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Keats, Robertson, and That Most Hateful Land

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

H. E. Briggs*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

      More dismal cares
      Seize on me unawares,—
      Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
      To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
      Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
      Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
      That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
      Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
      Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
      Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
      Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
      Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
      Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
      Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
      There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
      And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1944 , pp. 184 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

Note 1 in page 184 These are vss. 28–43 of the poem, usually called simply To———-. It was first published by Richard Mimes, later Lord Houghton, in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, in 1848, ii, 34–35. No manuscript is known.

Note 2 in page 184 John Keats (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), p. 378.

Note 3 in page 184 Colvin, op. cit., p. 374; Houghton, op. cit., ii, 33.

Note 4 in page 184 The Poems of John Keats, 5th ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1926), pp. 531–532 and p. 550.

Note 5 in page 185 John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925), ii, 375–376.

Note 6 in page 185 The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1936), i, xvi.

Note 7 in page 185 Ibid., ii, 592.

Note 8 in page 185 Ibid., ii, 592–593.

Note 9 in page 186 M. B. Forman, ed., The Letters of John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 147.

Note 10 in page 186 Ibid., p. 152.

Note 11 in page 186 Ibid., p. 202.

Note 12 in page 186 Ibid., p. 219.

Note 13 in page 186 Ibid., p. 224.

Note 14 in page 186 Ibid., p. 283.

Note 15 in page 186 Ibid., p. 284.

Note 16 in page 186 Ibid., p. 286.

Note 17 in page 186 Ibid., p. 289.

Note 18 in page 187 Ibid., p. 291.

Note 19 in page 187 Ibid., p. 318.

Note 20 in page 187 Ibid., p. 334.

Note 21 in page 187 Ibid., pp. 334–335.

Note 22 in page 187 “Recollections of Keats,” Atlantic Monthly, vii (January, 1861), 87.

Note 23 in page 187 “Keats's Realms of Gold,“ PMLA, xlix (1934), 246–257.

Note 24 in page 188 See The History of America (2 vols., Dublin: Whitestone, etc., 1777), i, 250–253, for a general account of the frozen lakes and rivers; and Note xxix, i, 448: “Newfoundland, part of Nova Scotia and Canada, are the countries which lie in the same parallel of latitude with the kingdom of France; and in all of them the water of the rivers is frozen during winter to the thickness of several feet. . . .” This fact was surprising to both Robertson and Keats; in England and Scotland the larger streams seldom or never freeze.

Note 25 in page 188 Ibid., i, 257–258.

Note 26 in page 188 Forman, ed. cit., p. 208.

Note 27 in page 189 Robertson, op. cit., i, 248.

Note 28 in page 189 Ibid., i, 249.

Note 29 in page 189 See, for example, idem., i, 212–213.

Note 30 in page 189 Ibid., i, 381.

Note 31 in page 189 Ibid., i, 254.

Note 32 in page 189 See idem, i, 85, 114, 132, 136.

Note 33 in page 190 Ibid., i, 204.

Note 34 in page 190 Ibid., i, 254.

Note 35 in page 190 Ibid., i, 252.

Note 36 in page 190 Ibid., i, 250.

Note 37 in page 190 Ibid., i, 257–258.

Note 38 in page 191 Ibid., i, 260–261.

Note 39 in page 191 Ibid., Note xxxv, i, 455–156.

Note 40 in page 191 Ibid., i, 262.

Note 41 in page 191 Loc. cit.

Note 42 in page 192 In An Essay on Criticism, Part i, vs. 70, Pope speaks of “Unerring Nature.” There are several quotations or adaptations from Pope's work in Keats's letters.

Note 43 in page 192 So far as I have noticed, Robertson does not say specifically that the “bad flowers” of America are without scent, as Keats does in his poem. But Robertson frequently mentions “shrubs and herbs and weeds,” never says anything of “good” flowers with a fragrant odor, and in fact indicates the presence of very unpleasant smells: “When any region lies neglected and destitute of cultivation, the air stagnates in the woods, putrid exhalations arise from the waters,” etc., i, 258. These details appear three pages after Robertson's discussion of the coldness of North America, two pages before his discussion of the degeneracy of such imported European animals as oxen, and three pages before his discussion of the birds with “no sweet song.” The position of the details about “herbs and weeds,” therefore, suggests they were the source of Keats's image of the “bad flowers.“

Note 44 in page 193 Forman, ed. cit., pp. 398–399.

Note 45 in page 193 Ibid., p. 399, n. 1. S. C. Arthur, Audubon (New Orleans: Harmanson, 1937), p. 92, accepts the story of the transaction as a fact, except that the boat was at the bottom of the Ohio, not the Mississippi.

Note 46 in page 193 Op. cit., p. 550.

Note 47 in page 193 Ibid., p. 532.

Note 48 in page 193 Loc. cit.

Note 49 in page 194 Op. cit., ii, 593.

Note 50 in page 194 This statement should not be taken to mean that Keats forgot Robertson after April, 1819. The historian's influence appears, for example, in the Vision or revised Hyperion, on which Keats was working in August and September, 1819. See the Vision, i, 2–6, and especially i, 271–274:

As I had found
A grain of gold upon a mountain's side,
And twing'd with avarice strain'd out my eyes
To search its sullen entrails rich with ore,
So [etc.].

A point which Robertson makes repeatedly is that the Indians were content to pick up grains of gold in the streams and on the mountain sides, but the Spaniards were eager to open gold mines. “To penetrate into the bowels of the earth, and to refine the rude ore, were operations too complicated” for the Indians, Robertson says, i, 120. “Bowels” may possibly have suggested “entrails” to Keats. Of the Mexican Indians Robertson writes, “The utmost effort of their labour in search of it [gold] was to wash the earth carried down by torrents from the mountains, and to pick out the grains of gold which subsided. . . . Thus, though the Spaniards had exerted all the power which they possessed in Mexico, and often with indecent rapacity . . . in hopes of satiating their thirst for gold,” etc., ii. 69. Here we find the “grain of gold upon a mountain's side” and the “avarice.” See also Robertson, i, 94, 96; ii, 14, 138, 177, 320, 328, 329.

Note 51 in page 195 Forman, éd. cit., pp. 146–147. To avoid overuse of sic I have refrained from indicating all of Keats's numerous peculiarities of spelling and punctuation.

Note 52 in page 195 Ibid., p. 152.

Note 53 in page 196 Op. cit., i, 252.

Note 54 in page 196 Ibid., i, 258. “Withered” came from Keats's personal observation. In March, 1819, in the same journal letter in which La Belle Dame appears, Keats wrote, “I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass.” See Forman, éd. cit., p. 316. Surely we have in Keats's ballad a combination of personal observation and details taken from Robertson's history.

Note 55 in page 196 Forman, ed. cit., p. 330.

Note 56 in page 196 Ibid., p. 237.

Note 57 in page 196 The “cold hillside” may also be reminiscent of the “Panorama of the Ships at the north Pole” which Keats saw shortly before writing La Belle Dame. See Forman, ed. cit., p. 329. This experience, I believe, reinforced the impressions that Keats had got from reading Robertson's book.

Note 58 in page 197 Robertson, op. cit., ii, 96. See also i, 325.

Note 59 in page 197 Forman, ed. cit., pp. 334–337. I quote the term “philosophical” because, in spite of Professor A. C. Bradley's high praise of the discussion, in the Keats Memorial Volume and again in A Miscellany (London : Macmillan, 1929), pp. 189–206, it seems to me chiefly interesting from a psychological point of view.

Note 60 in page 197 Forman, ed. cit., pp. 334–335.

Note 61 in page 197 Robertson, op. cit., i, 287.

Note 62 in page 197 Ibid., i, 288–289.

Note 63 in page 198 Forman, ed. cit., p. 335.

Note 64 in page 198 Ibid., p. 336.

Note 65 in page 198 Robertson, op. cit., i, 306–307.