THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the fragmentary Hyperion which he had abandoned in April 1819 and which was printed, as the publishers were
obliged to acknowledge, ‘contrary to the wish of the author’. The earliest of the narrative poems, ‘Isabella; or, The Pot
of Basil’, was originally intended to form a contribution to a collection of verse-tales based on stories by Boccaccio.
Keats’s version of the story of two tragic lovers elaborates on the original by introducing a complex scheme of natural
imagery, an interpolated social and moral commentary, and elements of the Gothic. It became in the poet’s own
opinion ‘too smokeable ... „A weak-sided poem” with an amusing sober-sadness about it’. ‘The Eve of St Agnes’,
written some eight months later, shares a medieval setting with its predecessor but moves far beyond it in what it
reveals of Keats’s new mastery of dramatic and verbal effect and of narrative shape and tension. The poem is shaped
around a series of intense contrasts, of cold and warmth, of dark and light, of hardness and softness, of noise and
stillness, and, above all, of cruelty and love, but it is ultimately as ambiguous and uncertain as the superstition on
which its heroine, Madeline, sets her hopes. As Madeline anxiously enters her chamber her taper flickers out and the
moonlight falls on her through a stained-glass window:
A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag’ries
Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings;
And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.
The poem is emphatically concrete in the variety of its clustered, sensual suggestion, but both abrupt and elusive in its
final wrench away from the lovers’ escape ‘into the storm’ and its return to suggestions of sickness, death, and
penitence. A far greater ambiguity marks the retelling of a classical haunt-
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ing in ‘Lamia’, an ambiguity which begins with Keats’s omission of the associations of vampirism with the figure of
his half serpent ‘lamia’ (according to Lemprière such monsters ‘allured strangers ... that they might devour them’).
His serpent is beautiful, agonized by her transformation into a lover and enchanting rather than devouring. The
narrative pits her against an aged, rational philosopher, Apollonius, in a competition for the attention of Lycius, but if
Lycius is finally the victim of the piercing of the illusion on which his world becomes centred, the poem allows little
sympathy with the reasoning dream-breaker. Lamia builds fairy palaces, Apollonius demolishes them; she fosters the
imagination, his philosophy clips angel’s wings and will ‘conquer all mysteries by rule and line, | Empty the haunted
air and gnomed mine — | Unweave a rainbow’. The poem does not manoeuvre a reader into taking sides, but its
juxtapositions of illusion and reality, of the ideal and the actual, of feeling and thought, remain tantalizingly
unresolved.
A related debate about contraries informs the five odes included in the 1820 volume (a sixth, the ‘Ode on
Indolence’, written in May 1819, was published posthumously in 1848 in a collection which also included a reprinting
of Keats’s most famous lyrical treatment of the idea of fairy enthralment, the ballad ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’).
The earliest of the odes in terms of composition, that to Psyche, has often been seen as an enactment of a ceremonial
dedication of the Soul — ‘as distinguished from an Intelligence’ — and as a variation on the idea of the world as ‘the
vale of Soul-making’ which Keats outlined in a long letter of April 1819, a letter which also included a draft of the
poem. The odes to a Nightingale and on Melancholy, both of which slightly vary the metrical structure evolved in the
earlier poem, were composed in May 1819. The former takes as its subject the local presence of a nightingale, and the
contrast of the ‘full-throated ease’ of its singing with the aching ‘numbness’ of the human observer, the rapt and
meditative poet. The ode progresses through a series of precisely delicate evocations of opposed moods and ways of
seeing, some elated, some depressed, but each serving to return the narrator to his ‘sole self’ and to his awareness of
the temporary nature of the release from the unrelieved contemplation of temporal suffering which the bird’s song has
offered. The more succinct ‘Ode on Melancholy’ opens with a rejection of traditional, and gloomy, aids to reflection
and moves to an exploration of the interrelationship of the sensations of joy and sorrow. The perception of the
transience of beauty which haunts the poem also informs the speculations derived from the contemplation of the two
scenes which decorate an imagined Attic vase in the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, one showing bucolic lovers, the other a
pagan sacrifice. Both scenes are frozen and silent, images taken out of time and rendered eternal only by the
intervention of art. The image of the sacrifice, in particular, has something of the sculptural patterning and spatial
imagination of Poussin: