The text in L has ‘cliff’.

126 tablet ‘a small smooth inflexible or stiff sheet or leaf for writing upon’ (OED).

130 scarlet coats soldiers.

TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE

Written September 1816 as a verse epistle. Published 1817. An autograph MS is now in the Huntington Library. This is the last of the three poems Keats wrote during his two month stay at Margate. Clarke (1787–1877), the son of Keats’s headmaster at Enfield, had early encouraged Keats’s interests in poetry, music and liberal politics. Clarke had just moved to London to take up publishing as his father was about to retire.

6 With outspread wings the Naiad Zephyr courts Allott considers ‘the naiad’ a ‘slip, as the swan here is masculine’. But the ‘Naiad Zephyr’ is a composite figure invented by Keats, not a synonym for the swan. Keats imagines the swan half-flying (‘With outspread wings’), half-treading across the water in the act of courting the ‘Naiad Zephyr’. A Naiad was an inferior deity, presiding over springs, rivers, etc., usually pictured as a beautiful virgin. Zephyrs were wind deities, normally masculine, and usually so for Keats. However, he elsewhere relates them to women and streams – Woodhouse’s transcript of the draft of Endymion has ‘Upon some breast more zephyr-feminine’ (III, 577), while the text in L of the Ode to Psyche 56 has ‘Zephyrs’ streams’; see also Endymion I, 376–7. The fusion of the two figures creates a suitable mistress for the swan, who also belongs to both air and water.

15–20 Keats’s stay at Margate was marked by despondency: inspiration failed to come.

17 shattered boat compare Endymion 1,46–7, ‘I’ll smoothly steer / My little boat’.

29–30 Clarke had introduced Keats to Tasso. ‘Baiae’ refers to the Bay of Naples, Tasso’s home.

31 Armida heroine of Gerusalemme Liberata: see On Receiving a Curious Shell 8n (p. 561).

33–7 all Spenserian references. ‘Mulla’ is the stream near Spenser’s last home, Kilcolman, Ireland. Line 34 can be compared to Epithalamion 175, ‘Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded’. Archimago is the magician in The Faerie Queene I and II; Una and Belphoebe are the heroines in the same books.

40 Titania the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Wieland’s Oberon.

41 Urania the Muse of astronomy as well as Venus. Compare with the astronomical image in 1. 67.

44 wronged Libertas Leigh Hunt, wronged because imprisoned. See Specimen of an Induction 61 and preceding poem, 1. 24.

46–7 Refers to Hunt’s The Story of Rimini I, 147ff.

49 ] autograph MS marks a paragraph, as do G, Allott; 1817 and Garrod (OSA) runs straight on.

52–3 Keats met Clarke first in 1803 at Enfield school, which was run by his father.

57 refers to the halcyon: see To the Ladies who Saw Me Crowned 7n (p. 580).

59 refers to Paradise Lost IV-VI, and VIII.

67 Saturn’s ring Keats won Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy (1807 edn) as a school prize.

70–71 Alfred… Tell… Brutus compare To George Felton Mathew 67–9.

94 cloudlets ] autograph MS, Garrod (OSA), Allott; cloudlet’s 1817, G.

100 Compare this use of quotation with the urn’s statement at the end of Ode on a Grecian Urn.

110 Mozart Keats reacted strongly to Mozart. On 14 October 1818 he wrote, ‘… she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart’s might do’ (L I, p. 395). Clarke was a good pianist, and first excited Keats’s love of music.

111 Arne Thomas Arne (1710–88), a prolific composer, responsible, among other things, for the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’.

112 Erin Ireland. Probably the ‘song of Erin’ refers to Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies.

‘HOW MANY BARDS GILD THE LAPSES OF TIME!’

Probably written c. October 1816. Often dated March 1816, but see Woodhouse (1817), pp. 110–11, and Allott. One of the ‘two or three’ poems Keats showed to Leigh Hunt when he finally met him in Hampstead in October 1816, Cowden Clarke, pp.