Milton’s Noseprints: Momentum in Keats’s ‘Doggrel’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The light verse that Keats enclosed in his 1818 travel letters is not often studied, perhaps because it is so thoroughly unserious, heavy on the jangly rhyme and the dairymaid anecdotes. But its freedoms help to prepare the way for Keats’s miraculous 1819. This essay presents a formal reading of a few of what Keats called his ‘doggrel’ poems, paying special attention to their evocations of embodied motion – tumbling, galloping, striding. The three poems examined here reflect Keats’s intellectual movement during this important period of his poetic development. As Keats’s ‘naughty boy’ who finds that, in Scotland, ‘a door / Was as wooden / As in england’ at last stands in his shoes and wonders, so Keats in these verses moves through questing into waiting, through seeking into seeing.