Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the East to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May. But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.
[1] These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats's first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of _Poems_, with the principal piece, _Sleep and Poetry_, partly modelled on the _Floure and the Lefe_ itself and headed with a quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does not admit _The Floure and Lefe_ into the canon of Chaucer's works.
Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The sex-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of Emancipation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--_Calidore_: influence of Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--_Sleep and Poetry_ and _I stood tiptoe_--Analysis of _Sleep and Poetry_--Double invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--Analysis of _I stood tiptoe_--Intended induction to _Endymion_--Relation to Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek Mythology--_Tintern Abbey_ and the three stages--Contrasts of method--Evocation _versus_ Exposition.