rn." The main point the
Head of the Department made, with regard to the nightingale, was that it
was not worth rewriting. "'The Ode to the Nightingale,'" says he,
"offers me no such temptation. There is almost nothing in it that
properly belongs to the subject treated. The faults of the Grecian Urn
are such as the poet himself, under wise criticism" (see catalogue of
Chicago University) "might easily have removed. The faults of the
Nightingale are such that they cannot be removed. They inhere in the
idea and structure." The Head of the Department dwells at length upon
"the hopeless fortune of the poem," expressing his regret that it can
never be retrieved. After duly analysing what he considers the poem's
leading thought, he regrets that a poet like John Keats should go so
far, apropos of a nightingale, as to sigh in his immortal stanzas, "for
something which, whatever it may be, is nothing short of a dead drunk."

One hears the soul of Keats from out its eternal Italy--

"Is there no one near to help me
... No fair dawn
Of life from charitable voice? No sweet saying
To set my dull and sadden'd spirit playing?"

The Head of the Department goes on, and the lines--

Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod--

are passed through analysis. "What the fitness is," he says, "or what
the poetic or other effectiveness of suggesting that the corpse of a
person who has ceased upon the midnight still has ears, only to add that
it has them in vain, I cannot pretend to understand"--one of a great
many other things that the Head of the Department does not pretend to
understand. It is probably with the same outfit of not pretending to
understand that--for the edification of the merely admiring mind--the
"Ode to a Grecian Urn" was rewritten. To Keats's lines--

Oh, Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know--

he makes various corrections, offering as a substitute-conclusion to the
poet's song the following outburst:

Preaching this wisdom with th