Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.The element of mutual wish-fulfilment is clear, but the sleet tells us that it does not
last. Unlike his masters, Keats sees medieval society and religion critically, but he also
shows that a sweet modern solution does not bring happiness ever after:
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.This medieval romance is more serious than Scott’s and more balanced than
Coleridge’s. Keats once again perfected a genre pioneered by others in La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, the first lyrical ballad to have the qualities of both forms – and much
imitated by poets down to W. B. Yeats.
Between April and September 1819 Keats wrote six Odes. This lofty Greek lyric
form, revived in the 18th century and favoured by the Romantics, often addresses
abstract entities. In his Odes to the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn and Autumn, Keats
has much of the grandeur of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, the evocativeness of
Coleridge’s ‘Dejection Ode’ and the intensity of Shelley’s apostrophe to the West
Wind. He brings to this demanding form his sensuous apprehension and a new
poetic and intellectual economy. His Odes dramatize the struggle between longing
and thinking. Odes tempted Romantic poets to use capital letters – as in Schiller’s
‘Ode to Joy’. Especially tempting letters were ‘I’ and ‘O!’ Keats resists.
He had advised Shelley to ‘load every rift with ore’. His own gift was to imagine
particularly a desired sensation: ‘O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been / Cool’d
a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country green, /
Dance and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!’ Provençal troubadours sang of the
nightingale. Thus, for the myth-hungry Keats, the song of the nightingale he heard on
Hampstead Heath was love-poetry. (The Symbol, wrote Coleridge, ‘always partakes of
the Reality which it renders sensible’.) On first hearing the bird sing ‘of summer in
full-throated ease’, his ‘heart aches’: not only for the girl he loved but because he
desires oblivion. He wishes to drink, and ‘with thee fade away unto the forest dim’:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou amongst 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.Keats’s images of illness and death would be just as concrete if we did not know that
he was an apothecary-surgeon who had nursed his dying brother Tom. This
co ncreteness is the ‘ore’ he recommended to Shelley.
The struggle continues: ‘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 would’st thou sing, and I have ears in vain – / To thy high
requiem become a sod.’
THE ROMANTIC POETS 243