Sunday Poetry - John Keats

The quotation I referred to last week was from The Ghost & Mrs Muir, one of my favourite movies. Lucy & Captain Gregg are talking about his house which Lucy is now renting. She says it's a lovely design & reminds her of an old song or an poem & he tells her that he designed it himself & quotes the last two lines of this stanza of Keats's Nightingale.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Sunday Poetry - John Keats

I've decided to take up that idea from last week about quotations in books & movies. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale has two quotations in it that are familiar to me from other contexts. One of my favourite scenes in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women is when the vicar, Julian Malory, visits Mildred one evening after an emotionally upsetting scene (I'll say no more for fear of spoilers). They're standing in front of the electric fire & he's just put a pair of ping pong bats down on the table,

'I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,' said Julian softly.
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, I continued to myself, feeling the quotation had gone wrong somewhere and it was not really quite what Julian had intended.
'That's Keats, isn't it?' I asked rather bluntly. 'I always think Nor What Soft Incense would be a splendid title for a novel. Perhaps about a village where there were two rival churches, one High and one Low. I wonder if it has ever been used?'

Mildred cuts through the sentimentality in a very Pymish way.

I'll leave you to speculate about the other quotation. It's from a movie about a widow & a ghost in a house by the sea.

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:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy 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.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal 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,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain---
To thy high requiem become a sod

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep? 

Sunday Poetry - John Keats

One of my favourite sonnets. It always makes me wonder what Keats would have done if he'd lived. It also provides the quotation for the crossword clue Fred is working on in Brief Encounter, one of my favourite movies. He asks Laura for help with the missing word in this quotation, Huge cloudy symbols of a high - something in seven letters. Laura knows it's Romance.
That might be an idea for a series of Sunday poems. Famous quotations from books & movies & the poems they came from.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Sunday Poetry - John Keats

To continue Barbara Pym's Centenary celebrations here's a poem by Keats (picture from here) that gave her the title of one of her novels, The Sweet Dove Died. It's a melancholy novel about an older woman, a younger man who she fancies & an older man who fancies her. I haven't read it for many years. I thought it was out of print but it seems Bello have just reprinted several Pyms, including this one as ebooks & paperbacks. I'm tempted to reread it although it is such a melancholy book & I didn't find Leonora a very sympathetic character. Of course, I was much younger when I read it. I may have more sympathy for a middle-aged woman now!

The poem always strikes me as sad & naive. The speaker is so unaware. As Sting so memorably sang, If you love someone, set them free. I wonder if he had Keats in mind when he wrote that? The book, the poem & the song are all entwined for me.

I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
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 liv'd 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?

Sunday Poetry - John Keats & Abby

It's two years today since my much loved cat Abby died. So, here's a sonnet by Keats about Mrs Reynolds' Cat. Abby wasn't really very much like this cat who seems to have spent his life killing mice & getting into fights but it's an affectionate tribute & that's what's important. Abby was a timid cat, more likely to spend her days sleeping in her favourite spots in the garden, waiting for me to sit down so she could jump on my lap & being fed the finest tidbits of chicken & fish on offer.

Next week, some more Keats with a Barbara Pym connection as Barbara Pym Reading Week gets underway.

Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
   How many mice and rats hast in thy days
   Destroyed? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but prithee do not stick
   Thy latent talons in me, and up-raise
   Thy gentle mew, and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
   For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all
Thy tail's tip is nicked off, and though the fists
   Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
   In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.  

Sunday Poetry - John Keats

There's only one poem it could be today as autumn has finally arrived in Melbourne. The clocks went back last night & the air is hazy with the smoke from the Department of Sustainability & Environment's (DSE) controlled burns in eastern Victoria. There's not a lot of mellow fruitfulness yet but it's early days. I'm sure you've guessed by now that it's To Autumn by Keats. This is one of my favourite photos of Abby. She loved sleeping in the garden on a bed of autumn leaves.

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.
 
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.

 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.

Sunday poetry - John Keats

I'm afraid I'm cheating this week.The poem by John Keats (picture from here) that I had my heart set on featuring this week isn't in the anthology I've been reading so I've gone to my old Everyman edition of Keats to find this lovely sonnet. There were several poems in my anthology that I also love, often because they're quoted or referenced in other books. One of my favourite moments in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women is when Julian, the jilted vicar is standing in Mildred's living room & sentimentally quotes from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet." Mildred quotes the next line, "Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs" & briskly moves the conversation on to more mundane matters, such as whether Nor What Soft Incense has ever been used as the title of a novel about rival churches. There is even a quote in my chosen poem from the movie Brief Encounter, where Fred is doing the crossword & asks Laura for the missing word in his clue which, significantly, is Romance.

Keats's short life produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the language. His wonderful year of 1819 was the final blaze of genius before his health declined & he died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821 at the age of 25. Several of his poems seem to foreshadow his early death & this sonnet is one of the most poignant.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd ny teeming brain,
Before my high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.