• Down the wide stairs a darkling way they > ODE ON A GRECIAN URN found. In all the house was heard no human sound. A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door; The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound, Flutter'd in the besieging wind's up roar; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. XLI They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide, Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flagon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; Lemprière's classical dictionary made Keats acquainted with the names and attributes of the inhabitants of the heavens in the ancient world, and the Shakesperean Chapman introduced him to Homer, but his acquaintance with the subtlest spirit of Greece was by a more direct means. Keats did not read Greek, and he had no scholar's knowledge of Greek art, but he had the poetic divination which scholars sometimes fail to possess, and when he strolled into the British Museum and saw the Elgin marbles, the greatest remains in continuous series of perhaps the greatest of Greek sculptures, he saw them as an artist of kindred spirit with their makers. He saw them also with the complex emotion of a modern, and read into them his own thoughts. The result is most surely read in his longer poem of Hyperion, but the spirit evoked found its finest expression in this ode. The ode appears to have been composed in the spring of 1819 and first published in January, 1820, in Annals of the Fine Arts. There are then about four years in time between the sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer,' and this ode; if the former suggests a Balboa, this suggests a Magellan who has traversed the Pacific. It is not needful to find any single The key turns, and the door upon its hinges piece of ancient sculpture as a model for the poem, although there is at Holland House, where Keats might have seen it, an urn with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is described in the fourth stanza. The ode was included by Keats in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems. I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase — a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the Mind.' I ONE morn before me were three figures seen, With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced; And one behind the other stepp'd serene, In placid sandals, and in white robes graced; They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side; They came again; as when the urn once more Is shifted round, the first seen shades return; And they were strange to me, as may betide With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore. II How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not? How came ye muffled in so hush a mask? Was it a silent deep-disguised plot To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour; And once V more came they by; -alas! wherefore? My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams; My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o'er With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams: The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Tho' in her lids hung the sweet tears of May; The open casement press'd a newleaved vine, pages [of his letter] and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point, though the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went away and I wrote with my Mind and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart.' WHY did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell; No God, no Demon of severe response, Let in the budding warmth and throstle's Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell: lay; O Shadows! 't was a time to bid farewell! Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine. VI Then to my human heart I turn at once. Heart! Thou and I are here sad and alone; I say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan, To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain. So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot Why did I laugh? I know this Being's raise My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass; For I would not be dieted with praise, more In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn; Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store; Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright, Into the clouds, and nevermore return! SONNET Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains. In a letter to his brother George and wife, Keats writes March 19, 1819: 'I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet - but look over the two last lease, |