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he managed to mention Winchester
College. Drawing on ‘To the River
Loddon’, a seminal poem by Thomas
the Elder, Bowles devised a new style
of sonnet, characterised by riparian
settings, a poetic persona of youthful
sensibility, a focus on personal
development, and a tripartite
structural form involving scenes
which are left, revisited and then
recollected.
The effect of Bowles’s sonnets was
immediate: Southey, Coleridge and
Wordsworth acknowledged their
profound force and impact. Only
Byron refused to be convinced,
savaging Bowles as ‘the maudlin
prince of mournful sonneteers’.
Keats, an ardent Wartonian in his
critical tastes, stayed in Winchester
in 1819. He described the city as
‘the pleasantest town I was ever in’,
‘beautifully wooded’, and with air
worth ‘sixpence a pint’. Keats cannot
have failed to realise that he was
moving in the footsteps of Bowles –
but no one has ever related the Keats
masterpiece to the riparian poetic
traditions in which, almost literally,
the poet trod.
Keats’s individual aesthetic broadly
involved the hiding of the obvious.
His objections to poetry which had
palpable designs upon its reader,
his invention of the term ‘negative
capability’ (‘when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties… without
any irritable reaching out of fact’) and
his conviction that ‘the only means
of strengthening one’s intellect is to
make up one’s mind about nothing’
all demonstrate this tendency. A
better understanding of Keats can
therefore often be obtained by
working out not what he has said, but
what he has hidden.
‘To Autumn’ carefully avoids the
Wartonian trilogy of topography,
poetic persona, and aesthetics.
Bowles’s sonnets were topographical
about a particular place, a particular
The Trusty Servant
river. ‘To Autumn’ lacks all specificity
of location. The Wartons gave the
reader rivers; Bowles, Coleridge
and Wordsworth gave them ruins –
‘Tintern Abbey’ was a poem Keats
knew and greatly admired. Yet a poem
conceived on a walk along a river,
towards an ecclesiastical edifice of
historic distinction, mentions neither.
It is as though there is no irrigation,
only fruitfulness, a fruitfulness that
can only self-destruct.
In Keats’s poem also, the narrator
and his development remain
unmentioned. The contrast becomes
all the more obvious if one looks
at Henry Headley’s ‘Address to
the River Isis’, where the narrator
mourns his own impending death,
linking it with the tidal progression
of the Thames. Keats introduces
personification only in stanza two:
that figure appears, only to disappear.
There is no poetic persona in ‘To
Autumn’, indeed there is almost not
even a poet.
The tripartite time structure in ‘To
Autumn’ derives from Warton and
Bowles, but is more sophisticated.
Time becomes as teasing as place. It is
simultaneously fluid and static. Every
stanza is about autumn, but autumn
is three seasons in one. In stanza one,
we are in a morning, in early autumn.
In stanza two, we are in the afternoon
and mid-autumn. In stanza three,
we are in dusk, with a heralding of
winter. Thus, there is progress, yet no
progress.
The uncertainties of ‘To Autumn’
reflect the uncertainties in Keats’s
personal situation, as he decided
he must turn his back on poetry.
Summer, with its nightingales and
Grecian urns, was behind him. River
paths usually involve a progress,
especially in Bowles and Warton, yet
this poem envisages none. Keats must
reconcile himself not only to leaving
a poetic career, but also leaving life
altogether. But he does it with none
of Bowles’s slightly self-indulgent and
affected melancholy.
Few people now read Bowles. Hardly
anyone reads the Wartons. But many
people worldwide read the poets
which these precursors inspired; and
Wykehamists may be proud not only
of their poetic alumni, but also their
vindicated school historian.
This is a shortened version of a talk given
by the Headmaster on 19 th September
2019, the bicentenary of the composition of
Keats’s poem.
‘To the River Itchin’
by William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), OW.
Itchin! when I behold thy banks again,
Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart a shivering sense of pain!
Is it, that many a summer’s day has past
Since, in life’s morn, I carolled on thy side!
Is it, that oft since then my heart has sighed,
As Youth, and Hope’s delusive gleams, flew fast!
Is it, that those who gathered on thy shore,
Companions of my youth, now meet no more!
Whate’er the cause, upon thy banks I bend,
Sorrowing; yet feel such solace at my heart,
As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,
From whom, in happier hours, we wept to part.
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