A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Muse

8 Muse When Keats gives Clarke a group of poems to show Leigh Hunt, he seems a little abashed that “the Muse is so frequently mentioned.”3 Almost all of the poems of the time are addressed to a Muse, only some of them Helicon’s immortal goddesses. He writes sonnets in honor of those whose company he soon will keep: Hunt, Haydon, Clarke, and his brothers Tom and George. He writes sonnets to those poets he most admires: Wordsworth, Chatterton, Byron, Milton, Spenser. He sings back to Apollo Apollo’s own song. Keats calls out to the muses near at hand as fervently as he calls back to the Muses of the old, ongoing world. Those worlds—the Hunt circle, his brothers, and the god-­ haunted mountains—are not separate worlds for Keats, though it would be foolish to call them one. Keats feels the mythic underlay to life’s daily surface, and the poems begin, as soon as he devotes himself to the writing of them, to seek ways to draw those worlds into their curious consummation. Keats knows this himself, knows it keenly. He writes to Clarke in a verse letter: The air that floated by me seem’d to say, “Write! thou wilt never have a better day.” And so I did. When many lines I’d written, Though with their grace I was not oversmitten, Yet, as my hand was warm, I thought I’d better Trust to my feelings, and write you a letter. Such an attempt required an inspiration Of a peculiar sort,—a consummation;—4 The poem is that consummation—the page beneath the words a place of erotic potency, where creative expression reaches completion not in the poet’s final utterance, but in the creative reception of the listening other whose atten- 9 1816 tion commingles two minds into one. The poem becomes a work that affirms two lives genuinely intermingled at the very place that mingling occurs. For Clarke and Keats, that place was Clarke’s home, where they “revel’d in a chat that ceased not / When at night-­fall among your books we got.”5 And those feelings to which Keats trusts are feelings more precise than concepts allow; they are the very stuff of the nerves inspired. For Clarke would walk Keats halfway back to the house where the young man apprenticed to a country doctor; they would shake hands, and then Clarke would return. Keats would listen, he says, to the footsteps until they disappeared. But wait—they haven’t disappeared. The Muses have brought him a song through the air, a strange song, but real. Clarke walks on, heard once again through the fact of that silence slowly enveloping him: “You chang’d the footpath for the grassy plain.”6 The foot in the grass is another song, a quieter one, as the Muse of the bent grass knows, than the foot on the hard, weary road; and Keats does not turn homeward until he hears it. ...