12–13.

Motto Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini III, 430.

6 starry diadems ‘the dew Drops’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 141.

20 alley a walk in a park, etc., lined with trees: ‘every alley green… of this wilde Wood’ (Milton, Comus 310–11).

22 where] G, Allott; were 1817. ‘Jaunty’ is glossed as ‘wandering’ by Woodhouse (1817), p. 141.

31 lush cited by OED, along with Endymion I, 940 (‘a lush screen of drooping weeds’), as an example of the meaning, used of plants (esp. grass), ‘succulent and luxuriant in growth’. OED points out that the literary currency of this sense stemmed from Theobald’s emendation of ‘luscious woodbine’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream II. 1.251 to ‘lush woodbine’, a reading adopted by Johnson. Woodhouse, however, glossed the meaning as ‘deep coloured’, and his note on To a Friend who Sent me some Roses 3 (‘From his lush clover covert’) reads, ‘full-coloured – in opposition to faint-coloured’ (Woodhouse [1817], pp. 141, 149). This sense, which is recorded in Johnson’s Dictionary, stemmed from Hanmer’s explanation of ‘lush’ in The Tempest II. 1.52 as ‘of a dark deep Colour, opposite to pale, faint’ (Shakespeare’s Works [1774] VI). It is probable that Woodhouse is right about this instance: compare the ‘lush laburnum’ here with ‘the dark-leaved laburnum’s drooping clusters’ (To George Felton Mathew 41). Something of both meanings is usually present in Keats’s use of the word; see Endymion I, 46, 631, 940, II, 52.

51–2 for other examples of Keats’s enthusiasm for his contemporaries at this point, see Addressed to [Haydon] and Sleep and Poetry 220–30.

59 taper fingers the sweet peas’s tendrils. The adjectival use of ‘taper’ lasted through the nineteenth century.

61–106 a ‘recollection of having frequently loitered over the rail of a footbridge that spanned… a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton’ according to Cowden Clarke, pp. 138–9. These lines do not occur in the draft, and Ward (1963), pp. 420–21, suggests that they were written in Margate in August-September 1816.

67 sallows willows. For other occurrences see Endymion II, 341, IV, 392, and To Autumn 28.

70–71 compare Shakespeare, As You Like It II.1.15–17, ‘And this our life… / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in everything.’

113–15 moon… light anticipates Endymion in celebrating the moon’s influence over the poetic imagination. Cowden Clarke said that ‘one of the earliest things J. K. wrote was a sonnet to the moon’ (W3). It is, of course, a common Romantic theme.

114 swim see Endymion I, 571n (p. 590).

125–204 Keats engages here with the central problem of the function and nature of poetry. The source of the ideas lies in his reading of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), IV, 687–765, 840–81, which suggests that the Classical deities originated in man’s animistic response to the forces of nature. These views on the origins of myth had a profound influence on Keats. See Appendix I, p. 497.

134 vases rhymes with ‘faces’. Compare To [Mary Frogley] 55n (p. 564).

141–50 compare this handling of the Psyche story with that in Ode to Psyche (see headnote, p. 642).