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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
John Keats's "The Complete Poems of John Keats" is a profound collection that showcases the poet's mastery in evoking beauty, nature, and the human experience through rich imagery and emotive language. Embracing the Romantic literary style, Keats employs sensuous detail and lyrical beauty, often exploring themes of transience, love, and mortality. This compilation includes iconic works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which reflect his philosophical musings and emotional depth, emerging from a context of turmoil and personal tragedy, including the loss of loved ones and his own health struggles. John Keats (1795-1821) was a pivotal figure in the Romantic movement, profoundly influenced by the artistic revolutions of his time. His brief but intense literary career was shaped by an acute awareness of beauty and suffering, which deeply permeates his poetry. Keats's engagement with classical themes and his passionate exploration of the senses speak to his desire to capture the ephemeral moments of existence, heightened by his own transient life. This collection is a must-read for anyone seeking to delve into the emotional landscapes of human experience. Readers will find Keats's uniquely intimate connection with nature and profound existential inquiry both timeless and resonant, inviting deep reflection and appreciation for the delicate balance of beauty and sorrow in life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Poems of John Keats
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents the complete poems of John Keats, gathered in one continuous arc to trace the full sweep of his accomplishment. It brings together his lyrics, sonnets, narrative and mythic ventures, experiments, fragments, and occasional pieces, alongside Sidney Colvin’s Life of John Keats to provide historical and biographical orientation. The aim is to offer a single, navigable body of work in which readers can follow Keats’s development from early imitative exercises to the concentrated power of his maturity. Read as a whole, the collection restores the breadth of his ambition and the intricate coherence of his poetic imagination.
While the center of this collection is poetry, its range within verse is striking: odes such as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn; a substantial body of sonnets, including On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and When I have fears that I may cease to be; long narrative and romantic poems such as Endymion, Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes; epic fragments like Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion; songs, epistles, stanzas, dialogues, translations, and occasional verses. Colvin’s biographical study complements the poems with contextual prose.
Across these varied forms, Keats’s work coheres around recurring concerns: the intensity of sensation, the processes of imagination, the interdependence of beauty and mortality, and the passage of time. Classical myth and medieval romance repeatedly provide frameworks for meditations on desire, loss, and artistic making. Landscapes and seasons become sites of reflection where sensuous pleasure and philosophical inquiry interlace. Whether addressing a nightingale, a Grecian urn, or the cycles of harvest, the poems show a mind testing how art can hold transient feeling without denying change. The result is a sustained exploration of feeling shaped into form.
Stylistically, Keats is marked by sumptuous diction, richly textured imagery, and a musical ear that adapts rhythm to mood. He moves fluently among forms and meters: blank verse in Hyperion, heroic couplets in Endymion, elaborate stanzaic patterns in The Eve of St. Agnes, and the compressed argument of the sonnet. The collection reveals his pleasure in experiment, from playful pieces like A Song About Myself and Women, Wine, and Snuff to high meditations in the odes. The language often blends the sensory with the reflective, creating poems that are at once tactile and speculative, immediate yet contemplative.
The odes form a luminous axis within the whole. In Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on Indolence, Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn, a characteristic structure emerges: an address opens into meditation, which moves toward a provisional resolution. These poems test the endurance of rapture, the uses of reverie, and the limits of consolation. They balance longing with recognition, staging dramas of attention in which art and nature alternate as sources of insight. As a sequence, they demonstrate the refinement of Keats’s thought and technical poise at a singular moment.
The sonnets show Keats’s mastery of compact design. From celebratory pieces like On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and Sonnet to Spenser to introspective meditations such as When I have fears that I may cease to be and Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell, he adapts both Petrarchan and Shakespearean traditions with flexibility. Other sonnets look outward—To Homer, On the Sea, To Sleep—or are animated by friendship and conversation, as with those to John Hamilton Reynolds and others. The sonnet becomes a proving ground where philosophical pressure and emotional nuance can be held in fourteen lines.
The longer romantic narratives broaden his canvas. Endymion follows the questing energies of desire and visionary encounter; Lamia sets enchantment against skepticism; Isabella contemplates love and family conflict; The Eve of St. Agnes traces a winter vigil through a world of ritual and dream. These poems interweave classical and medieval atmospheres with contemporary feeling, using storytelling to examine the cost of aspiration and the frailty of happiness. Even at their most ornate, they remain attentive to inward states, using narrative as an instrument to test how imagination negotiates the contingencies and constraints of lived experience.
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion exhibit epic ambition and self-scrutiny. The former unfolds in stately blank verse, drawing on classical myth to contemplate suffering, succession, and transformation. The latter reimagines this material through a visionary frame that foregrounds the labor and responsibility of the poet. Read together, they reveal Keats’s willingness to revisit and recast his aims as his sense of poetic vocation deepened. The incompleteness of these projects is part of their value here, exposing the workshop of his art and the ethical and aesthetic questions that animated his most ambitious undertakings.
Beyond the monuments, a vibrant sociable poet appears. Verse epistles, such as those to George Keats and John Hamilton Reynolds, mingle affection, literary debate, and self-reflection. Occasional and convivial pieces—Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, To Haydon, Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison—root the poetry in friendships, reading, and shared causes. Songs and stanzas display lightness and wit; playful experiments, acrostics, and parodies confirm a taste for surprise. Translation from a Sonnet of Ronsard, dialogues like Ben Nevis, and fragments expand the picture of a writer testing voices and forms with curiosity.
As assembled here, the poems trace a rapid, compelling evolution. Early imitations and exercises, including Imitation of Spenser and youthful sonnets, reveal eager apprenticeship. Middle works enlarge his scope through romance and experiment. The mature lyrics concentrate thought and feeling with remarkable economy. Along the way, fragments such as The Poet and Specimen of an Induction to a Poem testify to a restless, evaluative mind, while revisions and returns—most notably from Hyperion to The Fall of Hyperion—show an artist refining his purpose. The collection invites readers to follow this unfolding with continuity and nuance.
Considered as a whole, Keats’s poetry remains significant for its fusion of sensuous immediacy with reflective depth. The poems sustain tension between delight and doubt, celebrating the world’s textures while acknowledging impermanence. Classical reference and local observation coexist; ambition and humility, craft and spontaneity, engage in productive balance. The work has shaped conversations about Romantic poetics and continues to influence lyric practice for its attention to form as a vessel for thought. In bringing together the entire range—from crystalline sonnets to ambitious narratives—the collection demonstrates how consistency of vision can thrive amid variety.
Colvin’s Life of John Keats, placed alongside the poems, offers a framework for situating the verse within the circumstances of a brief life and a charged cultural moment. It provides readers with a narrative of reception, friendships, and contexts that deepen appreciation without dictating interpretation. The intention of this pairing is serviceable rather than prescriptive: to support first-time readers and to supply scholars with a compact reference while keeping the poems central. Read sequentially or by theme and form, the collection invites return, comparison, and discovery, allowing Keats’s voice to be heard in its full register.
Author Biography
John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet whose brief life produced a remarkably concentrated body of lyric and narrative verse. Writing in the late Romantic period, he pursued a sensuous, richly allusive style that fused classical myth with close observation of the natural world. His odes and romances explored imagination, transience, and the tension between art and mortality, themes that became touchstones of nineteenth‑century and modern criticism. Though initially met with uneven reviews, his work came to be seen as a high point of English lyricism. Keats’s development was swift, and his letters articulated an influential poetics of uncertainty and negative capability.
Keats grew up in London and was educated at a progressive school in Enfield, where his aptitude for literature was encouraged by teachers who introduced him to classical history, mythology, and Renaissance poetry. As a teenager he apprenticed to a surgeon‑apothecary and later trained in hospital wards, gaining a professional license before choosing to devote himself to poetry in the mid‑1810s. The dual formation in science and the arts shaped his attention to bodily sensation and the vulnerabilities of human life. Early, avid reading of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, and classical epics supplied models for luxuriant description and ambitious narrative structure.
Introduced to London’s literary circles through the journalist and poet Leigh Hunt, Keats began publishing verse in periodicals and issued his first small volume, Poems, in 1817. The book included youthful pieces alongside more assured achievements such as On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, which celebrated the excitement of discovery in translation. Keats experimented with sonnets and couplets, often in a Miltonic or Spenserian vein, and reflected openly on his apprenticeship to prior masters. Although the collection drew modest attention, it established his presence among Romantic contemporaries and set the stage for more ambitious projects grounded in myth, romance, and reflective meditation.
In 1818 he published Endymion, A Poetic Romance, a long mythological narrative written in heroic couplets. Its extravagance and occasional diffuseness drew harsh notices in prominent reviews, which attacked both the poem and the coterie associated with Keats. The experience was bruising but not career‑ending. He turned to blank verse and began Hyperion, an austere epic fragment on Titan–Olympian struggle, later reimagined as The Fall of Hyperion with a self‑questioning, visionary framework. These experiments show his rapid technical evolution from ornate fluency toward compressed, sculptural effects, while retaining his central preoccupations with beauty, suffering, aspiration, and the limits of human knowledge.
Keats’s annus mirabilis came in 1819, when he composed a cluster of odes and romances that define his maturity. Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, and related lyrics combine sensuous immediacy with philosophical poise, often staging a dialogue between fleeting experience and the imagined permanence of art. Narrative poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, and Lamia extend these concerns into story, shifting among medieval, Italianate, and classical settings. Around the same time his letters articulated negative capability—the capacity to dwell in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Keats’s health declined sharply around 1820 with symptoms then commonly identified as consumption. Advised to seek a milder climate, he traveled to Italy with a close friend and settled in Rome for the winter. Despite devoted care, he died there in early 1821 and was buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. His final months curtailed new composition, yet his correspondence from earlier years remained a crucial part of his legacy, revealing a robust intellect, aesthetic skepticism, and humane wit. The 1820 volume—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems—had already secured his standing among attentive readers.
Posthumous reputation transformed Keats from a promising, embattled young poet into a central figure of English literature. By the later nineteenth century, his odes were widely taught and admired for their verbal richness and balanced poise, influencing poets across Europe and the United States. Twentieth‑century critics drew on his letters to frame discussions of aesthetic autonomy, the imagination, and lyric thinking, while scholarship has since situated him amid print culture, medical history, and global Romanticism. Today his work is read for its sensuous textures and ethical depth, its meditations on mortality and art, and its enduring capacity to renew wonder.
Historical Context
John Keats (born 31 October 1795, Moorfields, London; died 23 February 1821, Rome) wrote within the Regency era, a period of volatile politics and brilliant artistic experiment. Educated at Enfield under John Clarke and mentored by Charles Cowden Clarke, he trained as a dresser and apothecary-surgeon at Guy’s Hospital (1815–1816), securing his license in 1816 before turning decisively to poetry. The pressures of London’s expanding, commercial society and his own modest origins—son of a livery-stable manager—formed a counterpoint to his aspiration toward high art. Across sonnets, odes, romances, and fragments, he forged an intensely personal yet historically situated response to the cultural energies and anxieties of early nineteenth-century Britain.
Keats belonged to the second generation of British Romantics with Byron and Shelley, writing after the Napoleonic Wars ended at Waterloo (1815). The aftermath brought social unrest, the Corn Laws (1815), economic dislocation, and fierce debates over liberty and reform. He gravitated toward Leigh Hunt’s liberal circle, nourished by metropolitan journalism and dissenting conversation. Political repression—censorship, prosecutions, and surveillance—shadowed writers in the late 1810s. While Keats avoided polemical verse, his celebration of imaginative freedom, sympathy for suffering, and dignifying of ordinary life echoed the period’s reform energies. His poems often turn from noisy public life to inward vision without abandoning an ethical attention to human vulnerability.
Keats’s career unfolded within a vibrant yet combative print culture. His first poem appeared in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1816). The slim volume Poems (C. and J. Ollier, 1817) announced his ambitions; Endymion (Taylor & Hessey, 1818) met notorious attacks in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review (John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson Croker were implicated). The myth that criticism killed him is false, but the assaults shaped his reception. The 1820 volume—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems—secured his standing among discerning readers. Keats lacked aristocratic patronage; instead, a network of friends, editors, and publishers (Taylor & Hessey, John Hamilton Reynolds, Charles Brown) sustained him.
A powerful current of Hellenism flowed through Britain after Lord Elgin’s marbles reached London (displayed from 1816) and antiquities entered the British Museum and private collections. Keats’s response ranged from the sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817) to mythic narratives and the great odes. His Greek imagination blended bookish study—Chapman’s Homer thrilled him in 1816—with galleries, casts, and conversation, especially with the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. Rather than antiquarian exactness, he pursued what Greek art made thinkable: a tragic, sensuous beauty capable of bearing historical pain. Hyperion, Lamia, and the imagined urns and altars of the odes stage that synthesis of sculpture, rite, and living feeling.
Keats’s epic ambitions engaged the European tradition after Homer: he steeped himself in Milton and later grappled with Dante. Hyperion’s blank verse, austere and architectural, tests a Miltonic idiom while pondering fallen gods and the succession of forms—an allegory of artistic change. Dissatisfied, he recast it as The Fall of Hyperion, a dream-vision whose pilgrim-poet, judged by a priestess, recalls Dante’s moral scrutiny and visionary topography. The shift from impersonal grandeur to experiential trial marks his growing conviction that genuine poetry must pass through suffering. In these fragments, the history of poetry itself becomes a drama of loss, renewal, and the costs of prophetic seeing.
From the start Keats cultivated an English lineage. Spenser’s luxuriant diction and stanzaic architectures feed his early experiments—Imitation of Spenser and later romances—and shape the Spenserian stanzas of The Eve of St. Agnes. Medievalism and ballad revival—energized by Percy’s Reliques and Scott—inform Robin Hood and La Belle Dame sans Merci, where chivalric surfaces disclose darker psychological undercurrents. His affectionate nods to Elizabethan conviviality in the Mermaid Tavern pieces remember an imagined fellowship of poets (Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson). These retrospects are not antiquarian retreats: they supply modern feeling with forms elastic enough to hold dream, narrative, and song while exploring desire, danger, and the half-lit zones of memory.
The concentrated lyric achievement of 1819—composed largely at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, and during a sojourn at Winchester—grew from long apprenticeship. The odes (to a Nightingale; on a Grecian Urn; on Melancholy; on Indolence; to Psyche) refine a poetics he had theorized in letters: negative capability (a letter of December 1817), the chameleon poet, and disinterestedness. Their historical pressure is palpable: amid postwar distress and cultural disputation, Keats holds intensity and uncertainty in poised forms. Mortality, imaginative flight, and the ethics of beauty converge; urns and birds become thinking devices for time, art, and human pain. Their modernity lies in testing consolation without forfeiting truth.
Keats’s friendships and loves supplied the social matrix for many occasional pieces, epistles, and intimate lyrics. Leigh Hunt championed him; Reynolds, Cowden Clarke, and John Taylor advised and encouraged. Charles Armitage Brown offered practical assistance and companionship at Hampstead; Joseph Severn nursed him in Rome. Family demands were pressing: his brother George emigrated to America in 1818, generating a transatlantic correspondence and poems of distance; his brother Tom’s death from tuberculosis (1 December 1818) intensified the strain. The attachment to Fanny Brawne at Wentworth Place (1818–1820) inflects ardent and anguished love poems, where private feeling intersects with public forms while health, money, and reputation faltered.
The walking tour of northern England and Scotland in summer 1818 with Brown threaded Keats into Romantic travel culture. He climbed Ben Nevis, visited Staffa’s Fingal’s Cave, saw Ailsa Craig, and paid homage at Robert Burns’s tomb in Dumfries. These encounters generated sonnets and dialogues that braid geology, music (the bagpipe), and national tradition with questions about poetic inheritance. Scotland’s landscapes, tourist circuits, and bardic memory were not mere scenery; they offered a living archive of song, labor, and loss. The trip left him physically ill and emotionally worn, yet it recalibrated his scale: the sublime became tactile, the local historical, the personal made public.
Keats’s writing traces a geography of Regency Britain. The bustle of London—Guy’s Hospital, the Examiner office, Vauxhall Gardens, galleries, booksellers’ shops—frames urban pieces and sonnets addressed to friends. Hampstead Heath, with its clear air and salon-like parlors at Wentworth Place, nurtured the 1819 masterpieces. Earlier, Teignmouth (spring 1818), the Isle of Wight, and Margate provided coastal spaces for reflection and experiment; later, Winchester’s cathedral city and the Itchen meadows inform the ripeness of To Autumn (September 1819). These places are never neutral backdrops: they refract social class, circulating ideas, and the changing textures of leisure, labor, and travel in a modernizing nation.
The charged politics of 1819—the year of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester and the subsequent Six Acts—shadow Keats’s poise. Although he rarely writes overt protest, his poems honor dignity where institutions fail. His occasional tributes, such as to Leigh Hunt on release from prison, or to the Polish patriot Kosciuszko, register liberal sympathies shaped by the Examiner’s milieu. He recoils from cant and “vulgar superstition,” yet refuses doctrinaire certainty. The commitment is ethical as much as aesthetic: to attend to suffering without sensationalism, to rescue delight from coercion, and to imagine community—whether Elizabethan conviviality, Scottish song, or classical fellowship—under the pressures of surveillance and scarcity.
Keats’s letters—especially to his brothers, to Reynolds, to Bailey, and later to Fanny Brawne—codify principles that animate both playful lyrics and severe epics. He distinguishes fancy from imagination, praises intensity over system, and proposes the “vale of Soul-making” (1819) as a counter to facile optimism. In poems titled Fancy or in epistolary verse to friends, such theories become performance: quicksilver association, dramatic self-testing, and generous sociability. Even comic or occasional pieces carry a serious undertow about how pleasure educates the heart. This fabric of thought and feeling binds love songs, nature lyrics, and mythic narratives into a single experiment in cultivating capable, compassionate vision.
Keats’s oeuvre converses with contemporaries and precursors through sonnets of address and friendly competitions. The sonnet form—revived since Charlotte Smith and Wordsworth—served public homage and private challenge: he writes to Homer, Spenser, and Byron, and answers Dante. With Leigh Hunt he traded prompt-driven sonnets (On the Grasshopper and Cricket, To the Nile), sharpening craft within a convivial republic of letters. Encounters with Wordsworth, Lamb, and Hazlitt—famously at Haydon’s studio in late 1817—shaped his sense of tradition and rivalry. These dialogues entwine admiration and self-definition, situating Keats’s voice at the crossroads of magazine culture, salon talk, and the enduring English canon.
Nature in Keats is never merely picturesque. Botanical exactness, seasonal labor, and meteorology ground even visionary flights. His medical training—anatomy, observation, suffering—disciplines the gaze. Sea, fields, and orchards bear economic histories: harvests, gleaning, and transport. To Autumn’s Winchester landscape, for instance, registers England’s agrarian rhythms without pastoral illusion. Elsewhere, the sea’s restlessness and mountain weather frame reflections on endurance and change. Such attention joins scientific curiosity to sensuous apprehension, fusing the physical and the ethical. Soundscapes—the nightingale, the bagpipe, urban din—become modes of knowledge. In this way, Keats makes seasons and elements collaborate in a poetics of time, mortality, and shared livelihood.
Formally, Keats moves from apprenticeship to refinement in a compressed span. Endymion (1818) tests capacious heroic couplets for mythic romance; Isabella and Lamia recalibrate narrative into tauter ethical parables. Hyperion embraces severe blank verse, then submits to revisionary doubt in The Fall of Hyperion. Around and after these experiments, the sonnet becomes a versatile instrument—epitaph, manifesto, travel vignette—while the odes discover a capaciousness between story and song. Ballads and songs recover stark clarity after elaborate architectures. This evolution reflects his changing sense of audience and vocation: fewer grand designs, more pressure per line; less ornament for its own sake, more thought carried in cadence.
Illness and bereavement are the biographical gravity of Keats’s art. Tuberculosis had claimed his mother (1814) and brother Tom (1818) before it reached him in early 1820. After a pulmonary hemorrhage, he sailed for Italy in September 1820 with the painter Joseph Severn, wintering at 26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome, under Dr. James Clark’s care. Poverty and frustrated love compounded the ordeal. He died at twenty-five, desiring his tombstone to read “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” The nearness of death deepened his attention to transience and beauty: not a cult of decay, but a steeling of sympathy and a lucid gratitude for sensation.
Posthumous reputation reframed the whole body of work. Friends guarded the flame—Severn’s vigil in Rome, Brown’s recollections, Hunt’s advocacy—while Byron and others mocked or doubted. By mid-Victorian decades, admiration blossomed; Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, and later critics found in Keats a touchstone of sensuous exactitude and ethical tact. Scholarly editions and biographies multiplied; Sidney Colvin’s Life of John Keats (1917) consolidated archival knowledge and helped shape a canonical narrative of struggle, experiment, and belated recognition. Memorials arose—Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Wentworth Place as museum—enshrining places tied to composition. Read together, the poems and the later “life” trace art’s passage from embattled present to durable culture.
Synopsis (Selection)
Life of John Keats (Sidney Colvin)
A concise literary biography tracing Keats’s apprenticeship, friendships, major poems, love and illness, and early death, situating his work within Romantic circles and early reception.
Endymion (Books I–IV)
A four-book romance in which the shepherd Endymion pursues an ideal, visionary love through dreamlike descents, sea-journeys, and metamorphic realms, testing faith in beauty and imagination.
Lamia (Parts I–II)
A serpent transformed into a woman wins Lycius’s love in Corinth until a philosopher’s disenchanting gaze exposes the illusion, precipitating tragedy.
Isabella
A tragic narrative of lovers sundered by greed, where secret devotion turns macabre and grief becomes a private ritual of remembrance.
Hyperion (Books I–III)
An unfinished blank-verse epic recounting the fallen Titans’ despair and the dawning ascent of Apollo, framing change as a painful but necessary shift to a new order.
The Fall of Hyperion
A visionary recasting of Hyperion in which a dreaming narrator undergoes a trial before Moneta and witnesses the fall of the old gods, probing what separates true vision from mere fancy.
The Eve of St. Agnes
A medieval romance set on a frost-bound feast night, where Porphyro steals into Madeline’s chamber and the pair risk escape amid ritual, hush, and danger.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A ballad of a knight enthralled by a mysterious lady who leaves him desolate and haunted by pale kings and warriors in a dream of warning.
Ode to a Nightingale
A meditation on mortality and the desire to escape into song, where the nightingale’s seeming immortality contrasts the poet’s fading world before he returns to questioning wakefulness.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Addresses an urn’s silent scenes of pursuit and sacrifice to ponder art’s stillness versus life’s flux, arriving at a terse aphorism on beauty and truth.
Ode on Melancholy
Counsels against oblivion, urging the reader to savor beauty and joy at their height, even as their very perishability sharpens feeling.
Ode on Indolence
A morning vision of Love, Ambition, and Poesy passing by, which the speaker elects to renounce in favor of a suspended, idle consciousness.
Ode to Psyche
Vows to build a temple to Psyche within the mind, proposing an inward, private religion of imagination and gentle ritual.
To Autumn
An ode to the season’s ripeness and labor gently tilting toward decline, attentive to sense-rich tasks, dusk, and measured endings.
Other Odes and Hymns (Ode; Ode to Apollo; Ode to Fanny; Hymn to Apollo; Fragment of an Ode to Maia)
Brief invocations to deities, the beloved, or the ode tradition, blending mythic homage with personal feeling and occasional fragmentary starts.
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
A sonnet that records the shock of discovery on first encountering Homer through Chapman’s translation, likening the experience to new worlds and a discoverer’s astonishment.
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art
A love-sonnet that longs for the star’s steadfastness yet refuses cold distance, seeking constancy while remaining warmly, humanly alive.
Robin Hood
A celebratory ballad praising the greenwood’s fellowship, freedom, and the outlaw’s generous code.
Calidore
A Spenserian romance-fragment sketching a courteous knight and pastoral repose, an early exercise in chivalric narrative and style.
The Cap and Bells
A comic fairy-tale in nimble rhymes that satirizes courtly fashions and caprice through a light, fantastical intrigue.
I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill
An early descriptive poem that moves from sensuous nature-noticing into mythic reverie, positing how beauty stirs poetic origin.
Sleep and Poetry
A youthful program-poem that reflects on poetic ambition, pays dues to earlier masters, and seeks a more vigorous, truth-seeking art.
Specimen of an Induction to a Poem
A projected porch to a romance, conjuring faery atmosphere and narrative invitation before breaking off.
The Eve of Saint Mark
A gothic-tinged fragment that lingers over a cathedral town’s hush and expectation on a saint’s-eve night.
Fancy
A playful argument that fancy can select delights to soften care, proposing imaginative choice as a gentle antidote to sorrow.
Poems on Art and Artists (Lines on the Mermaid Tavern; Addressed to Haydon; To Haydon; Lines On Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair)
Tributes to artistic company and forebears that honor convivial Elizabethans, modern painterly ambition, and Miltonic legacy as sources of inspiration.
Epistles and Verse Letters (Epistles; Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds; To My Brother George [two poems]; A Prophecy: to George Keats in America; To George Felton Mathew; To Charles Cowden Clarke; To G. A. W.)
Conversational poems that mingle personal news, literary ideals, and counsel to friends and family, often sketching Keats’s evolving poetics and hopes.
Fanny Brawne Lyrics (Ode to Fanny; Lines to Fanny; Lines Supposed to Have Been Addressed to Fanny Brawne; Sonnet to Fanny)
Intimate addresses that balance ardor with unease, charting the pressures of love, time, and illness on attachment.
Nature and Travel Sketches (To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent; O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell; Staffa; Teignmouth; Dawlish Fair; Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns’s Country; Ben Nevis - a Dialogue)
Topographical and nature pieces that relish sea-caves, open air, and Highland vistas while contrasting urban confinement with restorative landscapes.
Short Songs and Ballads (A Song About Myself; Song: Hush, hush! tread softly! hush, hush my dear!; Song: I had a dove and the sweet dove died; Song: The stranger lighted from his steed; A Galloway Song; Daisy’s Song; Folly’s Song; What the Thrush Said; Song: Spirit here that reignest!; Faery Songs)
Brief narrative and lyrical pieces ranging from playful and nursery-like to plaintive love and nature songs, often made for light music or friendly amusement.
Humor, Satire, and Light Verse (Women, Wine, and Snuff; On Oxford A Parody; Modern Love; The Gadfly; Two or Three; You Say You Love; Fill for me a brimming bowl; A Draught of Sunshine; Sharing Eve’s Apple; The Devon Maid; A Party of Lovers)
Witty and convivial poems about wine, flirtation, and social foibles, with sprightly parodies and fables that favor nimble rhyme and quick turns.
Reflections on Fame, Time, and Hope (Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy; The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!; To Hope; Happy is England! I Could Be Content; Keen, Fitful Gusts are Whisp’ring Here and There)
Concise meditations on ambition, loss, patriot feeling, and seasonal mood that weigh desire against transience.
Classical and Mythic Vignettes (O! Were I one of the Olympian twelve; Apollo and the Graces; On a Picture of Leander)
Short addresses and tableaux drawing on Greek myth to voice aspiration and admiration, often using classical figures to mirror modern longings.
Patriotic and Occasional Pieces (To Kosciusko; Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison; On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt; To the Ladies who Saw Me Crown’d; To Some Ladies; Addressed to the Same; On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies; To a Young Lady who Sent Me a Laurel Crown)
Public-facing verses that register political sympathies, mark ceremonies of gratitude, and honor benefactors and friends.
Border and Character Sketches (Meg Merrilies)
A vivid character study in ballad strokes, presenting a gypsy matriarch with brisk sympathy and local color.
Spenserian Experiments and Faery Pieces (Imitation of Spenser; Faery Songs; Song of Four Faeries; Spenserian Stanza; Spenserian Stanzas on Charles Armitage Brown)
Exercises in Spenserian diction and stanza that test allegory, pastoral ease, and faery pageantry as vehicles for beauty.
Sonnets: Art, Mortality, and Mind (When I have fears that I may cease to be; Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell; The Human Seasons; Sonnet on the Sonnet; To Sleep; A Dream, after Reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca; On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again; As from the darkening gloom a silver dove; Before he went to feed with owls and bats; This pleasant tale is like a little copse; How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time!; Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve; Written in Answer to a Sonnet Ending thus:)
Sonnets that weigh the shock of art, the brevity of life, and the workings of thought, often turning the tight form into a test of intense feeling and clarity.
Sonnets: Places, Tributes, and Occasions (To Chatterton; Sonnet Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition; Sonnet Written upon the Top of Ben Nevis; To Homer; To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall; On Visiting the Tomb of Burns; Sonnet on Leigh Hunt’s Poem ‘The Story of Rimini’; To John Hamilton Reynolds; Sonnet Written in the Cottage where Burns was Born; To the Nile; Sonnet on Peace; Sonnet on Hearing the Bagpipe and; To Byron; To Spenser; Sonnet on the Sea; Sonnet to Ailsa Rock; Translation from a Sonnet of Ronsard; Sonnet to a Cat; Sonnet: After dark vapours have oppress’d our plains; On the Grasshopper and Cricket)
Address-sonnets to poets, patrons, landscapes, and moments that commemorate encounters, honor influences, and set places and occasions into compact praise or reflection.
Friendship and Family Lyrics (To My Brothers; On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour; To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses)
Short dedicatory pieces that affirm affection, gratitude, and the sustaining warmth of friendship and kin.
Miscellaneous and Fragmentary Pieces (Stanzas; Stanzas to Miss Wylie; Lines; An Extempore; The Castle Builder - Fragments of a Dialogue; The Poet - A Fragment; Fragment of an Ode to Maia; Oh, I am frighten’d with most hateful thoughts!; How fever’d is the man, who cannot look; Acrostic; The Eve of Saint Mark [fragment already noted])
Brief occasional stanzas and unfinished starts that show Keats testing openings, moods, and themes without full development.
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
A nature sonnet that hears poetry in the year’s extremes, finding one cheerful strain in summer and another warmth in winter silence.
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
A convivial tribute imagining the lively fellowship of Elizabethan poets and the tavern spirit that nourished them.
The Complete Poems of John Keats
Life of John Keats by Sidney Colvin
Preface
To the name and work of Keats our best critics and scholars have in recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. But their studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material. Ever since it was my part, some thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on Keats to the series of short studies edited by Lord Morley, (the English Men of Letters series), I have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to supply this want. Once released from official duties, I began to prepare for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the publication of Keats’ first volume, are the result. I have sought in them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special student. I have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on record, and moreover, owing to the openheartedness of the man and to the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare almost more than any other to our knowledge. Further, considering for how much friendship counted in Keats’ life, I have tried to call up the group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations, so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted before. I believe also that I have been able to trace more closely than has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in works of art, of his inspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time to make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. To illustrate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after life in the minds and hearts of English writers and readers until to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother language is English. To follow the extension of Keats’ fame to the Continent is outside my aim. He has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. But during the last thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon Keats done abroad, especially in France, where our literature has during the last generation been studied with such admirable intelligence and care.
In an attempt of this scope, I have necessarily had to repeat matters of common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and sufficiently already. But working from materials hitherto in part untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while my task was in progress, I have drawn from them some conclusions, both biographical and critical, which I believe to be my own and which I hope may stand. I have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of poems which everybody knows, in cases where I wanted the reader to have their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. I have also quoted very largely from the poet’s letters, even now not nearly as much read as things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his mind — a great and most interesting part — which is expressed in them but has not found its way into his poems. It must be added that when I found things in my former small book which I did not see my way to better and which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, I have not hesitated sometimes to incorporate them — to the amount perhaps of forty or fifty pages in all.
I wish I could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the amount and variety of friendly help I have had in its preparation. Thanks for such help are due in more quarters than I can well call to mind. First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have free and constant access to his unrivalled collection of original documents connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father (referred to in the notes as ‘Houghton MSS.’) and those acquired in recent years by himself (referred to as ‘Crewe MSS.’). Speaking generally, it may be assumed that new matter for which no authority is quoted is taken from these sources. To Miss Henrietta Woodhouse of Weston Lea, Albury, I am indebted for valuable documentary and other information concerning her uncle Richard Woodhouse. Next in importance among collections of Keats documents to that of Lord Crewe is that of Mr J. P. Morgan in New York, the chief contents of which have by his leave been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian Miss Greene. For other illustrative documents existing in America, I believe of value, I should like to be able to thank their owners, Mr Day and Mr Louis Holman of Boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of their help the issue of a limited edition de luxe of the book specially illustrated from their material, a condition the publishers judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend Professor W. P. Ker. For information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley; to Professor Ernest Weekley, the best living authority on surnames; to Mr A. H. Bullen; to Mr Falconer Madan and Mr J. W. Mackail; to Mr Thomas J. Wise; to Mr H. C. Shelley; to Mr J. D. Milner, Director of the National Portrait Gallery; and to my former colleague Mr A. H. Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr George Whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries concerning Keats in the books of Guy’s Hospital. Dr Hambley Rowe of Bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous Cornishman on Keats’ possible Cornish descent. I must not omit thanks to Mr Emery Walker for his skill and pains in preparing the illustrations for my book. With reference to these, I may note that the head from the portrait painted by Severn in 1859 and now in Lord Crewe’s possession was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the poet’s death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general air of any of the extant portraits. Of the miniature done by Severn from life in 1818, copied and recopied by himself, Charles Brown and others, and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the original, now deposited by the Dilke Trustees in the National Portrait Gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. I have preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known — nay, hackneyed — and very distressing deathbed drawing made by Severn at Rome. The profile from Haydon’s life-mask of the poet is taken, not, like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than the original cast itself in its present state. Both cast and electrotype are in the National Portrait Gallery. So is the oil-painting of Keats seated reading, begun by Severn soon after the poet’s death and finished apparently two years later, which I have reproduced, well known though it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to his sister. Besides the portraits of Keats, I have added from characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at the outset of his career, Leigh Hunt and Haydon. A new feature in my book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck and stimulated his imagination. The reproductions of autographs, one of his own and one of Haydon’s, speak for themselves.
Chapter I
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP
For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened, to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity. Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth’s birth and training? What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the counter-revolution, in the younger generation, — the one worldly, mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure or of crime, and may conceive that Shelley drew some of his instincts for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.
Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient Greece, of mediæval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and ‘if by traduction came his mind’, — to quote Dryden with a difference, — it was through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than from Shakespeare’s can we draw any argument as to the influence of heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin, in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one generation on the father’s side and two on the mother’s. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later, about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer’s daughter, Frances Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the country, at Ponder’s End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet John Keats, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.
The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears. Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land’s End.
There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and ‘Keats’ is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is the Middle-English adjective ‘kete’, a word of Scandinavian origin meaning bold, gallant. In the form ‘Keyte’ the name prevails principally in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or Keates) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern, especially the south-western, counties.
Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet. One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell’s school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of Nelson’s bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard Godwin Keats of the ‘Superb’, and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the pseudonym ‘Zack’, gave promise of a literary career which has been unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have made the prowess of their namesake of the ‘Superb’ their pride and boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous person, their mother’s brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant of marines who served with some credit on Duncan’s flagship at Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special mark for the enemy’s musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos, — that is round about Camelford, — and also as far eastward as Callington and westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come originally from Berkshire.
But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet’s father according to our information. A ‘Thomas Keast’, however, is registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes, between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name, limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps). So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely conjectural, and all we really know about the poet’s parents are the dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his lifetime as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: ‘of so remarkably fine a commonsense and native respectability,’ writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father’s school the poet and his brother were brought up, ‘that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.’ And again:— ‘I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature, and manner John resembled his father.’ Of Frances Keats, the poet’s mother, we learn more vaguely that she was ‘tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment’: and again that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her family as follows:— ‘my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother.’
As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl and woman their daughter, the poet’s mother, was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and was no credit to her family. Whatever truth there may be in these charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother’s roof and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:— ‘He was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue.’ Another trait of the poet’s childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to the last word people said and then laughing.
