The cambridge companion to british roman 289

Romantic poets and contemporary poetry What stands out here is the intimacy, the intensity of affiliation, with which the passage records, recreates, and reorders the language of Keats, the language of the letters and the poems After the conventional description of Keats’s extraordinarily productive year between September 1818 and September 1819 as his “annus mirabilis,” almost everything in the first stanza cited here consists of a reordering of the words of Keats’s “To Autumn”: “season” is from the first line’s “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”;17 the “oozing of the ciderpress” is a collapsing of two lines at the end of Keats’s second stanza (“Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours”); Clampitt’s “harvest done” and “stubble” both allude to the “stubble-plains” in the final stanza of “To Autumn” and to its general sense that harvesting has finished; the reference to poppies alludes to the “drowsing” effect of the “fume of poppies” in Keats’s poem; and “the swallows fretting to begin” reworks the ode’s final line, “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” The final stanza of Clampitt’s poem is a little more diverse in its references but still entirely Keatsian: “windborne” is condensed from “To Autumn”’s gnats in stanza three, which are “borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies”; “mists” is a word which, in its unmistakable plurality, is taken from the first line of Keats’s poem; “the imagination’s yet untrodden region” is from another Keats poem, “Ode to Psyche”’s “untrodden region of my mind” (l 51); “marble” is from, among other things, the “marble men and maidens” that seem so to disappoint the speaker at the end of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (l 42); and the description of the mists closing in on London’s “foul” air might seem to echo the sentiments of a letter dated just before Keats wrote “To Autumn.”18 Even the seemingly un-poetic “blood-spattered” in the earlier stanza of Clampitt’s poem can be read as an allusion to one of the commonly cited historical contexts of “To Autumn,” since, as critics have pointed out, the poem was written soon after and arguably in response to or in protest against a famously bloody charge by government troops on unarmed protesters at St Peter’s Field in Manchester (the so-called “Peterloo Massacre” of August 16, 1819); or it could be interpreted more directly as an allusion to the blood that spattered out of Keats’s lungs over the next eighteen months as he slowly died from consumption There is little here that originates with Clampitt, then, except the crucial matters of selection, of syntax, and of the reordering of words And what is remarkable about these stanzas is, as I say, the intimacy of affiliation with which they embrace Keats’s words, his language, in a poem that does so in order to intimate a sense of his life (and, more importantly, perhaps, his death, the manner of his dying after his voyage to Italy); what strikes one is the apparent ease of identification that a late twentieth-century female 267 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008