POETS AND POETRY.

THE JOHN KEATS MEMORIAL VOLUME.•

THE committee by whose exertions Keats' house at Hampstead

has been bought has now issued a memorial volume. Professor de Selincourt, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr. John Bailey, Mr. Clutton Brock, Sir Sidney Colvin, Mrs. Meynell, and many others have contributed to it, andat the end there are poems in praise of the poet in Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and Arabic. Perhaps we have all learnt to be a little afraid of memorial volumes. A Frenchman once commented on the cuisine of a pretentious hotel, and said that it supplied " Le nom de tout et le goiit de rien." Illustrious names will not make a book, and for some reason or other every one writes anxiously in such a volume.

The John Keats Memorial Volume, however, is better than most of its kind, and we do not feel the usual awful contrast between the occasional quotations from the Master and the prose of his lauders.

It is interesting how very much of the critical discussion is concerned with " Endymion." " Endymion " becomes a sort of test poem. The Keats lover will feel in the end as though the writers who prefer " Hyperion " or even the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " before it, must be people who when they are reading Keats wish that they were reading Wordsworth or Milton instead. The immense influence that Keats has on many of modern poets springs, we are inclined to think, chiefly from " Endymion." For, with all its faults, it was into " Endymion " that Keats managed to pour the fullest measure of his spirit,as it was. It was the complete expression of the only complete section of his life, his youth, the vernal Elizabethan stage out of which at the end of his life he was only just passing. In his

later work he was trying his new manner. So we may, in a sense, say that " Endymion " is the most mature of his poems. To the present writer it has always seemed the most delightful of all his works for a mechanical reason—its superior length.

Keats was the great evoker of atmosphere. Now the creation of atmosphere really involves the transporting of the reader or the beholder into another world. If in a non-stop train we were

to flash by. " The Madonna of the Rocks " as it hung in a tube station, we should not know, as we do if we look up at it quietly in a gallery, that we were suddenly seeing things under water. We might be made dizzy, but it would be the flashing by of the train that would confuse us, not our transportation to the new

world. Just so the poet cannot crowd his new complex world into a line and a-half. He has to make a subjective change in his reader, and the new adjustment takes time. By the time we reach the island and Circe's dreadful enchantments in " Endymion," we have acquired a new set of values and a new perspective ; we are initiated and ready :-

" One morn she left me sleeping : half awake I sought for her smooth arms and lips, to slake My greedy thirst with nectarous camel-draughts ; But she was gone."

• • • • Wandering about in pine and cedar gloom Damp awe assail'd me ; for there 'gan to boom A sound of moan, an agony of sound Sepulchral, from the distance all around.

Then came a conquering earth-thunder, and rumbled That fierce complain to silence : while I stumbled Down a precipitous path, as if impell'd.

I came to a dark valley.—Groanino swell'd

Poisonous about my ears, and louder grew,

The nearer I approach'd a flame's gaunt blue,

That glared before me through a thorny brake. This fire, like the eye of gordian snake,

• The John Scats Memorial Volume. London : John Lane. PU.1 Bewitch'd me towards ; and I soon was near A sight too fearful for the feel of fear : In thicket hid I cursed the haggard scene— The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen,"

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• " Avenging, slow, Anon she took a branch of mistletoe, And emptied on 't a black dull-gurgling phial : Groan'd one and all, as if some piercing trial Was sharpening for their pitiable bones."

Mr. John Bailey makes a very good point in his article when he says that Keats was the poet of stillness, and, in support of this, he quotes a number of passages. His notion is an admirable one, and we wish he had quoted something from the quiet scene which to many lovers of Keats seems the most perfect thing he ever wrote—we mean the account in the Second Book, of Adonis asleep in the myrtle bower :— " In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth

Of fondest beauty ; fonder, in fair sooth, Than sighs could fathom, or contentment reach : And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach, Or ripe October's faded marigolds,

Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds—

Not hiding up an Apollonian curve Of neck and shoulder, nor the tenting swerve Of knee from knee, nor ankles pointing light ; But rather, giving them to the filled sight Officiously." • " Hard by, Stood serene Cupids watching silently. One, kneeling to a lyre, touch'd the strings, Muffling to death the pathos with his wings."

No Venetian over put more golden light into a picture than Keats into this arbour.

Pictorial as Keats' art is, I do not share Miss Amy Lowe,ll's indig- nation with those who want to find an allegory in " Endymion." Of course it is allegorical. "Endymion" is a young man's poem, and do not we all when we are young deal in allegories, high-sounding immensities which we cannot quite work out or work in, and which finally fade away as we riot down some delicious path after primroses ? Perhaps it would not bo too much to say that no young poet ever wrote a poem which was not either a simple metrical or formal experiment or in some sense an allegory. A poet is always necessarily conscious that the whole mechanism of language is comparative and symbolical.

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