JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) was born in London, where his father kept a liverystable. He went to school at Enfield, and, after the death of both his parents, became apprentice to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London, where, however, he also found time for his favourite study of English literature. Breaking off his apprenticeship in 1810, he proceeded to London to continue his medical studies at the hospitals, and, in 1816, took his degree of Licentiate of Medicine. Meantime Keats had written and published some poetry, and, in the society of Leigh Hunt and other men of letters, became more and more convinced that his true calling was literature. Therefore, about 1817, he gave up the medical profession, and henceforth devoted all his energy to poetry. For the next few years he lived mainly with his brothers at Hampstead, near London, till the family circle was broken up by the eldest brother's emigration to America. A walking tour to Scotland, undertaken in August 1818, proved too great a tax on his strength, but is was on this occasion that he was for the first time introduced to the grandeur of mountain scenery. After his return his hereditarily weak constitution was still more severely tried by the death of his youngest brother and an ill-starred passion for Miss Fanny Brawne. Yet the years 1818 and 1819, which he spent with different friends at Hampstead, Shanklin (Isle of Wight), and Winchester, were the rich harvest-time of his poetry, and gave rise to all those masterpieces on which his fame now rests. Early in 1820 symptoms of consumption showed themselves, and drove him to the warm climate of Italy for the winter. But, in spite of the devoted care of the young painter Severn, he died at Rome on Febr. 23, 1821, only 25 years old. He was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery, near the grave of Shelley. Most of Keats's poetry was written in the short compass of four years, and published in three volumes, of which the last, that of 1820, contains most of what nowadays constitutes his fame. His narrative verse is mainly based either on classical mythology or medieval romance; but the manner of treatment is in both cases derived from the same source of inspiration, the English writers of the Renaissance. This Elizabethan spirit, both of conception and delineation, is most conspicuous in his earlier works on Greek subjects: Endymion (1818), an over rich setting of the well-known myth of Diana's passion for the shepherdboy, and Lamia (1820), the weird story of a serpent-lady and her marriage to the young Corinthian philosopher Lycius, which Keats found in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). In the fragment of Hyperion (1820), however, his last and greatest poem on Greek mythology (viz. the struggle between the Titanic and the Olympian gods), his style is brought nearer to the austerity and majesty of Milton's Paradise Lost. The medieval element in his work is smaller in bulk; but all the poems of that class, Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, an adaptation of Boccaccio's story of the unhappy love of Lorenzo and Isabella, the lovely, richly-decorated picture of The Eve of St. Agnes, which unites another pair of lovers, Madeline and Porphyro, and the fascinating ballad of La Belle Dame sans Merci, all published in 1820-, rank among his finest pieces. His five great Odes (To a Nightingale; On a Grecian Urn; To Psyche; To Autumn; On Melancholy) show him to be a master of lyrical and reflective verse, and are his most consummate works of art. The leading principle of all his poetry was the cultivation of beauty for beauty's sake. Keats marks the close of English Romanticism; but he, more than any one of his contemporaries, influenced the succeeding generation of the Victorian poets. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER. [From Poems (1817)] Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 4 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 8 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 12 Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Vray Book I, 11. 1-33: On Beauty. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 6 Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 10 Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways 25 Nor do we merely feel these essences 30 Haunt us till they become a cheering light Hom benen & Feve Book I, 11. 232–306: Hymn to Pan. Bowne Brit Part II. Ọ thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang 5 Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds By thy love's milky brow! do thou now, By all the trembling mazes that she ran, O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles 30 By every wind that nods the mountain pine, Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit; XX Herrig-Förster, British Authors. 29 4 To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw; Bewildered shepherds to their path again; For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells, O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, see, 60 The many that are come to pay their vows Be still the unimaginable lodge a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; 70 An element filling the space between; An unknown but no more: we humbly screen LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI. Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, | Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering; The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing. So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done. 12 ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been |