KEATS’S SONNET ON BLUE

(Century Guild Hobby Horse, July 1886.)

During my tour in America I happened one evening to find myself in Louisville, Kentucky.  The subject I had selected to speak on was the Mission of Art in the Nineteenth Century, and in the course of my lecture I had occasion to quote Keats’s Sonnet on Blue as an example of the poet’s delicate sense of colour-harmonies.  When my lecture was concluded there came round to see me a lady of middle age, with a sweet gentle manner and a most musical voice.  She introduced herself to me as Mrs. Speed, the daughter of George Keats, and invited me to come and examine the Keats manuscripts in her possession.  I spent most of the next day with her, reading the letters of Keats to her father, some of which were at that time unpublished, poring over torn yellow leaves and faded scraps of paper, and wondering at the little Dante in which Keats had written those marvellous notes on Milton.  Some months afterwards, when I was in California, I received a letter from Mrs. Speed asking my acceptance of the original manuscript of the sonnet which I had quoted in my lecture.  This manuscript I have had reproduced here, as it seems to me to possess much psychological interest.  It shows us the conditions that preceded the perfected form, the gradual growth, not of the conception but of the expression, and the workings of that spirit of selection which is the secret of style.  In the case of poetry, as in the case of the other arts, what may appear to be simply technicalities of method are in their essence spiritual, not mechanical, and although, in all lovely work, what concerns us is the ultimate form, not the conditions that necessitate that form, yet the preference that precedes perfection, the evolution of the beauty, and the mere making of the music, have, if not their artistic value, at least their value to the artist.

It will be remembered that this sonnet was first published in 1848 by Lord Houghton in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats.  Lord Houghton does not definitely state where he found it, but it was probably among the Keats manuscripts belonging to Mr. Charles Brown.  It is evidently taken from a version later than that in my possession, as it accepts all the corrections, and makes three variations.  As in my manuscript the first line is torn away, I give the sonnet here as it appears in Lord Houghton’s edition.

   Answer to A sonnet ending thus: 

      Dark eyes are dearer far
   Than those that make the hyacinthine bell. {74}

      By J. H. Reynolds.

   Blue!  ’Tis the life of heaven,—­the domain
      Of Cynthia,—­the wide palace of the sun,—­
   The tent of Hesperus and all his train,—­
      The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun. 
   Blue!  ’Tis the life