Of the Fancy's silken leash; Quickly break her prison-string And such joys as these she'll bring.— Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home. 90 Thou shalt have that tressed hair There she steps! and tell me who Has a mistress so divine? Be the palate ne'er so fine She cannot sicken. Break the mesh Of the Fancy's silken leash Where she's tether'd to the heart Quick break her prison string... ODE. [Written on the blank page before Beaumont and Fletcher's Tragi-Comedy "The Fair Maid of the Inn."] BARDS of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns; 5 10 From the fact that this poem is written in Keats's Beaumont and Fletcher, now in Sir Charles Dilke's possession, and from internal evidence, we may judge it to be addressed to the brother poets of passion and mirth who wrote the tragi-comedy of The Fair Maid of the Inn, and not to the poets at large, as indicated by the title given in The Golden Treasury, to wit Ode on the Poets. (4) Cancelled line in the manuscript after line 4– With the earth ones I am talking. (5-6) Cancelled manuscript reading,— that of heaven communes With the spheres of Suns and Moons... (10) In the manuscript, another's. (19-20) In the manuscript there is the following uncancelled reading of this couplet But melodious truth divine Philosophic numbers fine,... Compare Milton's Comus, lines 476-8, How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute,... (21) Cancelled reading, Stories for Tales. (29) Cancelled reading, loves for souls. (30-1) In the manuscript we read To mortals of the little Week They must sojourn— The rest of line 31 has had too much cut off to be legible; but I do Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, 35 40 not think it can have rhymed either with week or with delights; and probably its rhymelessness led to its rejection, and to the reading of the text. (40) The idea of the double life of the poetic soul is not uncommon; but perhaps the most noteworthy parallel is to be found in the two following stanzas from the poem which Wordsworth wrote in 1803 on the banks of Nith, near the poet's [Burns's] residence" (the third poem of the Memorials of a Tour in Scotland) : Through busiest street and loneliest glen Are felt the flashes of his pen ; He rules 'mid winter snows, and when Deep in the general heart of men What need of fields in some far clime Shall dwell together till old Time LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN. SOULS of Poets dead and gone, I have heard that on a day An astrologer's old quill 5 ΙΟ 15 When Mr. Palgrave issued his beautiful Golden Treasury he felt it necessary to explain in connexion with this poem that "the Mermaid was the club-house of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other choice spirits of that age." Probably such an explanation is considerably less necessary now than then. In Sir Charles Dilke's copy of Endymion is a fair manuscript of this poem, dated 1818. which shows the variations noted below. (4) The manuscript reads Fairer for Choicer. (9) The manuscript has Old in place of O. |