"
"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoined that voice; "they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice:
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low--
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve."
In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses
his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself.
A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms
would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that
poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of
dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare;
their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and
emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins
of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught
discipline.
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