See also Texts, pp. 94–5.

22 longer ] Keats-Wylie Scrapbook (Texts, ibid.); flower G, Allott.

‘WOMAN! WHEN I BEHOLD THEE FLIPPANT, VAIN’

Probably written March to December 1815. ‘From Mathew’s later enthusiastic endorsement… we can conclude that the [poem was] written while he and Keats were seeing one another most frequently (March to December, 1815)’, Bate (1963), p. 40n. Allott dates c. March 1816, but the earlier date is preferable since the poem seems to belong with the preceding group of poems to the Misses Mathew. Published 1817. Like other editors, G and Allott print the three stanzas as separate sonnets, but in 1817 the three sonnets are given as stanzas in a single poem, and Garrod (OSA) adopts this arrangement. Further, see Stillinger, p. 8n. The structure of this poem should be connected with Keats’s later experiments with the ‘sonnet stanza’ which led to the stanzaic structure of the major odes (see headnote to Ode to Psyche, p. 669).

12–13 Calidore… Red Cross Knight… Leander three examples of devoted lovers; the two first are from The Faerie Queene. Leander swam the Hellespont to reach Hero.

14 of yore of old (archaic).

31–2 ‘When Keats had written these lines he burst into tears overpowered by the tenderness of his own imagination (conceptions)’, Woodhouse (1817), p.145.

‘O SOLITUDE! IF I MUST WITH THEE DWELL’

Written c. October 1815, shortly after Keats entered Guy’s Hospital after leaving Edmonton. On the date, see Murry (1930), pp. 2–5. This, Keats’s first published poem, appeared in the Examiner, 5 May 1816, where it is entitled To Solitude: it has no title in 1817. The ‘kindred spirit’ of l. 14 is probably George Keats, but the style of the poem suggests G. F. Mathew’s influence. M. A. E. Steele believes the sonnet was written at the same time as ‘Fill for me a brimming bowl’ and To Emma.

TO GEORGE FELTON MATHEW

Written November 1815, as a verse letter to George Felton Mathew (L I, pp. 100–103). Published 1817. Mathew was an important friend and influence on Keats in 1815. For a while Keats thought his sentimental poeticizing endowed with a power it did not possess. They read and explored poetry together, as this letter suggests.