Today is the autumn day I wait for all year, the one that matches the spirit of John Keats' "To Autumn," to my mind the most perfect poem in the language and an essential expression of Romanticism. With crisp wind, blue skies and the leaves nearing their peak of autumn color, today feels like the day Keats described so many years ago.
Lately, I've been slowly reading Nicholas Roe's new life of Keats, a frequent subject of biographers the past 50 years or so. Roe has uncovered many new details about Keats and exhaustively traces connections among Keats and his family and friends. He fills in a lot of gaps left open in previous biographies, and makes more than a few speculative leaps. The autumn connection is appropriate this week, Keats' birthday was Oct. 31, at least on his birth certificate. His family said he was born on Oct. 29, 1795, 217 years ago today.
I suppose covers are not protected by copyright: Roe's book uses the same cover illustration of Andrew Motion's earlier biography of Keats, Joseph Severn's painting of Keats on the heath listening to the nightingale (shown below from the cover of Motion's book).
Severn, who cared for Keats in his final months, was neglected by Keats in his early days as a poet, Roe says. Pretty much snubbing young Severn, Keats rather sucks up to the then lauded artist Benjamin Haydon. Along with details about Keats' friendship with Haydon, Roe comes up with copious information about Keats' first literary acquaintances, including the most important, Leigh Hunt, the poet/journalist/editor/critic and political agitator who did prison time because of his radical views. The prison stay doesn't sound too daunting; Hunt was able to bring to his cell many personal belongings and comfort items and receive visitors.
Roe describes a scene I don't recall reading about before, a meeting between Shelley and Keats at Hunt's home. Shelley and Keats are entwined in literary history, through Shelley's eulogy to Keats and their joint burial in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Older than both Keats and Shelley, Leigh outlived his young proteges by many years, eventually achieving the dubious immortality of being a model for one of Dickens' comic characters.
I've visited the Keats houses in Rome and Hampstead in London. Roe discloses a number of other locations for Keats, which made me desire to return to London and embark upon a Keats pilgrimage. Until then, I'll continue reading "To Autumn" and other Keats poems.
One striking and thrilling detail about Keats' emergence is emphasized by Roe. The young poet for months wrote the kind of juvenile verse that other beginning poets produce, nothing distinguishable from the verse churned out by his early rival Reynolds, some of whose work Roe cites. Then, all of a sudden, Keats produces "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which displays the control and vivid language of his mature poems. Genius makes a stunning appearance, with little previous foreshadowing. Roe notes the advance, but doesn't delve deeply into its cause. Was it a rush of inspiration, or a new confidence in technique? Or a miracle that can be ascribed to the mystery of genius?
Keats would struggle with later poems, especially his "Endymion," and even poems like "Ode to A Nightingale" are marred by clumsy writing. "On Looking Into Chapman's Homer" however anticipates the mastery of "To Autumn."
1.
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
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