ON FAME

'You cannot eat your cake and have it too.'-Proverb.

Sent with the next two to George and Georgiana Keats, April 30, 1819, and printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

How fever'd is that man, who cannot look Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,

Who vexes all the leaves of his life's book, And robs his fair name of its maidenhood:

It is as if the rose should pluck herself,
Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom;
As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf,

Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom.

But the rose leaves herself upon the brier, For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed,

And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire,

The undisturbed lake has crystal space:
Why then should man, teasing the

world for grace,

Spoil his salvation for a fierce miscreed?

ANOTHER ON FAME

FAME, like a wayward girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish

knees,

เ The following poem the last I have writis the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry. This

boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, — will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content with

out her;

A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,

Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;

A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,

Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;

Ye lovesick Bards! repay her scorn for

scorn;

richly for it, and will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour and perhaps never thought of in the old religion- I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected.' Keats to his Brother and Sister, April 30, 1819. He afterward included the poem in his volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, 1820.

No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

IV

O brightest! though too late for antique Vows,

4C

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retired From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

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!

SONNET

In copying his 'Ode to Psyche,' Keats added the flourish Here endethe ye Ode to Psyche,' and went on Incipit altera soneta.' 'I have been endeavouring,' he writes, 'to discover a better Sonnet Stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language over well from the pouncing rhymes - the other kind appears too elegiac and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect I do not pretend to have succeeded- it will explain itself.' The sonnet was printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains.

IF by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,

And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness; Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd,

Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of poesy;

Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the

stress

Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd

By ear industrious, and attention meet; Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath

crown:

So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her

own.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

First published in the July, 1819, Annals of the Fine Arts and included in the 1820 volume. It was composed in May, 1819. In the Aldine edition of 1876 Lord Houghton prefixes this note: In the spring of 1819 a nightingale built her nest next Mr. Bevan's house. Keats

took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode.' Haydon in a letter to Miss Mitford says: The death of his brother [in December, 1818] wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely.' It may well be that Tom Keats was in the poet's mind when he wrote line 26.

In the early summer of 1819 Keats felt the pressure of want of money and determined to go into the country, where he could live cheaply, and devote himself to writing. He went accordingly to Shanklin, Isle of Wight, and wrote thence to Reynolds, July 12, 'I have finished the Act [the first of Otho the Great], and in the interval of beginning the 2nd have proceeded pretty well with Lamia, finishing the first part which consists of about 400 lines. I have great hope of success [in this enterprise of maintenance], because I make use of my judgment more deliberately than I have yet done.' He continued to work at Lamia in connection with the tragedy, completing it in August at Winchester. It formed the leading poem in the volume Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, published in 1820. Keats's own judgment of it is in his words: 'I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way—give them either pleasant or unpleasant association.' He found the germ of the story in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, where it is credited to Philostratus. The passage will be found in the Notes. Lord Houghton says, on the authority of Brown, that Keats wrote the poem after much study of Dryden's versification.

PART I

UPON a time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,