208 Ideals in the Modern World
Keats, in his beautiful “Ode to Psyche,” creates a vision of an
inner life— his own we must imagine— that is ready for creation and
ready for love. “A rosy sanctuary will I dress / With the wreathed
trellis of a working brain... / With all the gardener Fancy e’er
could feign.” And then he promises infi nite receptivity, both to the
beloved and, implicitly, to the life of poetry and imagination they
will create together. “And there shall be for thee all soft delight /
That shadowy thought can win, / A bright torch, and a casement
ope at night / To let the warm Love in.”
A Romantic is in love with love, what more is there to say? A great
deal, it turns out, in that the Romantic poet, or at least the Romantic
worth reading and studying, is also more alert to the possi ble delu-
sions that arise from love than men or women who follow the Ro-
mantic path without thinking much about it. Words worth loves
Nature with an intensity that borders on the erotic— for he has been
disappointed in love of the conventional kind. Yet he never stops
asking if Nature will betray the heart that loves her. “We Poets in
our youth begin in gladness,” he writes “but thereof come in the end
despondency and madness.” Keats writes the “Ode to Psyche,” the
hymn of praise to Eros and its potential to inspire creation, but he is
also the author of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lamia,” two
studies of erotic disillusionment. The knight of “La Belle Dame” is
sure he has found erotic bliss when he encounters a lady that seems
kindred of his soul. But it is all an illusion—he was tricked, it seems,
by the desires of the Self. He’s left on a cold hill’s side, not in the Eden
he had hopes to create with his beloved. “And this is why I sojourn
here” he says, recounting his sorrows, “Alone and palely loitering, /
Though the sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.”
The true Romantic calls into question his faith in love and imag-
ination much more intensely than the saint questions compassion
or the hero martial valor. Much of the poetry we call Romantic is a
harsh interrogation of the faith of love by those who nonetheless