"
He was a boy at the time of England's greatest naval glory, but he thinks
more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the
forest, says Keats,
He would swear, for all his oaks
Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas.
His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is
almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.
By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the
Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful
death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world.
The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris
before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers:
So with this earthly paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be,
Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.
Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its
broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew
tired of imitation and ease.
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