IN this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.

The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, as for example “In club or messroom ... indulging.”

The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.

The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of consonants and open vowels with much the same care.

But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by so doing.

Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiography:—

“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1] and ending with the words,

Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were not to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:—

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”

Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative “quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.