Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/162

126 O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,

With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving;

Sweet little red feet! why should you die—

Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?

You lived alone in the forest-tree,

Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me?

I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas;

Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

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.'

Lord Houghton, in the Aldine edition of 1876, makes the following prefatory note: 'A singular instance of Keats's delicate perception occurred in the composition of this Ode. In the original manuscript he had intended to represent the vulgar conception of Melancholy with gloom and horror, in contrast with the emotion that incites to—

"glut thy sorrow on a morning rose

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;"

and which essentially

"lives in Beauty—Beauty that must die,

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu."

The first stanza, therefore, was the following: as grim a passage as Blake or Fuseli could have dreamed and painted:—

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a platform gibbet for a mast,

Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans

To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;

Although your rudder be a dragon's tail

Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,

Your cordage large uprootings from the skull

Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail

To find the Melancholy—whether she

Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

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,—'

no! go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, or the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

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,

Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.