hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low--
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve."

In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses
his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself.
A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms
would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that
poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of
dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare;
their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and
emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins
of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught
discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to
discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning-
fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect--the
discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and
survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and
save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the
experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked
truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry.

Footnotes:

{78} For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am indebted to
Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, _James Macpherson_, _an Episode in
Literature_ (David Nutt, 1905).

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