Reading Keats to the Letter: e

Abstract

For Karl Kroeber Sweet sweet is the greeting of (1) having two little loopholes, whence I may look out into the stage of the world (2) IN AN ESSAY CHASTISING TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRITICAL EFFORTS TO RECUPERATE Keats as a silenced radical, Paul Fry has remarked: Nor can the author of 'If thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave' ... be saved for feminism.' (3) Fry does not stick his neck out to say so; he does not even need to quote the still more notorious line with which the offending passage (from the Ode on Melancholy) continues: Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, Feed deep, deep upon her eyes. (18-20) This passage has often been lamented as a lapse or false note in an otherwise magnificent poem) But in the context of Keats's oeuvre it is more like a motif. Comparable passages featuring a masculine gaze upon peerless feminine can be found in Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Fall of Hyperion, and Lamia. (5) For many, this spells sexism, to which Keats pleads guilty in a passage adduced by Fry: The sale of my book [writes Keats to Charles Brown, referring to the poems of 1820, which include the Ode on Melancholy] is very slow.... One of the causes, I understand ... is the offense the ladies take at me.... I am certain I have said nothing to displease any woman I would care to please: but still there is a to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats,--they never see themselves dominant. The tendency confessed here would appear to reference the Ode on Melancholy directly, where peonies, the morning rose, and thy mistress's are all catalogued together. I am not primarily interested in exonerating Keats from charges of sexism, least of all where (being Keats) he criticizes himself. (7) But I am interested in pursuing a formal observation about the passage cited by Fry that I believe will show judgments like his to be premature. If the content of that passage has given many readers pause, the form of line 20 seems calculated to do so. And feed deep, deep upon her between its monosyllables, its monotone, its early caesura, and its awkward joining of words with consonants on both ends, hitting the first half of line 20 after lines 18-19 is like tripping down stairs into a bed of pea-gravel. if the halted traveler should pause to look about, he may notice another extraordinary feature of line 20: a certain exuberance in e's. More than a third of the letters are e, and half of the syllables depend on a double e. Only at the line's end, however, do these e's appear as what they are, as eyes: the word eyes both announces them verbally and presents them pictorially, as in a face. Fanciful as this might seem, the iconic use of e's as is a cliche in ads for eyeglasses and security systems today (figs. 1-8). Keats's letters demonstrate his own playful awareness of the resemblance. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] [FIGURE 5 OMITTED] [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] [FIGURE 7 OMITTED] [FIGURE 8 OMITTED] [FIGURE 9 OMITTED] Keats wrote in September 1819 to John Hamilton Reynolds, whose sisters were in Devonshire: Your sisters by this time must have got the Devonshire ees--short ees--you know 'era--they are the prettiest ees in the Language. O how I admire the middle siz'd delicate Devonshire girls of about 15. (8) This passage refers mainly to the acquisition of a local accent, but by writing e as ee, which is an occasional Scots and archaic English form for eye, and by shifting the register, with the next sentence, to the visual, Keats makes the whimsical suggestion that Reynolds's sisters must be developing pretty along with their accented e's. …