701–2).

101–21 the realm… / Of Flora, and old Pan the carefree world of pastoral. Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers. Pan (‘God of all’) was the god of pastoral mythology, represented as a satyr. The ultimate source for Keats’s ‘realm of Flora’ is Ovid, but Ovid mediated through Sandys, eighteenth-century poets, and through the work of painters. Spence called the garden of Flora ‘the paradise of the Roman mythology’. Poussin’s Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of Pan probably contributes details to this passage, while his Realm of Flora provides a more basic inspiration: see Jack, pp. 135–40. Further, see Dictionary of Classical Names (pp.730, 737).

126–33 the image of the charioteer ‘O’ersailing the blue cragginess’ above the world of Flora and Pan is taken from Poussin’s painting The Realm of Flora, Jack, pp. 136–8. The charioteer is therefore to be identified with Apollo, god of the sun (and poetry). Woodhouse commented on ll. 127–8, ‘Personification of the Epic poet, when the enthusiasm of inspiration is upon him’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 154.

134 a green ] the green Garrod (OSA), Allott.

135 stalks ‘poetical expression for “trees” ’ Woodhouse (1817), p. 154.

162–229 Keats gives a brief history of the development of English poetry. In his account the greatness of the Elizabethans and seventeenth-century writers (ll. 171–80) was betrayed by the formalism of neo-classicism (ll. 181–206). He ends by turning to the resurgence of poetry in his own time (ll. 221–9).

180 soothe] Allott; sooth 1817, G. John Jones suggests emending to ‘smooth’, Jones, p. 58n; G notes it as a possible reading. Keats, however, regularly spelt ‘soothe’ as ‘sooth’, and its occurrence here should be compared with Endymion I, 783, ‘soothe thy lips’, and Isabella 403, ‘calmed its wild hair’. See also the otherwise unexampled superlative, ‘O soothest Sleep’, in To Sleep 5. Jones, p. 61, comments, ‘Did he spell [“sooth”] that way in order to bring it visually – and thus magically-truly – closer to “smooth”? Or perhaps its private rationale is to be found in the private Keatsian adjective “sooth” which exists in his poetry alongside the public “sooth” (meaning of course “true”) and appears to conflate “smooth” and “soothing” – at any rate in St Agnes Eve’s “jellies soother than the creamy curd”.’

186 rocking horse the Augustan heroic couplet. Hazlitt said in the Examiner 20 August 1815, ‘Dr Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus [Milton’s versification] into a rocking horse’, Works, ed. P. P. Howe (1930–34), IV, p. 40.

198 the certain wands of Jacob’s wit Jacob’s payment for looking after Laban’s flock was the right to all speckled cattle, goats and sheep.