John Keats

What The Thrush Said. Lines From A Letter To John Hamilton Reynolds

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind, Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars, To thee the spring will be a harvest-time. O thou, whose only book has been the light Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on Night after night when Phoebus was away, To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn. O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens At thought of idleness cannot be idle, And he's awake who thinks himself asleep. 'In an undated letter to Reynolds bearing the postmark "Hampstead, Feb. 19, 1818" (Life, Letters &c. , 1848, Volume 1, page 87), occurs the passage -- "I was led into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of idleness. I have not read any books -- the morning said I was right -- I had no idea but of the morning, and the thrush said I was right, seeming to say,"-- and these fourteen lines of blank verse follow immediately on the word 'say', so that the title I have ventured to give to the lines accords at all events with the facts. Keats seems to have been really writing in a kind of spiritual parallelism with the thrush's song : it will be noted that line 5 repeats the form of line 1, line 8 of line 4, while lines 11 and 12 are a still closer repetition of lines 9 and 10; so that the poem follows in a sense the thrush's method of repetition. A later poet, perhaps a closer and more conscious observer than Keats, namely Robert Browning, says of the same bird in his 'Home--Thoughts from Abroad' -- "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over Lest you should think he never could recapture The first line careless rapture!"' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.