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LIONEL TRILLING
illusion. In
The Eve of St. Agnes,
to take the most obvious example,
the moment of pleasure at the center of the poem, erotic pleasure
expressed in the fullest possible imagination of the luxurious, is the
very essence of reality: it is all we know on earth and all we need
to know. And it is the more real as reality and it is the more com–
prehensive as knowledge exacdy because in the poem it exists sur–
rounded by what on earth denies it, by darkness, cold, and death,
which make it transitory, which make the felt and proclaimed reality
mere illusion.
But we must be aware that in Keats's dialectic of pleasure it is
not only external circumstances that condition pleasure and bring it
into question as the principle of reality, but also the very nature of
pleasure itself.
If
for Keats erotic enjoyment is the peak and crown
of all pleasures, it is also his prime instance of the way in which
the desire for pleasure denies itself and produces the very opposite
of itself.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is-Love, forgive us-cinder, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace
is
perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
This opening statement of the second part of
Lamia
is not, as It
18
often said to be, merely a rather disagreeable jaunty cynicism but
one of Keats's boldest expressions of his sense that there is something
perverse and self-negating in the erotic life, that it is quite in the
course of nature that we should feel
«Pleasure .
..
turning to Poison
as the bee-mouth sips."
He insists on the seriousness of the statement
in a way that should not be hard to interpret- referring to the lines
I have just quoted, he says
That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
Hard for the non-elect to understand.
That faery land we know very well-in the Nightingale Ode, Keats's
epithet for the region is
forlorn;
it is the country of La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, the scene of erotic pleasure which leads to devastation,
of an erotic fulfillment which implies castration.
