Alexandra Paterson

A Greater Luxury: Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading

Keywords: Keats, mist, reading, poetic voice, Ode to a Nightingale, inuence In 1818 John Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds to describe a simile of human life: the Mansion of Many Apartments. In the second chamber of this Mansion, the Chamber of Maiden Thought, an initial infatuation with pleasant wonders wears off and one must negotiate, in the darkness, a world coloured by the awareness of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression. We are in a Mist, Keats describes it, and the doors surrounding the chamber are all dark all leading to dark passages . He writes that Wordsworths Genius is explorative of those dark Passages, which suggests that mist of the chamber may hinder creative, as well as personal, development. The letter continues, that the only way to explore the dark Passages leading to other chambers is to go on thinking.1 Thought leads one out of the darkness of the chamber, out of the Mist, but in a larger reading of Keatss encounters with mist, it is clear that the presence of mist also stimulates the imagination, and provokes this necessary thought. Mist is not only an inhibitor, but also a facilitator for thought and imagination in the right mental context, and it is this aspect of mist that I wish to explore, through the lens of Keatss own appreciation of

mist, made apparent in his representations of reading. The Mansion of Many Apartments letter was written on 3 May 1818, but Keats rst wrote to Reynolds about mist six days earlier, on 27 April. After expressing a desire to learn Greek, Keats immediately replaces this desire with a hypothetical reading experience he nds preferable: one in which Reynolds reads Greek aloud to him, and explains the meaning of the text. He calls the quality that characterizes this experience mistiness. I long to feast upon old Homer, he writes, as we have upon Shakespeare. and as I have lately upon Milton.if you understood Greek, and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, t would be, from its mistiness, perhaps a greater luxury than reading the thing ones self.
(Letters, i. 274)

Keats does not dene mistiness here, but it is clear that it is not simply Reynoldss reading aloud that produces luxury; it is the mistiness that arises from this reading experience that is signicant. The factors coming together to produce the experience are manifold: Reynolds would read aloud to Keats, in a language Keats does not understand; he would translate and interpret, offering his own, selective, reading of the text (that this is only now and then allows for gaps which Keatss own mind can ll); and

Romanticism 18.3 (2012): 260269

DOI: 10.3366/rom.2012.0097

Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/rom

Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading all of this combines into a social experience in which Keats and Reynolds are not only reading together but also collaborating in the creation of a mediated version of Homer in which the essence of the original text is sustained. The letter is also concerned with a real collaborative writing experience a planned volume of stories from Boccaccio that both Reynolds and Keats would contribute to and the description of the misty reading experience in the letter is not only preceded by Keatss thoughts about his creative future, but also followed by thoughts about his collaboration with Reynolds, suggesting a connection in Keatss own mind between these reading and writing experiences (Letters, i. 274). Keatss use of the term mistiness has not been explored extensively in scholarship, but a few critics have addressed it. Martin Aske and Jonathon Shears both couch it in terms of some form of anxiety of inuence. Shearss reading of Keatsian mist suggests it is an indication of Keatss sense of failure as an epic poet, and Aske nds that Keats needs the obscurity of mediating mist to protect him from an encounter with the original, which could be painful or importunate.2 He suggests that Keatss preference for a mediated version of Homer stems from a desire to avoid the original, but this is not necessarily the case. In the letter to Reynolds, Keatss preference for a mediated version of Homer is signied by its being a greater luxury, a phrase which indicates a positive desire for a mediated experience of Homer, rather than the avoidance Aske suggests. Aske does not dwell on this point, however, and since his 1985 book there has been a critical shift away from anxiety of inuence. Lucy Newlyn and Beth Lau, for example, have both argued successfully for Keatss receptive approach to others work and inuence.3 Yet Shearss 2009 book demonstrates that it may still be appealing to think about Keatss reading and inuence, especially regarding Milton, in

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these terms.4 Shears restricts his focus to Keatss narrative poetry, nding that mist signals Keatss failure to complete his own epic, but a broader consideration of Keatss reading of Miltons mist reveals that Keatss reading, particularly of Paradise Lost, illustrates a positive relationship with mediating mist. Keatss broader use of the term mist reects his willingness to be content with half knowledge (Letters, i. 194), and far from poetic failure, his appreciation of mistiness in his reading leads to creative power. The word mist and its variants, mists, and misty, appear frequently in Keatss poetry. As a point of comparison, Shakespeare and Milton, both admired by Keats, use the word and its variants sixteen and twelve times, respectively.5 Keats does a full thirty times.6 A third of Keatss uses come from Endymion alone, but it was a word he continued to use as his poetry matured, perhaps most famously in the rst line of To Autumn. The OED cites six different meanings for mist, and in Keatss poetry and letters, I nd at least three distinct meanings. The rst is the strictly literal, meteorological sense of mist, which he uses most often in Endymion; second, a signier of things mystical, supernatural or of the gods, which he uses, for example, in The Fall of Hyperion; and the third use describes a state of, or place in, the human mind or imagination this is the meaning he uses in the mistiness letter to Reynolds, and the Mansion of Many Apartments letter. Keats had been reading Milton at around the time he wrote the mistiness letter (Letters, i. 274), and his marginal notes and markings to Paradise Lost suggest that Miltons use of the word was particularly inuential to his thinking. Beth Lau notes that while Keatss Paradise Lost marginalia often emphasize pictorialism and vivid sensory impressions, they also demonstrate a strong appreciation of obscurity and indeniteness, and that Keats marks several passages in [Paradise Lost] in

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Romanticism He also underscored the following lines from Book V: Ye mists and exhalations, that now rise From hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey, Till the sun paint your eecy skirts with gold, (V. 18587) Once again, Keats is struck by the image of the sun mingling with the mist, but here the mist also has a divine connection, as we learn that the mists and exhalations are rising [i]n honour to the worlds great author (V. 188). God, the great author, is hailed by mist, and thereby also signied by mist. Keats chooses to hail Homer, a great author himself, and of godlike status among poets, through mist. Milton uses the words mist and exhalation almost interchangeably here, and if we equate Miltons use of exhalation with mist, then mist, an exhalation of the earth, exists for the very purpose of being inhaled. If we also consider Keatss early sonnet On First Looking into Chapmans Homer, in these terms, Keatss description of his reading as an inhalation of poetic power, of breath[ing] the pure serene (7) becomes decidedly misty.8 Lipking notes that Keats may have been aware of an already archaic denition of serene: that of a deadly mist supposed to descend after sunset. This, he argues, would make the phrase pure serene an oxymoron: an innocuous noxious fume.9 Yet the word pure may also obviate the deadliness of this mist altogether, and in any case, it suggests that even in his early poetry, Keats thought about his reading in terms not only of breathing, but also of mist. In Endymion he also makes this connection when he refers to Apollo, the god of poetrys, gold breath misting in the west (III. 44).10 Keats takes mistiness out of mediated reading experiences, and this mistiness allows him to reach the pure serene, the heart of the text, and breathe [in] the essence of it.

which mist is mentioned, as well as two passages that describe light veiled by a cloud (Lau, 52, 192). Milton opens the third book of Paradise Lost by invoking Gods celestial light, asking that it Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III. 5255)7 For Milton, metaphorical mist veils divine understanding from his own mortal knowledge, in much the same way that Keatss inability to understand Greek acts as a mist which obscures the original Homer from him. Yet, although Milton requires divine assistance to see through the mist, Keats depicts exploring within the mist as a valuable experience in itself. Another use of the word mist in Paradise Lost is perhaps a more accurate guide to Keatss appreciation of it: his [Satans] form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruind, and excess Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, (I. 59196) The simile of the suns muted beams illustrates not only the brightness that remains in Satans fallen form, but also the beauty of it. The misty air holds, and, in a way, stabilizes, that original brilliance. The lines may well have resonated with Keats, who felt that mistiness would not take away anything essential from the original Homer in a mediated reading experience. They certainly struck him, for he underlined them in his own copy of Paradise Lost (Lau, 84).

Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading In a sonnet composed in August 1818, during his Scottish walking tour, and four months after the mistiness letter, Keats explores mist again, inspired by his [v]aprous (4) surroundings atop Ben Nevis. The sonnet is so saturated in mist that it is worth including in full: Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist! I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vaprous doth hide them; just so much I wist Mankind do know of hell: I look oerhead, And there is sullen mist; even so much Mankind can tell of heaven: mist is spread Before the earth beneath me; even such, Even so vague is mans sight of himself. Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet; Thus much I know, that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them; that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might.11 The literal mist which envelops Keats in the moment of composition metamorphoses into a mortal mist clouding human vision of not only the divine, but mans sight of himself. It recalls Miltons desire for celestial light to [p]urge and disperse a similar mortal mist. In Keatss poem, however, though the mist is a hindrance to the speaker, he does not ask the muse to disperse it, but rather to speak over it. Though the mist smothers one sense, sight, it

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also opens up another, hearing. When the speaker invokes the Muse in the opening lines, it is not only because, blind in mist, he cannot see and must hear her instead, but also because the mist surrounding him facilitates the invocation by amplifying the poets metaphorical sense of hearing. It is the amplication of hearing that appeals to Keats when he talks of mistiness to Reynolds, and in that letter, as in Read me a lesson, Muse, the amplied sense of hearing is in direct relation to having something read aloud to him. Similarly, the experience he celebrates in the Chapmans Homer sonnet is not actually reading the translation, but hear[ing] Chapman speak out loud and bold. Here, his response to blindness is to call for help through an aural experience of poetry, as he purposefully asks the Muse to [r]ead [him] a lesson out loud. He places the muse herself, inspirer of poets, in the role of a mediator, reading what is hidden from the speaker. Although the mist hides divine sight from him, it may also amplify a mediated reading of divine knowledge. Calling upon the muse also suggests a creative dimension to this mediating mist, and part of the appeal of mist for Keats is that it engages his creative imagination by acting as a stimulus for active reading. If his reading is an inhalation of poetic power, the exhalation that necessarily follows is his own imaginative output. Lau argues that uncertainty or indeniteness in poetry is appealing for Keats precisely because it activates and empowers the readers imagination to complete what the text only sketchily provides (Lau, 49). Shears also recognizes this quality of mist, but unlike Lau, he denies its stimulating effect on Keats. Referring to Byron and Shelleys readings of the Milton passage in which Satans original brightness is retained in his fallen form, he argues that mist stimulates the active mind to search into Satans origins and complete the image, but nds that in the case of Keats,

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Romanticism of the imagination, and so mistiness, which generates this obscurity, is a valuable function of the poetic mind. There are, necessarily, two poetic minds involved in Keatss reading: his own, and that of the poet he reads. Mistiness allows the reader-Keatss mind to explore deeply into the text and reach a meeting point between these two minds. The readers ability to explore mist suggests a spatial dimension to it; mist serves as a meeting place for Keats and the authors, times and places he is displaced from. That is not to say that Keats never felt this displacement, for there is a keen awareness of it in some of his letters. In a September 1818 letter to his brother George, for example, he compares his writing to Byrons, asserting that while [Lord Byron] describes what he sees I describe what I imagine Mine is the hardest task (Letters, ii. 200). Similarly, through a mediated reading of Homer he can only read what he imagines. Yet he celebrates this reading when he describes its mistiness to Reynolds. As a site in the human mind, mist accommodates his imagined, or mediated, reading, and thereby bridges the distance it also represents. Keats readily found sympathy in the voice of authors he read, and the idea of mist as a meeting place suggests a sympathetic relationship between reader and author mirroring, to a certain extent, the real experience of reading with Reynolds.14 In the misty, mediated reading experience, Keats nds his own thoughts and feelings reected, or understood, through the sympathetic voice of his mediators. In his marginal notes to Paradise Lost, Keats describes Miltons use of vales in Heaven and Hell as a sort of delphic Abstraction a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reected and put in a Mist (qtd. in Lau, 77). The image of beauty reected recalls the rst of Keatss poetic axioms, which is that Poetry should surprise by a ne excess and not by Singularity it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest

whose focus is often on the mist itself, mist hinders, rather than stimulates, imaginative exploration (Shears, 177). He also argues against the notion that Keatss Mysteries [always] promote imaginative vigour (Shears, 167), and makes a distinction to support this between receptive . . . as opposed to creative . . . Negative Capability (Shears, 168). As Donald C. Goellnicht has shown, however, Keatsian receptivity engenders a response, and this is often a creative one.12 Goellnicht makes a subtle distinction between the poet who employs negative capability and the reader who appreciate[s] a state of Negative Capability in which he or she can accept perplexities with half-knowledge (Goellnicht, 205). Keats, who was not only willing to be content with half knowledge (Letters, i. 194), but also found intense pleasure [in] not knowing (qtd. in Lau, 49), is receptive to what is in the mist, and this receptivity is not a hindrance because his response to it is often a creative one. In an 1817 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon, Keats writes that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration (Letters, i. 194). Yet the obscurity that excites his senses also leads to imaginative consideration. I have emphasized the importance of the aural in the Chapmans Homer sonnet, but hearing Chapman speak is also a springboard for Keatss other senses, as he becomes a watcher of the skies (9). The synaesthetic shift from sound to sight mirrors the experience, as William Hazlitt describes it, of viewing a painting with gusto, which is where the impression made on one sense excites by afnity those of another.13 But Keatss sensory rhetoric does not only substantiate other senses, it also invokes imaginative stimulation. Lau notes that Keats celebrates the physical blindness of Homer and Milton as something that excites their creative minds (Lau, 49). The simultaneous obscuring and overwhelming of senses spurs the working

Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance (Letters, i. 238). That great poetry should appear to reect a readers own thoughts, and that a great poets beautiful thing can be reected in mist, highlight the importance of mist as a meeting place, where the opacity of the mist blends the thoughts of the readers and poets minds. William Hazlitt describes a similar meeting of minds when he writes of Shakespeare that his mind has the power of communication with all other minds (Hazlitt, v. 47). Keats also alludes to this sort of communication in the 1818 poem, Bards of passion and of mirth. Addressing the great bards, who have left [their] souls on earth (2), he writes that while their heavenly souls commune / With the spheres of sun and moon (56), their earth-born souls still speak / To mortals (2930), teaching and guiding them in a meeting of minds.15 Keatss use of the term Remembrance to describe the reading experience is equally signicant, for it elevates the readers mind to the level of the great poets, underlining once again the equality that is found in mist. Remembrance as well as mist features in The Fall of Hyperion, through the character of Moneta (or memory). Shears questions Keatss choice of using Moneta as a muse in the poem, writing that [t]here is a curious masochism in the fact that Keats chooses Moneta or memory, when he desires to escape the inuence of Milton, and the pressures of Miltonic narrative (Shears, 176). Keatss use of Moneta as a muse, however, may suggest an attempt to take part in that brotherhood of great poets; it is an assertion of memory as part of a larger poetic consciousness, which mistiness allows him to participate in. An explicit connection between forgetting, on the other hand, and mist is made only once in Keatss poetry. In I cry your mercy pity love! aye, love, a lovesick speaker considers that he may [f]orget, in the mist of idle misery, / Lifes purposes (1213).16 The mist of idle misery is not the mist of

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mediation, of Keatss reading, which allows thoughts that are like a remembrance. The connection between this mist and forgetting does, however, highlight the connection between mist and the mind, and may also explain the apparently contradictory effects of mist remembrance and forgetting for they depend on the varying states of the readers or speakers minds. In an active mind, mist enables remembrance; the meeting place in mist is the result of a readers imaginative exploration. In I cry your mercy the speaker exists in idle misery, wilfully passive. He forgets because he cannot actively call upon a mediator such as the Muse, and loses his ambition blind (14). While mist can separate inert readers from the cultural memory readers and writers share, it can also be a stimulating space for the mind to work in, especially if that mind actively seeks it out and engages with it. This is what Keats advocates when he writes to Reynolds that if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore the dark passages that lead out of the Chamber of Maiden Thought. The we that Keats emphasizes in the letter (We are in a Mist We are now in that state We feel the "burden of the Mystery" . . . . we too shall explore them [Letters, i. 281]) not only recalls their collaboration in creative reading; it also reminds us that mist is a shared space. The mental state suggested by being in a Mist is substantiated by the spatial metaphor of the Mansion of Many Apartments. This physicality of the mind is not unique to the letter, and the space of the mind features prominently in the rst of Keatss great odes of 1819, the Ode to Psyche, which ends with the speaker building a shrine for his muse In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: (5153)17

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Romanticism human life and suffering is a desire to be in a state of idle mistiness the sort of mistiness that does not allow thought or action. The very notion of dissolv[ing] into the air suggests mistiness, and forget[ting] is the necessary cause of this mistiness, as in I cry your mercy. The presence of the Nightingale as an inuential voice or text, however, transforms the mental mistiness the speaker desires into the mistiness that stimulates the mind and awakens poetic voice, consistent with the positive misty reading experience that is sparked by voice in the mistiness letter to Reynolds and in Read me a lesson, Muse. In the Mansion of Many Apartments letter Keats makes an explicit connection between darkness and mistiness: to be in the Chamber of Maiden Thought, which becomes gradually darkened, and whose doors are all dark all leading to dark passages, is to be in a Mist. In Nightingale, although the speaker begins with a desire for idle mistiness, his dark surroundings lead to an experience that is suggestive of exploring the dark passages out of the Chamber.20 The gradual darkening, as it were, of the idle mist of forgetfulness in Nightingale is transformative; it allows the darkness to become a stimulating mistiness. Like the mists at the top of Ben Nevis, darkness in Nightingale obscures the speakers vision but amplies his aural sense, and enables him to actively listen, opening up his imaginative faculties in the process. The speaker describes the soft incense that hangs upon the boughs (42). He does not smell, but must guess each sweet (43). Although the speaker cannot see, he can read his surroundings by guessing, and this act of guessing signals that the imagination is at work, lling in the visual gaps by taking cues from various other senses, as Keats also does in a mediated, or misty, reading. The larger meditation of the poem, however, is occasioned by the speakers listening to the Nightingales song. The cognitive process that listening provokes has been at work throughout

The mind is also given physical attributes in Ode to a Nightingale.18 The rst three stanzas offer a reading of the Nightingales song, which contrasts the Nightingales happy lot (5) with the larger human world of suffering, but as the poem progresses, the focus of the poem turns inward, so that by the end of the fourth stanza the poem is situated within the poet-speakers mind. Without seeing the Nightingale, the speaker pictures it singing [i]n some melodious plot (8), and when he tells it to y [a]way! (31) he manages almost effortlessly to reach the bird: Already with thee! (35). The instantaneousness of the meeting suggests that this meeting place is in the poets mind, and although it exists in the mind, where there is no light (38), it is given a physical presence by the terms it is described in: the night is tender (35) and the darkness embalmed (43). It is also, like mist and the Chamber of Maiden Thought, a shared space. I have already established mist as a meeting place between Keats as a reader and the authors he reads, and here is no exception, for the poem is, in some sense, about reading. As Jack Stillinger points out, the subjects of all the odes, including the Nightingale, are text[s] that the speaker become[s] reader of, and the connections made between poetry and the song of the Nightingale in the poem signal that the speakers listening to the Nightingales song is a form of reading.19 It is not immediately clear, when the poet cries out to the Nightingale that he will y to thee (31) on the viewless wings of Poesy (33), whether he reaches the Nightingale through reading or writing, and it may point to a larger experience of poetry, which includes both. What is apparent in the poem, however, is that in the space inhabited by both the Nightingale and the poets mind, reading stimulates the creative imagination and spurs his writing. The speakers initial desire to [f]ade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / . . . / The weariness, the fever, and the fret (2123) of

Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading the poem, gaining momentum until it reaches its imaginative height through guessing in the fth stanza. It is not until the sixth stanza that the term listen is actually introduced, through the striking Miltonic phrase, [d]arkling I listen (51), the word darkling reminding us that listening is a result of the poets loss of vision, which has heightened both his sense of hearing and his imaginative capabilities. The phrase is relatively central to the poem, at line 51 of 80, and stands out, separated from both the line before it by a stanza break, and the words following it by a semi-colon. Susan Wolfson points to the importance of interstanzaic space, which marks a turning point, or pivot, between the stanzas separating the dialogues of the mind with itself.21 The phrase [d]arkling I listen answers the murmurous haunt of ies on summer eves (50) that ends the fth stanza. As this stanza is the most illustrative in the poem of the speakers working imagination, the idea that these lines are in dialogue with each other indicates the importance of listening to that imaginative breadth. A useful comparison can also be made here to the Chapmans Homer sonnet, which emphasizes the aural experience of reading by using hearing as a metaphor for it. The focuses on hear[ing] Chapman in the early sonnet, and listen[ing] to the Nightingale in the ode, however, point to different creative experiences. While hearing Chapmans voice is a result of Keatss deliberate opening up to poetic power, the more active listening involves the reader/listener in the creative process itself through its association with the imagination. By the very act of listening in Nightingale Keats hears its song as well, but the focus of the poem is the mental process that the poets listening provokes. Hearing Chapman is almost serendipitous for Keats; though he had travelld in the realms of gold (1), he had not sought out either Homer or Chapman. He was not, in fact, even listening for Chapmans voice, but rather, as the title of the sonnet says,

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[l]ooking. Hearing in Nightingale, on the other hand, is part of a larger meditation caused by his listening, and the use of the verb hear in the poem is passive: The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days (6364). Having already discovered the power of poetic voice in reading Chapmans Homer, he now seeks it out. In Read me a lesson, Muse, he called for an aural reading experience; in Nightingale, simply by listening, he actively invites it, and forges an imaginatively rich meeting of minds by doing so. Because a positive reading experience is associated with voice for Keats (as we see in the mistiness letter through Reynoldss reading aloud), the act of listening signals the speakers own transformation as his mental mistiness becomes, in darkness, the sort of mistiness that provokes creation, rather than hinders it. Darkling I listen is also directly followed by the speakers musing on easeful Death (52), and the realization at the end of the stanza that in death the speaker would have ears in vain / To thy high requiem become a sod (5960). Unable to hear, he would also lose the imaginative capability that listening provokes. The weariness, the fever, and the fret that the speaker initially wishes to forget recall the awareness of a World [which] is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression in the Chamber of Maiden Thought (Letters, i. 281). In order to move on from this, Keatss suggestion to Reynolds that they go on thinking remains pertinent. The speaker, impelled by the Nightingales song, does go on thinking and this gives way to a heightened imaginative state, so that by the fth stanza, Keatss thoughts are creative rather than sorrowful as they establish his surroundings, guess[ing] each sweet. If thinking is equated with suffering at the beginning of the poem, a reminder of death and illness, then in the deeper imaginative state brought on by the Nightingales song and the speakers own sense of oblivion, suffering is obliterated. As

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Romanticism Overcoming his initial desire to [f]ade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / . . . / The weariness, the fever, and the fret (2123) of human life and suffering in Nightingale illustrates the capability of mistiness to fuel an active mind. The Nightingales inuential presence compels the speaker to continue thinking, so that succumbing to the mist of forgetfulness, of idle misery, is impossible. When the Nightingale leaves, and the song ends, the speaker has changed. He has explored the dark passages, and his mind is no longer bound in the mist of the Chamber of Maiden Thought. Yet, by meeting the Nightingale in that very mistiness of mind, he has opened his imagination and awoken his poetic voice. Victoria University of Wellington

tempting as this vision of death and oblivion is, however, its totality makes it ultimately undesirable, for while it obliterates suffering, it also obliterates the imaginative power that the speaker has carefully cultivated throughout the poem by reading the Nightingales song. The reference to death taking the speakers quiet breath (54) recalls the breathing that is vital to the creative process in the Chapmans Homer sonnet, and when the speaker snaps out of his dreamlike state to conclude the poem, he transforms the equally vital connection of the senses to imaginative power into poetic voice. The silence that accompanies the Nightingales disappearance marks a signicant change in the speakers imaginative activity. Until this point, silence had been the domain of the actively listening speaker, and the Nightingales ongoing song was not only a backdrop and springboard to the speakers mind and thoughts, it also played an active role in the speakers articulation of his meditative mood. The introduction of listening in the sixth stanza marks a refocusing of the poet-speakers mind from a contemplation of his surroundings to a mode of self-reection, and this inward turn makes his silence all the more apparent. The tensions between the silence of the speaker and the sound of the Nightingales song, which begin with the meeting of the Nightingale and speaker as gures of poet and reader in dark surroundings, paralleling the meeting of author and reader in misty reading experiences, are at their highest in this stanza, as the speaker imagines the Nightingale continuing its song in ecstasy (58) while death has taken his quiet breath from him. The speakers entering the interrogative mode at the end of the poem with the lines, Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep? (7980), demonstrates an awareness of the necessity of these tensions for creativity, for in voicing these questions the speaker asserts his own poetic voice, taking the place of the Nightingale and its song in their absence.

Notes
1. The Letters of John Keats, 18411821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, 1958), i. 28081. 2. Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge, 1985), 34. 3. Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993); Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford, 2000); Beth Lau, Keatss Paradise Lost (Gainesville, 1998). 4. Jonathon Shears, The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading Against the Grain (Burlington, 2009). While Shears claims not to be of a Bloomian persuasion (178), his argument appears to be derived from the anxiety of inuence model. His contention, for example, that Keats read[s] against the grain of Milton (Shears, 171, 17374 and 17677), and in particular his use of the term misreading (Shears, 159), bear a striking resemblance to the misreading and correction that is central to Harold Blooms argument for anxiety of inuence. That is, Poetic Inuence . . . always proceeds by a misreading of the proper poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Inuence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York, 1973), 30. 5. Concordance of Shakespeares Complete Works, Open Source Shakespeare; A Concordance to the

Keatss Depictions of Mistiness and Reading

Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. John Bradshaw (1894; rpt. London, 1965). An Electronic Concordance to Keatss Poetry, ed. Noah Comet, Romantic Circles. The frequent use of mist is not unique to Keats; as a Romantic comparison, Wordsworth used the word 79 times in his poetry, although it should be noted that Wordsworths body of work is considerably larger than Keatss. A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Lane Cooper (London 1911). John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford, 1991), 355618. On First Looking into Chapmans Homer, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, 1978), 64. Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, 1981), 95. Endymion, in The Poems of John Keats, 102220. Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud, in The Poems of John Keats, 279. Donald C. Goellnicht, Keats on Reading: "Delicious Diligent Indolence," JEGP, 82 (1989), 190210, 1956.

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols, London, 193034), vi. 78. 14. In Sleep and Poetry Keats writes that poetry should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man (24647). For a discussion of Keatss intense sympathetic engagement with the author see H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, 2005), 193. 15. Bards of passion and of mirth, in The Poems of John Keats, 29495. 16. I cry your mercy pity love! aye, love, in The Poems of John Keats, 492. 17. Ode to Psyche, in The Poems of John Keats, 36466. 18. Ode to a Nightingale, in The Poems of John Keats, 36972. 19. Jack Stillinger, Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (New York, 1999), 87. 20. Leon Waldoff, among others, has noted this in Keats and the Silent Work of the Imagination (Urbana, 1985), 122. 21. Susan Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, 1986), 314.