GIVE ACROSTIC: GEORGIANA AUGUSTA KEATS. IVE me your patience, sister, while I frame Or sue the fair Apollo and he will Rouse from his heavy slumber and instill And kingdom over all the Realms of verse, Nears more to heaven in aught, than when we nurse Anthropophagi in Othello's mood; Such tender incense in their laurel shade To all the regent sisters of the Nine As this poor offering to you, sister mine. 15 Kind sister! aye, this third name says you are; 20 This acrostic seems to have been written at the foot of Helvellyn on the 27th of June 1818; for although it appears in the Winchester journal-letter of September 1819 as given in the New York World of the 25th of June 1877, it purports to be copied from an old letter which reached Liverpool after the George Keatses had sailed for America, and which was therefore returned to the poet. The words "Foot of Helvellyn, June 27th," are printed in The World as if they belonged to the next piece copied into the journal-letter; but the context indicates that the date really belongs to the acrostic. Keats (with his friend Charles Armitage Brown) was on the way to Carlisle, to take coach there for Dumfries and begin the walking tour in Scotland on which the first serious break-down of his health occurred. Leaving London about the middle of June, they had seen the George Keatses off from Liverpool for America, and had then started walking from Lancaster; so that, by the time Keats was writing the acrostic, he had already been walking several days; and four days later the friends reached Carlisle, ending there the English portion of their walk. ΙΟ པ་ SONNET. ON VISITING THE TOMB OF BURNS. HE town, the churchyard, and the setting sun, Though beautiful, cold seem, I dreamed long ago, now new begun. The short-liv'd, paly Summer is but won From Winter's ague. for one hour's gleam; Though sapphire-warm, their stars do never beam: All is cold Beauty; pain is never done: For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise, The Real of Beauty, free from that dead hue Canst wan upon it! Burns! with honour due I oft have honour'd thee. Great shadow, hide Thy face; I sin against thy native skies. This sonnet, with which the poems of the Scotch tour with Brown begins, was not a very prosperous opening." It seems to have been written on the 2nd of July 1818, and was first given by Lord Houghton in the Life, Letters &c. in 1848, as part of a letter to Tom Keats, wherein the poet sufficiently explains the comparative poverty of the production, thus: "You will see by this sonnet that I am at Dumfries. We have dined in Scotland. Burns's tomb is in the church-yard corner, not very much to my taste, though on a scale large enough to show they wanted to honour him. Mrs. Burns lives in this place; most likely we shall see her to-morrow. This sonnet I have written in a strange mood, half-asleep. I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish. I will endeavour to get rid of my prejudices and tell you fairly about the Scotch." It is well to say at once that the precise dates assigned to this series of poems are not absolutely certain; for Keats himself was notoriously inexact about dates, and, according to his own confession, never knew." Thus the next published letter, containing the Meg Merrilies poem, is dated "Auchtercairn, 3rd July;" and in it we read "yesterday was passed in Kirkcudbright," without any fresh date, though probably this statement belongs to the day on which Keats was at Newton Stewart. I have before me an unpublished letter to his sister, wherein, beginning at Dumfries on the 2nd, he says he shall be at Kirkcudbright the next day; speaks of visiting Burns's tomb "yesterday;" and says he has so many interruptions he cannot fill a letter in one day. Unfortunately these interruptions sometimes occurred in the middle of a paragraph, and one cannot alway be sure at what point the date changes. Keats and his companion seem to have started from Dumfries again on the 2nd of July, "through Galloway—all very pleasant and pretty with no fatigue when one is used to it," as he writes to his sister, adding "We are in the midst of Meg Merrilies' country of whom I suppose you have heard," and giving her forthwith a copy of the poem. Lord Houghton says of this stage "The pedestrians passed by Solway Frith through that delightful part of Kirkcudbrightshire, the scene of 'Guy Mannering.' Keats had never read the novel, but was much struck with the character of Meg Merrilies as delineated to him by Brown. He seemed at once to realise the creation of the novelist, and, suddenly stopping in the pathway, at a point where a profusion of honeysuckles, wild rose, and fox-glove, mingled with the bramble and broom that filled up the spaces between the shattered rocks, he cried out, Without a shadow of doubt on that spot has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.'' On the 3rd of July he writes to Tom from " Auchtercairn" (meaning, I presume, Auchencairn, some six miles east of Kirkcudbright) -"We are now in Meg Merrilies' country, and have, this morning, passed through some parts exactly suited to her. Kirkcudbright County is very beautiful, very wild, with craggy hills, somewhat in the Westmoreland fashion. We have come down from Dumfries to the sea-coast part of it. The following song you will have from Dilke, but perhaps you would like it here." I should judge that the scene given by Brown to Lord Houghton belonged rather to the morning of the 3rd than to the evening of the 2nd; and that Keats took out his current letter to his sister at Auchencairn on pausing there to breakfast, and wrote the poem into it when he began a fresh letter to Tom with it. Thus, besides a rough draft, there would be three fair copies of the poem, one for Tom, one for Fanny, and one for Mr. Dilke. The only copy I have seen is that for his sister, from which I have revised the text. It is written in stanzas of four lines, not 4. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare 5. But every morn of woodbine fresh And every night the dark glen Yew 6. And with her fingers old and brown 7. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere She died full long agone! eight as hitherto given, - the final stanza having thus two extra lines instead of being unfinished as it appears in previous editions. In this manuscript very few variations of consequence occur. Stanza 4 shows a cancelled reading, day for morn ̧ in line 1; and stanza 6 affords a rejected variant of the first line And sometimes with her fingers old... The head-gear of stanza 7 is clearly a chip hat, and not a ship-hat as in the current texts: this confirms a suggestion of the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote to me that he considered chip made better sense (as it obviously does), and that he believed it stood so in Hood's Magazine, where the poem first appeared, - a belief which reference to the magazine for 1844 shows to be correct. Rossetti thought it "a pity to tack the poem on to the novel," and cited Hood's Magazine in support of the title "Old Meg, which answers much better." This is one of the very few points on which I find myself in disagreement with Rossetti. It is true that the poem is headed Old Meg in the magazine, and has no title at all in the letter in which Lord Houghton gave it in the Life, Letters &c., or in that to Fanny Keats; but I think the extracts given above so distinctly connect it with the novel as to render Meg Merrilies the most proper title. A SONG ABOUT MYSELF. I. HERE was a naughty Boy, Ta naughty boy was he, He would not stop at home, In his Knapsack A Book Full of vowels And a shirt With some towels A slight cap For night cap A hair brush, Comb ditto, He rivetted close And followed his Nose To the North, To the North, And follow'd his nose To the North. 2. There was a naughty boy For nothing would he do But scribble poetry – In the letter to his sister mentioned in the note to Meg Merrilies, Keats makes a fresh start with -- "since I scribbled the Song we have walked through a beautiful Country to Kirkcudbright—at which place I will write you a song about myself." He then proceeds with the very curious piece of doggerel now first given from the manuscript, and excuses himself on the plea of fatigue. My chief purpose in including these verses here is that students may note the variety of the pieces of this class addressed to different correspondents. Compare this with the Devon pieces sent to Haydon, and more particularly with The Gadfly, sent to Tom a little later than this. I presume this piece should be dated the 3rd of July 1818. |