FullReads

“And still my body drank.”

ROSE AYLMER

Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect stanzas.

THE ISLES OF GREECE

One really fine and poetic stanza–of course, the third; three stanzas that are good eloquence–the fourth, fifth, and seventh; and one that is a fair bit of argument–the tenth–may together perhaps carry the rest.

HELLAS

The profounder spirit of Shelley’s poem yet leaves it a careless piece of work in comparison with Byron’s. The two false rhymes at the outset may not be of great importance, but there is something annoying in the dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza. Dissyllabic rhymes are beautiful and enriching when they fall in the right place; that is, where there is a pause for the second little syllable to stand. For example, they could not be better placed than they would have been at the end of the shorter lines of this same stanza, where they would have dropped into a part of the pause. Another sin of sheer heedlessness–the lapse of grammar in The Skylark, at the top of page 296 (With thy clear keen joyance)– will remind the reader of the special habitual error of Drummond of Hawthornden.

THE WANING MOON

In these few lines the Shelley spirit seems to be more intense than in any other passage as brief.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great poses writings, and one of the most splendid poems on nature and on poetry in a literature resounding with odes on these enormous themes.

THE INVITATION

No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucent verse.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

Keats is here the magical poet, as he is the intellectual poet in the great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise of both imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his day they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his poetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and simplicity, and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats was to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all that in fact he was.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the most perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urn is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea–the emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn–is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy–a prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines in which this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in all literature: the “little town,” the “peaceful citadel,”–were ever simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats’s final moral here is undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The Ode to Autumn is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovely and perfect. The Psyche I love the least, because its fancy is rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the deadly sickliness of Endymion. None the less does it remain just within the group of the really fine odes of English poets. The eloquent Melancholy more narrowly escapes exclusion from that group.