KEATS AND THE NIGHTINGALE [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
•
SIR,--Here in Japan the Spectator is passed on to me late, but Mr. D. H. Lawrence's article on " The Nightingale," in the copy for September 10th, prompts a protest from a lover of Keats.
"Don't try to argue with a poet," says Mr. Lawrence, after arguing for two columns. One suspects him of either trying a long, strong pull on our resistant legs, or of wilfully perverting the mind of this generation.
. I venture to say that Keats was not thinking very much of the nightingale, with its " Hello ! Hello ! Hello ! " or " Tra-la-la ! Tri-li-lilylilylilylily," or " jug ! jug ! jug ! " or whatever sounds it seems to make. But he was, perhaps, thinking of the music he had heard from it, and he gave the bird due credit for having opened the heavens to him for a spell. The sadness in the poem is not brought forth by the song, but by the knowledge that true beauty, of which the • song -seems an echo, is yet afar off.
" My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense . .
tells us at -once that Keats in spirit is leaving the body for awhile, willing even to die, so that he may strain upward to the clearer song of .Reality. He likens Ruth's sadness at separation from home to his own homesickness for the heaven his- imagination tells him of. What Mr. Lawrence calls " the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness "I think is the Most confident beating of the wings of a poet in full flight above the earth that we have ever heard. Who thinks of a nightingale when reading.- the poem ? Any other beauty
would have served to inspire the poet if it had come upon him at the right moment— •
" A touch divine— '
And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod : Visibly in His garden walketh God ! "
What can be happier than the sound of the nightingale's voice for the earthborn, and what sadder for those who hear in it the music of the lost world which they faintly remember ?
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