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.
This is a strong version of the classical and Renaissance claim – one which gives this
History what interest it may have – that human song is heard across human gener-
ations impatient to replace their predecessors.
The same contest between the beauty of art and the pain of life runs through the
Odes to Psyche, Indolence, Melancholy and the Grecian Urn. For the Romantics, the
glory of Greece surpassed the grandeur of Rome, and Keats’s Odes turn Greek
myths into new English myths. Thus the Urn is a ‘still unravish’d bride of
Quietness’, a ‘foster-child of Silence and slow Time.’ Autumn is addressed as a
‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom friend of the maturing
Sun / Conspiring with him’. These involuted apostrophes have an intelligence,
poise and richness equal to those of Renaissance verse. The models which the
Romantics emulated were Shakespeare and Milton. Their best lyrics survive the
comparison, much as the lyric music of Schubert (1797–1828) and Chopin
(1810–1849) survives comparison with that of Mozart (1756–1791). But no English
Romantic poet was able to combine intensity with major form on the scale of
Milton and Beethoven.
Keats envies the perfection of the scenes on his ‘still unravish’d’ urn. He turns to
her again as he ends:
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.’
Keats did not always think that what the Urn says is all we need to know, for he once
wrote in a letter that ‘an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth’. In another letter he
wished for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. He created a correlative to this
wish in ‘To Autumn’, the most perfect English poem of the 19th century. The mental
struggle of earlier Odes is over, and an apparently artless natural symbolism tells us
all we need to know – that as ‘gathering swallows twitter in the skies’ in September
1819, he accepted that winter was not far behind.
The spontaneous mode of Romantic poetry relies, in extended works, upon
unusual powers of syntax and form, and also on organization, which cannot be
improvised. Keats’s major Odes are superbly organized, but his earlier Hyperion, like
some ofthe ambitious myths of Byron and Shelley, gets lost. The new sublime, what
Keats called ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, needed a world, a myth, an
intelligible form if it was to communicate more than the feelings and experience of
one person. Turning away from Christianity to a ‘religion of humanity’ led the
younger Romantics to create provisional truths in historical legend and literary
myth. They found some of these difficult to finish, as have their readers. The ‘low’
rural narratives of Wordsworth succeed by understating their symbolic values. The
gr andiose Titanic myths of his successors are less coherent. In Keats’s later The Fall
ofHyperion: A Dream he sees a ladder leading upwards and is told by the Prophetess
Moneta: ‘None can usurp this height ... / But those to whom the miseries of the244 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837