XXII THE NAUGHTY BOY
Reading edition
BOUND up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the senses, take his “Song about Myself”:—
There was a naughty Boy And a naughty boy was he He ran away to Scotland The people for to see Then he found That the ground Was as hard, That a yard Was as long, That a song Was as merry, That a cherry Was as red— That lead Was as weighty, That fourscore Was as eighty, That a door Was as wooden As in England— So he stood in his shoes And he wonder’d, He wonder’d, He stood in his shoes And he wonder’d.
Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St. Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual notes of which each strike a separate sense.