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. Be van'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.' Hay don 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.
I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'T is not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
II
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
