7 Alp used in the singular by Milton, Paradise Lost II, 620, ‘many a Fierie Alp’. See also Endymion I, 666.

‘AFTER DARK VAPOURS HAVE OPPRESSED OUR PLAINS’

Dated 31 January 1817 (W1–2). Published in Examiner, 23 February 1817, and in 1848. Keats had 1817 ready for the press on 1 January: this is the only poem he wrote that month.

5 month, relieving from] W1–2, G; month, relieving of Examiner; mouth, relieved from 1848; month, relieved of Garrod (OSA), Allott. ‘Mouth’ is a possible reading in view of the images of sickness (ll. 1, 4) and the reference to ‘eyelids’ (l. 7). ‘Month’, however, fits in with the seasonal imagery, and also fits the period in which Keats wrote the poem. ‘Relieving from’ is a rare intransitive use: OED records the sense, ‘to lift or raise up again’ (1533).

6 the feel of compare In drear-nighted December 21n.

10 fruit… suns anticipates To Autumn 1–2.

14 a Poet’s death Chatterton, perhaps. ‘I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn’ (L II, p. 167).

TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.

Probably written c. February 1817, and published as the Dedication to 1817. Although Hunt’s answering sonnet is dated ‘Dec. 1, 1816’ by Keats’s publisher, Charles Ollier, Clarke reports that when the last batch of proofs reached Keats one evening, he ‘drew to a side-table, and in the buzz of a mixed conversation… he composed… the Dedication sonnet to Leigh Hunt’ (Cowden Clarke, p. 138).

3 wreathed incense ‘smoke of sacrifice’, Woodhouse (1817), p. 140.

5–8 Jack, p. 117, compares with Poussin’s The Triumph of Flora. Compare also Sleep and Poetry 101–21.

WRITTEN ON A BLANK SPACE AT THE END OF CHAUCER’S TALE OF ‘THE FLOURE AND THE LEAFE’

Probably written on 27 February 1817. Published Examiner, 16 March 1817, reprinted 1848. According to Cowden Clarke, p. 139, ‘the sonnet… was an extempore effusion’. It was written in Clarke’s copy of The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1782), now in the British Museum. The Floure and the Leafe is no longer attributed to Chaucer: Keats had used a quotation from the poem as the motto to Sleep and Poetry. Text based on the Examiner.

2 do ] so 1848.

9 has ] hath autograph MS, G, Allott.

9 white simplicity The Floure and the Leafe praises chastity.

11 do ] Examiner, 1848; for autograph MS, G, Allott.

13–14 an allusion to the Babes in the Wood. The robins covered the sleeping children with leaves.

ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

Date uncertain. Assigned to 1 March 1817 or before, as Hunt’s two sonnets on being given an ivy crown by Keats are so dated, and the two crownings are supposed to belong to the same occasion. Further, see Bate (1963), pp. 138–9. The sonnet is another by-product of Hunt’s poetry contests: see also On the Grasshopper and Cricket and To the Nile. Woodhouse records, ‘As Keats and Leigh Hunt were taking their wine together after dinner at the house of the latter, the whim seized them to crown themselves with laurel after the fashion of the elder Bards’ (W2).