On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!
Fair plumèd Syren, Queen of far-away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay
Must I burn through. once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But, when I am consumèd in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
– John Keats
Why is Keats sitting down to read King Lear, instead of going to the theater to see it? The reason is that, in a perverse tribute to the horrifying power of Shakespeare's tragedy, the version of Lear that held the English stage from 1681 until around 1838 (years after the death of Keats in 1821) was an adaptation by Nahum Tate that ended with Lear restored to sanity & his throne, & a still-living Cordelia marrying Edgar. (Tate was a Poet Laureate of England, best remembered for his adaptation of Lear, which is rarely staged these days, & his libretto for Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, which is still frequently done.) So reading was the only way to confront the real Shakespearian deal.
The poet begins by saying farewell to the more alluring world of Romance, a word which suggests a certain amount of fancy & playfulness with a perhaps tangential relationship to reality – a world with the possibility of escape from the world we live in, & of escapism. The description of Romance brings to mind The Faerie Queene, by Shakespeare's contemporary Spenser, & the reference to the Queen of far-away reinforces the suggestion. I wouldn't describe that work as serene or as an escape, but it does tend towards a "happy" ending, in which Virtue eventually & after hard struggles overcomes its many enemies. But perhaps serene refers more to the melodious sound of Spenser's verse, its sensuous & musical evocations, which were influential on Keats. There is a suggestion of danger in such charms, as the reference to Syrens hints; the sirens of course were sea-women of Greek mythology (best known from their appearance in The Odyssey) whose entrancing songs led sailors to their deaths. The lute, already an outmoded instrument in Keats's time, the olden pages (Spenser's epic is written in a deliberately & self-created "archaic" style & is modeled on the great Italian Renaissance epics by Ariosto & Tasso), the far-away, all suggest a work that, however absorbing & even irresistible, is perhaps also distant from modern & local concerns. Is there a danger of being lured into a lovely land, far from the crushing world we live in? The sudden appearance in the poem of the wintry day is a reminder that reality is often cold & harsh & cannot be safely escaped for too long.
There is a feeling that revisiting King Lear is a bit of a compulsion with the poet. Once again appears not only in the title, but in the body of the poem, as he turns from bidding adieu to Romance to explaining why he must (& that is the word he uses, the imperative must) read the original tragedy again. Once again suggests that this is a periodic corrective he feels obliged to undertake. That may make it sound like eating your vegetables. But the description of the Lear experience evokes not drudgery or duty but the frightening & the sublime: fierce, burning, humbling. Here is no concord as guided by the serene lute of Romance, but a struggle, a fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation & impassioned clay. Damnation is usually associated with divine forces, forces larger than humanity's powers. Yet humanity struggles against this fate. Redemption does not appear to be a possibility, nor does any sort of limbo. The universe opposes us, in the world of King Lear, with the hopelessness of damnation. We are the impassioned clay. Clay is interesting: it connects humanity with the basic stuff of earth, it is reminiscent of Biblical language, but the usual terms there are ashes or dirt. Clay in the Bible is also used in comparisons involving a potter working on a wheel: something being shaped, formed, yet fragile, breakable. The potter in that metaphor is usually God; are we clay being shaped by divine or otherwise unseen powers? & being smashed by the same? The power we have, between damnation & our clay-like nature, is being impassioned: driven to resist, not intellectually, but emotionally, spiritually.
This poem's form is a sonnet: a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter. There are two main variants in English: The Shakespearian, three quatrains & a concluding couplet, & the Spenserian, an octave & a sestet. For this poem about Shakespeare's play, Keats chooses Spenser's form. The octave describes the poet putting aside the temptations of Romance to deal with the intensity of Shakespeare's tragedy. Then he opens the sestet by addressing, not the general spirit of a type of literature, as in his opening lines, but the specific poet who wrote the tragedy in question: & not just as a poet, but as Chief Poet, an acknowledgement of the primacy of what he created over the melodizing of Romance. But Shakespeare seems to be only a co-creator: listed as the other begetter are the clouds of Albion. Albion is an archaic / poetic term for Britain. It is of course suitable for the period in which King Lear is set. Perhaps as an elegantly outmoded term it also hints at the continuing influence & power of Romance. (& we shouldn't underestimate its importance as a rhyme for gone; English is a language notoriously poorer in rhymes than, say, Italian.) Mentioning England in connection with co-creation of Shakespeare's play gives it a bardic power: something rooted in the history of a nation (& King Lear was in fact considered an historical figure).
But it is not Albion itself but its clouds that are co-begetters of the deep eternal theme. Clouds gives us a force of Nature, something outside of human control, maybe suggesting a heaven, but one absent of a personified Deity. They are above the world, perhaps a source of poetic inspiration, or at least of seeing beyond the daily (to have your head in the clouds is to be dreamy, unrealistic). Clouds of Albion suggests some specifically British connection to this powerful natural force. The term also brings to mind the famous storms in the drama, during which the maddened Lear rages. Sunny & clear skies are usually preferred to cloudy ones. I will admit to being uncertain about Keats's old oak forest here. If I think of the landscape of Shakespeare's play, I picture the wild heath, or of the cliffs of Dover. Perhaps old oak forest is meant to suggest an older, even primeval & Druidic England. But forests, oak or otherwise, don't really play a major role in Lear the way they do in other plays by Shakespeare. Possibly the image is meant to suggest Dante at the beginning of his Commedia, struggling to find his way out of a dark & obscure forest. Possibly Keats just liked the image & the sound.
Why is Keats addressing Shakespeare, & Nature (& History) as represented in the Clouds of Albion? He is praying, in a substitution of the Poet & Nature for the Divinity, for guidance & mercy. When he has been burnt up, consumed, by the fire that is King Lear, when he has experienced the hollowing-out & purification, the catharsis that great tragedy is supposed to bring us as its moral justification (otherwise what is it but voyeurism towards the suffering of others?), he begs that he not be left to wander in a barren dream. Barren suggests sterility; the poet is asking that this bitter-sweet Shakespearian fruit will bear fruit in him. He's not necessarily asking not to be in a dream, just not in one that is barren. Dreams can be fructifying. Dreams are a poetic source common to both Shakespeare & Romance. & Romance, in a purged & renovated form, makes something of a reappearance in the final lines. The poet asks to be reborn after he is consumed, using the image of the Phoenix, the mythological bird whose immortality came from emerging newborn from the fire in which, after his allotted centuries have passed, he consumes himself. & though the phoenix appears frequently in Shakespeare, it is also the sort of mythological & allegorical creature that populates the Faerie Queene. & in a closing suggestion of Spenser, the final line is not in the usual five-beat line of a sonnet, but, as in the so-called Spenserian stanza invented for the Faerie Queene, a six-beat line. Turning from Romance to plunge himself once more into the harrowing world King Lear will, the poet hopes, allow him to turn as he wishes (at my desire) to a new, more urgent sort of Romance.
I took this poem from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of Keats.
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