Poem of the Week 2024/25

Song

I had a dove and the sweet dove died;

    And I have thought it died of grieving.

O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,

    With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.

Sweet little red feet! why would you die –

Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?

You lived alone on the forest-tree,

Why, pretty thing, could you not live with me?

I kissed you oft and gave you white peas;

Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

– John Keats

According to the endnotes in my Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats, from which I took this poem, Keats more or less dashed off this little poem while listening to some music (unfortunately, the music in play is not specified). It does have the hallmarks of verse written to be sung: the diction is fairly simple, the rhyme scheme doesn't make you wait to long for the chiming reward, & the picture is made vivid with simple & direct color references: the dove's red feet, the white peas, the green trees.

But the poem, really a dramatic monologue, shows great psychological acuity & subtlety. The suffering of the formerly free dove is made more poignant by the owner's inability to accept that that is its nature: he realizes that the dove was in misery, but his blithe narcissism prevents him from understanding that he was the cause of that misery. The situation is made even more poignant by our seeing it through the lens of the benevolently, cluelessly cruel master (in this it might bring to mind another famous dramatic monologue in verse, Browning's My Last Duchess).

The opening quatrain uses an abab rhyme scheme, & presents the situation: the narrator is consistently, at least in his view, loving; his pet is sweet, & he is bewildered at his loss. He has considered the possibility that sorrow killed the lovely bird, but is mystified as to why the bird should be sad: he himself wove the gentle silken thread that kept the creature captive. Doves have a Biblical resonance; they are the bird of peace, & the sign of heavenly blessing, & the bird that brought Noah the branch that signified the receding of the waters; memorably, they are the ideal of Psalm 55, where the singer cries out "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest": all signifiers of peace & freedom. Even a silken thread, though woven with care by an owner who thinks he is loving, would be inimical to such a creature.

After the opening quatrain, the poem is written in couplets, as if our speaker is unable to stretch things over more than two lines. He is baffled: why would the bird prefer liberty & solitude to . . . well, yes, captivity, but captivity with him? The white peas to me suggest a refined, almost unnatural, diet, &, again, the speaker cannot understand why any creature would prefer the green trees. White suggests innocence & purity, perhaps an imposed innocence & purity, as contrasted with the wild red of the bird's feet & the vivid green of its native habitat. The narrator never does learn to understand, & we can be pretty sure he never will, no matter how many "pretty things" pile up at his own untrammeled feet.

Keats obviously had a fecund imagination, but I wonder if somewhere in his mind the seed for this poem had been planted by Juliet's remarks in the celebrated balcony scene of Romeo & Juliet:

'Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone –

And yet no farther than a wanton's bird,

That lets it hop a little from his hand,

Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,

And with a silken thread plucks it back again,

So loving-jealous of his liberty.

(Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, ll 176 - 81; Romeo's response: "I would I were thy bird"; clearly he is no sweet dove longing for liberty)

Barbara Pym, who often used lines from the English Romantic poets as titles for her novels, wrote one late in her career titled The Sweet Dove Died; it's a brilliant dissection of such a relationship: a well-off, elegant & detached woman has a romantic (though not physical) relationship with a handsome young man, complicated by his more straightforward uncle, a young woman he has a fling with, & then a young man he has an affair with (the young man is an American scholar who quotes the Keats poem, though he has a single thread rather than a silken thread; I don't know if that's a variant reading of the manuscript or a memory slip on Pym's part). The novel is written with Pym's characteristic wit & understanding, but there's something almost cold in its clarity which, to me, sets it apart a bit from her other novels, which tend to be warmer. I recommend them all, cold & warm.