Keats’s sources are Lemprière, Spence’s Polymetis, and paintings of Arcadian scenes such as Poussin’s. The cluster of figures here – Psyche and Cupid, Pan and Syrinx (11. 157–62), Echo and Narcissus (11. 163–80), and Endymion and Cynthia (ll. 181–204) – were associated in Keats’s mind: all of them could be used to describe the origin of poetry, and they had all provided subjects for painters; see Jack, pp. 144 ff.

151–2 Woodhouse (1817), p. 141, identifies the figure here with Ovid.

163–80 this passage is probably indebted to memories of Poussin’s Landscape with Narcissus and Echo as well as to the more obvious source in Ovid, Metamorphoses III.

180 bale torment, woe (poeticism), also mental suffering, misery (Spenser).

189 speculation the act of observing (archaic by Keats’s time). Keats ‘almost always used the word… with the meaning… of “contemplation” or “simple vision” or with a meaning in which the contemplative element predominates’, Murry (1930), p. 93.

194 Latmos the mountain where Endymion pastured his sheep and was visited by Diana: see Endymion I, 63–88 for another handling of this incident.

218 young Apollo on the pedestal a reference to the Apollo Belvedere. Allott points out that Keats knew the illustration in Spence (Plate XI).

221–30 Probably, as Ward (1963), p. 59, suggests, a memory of Keats’s experiences as a student in the wards of Guy’s Hospital.

220 Venus the Venus de Medici.

233 other’s] G, Allott; others’ 1817; others MSS.

SLEEP AND POETRY

Completed December 1816, written largely in Leigh Hunt’s Hampstead cottage, and therefore started sometime after 9 October. ‘It was in the library at Hunt’s cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa, that [Keats] composed the frame-work and many lines of the poem… the last sixty or seventy being an inventory of the art garniture of the room’, Cowden Clarke, pp. 133–4. It is closely related to ‘I stood tip-toe…’ (see note to preceding poem), and was published as the final poem in 1817.

Sleep and Poetry takes up the themes raised by his verse letters, and the loose framework allows Keats to make the first serious effort to outline his major concerns. Discussed by Bate (1963), pp. 124–30, Jack, pp. 130–40, and Jones, pp. 40–48, passim.

Motto The Floure and the Leafe 17–21. The poem is no longer attributed to Chaucer. See also Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of ‘The Floure and the Leafe’.

5 blowing blooming (poeticism). For ‘musk-rose’, see To a Friend who Sent Me some Roses 6n (p. 567).

28 rumblings Woodhouse altered to ‘rumbleings’ with the note, ‘3 syllables’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 153.

33 shapes of light, aërial limning delicately outlined spirits made of light: the participle also suggests that the spirits are ‘limning’ themselves in light.

48 denizen citizen, inhabitant, often used in a poetic sense by this time. The word may here have something of its legal meaning, for which OED cites Blackstone, Commentaries (1765) I, p. 374, ‘A Denizen is an alien born, but who has obtained… letters patent to make him an English subject.’

56 clear air ‘i.e. of poetic inspiration’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 153.

69–71 compare Wordsworth, To the Daisy (1807), 70–72, ‘A happy, genial influence, / Coming one knows not how, nor whence, / Nor whither going’.

71–2 imaginings will hover / Round my fireside see To My Brothers.

74 Meander] G, Allott; meander 1817. In classical geography, a river in Asia Minor celebrated for its windings.

79 tablets writing pad, though dignified perhaps by an echo of the Mosaic ‘tablets’.

88–9 steep / Of Montmorenci a river in Quebec with a waterfall.

96–154 Keats gives an account of the development of the artist. It resembles Tintern Abbey, and anticipates his later discussion of life as ‘a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ (3 May 1818, L I, pp. 280–81, quoted in part in headnote to The Fall of Hyperion, p.