His winged minions' in close clusters stand follmvers
Amaz'd, and full of fear; like anxious men
Who on a wide plain gather in sad troops,
When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers.
45 Even now, while Saturn, rous'd from icy trance,
Goes, step for step, with Thea from yon woods,
Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,
Is sloping to the threshold of the west.
Thither we tend.'?Now in clear light I stood,
50 Reliev'd from the dusk vale. Mnemosyne
Was sitting on a square edg'd polish'd stone,
That in its lucid depth reflected pure
Her priestess-garments. My quick eyes ran on
From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
55 Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,
And diamond paved lustrous long arcades.
Anon rush'd by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
60 That scar'd away the meek ethereal hours
And made their dove-wings tremble: on he flared1
July-Sept. 1819 1857
This living hand, now warm and capable1
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
5 That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is?
I hold it towards you.
1819 1898
1. The manuscript breaks off at this point. humous readers (e.g., users of this Norton anthol1. These lines, first published in H. B. Forman's ogy)?to the fictionalized and dramatic (e.g., a edition of Keats's poems in 1898, were written on fragment of a speech intended for the deranged a sheet that later formed part of the draft of Keats's Ludolph toward the end of Keats's and Charles unfinished satire The Jealoiisies. They have been a Brown's never-produced tragedy Otho the Great). key text in late-20th-century critical and theoreti-In their lyric character the lines are included in cal discussions of interpretation. Readings range anthologies of love poetry. In their dramatic char- from the personal and autobiographical?Keats acter they are described by critics as, for example, addressing a loved one (Fanny Brawne) or his post-'ghoulishly aggressive.'
.
94 0 / JOHN KEATS
Letters Keats's letters serve as a running commentary on his life, reading, thinking, and writing. They are, in his career, the equivalent of the essays, prefaces, and defenses of poetry produced by his contemporaries. His early reputation as a poet of pure luxury, sensation, and art for art's sake has undergone a radical change since, in the twentieth century, critics began to pay close attention to the letters. For Keats thought hard and persistently about life and art, and any seed of an ethical or critical idea that he picked up from his contemporaries (in particular, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Wordsworth) instantly germinated and flourished in the rich soil of his imagination. What T. S. Eliot said about the Metaphysical poets applies to Keats in his letters: his 'mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by [his] reading and thought.' And like Donne, he looked not only into the heart but, literally, 'into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract.' A number of Keats's casual comments on the poet and on poetry included here?especially those dealing with 'negative capability' and the kind of imaginative identification with someone or something outside ourselves that we now call empathy?have become standard points of reference in aesthetic theory. But Keats regarded nothing that he said as final; each statement constituted only a stage in his continuing exploration into what he called 'the mystery.'
The text printed here is that of the edition of the Letters by Hyder E. Rollins (1958), which reproduces the original manuscripts precisely.
LETTERS
To Benjamin Bailey1
