The poetry of dream and the threat of barrenness in three sonnets by John Keats

Abstract

The concept of the fruitful dream is central to Keats's understanding and depiction of the imagination. In a letter written in November 1817, he compares the imagination to ‘Adam's dream’, which is proven true when Adam awakes.The image of the ‘barren dream’, first mentioned in ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’, therefore represents an ever-present threat of creative desolation, and a limited imaginative scope.Through attentive readings of three sonnets written between 1817 and 1818 (‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’, the Lear sonnet and ‘On visiting the Tomb of Burns’) this article shows that the expression of the barren dream image reflects central formal and thematic creative tensions in Keats's work which must be negotiated in order to achieve a mature and fruitful poetic vision.These tensions are placed in the context of Keats's initial poetic endeavours and his later achievements, and the article demonstrates the importance of the sonnets of the period as transitions between early poems such as Endymion and the great odes of 1819.

Key words:

• barren dream
• Robert Burns
• dreaming
• Elgin Marbles
• John Keats
• King Lear
• poetic imagination

Notes

1 This and all subsequent references to Keats's poetry are taken from Bright Star: The complete poems and selected letters of John Keats, edited by Jane Campion (2009a).

2 I refer here to the discussions by critics who will be engaged later, in the section on the Lear sonnet, namely Stillinger, Kern, Vendler and Wolfson. Another article in which the ‘barren dream’ is explicitly mentioned, but which is not discussed in this article, is William Fitzgerald's ‘Keats's Sonnets and the Challenge of Winter’ (1987). Fitzgerald's approach follows the example of Stillinger in equating the ‘barren dream’ with the romance genre.

3 Stillinger goes on to demonstrate this claim in a reading and reappraisal of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’, which was written soon after the Lear sonnet. His interpretation of Keats's movement towards realism and away from romance is a central issue in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (1971).

4 The phrase ‘the poetry of dream’ is often used by Kern in the cited article.

5 Like Stillinger, Kern and Wolfson extend their interpretations to longer poems by Keats. Kern looks at ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ specifically, while Wolfson develops her view of romance in Keats ‘as a subject for tantalizing, cautionary negotiation, tagged by the phrases “new Romance” (dark, stark Isabella), or “old Romance” (the whims of Madeline in The Eve of St Agnes, a Spenserian-stanza romance that alternatively indulges and ironizes the genre) or honey words with a bite in the catastrophe of Lamia’ (2015, 49).

6 This connection to Frye's theories, specifically the ‘mythos of summer’ as associated with romance, is also picked up briefly by Kern in his analysis (1979, 179).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marguerite de Waal

MARGUERITE DE WAAL is an assistant lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pretoria. Her research interests are Romantic poetry, nineteenth century literature, and Renaissance drama. She is currently working on an MA dissertation which explores meta-theatrical deceptions in selected Shakespearean plays.