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Realms of Gold Letters and Poems of

Read by Samuel West with Matthew Marsh POETRY

NA243712D 1 Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold 6:42 2 To Benjamin Haydon, 20th November 1816 0:12 3 Great Spirits now on Earth are sojourning: 1:05 4 To John Reynolds, 17th and 18th April 1817 Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight 3:26 5 On the Sea 1:05 6 To Benjamin Bailey, 22nd November 1817 1:40 7 Wherein lies happiness? 4:33 8 To George and Tom Keats. , Sunday 21st December, 1817 2:04 9 To George and Tom Keats, 23rd, 24th January 1818 0:44 10 On Sitting Down to read King Lear once Again 1:17 11 To J. H. Reynolds, Teignmouth, May 3rd 1818 3:41 12 To Benjamin Bailey, l0th June 18l8 1:23 13 To Tom Keats, 25th June, 18l8. Endmoor, Cumbria 2:59 14 Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art – 4:03 15 To Tom Keats, 29th June, 1818. Keswick 0:28 16 To Fanny Keats, 2nd July, I818. Dumfries 0:50 17 Old Meg 1:13 18 To Benjamin Bailey, Inverary, 18th July 2:21 19 To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 2:54 20 Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 4:25 21 To George and Georgiana Keats, 14th October 1818 6:09 22 To George and Georgiana Keats, 16th December 1818, 2-4 January 1819 4:19

2 23 A casement high and triple-arched there was 1:27 24 To Fanny Keats, 1st May 1819 Wentworth Place, Saturday 0:48 25 5:10 26 To George and Georgiana Keats, Friday 19th March 1819 2:30 27 4:45 28 Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: 2:11 29 3:01 30 To George and Georgiana Keats, Friday 19th March 1819 (cont.) 6:42 31 4:07 32 To Sleep 1:34 33 4:41 34 To Fanny Brawne, 1st July, 1819 Shanklin, Isle of Wight 3:50 35 To Fanny Brawne, 25th July 1819. Sunday Night 1:35 36 To Fanny Keats, Winchester, 28th August 1819 3:03 37 To John Taylor, 5th September, 1819 0:42 38 A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone 1:45 39 To J. H. Reynolds, 21st September, 1819. Winchester 1:34 40 2:03 41 To Fanny Brawne, 13th October, 1819. College Street/To Fanny Keats, 20th December 1819 Wentworth Place 3:26 42 To Fanny Brawne, 4th February 1820 1:21 43 To Fanny Brawne, February 1820 2:12 44 To Fanny Brawne, February 1820 2:20

3 45 To Fanny Brawne, March 1820 3:54 46 To Fanny Brawne, May 1820 Wednesday morning 47 This living hand, now warm and capable 0:32 48 To Fanny Keats, 23rd June 1820. Friday Morning 1:03 49 To Fanny Keats, 5th July 1820 Wednesday 1:15 50 To Fanny Keats, 22th July 1820 1:40 51 To Fanny Brawne, August 1820 3:38 52 To Fanny Keats, 13th August 1820 Wentworth Place 1:33 53 To , 16th August 1820 3:31 54 To Fanny Keats, dictated, 11th September 1820 1:27 55 To Charles Brown, 30th September 1820. The ‘Maria Crowther’, off Yarmouth, Isle of Wight 5:08 56 To Mrs. Samuel Brawne, 24th October 1820 Naples Harbour 3:39 57 To Charles Brown, 1st November 1820 4:14 58 To Charles Brown, 30th November 1820 2:56 59 that I may cease to be 2:17

Total time: 2:37:21

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Realms of Gold The Letters and Poems of John Keats

The Life abandoned by her husband and living in John Keats was born in London on the 31st poverty, died. October, 1795. Two brothers, George and 1814 saw the death of his grandmother, Tom, and a sister, Fanny, followed during Mrs Jennings, and in the following year the next eight years. Their father, Thomas Keats entered Guy’s Hospital as a student, Keats, helped in the management of his qualifying as an apothecary in July 1816. father-in-law’s stables and tavern; their This was the year when his passion for mother, Frances Jennings, was from a well- poetry – and for politics, philosophy and the to-do business family, and seems to have arts in general – truly took hold of him. His been an intelligent, well-educated and circle of acquaintances rapidly enlarged to forceful woman. include such radical thinkers and artists as Young John was himself, by all accounts, , Hazlitt and Benjamin Haydon. of a passionate, possessive, even wilful By December, Keats had abandoned character: ‘violent and ungovernable’, said medicine in order to pursue his vocation as a family servant in later years. When he was a poet. eight, John began to attend a school in Barely five years of life remained to him, Enfield run by the sympathetic and but within that time he was to live with an imaginative John Clarke; but, within a year, intensity, a gusto and a creative urgency the first of the many domestic tragedies which would lead directly to the which were to afflict the family occurred – extraordinary poems and letters we have his father was killed in a riding accident. A today. mere two months later, and apparently to By the time of our first letter – dated 20th the displeasure of John and his siblings, November, 1816 – Keats was enjoying the their mother remarried. Before long, the first excitement of an independent, if children went to live with their insecure, literary life. The remaining years grandmother in Edmonton. In 1810, when were to be dominated by the poetry, of John was barely fifteen, his mother, now course, but also by a consuming interest in 5 the value and purpose of poetic Not long after the onset of the disease, composition and the nature of the poet Keats’ poetic composition began to falter, himself. At the same time, Keats enjoyed the last of his major poems – ‘To Autumn’ – travelling the length and breadth of the being written in September 1819: he found British Isles, often walking huge distances in the activity of writing emotionally a day; continuing his education by reading exhausting, perhaps disturbing, especially everything he could lay his hands on; as he tried to come to terms with the developing radical political views in a post- apparent impossibility of sustaining the war England dominated by timidly relationship with Fanny, whom he could no conservative attitudes; and, finally, falling in longer see – unless it were by arrangement, love. when she would greet him through the Yet hanging over all this intense pursuit window from the garden of Wentworth of pleasure, self-knowledge and poetic Place. This distance had become necessary perfection was the cloud of the ‘family’ after the crisis of February 1820, when illness – tuberculosis, or consumption as it Keats had returned to Hampstead on the was then known. His beloved brother Tom outside of the coach: he staggered home to died of the disease in December 1818 after Wentworth Place, both chilled and feverish, a long illness, during the latter stages of and coughed blood as he got himself to which Keats had patiently nursed him. The bed. With extraordinary calmness, Keats agony of this loss must have been asked his friend Brown to bring a candle by intensified by the absence of his other which he could inspect the discharge, and brother, George, who had married and then announced: ‘I know the colour of that emigrated to America earlier in the same blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be year. Within another year, Keats himself had deceived in that colour. That drop of blood begun to show the first symptoms of is my death-warrant. I must die.’ tuberculosis. He had now to confront the Keats’ last hope seemed to lie in a kinder real possibility of his own death within a climate, and to that end he set sail for Italy few years – or even months – his emotional in September. His last known letter was turmoil infinitely complicated by the written from Rome in November 1820: he simultaneous ripening of his love for Fanny died on 23rd February, 1821, at 26 Piazza di Brawne into an engagement, probably in Spagna. December 1819. 6 The Letters and Poems The Poems Many of the letters contain first drafts of CD1:1 On First Looking into Chapman’s poems by Keats, sometimes close to the Homer version which would eventually be In this sonnet Keats uses the metaphor of published, at other times less so: I have geographical exploration to convey the generally used the version of the poem with excitement of ‘discovering’ Homer in the which readers are familiar. Poems marked 16th century translation by George (L) in the notes below were included by Chapman. Keats himself in the letters. Elsewhere, I have inserted poems where Keats has made And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; reference to them, or to an idea or image Round many western islands have I been important to them – an example would be Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. To Autumn, which Keats specifically Oft of one wide expanse had I been told mentions in his letter of 21st September, That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; 1819: ‘How beautiful the season is Yet never did I breathe its pure serene now…this struck me so much in my Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’ Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

CD1:3 Great Spirits Now on Earth are Sojourning (L) Another sonnet, this time expressing Keats’ optimistic belief that society stood on the threshold of a new age – an age of visionary idealism derived from Nature (represented by ‘he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake’ Wordsworth), and of political freedom (embodied by Keats’ friend, Leigh Hunt). 7

Great Spirits now on Earth are sojourning: Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth and brood, He of the Cloud, the Cataract, the Lake, Until ye start, as if the Sea Nymphs quired! Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake, Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing: CD1:7 Wherein Lies Happiness? He of the Rose, the Violet, the Spring, In this extract from Book 1 of ‘’, The social Smile, the Chain for freedom’s sake: Keats’ first attempt at a long ‘philosophical’ And lo! – whose stedfastness would never take poem, he argues that true happiness is that A Meaner Sound than Raphael’s Whispering. which leads ‘our ready minds to fellowship And other Spirits are there standing apart divine’: a sense of beauty is ultimately Upon the Forehead of the Age to come; indistinguishable from a moral sense. These, These will give the World another heart And other pulses – hear ye not the hum Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Of mighty Workings in a distant Mart? Our ready minds to fellowship divine, Listen awhile ye Nations, and be dumb! A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold CD1:5 On the Sea (L) The clear religion of heaven! Fold Keats invites us to escape from the A rose leaf round thy finger’s taperness, vexations of worldly concerns and to lose ourselves in the ‘wideness’ and ‘eternal’ And soothe thy lips: hist, when the airy stress qualities of the sea. This, too, is a sonnet. Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds, And with a sympathetic touch unbinds It keeps eternal Whisperings around Aeolian magic from their lucid wombs: Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs; Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns; till the spell …Feel we these things? – that moment have we Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. stepped Often ‘tis in such gentle temper found Into a sort of oneness, and our state That scarcely will the very smallest shell Is like a floating spirit’s. But there are Be moved for days from whence it sometime fell Richer entanglements, enthralments far When last the winds of Heaven were unbound. More self-destroying, leading, by degrees, O ye who have your eyeballs vext and tir’d, To the chief intensity: the crown of these Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; Is made of love and friendship, and sits high O ye whose Ears are dinned with uproar rude, Upon the forehead of humanity… Or fed too much with cloying melody – 8 CD1:10 On Sitting Down to read King Lear ‘swoon to death’ rather than return to the once Again (L) suffering world. Keats’ re-reading of King Lear compels an awareness that mature poetry must tackle Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art – the difficult and demanding themes of Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, human suffering: reading a play like King And watching, with eternal lids apart, Lear is akin to an experience of death and Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite, rebirth – like the mythical phoenix which is The moving waters at their priestlike task born out of its own ashes. Another sonnet. Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask O golden tongued Romance with serene Lute ! Of snow upon the mountains and the moors – Fair plumed syren, Queen of far-away ! No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, Shut up thine olden pages and be mute: To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Adieu ! for, once again, the fierce dispute Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Betwixt damnation and impassioned Clay Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, Must I burn through; once more humbly assay And so live ever – or else swoon to death. The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit: Chief Poet ! and ye clouds of Albion, CD1:17 Old Meg (L) Begetters of our deep eternal theme, Keats included this light-hearted evocation When through the old oak Forest I am gone, of a gipsy’s life, written while he was Let me not wander in a barren dream, travelling in Scotland, in a letter to his But, when I am consumed in the Fire, young sister, Fanny. Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire. Old Meg she was a Gipsy, CD1:14 Bright star! Would I were steadfast And liv’d upon the Moors: as thou art – Her bed it was the brown heath turf, In this sonnet Keats envies the ‘steadfast’ And her house was out of doors. north star which gazes eternally down upon Her apples were swart blackberries, the world of man and nature: he himself Her currants pods o’ broom; would like to be forever ‘pillow’d upon [his] Her wine was dew o’ the wild white rose, fair love’s ripening breast’ – or, perhaps, Her book a churchyard tomb 9 Her Brothers were the craggy hills, but there can be few more powerfully Her Sisters larchen trees – evocative openings in English literature. The Alone with with her great family theme of the poem is the evolution of She liv’d as she did please. human sensibility and creativity, symbolised in the narrative by the legend of the new No breakfast has she many a morn, Olympian race of gods defeating and taking No dinner many a noon, over from the Titans. Their downfall is both And ‘stead of supper she would stare tragic and necessary. Saturn is the King of Full hard against the Moon. the Titans. Thea, who attempts to comfort him, is married to , the only Titan But every morn of woodbine fresh yet to be overthrown… She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew Deep in the shady sadness of a vale She wove, and she would sing. Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, And with her fingers old and brown Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, She plaited Mats o’ Rushes, Still as the silence round about his lair; And gave them to the Cottagers Forest on forest hung about his head She met among the Bushes. Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, And tall as Amazon: But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. An old red blanket cloak she wore; A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more A chip hat had she on. By reason of his fallen divinity God rest her aged bones somewhere – Spreading a shade: the Naiad ‘mid her reeds She died full long agone! Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips. Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, CD1:20 From Hyperion No further than to where his feet had stray’d, These are the first lines of Keats’ great (but And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground unfinished) epic poem. Keats eventually His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, abandoned its composition because of what Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed; he felt was an excess of Miltonic influence, While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth, 10 His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. ‘I have no comfort for thee, no not one: It seem’d no force could wake him from his place; ‘I cannot say, “O wherefore sleepest thou?” But there came one, who with a kindred hand ‘For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth Touch’d his wide shoulders, after bending low ‘Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God; With reverence, though to one who knew it not. ‘And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, She was a Goddess of the infant world; ‘Has from thy sceptre pass’d; and all the air By her in stature the tall Amazon ‘Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. Had stood a pigmy’s height: she would have ta’en ‘Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, Achilles by the hair and bent his neck; ‘Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house; Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel ‘And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, ‘Scorches and burns our once serene domain. Pedestal’d haply in a palace court, ‘O aching time! O moments big as years! When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore. ‘All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, But oh! how unlike marble was that face: ‘And press it so upon our weary griefs How beautiful, if sorrow had not made ‘That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self. ‘Saturn, sleep on: – O thoughtless, why did I There was a listening fear in her regard, ‘Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude? As if calamity had but begun; ‘Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? As if the vanward clouds of evil days ‘Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep.’ Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder labouring up. CD1:23 From The Eve of St Agnes One hand she press’d upon that aching spot These stanzas describe Madeline’s chamber. Where beats the human heart, as if just there, Porphyro, her lover, spies upon her as she Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain: prays, warmly illuminated by the moonlight The other upon Saturn’s bended neck shining through the stained-glass window. She laid, and to the level of his ear This narrative poem brilliantly conveys the Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake idea of human love triumphing over hostile In solemn tenour and deep organ tone: forces: ‘Romeo and Juliet’, perhaps, with a Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue happy ending… Would come in these like accents; O how frail To that large utterance of the early Gods! A casement high and triple-arched there was, ‘Saturn, look up! – though wherefore, poor old All garlanded with carven imageries King? Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, 11 And diamonded with panes of quaint device One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings; But being too happy in thine happiness, And in the midst, ‘mong thousand heraldries, That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, In some melodious plot A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, queens and kings. Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon; Tasting of Flora and the country green, Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! And on her silver cross soft amethyst, O for a beaker full of the warm South, And on her hair a glory, like a saint. Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, Save wings, for heaven. Porphyro grew faint; And purple-stained mouth; She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from taint… That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: CD1:25 Ode to a Nightingale One of the great series of odes written in Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget May 1819. Keats, caught up by the What thou among the leaves hast never known, seductive beauty of the nightingale’s song, The weariness, the fever, and the fret is led into an impassioned meditation upon Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; human suffering and mortality, imagining Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, ways in which he might escape them. Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Eventually he is compelled to acknowledge Where but to think is to be full of sorrow the necessity of returning to the ‘real’ And leaden-eyed despairs, world, still unable to resolve the competing Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, claims of beauty and truth… Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Away! away! for I will fly to thee, My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 12 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: The voice I hear this passing night was heard Already with thee! tender is the night, In ancient days by emperor and clown: And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for But here there is no light, home, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown She stood in tears amid the alien corn; Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy The same that oft-times hath ways. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Forlorn! the very word is like a bell Wherewith the seasonable month endows To toll me back from thee to my sole self! The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades And mid-May’s eldest child, Past the near meadows, over the still stream, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Darkling I listen; and, for many a time Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep? I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, CD1:27 Ode on Melancholy To take into the air my quiet breath; Keats rejects the temptation of escaping Now more than ever seems it rich to die, ‘the melancholy fit’ by retreating into To cease upon the midnight with no pain, unconsciousness, and instead proposes that While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad our wisest course is to embrace sorrow: In such an ecstasy! sorrow, after all, ‘dwells with beauty’, since Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – all beautiful things are doomed to die. To thy high requiem become a sod. Intensely pleasurable experience is inevitably bound up with the grief of Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! transience and loss… No hungry generations tread thee down; 13 No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist CD1:28 Why did I Laugh Tonight? (L) Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Keats finds himself almost irresistibly drawn Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d towards death. ‘Verse, Fame and Beauty’ all By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; have their appeal, but death is ‘intenser’ – Make not your rosary of yew-berries, ‘death is life’s high meed’. Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries; No God, no Demon of severe response For shade to shade will come too drowsily, Deigns to reply from heaven or from Hell. And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. Then to my human heart I turn at once. Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; But when the melancholy fit shall fall Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain ! And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Why did I laugh? I know this being’s lease Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Yet could I on this very midnight cease, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, Verse, Fame and Beauty are intense indeed, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. But Death intenser-Death is Life’s high meed.

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die; CD1:29 La Belle Dame sans Merci (L) And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Written in the form and style of a medieval Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, ballad, this simple yet powerful poem seems to Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: express Keats’ ambivalence towards women: Ay, in the very temple of Delight they are both intensely alluring and intensely Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, threatening. Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; Alone and palely loitering? His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, The sedge has withered from the lake, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. And no birds sing! 14 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, With kisses four. So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, And there she lulled me asleep, And the harvest’s done. And there I dream’d – Ah woe betide! The latest dream I ever dreamed I see a lily on thy brow, On the cold hill’s side. With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose I saw pale kings, and princes too, Fast withereth too. Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried – ‘La belle dame sans merci I met a lady in the meads Hath thee in thrall!’ Full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light I saw their starved lips in the gloam And her eyes were wild. With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke, and found me here I made a garland for her head, On the cold hill side. And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love And this is why I sojourn here, And made sweet moan. Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the Lake I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; And no birds sing. For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s song. CD2:2 Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats muses on the idealised beauty of a She found me roots of relish sweet, Grecian urn and its ‘brede of marble men And honey wild, and manna dew; and maidens’. The story which this And sure in language strange she said, decoration tells is, of necessity, ‘frozen’ at a ‘I love thee true’. certain moment, and the poet at first envies this permanence and immunity to change. She took me to her elfin grot, But he also recognises that human life is both And there she wept, and sighed full sore, more satisfying and more painful: the urn is And there I shut her wild wild eyes indeed a ‘friend to man’, but, although art 15 can enhance life, it cannot replace it. All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express Who are these coming to the sacrifice? A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: To what green altar, O mysterious priest, What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Leadst thou that heifer lowing at the skies, Of deities or mortals, or of both, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What little town by river or sea shore, What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Of marble men and maidens overwrought, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: With forest branches and the trodden weed; Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought leave As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; When old age shall this generation waste, Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve; Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’-that is all For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed CD2:3 To Sleep (L) Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; With ‘lulling’ softness, Keats evokes the And, happy melodist, unwearied, allure of sleep which can ‘save [him] from For ever piping songs for ever new; curious Conscience’, and prays that it will More happy love! More happy, happy love! ‘seal the hushed casket of [his ] soul’. A For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, sonnet. For ever panting, and for ever young; 16 O soft embalmer of the still midnight, Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, A Brooklet scarce espied: Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light, ‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers,fragrant-eyed, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine; Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close They lay, calm-breathing on the bedded grass. In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes, Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws Their lips touch’d not, but had not bid adieu, Around my bed its lulling charities. As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, Then save me, or the passed day will shine And ready still past kisses to outnumber, Upon my pillow, breeding many woes. At tender eye-dawn of aurorian love. Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords The winged boy I knew: Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole: But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, – His Psyche true! And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul. O latest born, and loveliest vision far CD2:4 Ode to Psyche (L) Of all Olympus’ faded Hierarchy! Keats wishes to be the poetic disciple of Fairer than Phoebe’s Psyche, hitherto unsung goddess of the sapphire-region’d star, soul. The workings of his imagination Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; (‘Fancy’, in this instance) will be dedicated Fairer than these, though Temple thou hast none, to her. Nor Altar heap’d with flowers; Nor virgin choir to make delicious moan O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung Upon the midnight hours; By sweet enforcement, and remembrance dear, No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet And pardon that thy secrets should be sung From chain-swung Censer teeming; Even into thine own soft-conched ear! No shrine, no grove, no Oracle, no heat Surely I dreamt to-day; or did I see Of pale-mouth’d Prophet dreaming. The winged Psyche, with awaken’d eyes? I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, O Brightest! though too late for antique vows, And on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Too, too late for the fond believing Lyre, Saw two fair Creatures, couched side by side When holy were the haunted forest boughs, In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof Holy the air, the water and the fire: 17 Yet even in these days so far retir’d CD2:9 From , Book 2 (L) From happy Pieties, thy lucent fans, The youth Lycius has fallen in love with the Fluttering among the faint Olympians, beautiful but deceiving Lamia, a serpent- I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. enchantress. This extract describes So let me be thy Choir, and make a moan preparations for the wedding which Lycius Upon the midnight hours; has insisted upon, but which she fears. Her Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet fears are justified when Lycius’ old teacher, From swinged Censer teeming; the philosopher Apollonius, exposes her Thy shrine, thy Grove, thy Oracle, thy heat true nature before the horrified bridegroom Of pale-mouth’d Prophet dreaming! and guests…

Yes, I will be thy Priest and build a fane A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone In some untrodden region of my Mind, Supportress of the faery roof, made moan Where branched thoughts new grown with Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might pleasant pain, fade. Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Of Palm and Plantain, met from either side, Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep, High in the midst, in honour of the bride: And there by Zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees Two palms, and then two plantains, and so on, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep. From either side their stems branch’d one to one And in the midst of this wide quietness All down the aisled place; and beneath all A rosy Sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to trellis of a working brain: wall. With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, So canopied, lay an untasted feast Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest, same – Silently pac’d about, and as she went, And there shall be for thee all soft delight In pale contented sort of discontent, That shadowy thought can win; A bright torch, Mission’d her viewless Servants to enrich and a casement ope at night, The splendid cornicing of nook and niche. To let the warm Love in! Between the Tree stems, marbled plain at first, Came jasper panels; then, anon, there burst 18 Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? And with the larger wove in small intricacies. Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Approving all, she faded at self-will, Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, And shut the chamber up, close, hush’d and still, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Complete and ready for the revels rude, Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, when dreadful guests would come to spoil her Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy solitude. hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: The day came soon , and all the gossip rout. And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep O senseless Lycius! Madman! Wherefore flout Steady thy laden head across a brook; The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister’d hours, Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, And show to common eyes these secret Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. bowers?... Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are CD2:11 To Autumn they? This is Keats’ last major poem. He had been Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, – staying in Winchester and enjoying While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, beautiful late summer and early autumn weather: the poem’s exquisite serenity and And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; restraint reflect a mood of quiet Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn acceptance. Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft Conspiring with him how to load and bless The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; CD2:18 This Living Hand To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells This extraordinarily powerful fragment With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, seems to express something of the almost And still more, later flowers for the bees, paranoid jealousy from which Keats began Until they think warm days will never cease, to suffer concerning Fanny Brawne as the For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. tuberculosis took hold. He dramatises such 19 punitive feelings with vivid concreteness: And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! ‘thou would wish thine own heart dry of That I shall never look upon thee more, blood/ So in my veins red life might stream Never have relish in the faery power again…’ Of unreflecting love! – then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, This living hand, now warm and capable Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calmed-see, here it is – I hold it towards you.

CD2:30 When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be Another sonnet. Although written some time before Keats’ death, the poem seems to express with uncanny foresight his increasing sense that he would die before fulfilling himself either as a writer or as a lover.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before 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 think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; 20 The Letters recurrent themes which are of special Keats’ letters are justly famous for their interest. range, intelligence, passion and humanity. First, there is a continuing debate They communicate an extraordinary concerning the nature of the poet and of spontaneity because they are written poetry itself. Within his short career, Keats apparently without premeditation; yet, at repeatedly returns to the question of the same time, there is almost always a growth and maturity in a writer, proposing sense of energy and compression as Keats (for example) the theory of life as ‘a vale of follows a train of thought, or relates an Soul-making’: ‘Do you not see how anecdote, with sustained excitement. The necessary a world of pains and troubles is to surviving letters cover a period of just over school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A four years, but within that apparently Place where the heart must feel and suffer narrow scope we probably learn more in a thousand diverse ways!’ This, given about him than we can hope to discover Keats’ early experience of family illness and about any other pre-20th century English bereavement, is no empty theorising: for writer, at least through their him, the writer must find a way of correspondence. Miraculously, Keats’ reconciling his acute sense of the beauty correspondents seem to have realised and promise of life with its darker side – immediately the value of the letters they pain, mortality and transience. The letters, were receiving and to have preserved them in fact, are full of ideas and phrases which with care. have passed into the critical language: The letters are addressed to fellow- ‘’, ‘the holiness of the writers – men like John Reynolds and heart’s affections’, ‘the chameleon poet’, Benjamin Bailey, now only remembered for and the repeated reflections on the subject their association with Keats – to members of ‘Beauty and Truth’. Even so stern a critic of his family, his brothers George and Tom, as T.S. Eliot was forced to acknowledge the his schoolgirl sister Fanny – and, finally, to vivid brilliance of Keats’ thought: ‘There is Fanny Brawne, the woman to whom he was hardly one statement of Keats about poetry, engaged at the time of his death. Their which, when considered carefully and with subject matter is wide and varied, reflecting due allowance for the difficulty of Keats’ intense interest in his craft and in his communication, will not be found to be fellow-men, but one may distinguish certain true…’ 21 Yet Keats brings an equal energy to the months of his life, almost unbearably discussion of the personal and the moving. When he can no longer face the domestic. He writes with amazing candour emotional pressure of writing to her directly, about (for example) his feelings for women: he talks of her thus in a letter to Charles in one of his long journal-letters to his Brown: ‘the thought of leaving Miss Brawne brother George and his wife in America, he is beyond every thing horrible – the sense of vividly describes an encounter with Isabella darkness coming over me – I eternally see Jones in which she asks him home; in a her figure eternally vanishing…’ In fact, letter to Bailey, Keats confides that ‘I am these last letters of Keats are so painful that certain I have not a right feeling towards some earlier editors left them out. One is women…Is it because they fall so far reminded of Samuel Johnson’s inability to beneath my Boyish imagination?’ read the closing scenes of King Lear: the This question of his ‘feeling towards difference, of course, is that the story of women’ came to the fore in the last two Keats’ life is no fiction. years of his life when he fell in love with Fanny Brawne. The letters he wrote her are Notes by Perry Keenlyside honest, ardent, compelling and, in the last

22

The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue.

MENDELSSOHN PIANO WORKS VOLUME 3 8.553186 Benjamin Frith

MENDELSSOHN PIANO WORKS VOLUME 2 8.550940 Benjamin Frith

MENDELSSOHN PIANO WORKS VOLUME 1 8.550939 Benjamin Frith

MENDELSSOHN SONGS WITHOUT WORDS 8.554055 Peter Nagy

Cover picture: John Keats by William Hilton after . Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library 23 Samuel West was widely praised for his performance as Leonard Bast in the Merchant Ivory film, Howard’s End. Other film credits include Carrington and Reunion, and he has been seen on TV in Persuasion and Heavy Weather. Theatrical roles have included Valentine in Arcadia and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. He also reads Great Narrative Poems of the Romantic Age, Great Speeches in History, Peter Pan, and Lord Windermere in Lady Windermere’s Fan, for Naxos AudioBooks

Matthew Marsh has appeared in several theatre productions, including the RSC and Royal National Theatre, including the West End run of Copenhagen. He is an extremely versatile actor with many television credits from As Time Goes By; A Certain Justice; Heartbeat and A Touch Of Frost. For film: Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow. For Naxos AudioBooks he also features on Naked She Lay: An Anthology of Classic Erotic Verse.

24 Compiled by Perry Keenlyside. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORISED PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, Produced by Nicolas Soames. BROADCASTING AND COPYING OF THESE COMPACT DISCS PROHIBITED. p 2006 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. © 2006 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. Recorded and edited by Simon Weir, Classical Recording Made in Germany.

Company. 2:37:21 Total time Total o n’,’Old ci’ and ‘T ecian Ur Matthew Marsh with View our catalogue online at online catalogue our View elationship with Fanny Brawne. elationship with Fanny www.naxosaudiobooks.com e: ‘Ode to Melancholy’, ‘Ode on a Gr e: ‘Ode to Melancholy’, his own, tormented by the fear that he will not live to his own, tormented ’s death from tuberculosis and then the imminent tuberculosis from death ’s

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Autumn’. 978-962-634-437-8 CD ISBN: his br ponders on the nature of the writer’s craft, he must first confront craft, he must of the writer’s the nature ponders on richly productive but also tragic final years of the poet’s life. As he of the poet’s also tragic final years but richly productive Keats’ letters paint an unforgettably vivid and moving picture of the picture vivid and moving paint an unforgettably Keats’ letters

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Among them ar letters themselves. versions time within the for the first of which often appeared This general selection also includes many of his finest poems, This general selection ‘La Belle Dame sans Mer Meg’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, pr consummate his r