O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair plumed Syren!
Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute, Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay Must I burn through; once more humbly
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.'This sonnet appears to have been written on the 22nd of January 1818, in the folio Shakespeare containing the manuscript of the preceding poem; but I think Keats must have drafted it before writing it in the Shakespeare; and there is a second manuscript in Sir Charles Dilke's copy of Endymion.
A third may perhaps be presumed to be in America, as Keats, writing to his brothers on the 23rd of January 1818, transcribed the sonnet for them with the following remarks: --"I think a little change has taken place in my intellect lately;
I cannot bear to be uninterested or unemployed,
I, who for so long a time have been addicted to passiveness. Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
As an instance of this -- observe -- I sat down yesterday to read 'King Lear' once again: the thing appeared to demand the prologue of a sonnet. I wrote it, and began to read. (I know you would like to see it.)"A copy of the sonnet follows, and then the words, "So you see I am getting at it with a sort of determination and strength,...." So far ass I have ascertained, the first appearance of the sonnet was with this letter, in the Life,
Letters &c. (1848),
Volume I, pages 96 and 97; but Medwin, in his Life of Shelley (1847,
Volume II, page 106) records the belief that the sonnet had already appeared in a periodical.' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.
H.
Buxton Forman,
Crowell publ. 1895.
