THIS mortal body of a thousand days Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room, Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays, Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom! My pulse is warm with thine old Barleybree, My head is light with pledging a great soul, My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see, Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal; Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor, Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find The meadow thou hast tramped o'er and o'er, Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind, The verses which follow were first printed in Life, Letters and Literary Remains. They occur in a letter to Tom Keats from Oban, July 26, 1818, and were preceded by this description: I am puzzled how to give you an Idea of Staffa. It can only be represented by a first-rate drawing. One may compare the surface of the Island to a roof — this roof is supported by grand pillars of basalt standing together as thick as honeycombs. The finest thing is Fingal's cave it is entirely a hollowing out of Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole Mass of black Columns and bound them together like bunches of matches and then with immense axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns-Of course the roof and floor must be composed of the broken ends of the Columns - such is Fingal's cave, except that the Sea has done the work of excavations, and is continually dashing there - -so that we walk along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs. The roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise, and the length of some of the entire side-pillars is fifty feet. About the island you might seat an army of men each on a pillar. The length of the Cave is 120 feet, and from its extremity the view into the sea, through the large arch at the entrance the colour of the column is a sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedral. At the extremity of the Cave there is a small perforation into another Cave, at which the waters meeting and buffeting each other there is sometimes produced a report as of a cannon heard as far as Iona, which must be 12 miles. As we approached in the boat, there was such a fine swell of the sea that the pillars appeared rising immediately out of the crystal. But it is impossible to describe it.' NOT Aladdin magian Were upon the curl again. 'I am Lycidas,' said he, Famed in funeral minstrelsy! Hollow organs all the day; Hath pass'd beyond the rocky portal; Such a taint, and soon unweave TRANSLATION FROM A SONNET OF RONSARD Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains in a letter to Reynolds, of which the probable date is September 22, 1818; in a letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke September 21, 1818, Keats quotes the last line with the remark: You have passed your Romance, and I never gave in to it, or else I think this line a feast for one of your Lovers.' The text of the sonnet will be found in the Appendix. NATURE withheld Cassandra in the skies, For more adornment, a full thousand years; She took their cream of Beauty's fairest dyes, And shaped and tinted her above all Peers: Meanwhile Love kept her dearly with his wings, And underneath their shadow fill'd her TIME's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb, Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Long hours have to and fro let creep the Spirit of a winter's night; When the soundless earth is muffled, - send her! To banish Even from her sky. 20 30 thou shalt hear 40 Or the rooks, with busy caw, Sapphire queen of the mid-May; 60 8 Then the hurry and alarm Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose; Every thing is spoilt by use; Where's the cheek that doth not fade, Too much gazed at? Where's the maid 70 At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet, 80 With the spheres of sun and moon; Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again; And the souls ye left behind you Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new! SONG 10 20 30 40 "There is just room, I see, in this page to copy a little thing I wrote off to some Music as it was playing.' Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, January 2, 1819. I HAD a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving; Published in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, 1820. There is no date affixed to it, but if it takes its color at all from Keats's own experience, it might not be amiss to refer it to the early part of 1819, when he had come under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne. In a letter to Haydon, written between January 7 and 14, 1819, Keats says: 'I have been writing a little now and then lately: but nothing to speak of - being discontented and as it were moulting. Yet I do not think I shall ever come to the rope or the pistol. For after a day or two's melancholy, although I smoke more and more my own insufficiency - I see by little and little more of what is to be done, and how it is to be done, should I ever be able to do it.' "Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the object of the poem to produce, and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images, and let the ode at once begin, — ' I No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poison ous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; ily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. II But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hills in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, eyes. |