Genesis xxx 37–42 gives the story of how Jacob used rods of poplar, hazel and chestnut in a magical variety of selective breeding.

202 Lyrist Apollo.

206 Boileau Boileau (1636–1711), French poet and critic, whose Art poétique formulated neo-classical critical attitudes. Like most of his generation, Keats thought of Augustanism as an interregnum in English poetry, dominated by French taste.

206 O ye whose charge ‘Oh ye elder & better poets, who sang in your day of our pleasant hills, & of natural scenes, & whose spirits may be imagined now to haunt those places’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 155.

209 boundly either bounden or boundless (coinage).

218 lone spirits ‘alluding to H[enry] Kirke White [1785–1806] – Chatterton – & other poets of great promise, neglected by the age, who died young’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 155.

226 swan’s ebon bill refers to Wordsworth according to Woodhouse (1817), p. 155.

226–8 from a thick brake…/Bubbles a pipe ‘Leigh Hunt’s poetry is here alluded to, in terms too favorable’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 155. A ‘brake’ is a thicket, or clump of bushes. ‘Pipe’ refers to the bird’s song.

231 Strange thunders from the potency of song ‘Allusion to Lord Byron, & his terrific stile of poetry – to Christabel by Coleridge &c.’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 155.

233–5 the themes / Are ugly clubs, the poets Polyphemes / Disturbing the grand sea ‘The poets, says Keats, are giants like Polyphemus and his brethren, of superhuman strength, but like the eyeless Polyphemus without ability to direct their energies fitly, so that their clubs (the themes they write on…) only succeed in disturbing the grand sea (of poetry? or life?)’, De Selincourt (who further suggests that Keats was probably thinking of Byron). Hunt took the lines as an attack on the Lake School. Woodhouse (1817) suggests ‘cubs’ for ‘clubs’.

237 ’Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm echoed by Coleridge in the lines added to The Eolian Harp in 1817, ‘Is Music slumbering on its instrument’ (l. 33). De Selincourt comments on Keats’s characteristic power ‘of presenting in his poetry the effects of sculpture’, and Woodhouse (1817), p. 155 refers to the Elgin Marbles. Jack, p. 135, notes that the Dionysus on the East pediment is the only figure bearing any resemblance to the line, and suggests Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel as a possible source.

241–2 ‘Alluding still to Lord Byron’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 155.

248 a myrtle fairer ‘Allusion to the coming age of poetry under the type of a myrtle. The author appears to think (perhaps justly) very favourably of the approaching generation of poets…’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 156.

257 Yeaned brought forth, born (used of sheep, goats, and occasionally other beasts).

276 fane temple (poeticism).

303 Dedalian wings see under ‘Dedalus’, Dictionary of Classical Names (p. 703).

322 pleasant rout ‘rout’ usually means uproar, clamour, but here means ‘A fashionable gathering or assembly, a large evening party or reception, much in vogue in the 18th and early 19th centuries’ (OED).

324 perhaps pronounced as one syllable.

344–6 the swift bound / Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye / Made Ariadne’s cheek look blushingly Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, was abandoned on Naxos by Theseus, where she was found by Bacchus. The latter’s ‘swift bound’ is drawn from Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, exhibited in London in 1816 and which Keats much admired (see Jack, pp. 130–31). See also Endymion IV, 193–272 and n (p.607).

338 portfolio portfolios of engravings of paintings were the best way to gain acquaintance with art in the early nineteenth-century. Keats was given the run of Hunt’s collection.

354 a poet’s house Hunt’s cottage (see headnote). Keats goes on to describe its library in the following lines (354–91). For a discussion of the paintings by Poussin, Claude, and Titian which probably influenced these lines see Jack, pp. 132–3.

377 smoothness] G, Allott; smoothiness 1817.

379 unshent unsullied, unspoiled (now archaic).

381 Sappho’s meek head a bust of the Greek poetess.

385 Great Alfred a patriotic hero of Keats; see To George Felton Mathew 67–9n (p. 563).

387 Kosciusko see headnote, To Kosciusko, below.

389–90 Petrarch… Laura for an earlier reference see Keen, fitful gusts 13–14n (p. 571).

WRITTEN IN DISGUST OF VULGAR SUPERSTITION

Written on Sunday evening, 22 December 1816. Keats’s autograph (Harvard) has a note, which may be in Tom Keats’s hand, ‘J.