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other
woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know.
May 1819
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gOShpPL3Ds
Opening lines
of Hyperion
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
It seem'd no force could wake him from his place;
But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy's height; she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
When sages look'd to
But oh! how unlike marble was that face:
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press'd upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!
"Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King?
I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou?'
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractis'd hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
Saturn, sleep on:—O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep."
As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground,
Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RwqAQZnRm4
Crocker
attacks Keats in the Quarterly Review
Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they
affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's
complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we
have been wanting in our duty-far from it-indeed, we have made efforts almost
as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with
the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have
not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this
Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or
whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation - namely,
that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we
have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not
looked into.
It is not that Mr Keats, (if that be his real name, for
we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a
rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays
of fancy, and gleams of genius-he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple
of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may
be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth
language.
Of this school, Mr Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former
Number, aspires to be the hierophant. Our readers will recollect the pleasant
recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his preface to
Rimini, and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in
the verses themselves; and they will recollect above all the contempt of Pope,
Johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly
contrasted itself with Mr Leigh Hunt's self-complacent approbation of
—all the things itself had wrote,
Of special merit though of little note.
This author is a copyist of Mr Hunt, but he is more
unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome
and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat
himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own
standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr Keats had advanced no dogmas
which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense therefore is quite
gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr Leigh Hunt's
insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.
Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced
under peculiar circumstances.
Knowing within myself (he says) the manner in which
this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make
it public.-What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon
perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish
attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.-Preface, p. vii.
We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to
us to be quite so clear-we really do not know what he means-but the next
passage is more intelligible.
The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel
sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.—Preface,
p. vii.
Thus 'the two first books' are, even in his own
judgment, unfit to appear, and 'the two last' are, it seems, in the same
condition—and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books,
we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.
Mr Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this
'immature and feverish work' in terms which are themselves sufficiently
feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him
any of the tortures of the 'farce hell' of criticism, which terrify his
imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write
more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to
be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to be warned of the wrong;
and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which
imperiously require mental discipline. Of the story we have been able to make
out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves
of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether
escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty; and must therefore
content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and
versification:-and here again we are perplexed and puzzled.—At first it
appeared to us, that Mr Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers
with an immeasurable game at bouts-rimés; but, if we recollect rightly, it is
an indispensable condition at this play, that the rhymes when filled up shall
have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He
seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought
excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes.
There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book.
He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas but
of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident,
have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on
which they turn.
We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but
as the least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.
… Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
&c. &c. —pp. 3-4
Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, moon
produces the simple sheep and their shady boon, and that 'the dooms of the
mighty dead' would never have intruded themselves but for the 'fair musk-rose
blooms'.
Again,
For 'twas the morn: Apollo's upward fire
Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
Of brightness so unsullied, that therein
A melancholy spirit well might win
Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
Into the winds: rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.
—p. 8
Here Apollo's fire produces a pyre, a silvery pyre of
clouds, wherein a spirit might win oblivion and melt his essence fme, and
scented eglantine gives sweets to the sun, and cold springs had run into the
grass, and then the pulse of the mass pulsed tenfold to feel the glories old of
the new-born day, &c.
One example more.
Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal-a new birth.
—p. 17
Lodge, dodge-heaven, leaven-earth, birth; such, in six
words, is the sum and substance of six lines. We come now to the author's taste
in versification. He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able
to spin a line. Let us see. The following are specimens of his prosodial
notions of our English heroic metre.
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite. —p. 4
So plenteously all weed-hidden roots. —p. 6
Of some strange history, potent to send. —p. 18
Before the deep intoxication. —p. 27
Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion. —p. 33
The stubborn canvass for my voyage prepared… —p. 39
'Endymion! the cave is secreter
Than the isle of
No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.' —p. 48
By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied
as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines: we now
present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr Leigh
Hunt, he adorns our language.
We are told that 'turtles passion their voices,' (p.
15); that 'an arbour was nested,' (p. 23); and a lady's locks 'gordian'd up,'
(p. 32); and to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized Mr Keats, with
great fecundity, spawns new ones; such as 'men-slugs and human serpentry,' (p.
41); the 'honey-feel of bliss,' (p. 45); 'wives prepare needments,' (p. 13) -
and so forth.
Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting
off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads;
thus, 'the wine out-sparkled,' (p. 10); the 'multitude up-followed,' (p. 11);
and 'night up-took,' (p. 29). 'The wind up-blows,' (p. 32); and the 'hours are
down-sunken,' (p. 36.)
But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs he
compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from
the parent stock.
Thus, a lady 'whispers pantingly and close,' makes
'hushing signs,' and steers her skiff into a 'ripply cove,' (p. 23); a shower
falls 'refreshfully,' (p. 45); and a vulture has a 'spreaded tail,' (p. 44).
But enough of Mr Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.—If
any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much
more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more
fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his
success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and
endeavour to make all due amends to Mr Keats and to our readers.