Giving laurel crowns seems to have been one of Hunt’s pastimes judging by To Charles Cowden Clarke 44–5, ‘Libertas – who has told you stories / Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo’s glories…’. Garrod thinks that Keats and Hunt may have been given crowns by the woman celebrated in To a Young Lady who Sent me a Laurel Crown (G, p. 529). However, the date of that poem is uncertain (see p. 571). First published The Times, 18 May 1914.

3 delphic labyrinth Apollo’s oracle was at Delphi. The meaning is ‘the labyrinth of poetic inspiration’.

4 immortal] Allott; unmortal G. Keats’s MS is unclear, but see H. E. Rollins, Harvard Library Bulletin, VI (1954), p. 164.

13 wild surmises compare On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 13, ‘with a wild surmise’.

TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

Date uncertain, and dependent on preceding poem. Tentatively, 1 March 1817 or before. Published The Times, 18 May 1914. Woodhouse’s reconstruction of the events indicates that Hunt and Keats were still wearing their wreaths when visitors called: ‘… Hunt removed the wreath from his own brows… Keats however in his mad enthusiastic way, vowed that he would not take off his crown for any human being: and… wore it… as long as the visit lasted’ (W2). The visitors were probably the Reynolds sisters: for other poems addressed to them see headnote to On a Leander Gem (p. 582). On the whole episode, see Bate (1963), pp. 137–40.

7 halcyon ‘A bird of which the ancients fabled that it bred about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and that it charmed the wind and the waves so that the sea was specially calm’ (OED). Further references occur in To Charles Cowden Clarke 57 and Endymion I, 453–5.

ODE TO APOLLO

Written immediately after the two preceding poems, spring 1817. Keats regretted the ‘folly of his conduct’ and ‘was determined to record it by an apologetic ode to Apollo’ (W2). Published Western Messenger (Louisville), 1 June 1836; reprinted 1848. The text is based on the autograph MS in the Morgan Library. Keats’s draft is in Harvard Library.

Title ] W2–3, Western Messenger, G; no title in MSS; Hymn to Apollo 1848; To Apollo Allott. W1 has ‘A Fragment of an Ode…’

6 Round ] Of Draft, Western Messenger, 1848, G, Allott.

11 –creeping ] Crawling W2–3, Western Messenger, 1848, G, Allott.

13 grasped grasped his thunderbolt.

15 eagle one of Jupiter’s emblems.

23 germ seed (Latin germen), both literally and figuratively (from 1823), or, more loosely (as here), a shoot, ‘the rudiment of a new organ’, used of plants and animals (OED). Compare Cowper, The Task (1784) III, 521, ‘Then rise the tender germes, upstarting quick / And spreading wide their spongy lobes.’

25 Pleiades a constellation of seven stars. Lemprière notes that it was also the name given to seven poets ‘near the age of Philadelphus Ptolemy, king of Egypt’.

32 for a moment] like a madman Draft, Western Messenger, 1848, Garrod (OSA).

ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

Written before 3 March 1817, after visiting the British Museum with Haydon to see the Marbles, which had been bought recently for the nation (see Addressed to Haydon 11–12n, p. 572). Published in the Examiner and the Champion, 9 March 1817; reprinted Annals of the Fine Arts, April 1818, 1848. On 3 March Haydon wrote, ‘Many thanks My dear fellow for your two noble sonnets’ (L I, p. 122): for the second sonnet, see next poem.