John Keats

Sonnet. Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucer's Tale Of 'The Floure And The Lefe'

This pleasant tale is like a little copse: The honied lines do freshly interlace, To keep the reader in so sweet a place, So that he here and there full hearted stops; And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops Come cool and suddenly against his face, And by the wandering melody may trace Which way the tender-legged linnet hops. Oh! What a power hath white simplicity! What mighty power has this gentle story! I, that for ever feel athirst for glory, Could at this moment be content to lie Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings Were heard of none beside the mournful robbins. 'This sonnet was published in The Examiner for the 16th of March 1817, having been written in February 1817 in the late Charles Cowden Clarke's "miniature 18mo. copy of Chaucer," as recorded in Clarke's Recollections of Keats in The Gentleman's Magazine. When Clarke died, he bequeathed the Chaucer to Alexander Ireland, author of the Leigh Hunt, Lamb, and Hazlitt Bibliography. The sonnet is said to have been "an extempore effusion, and without the alteration of a single word;" but as Clarke seems to have been asleep when it was written we are justified in construing the word 'extempore' with a certain latitude. It was certainly most unusual for Keats to write that much without a single erasure, and it is quite possible that he jotted the sonnet down in pencil in a note-book which he certainly carried at that time and certainly did draft sonnets in. In any case he probably had ample time and quiet, while Clarke was sleeping, to elaborate the two highly finished quatrains in his mind: the third quatrain and the couplet are of inferior merit, and might well be extemporary. This early performance seems to have quite won the heart of the genial critic Hunt, for in inserting it in his paper he characterized it as "exquisite," and added that the author might "already lay true claim to that title: -- 'The youngest he That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree. "' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.