14/15 December 1816: A Whoreson Night
& A Too-tippy I stood
tip-toe
9 Providence Place, London


Regency London: The years from 1811 to 1820 are called The Regency, or Regency period, marked by George, Prince of Wales, becoming the Prince Regent. George’s father, King George III, has been officially declared mentally incapable, and therefore his son assumes (is delegated) the role of King—hence, the Prince Regent and the Regency Period. The era is marked by complicated historical, economic, political events and forces—such as the defeat of Napoleon (1815, with the Battle of Waterloo), the Corn Law (1815), Luddite activities (1811-1812), the Spa Field riot (1816), political activism (for example, Hannah More, James Stephen, William Wilberforce), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), the Cato Street conspiracy (1820), and the rise of both Evangelicalism and humanitarianism. Then there was also the Regency London social and cultural scene, known for its extreme pursuits of fashion (like dandyism), pleasure-seeking, décor, theatre, sporting events, the fine arts, and architecture (for example, the work of John Nash). For many, this was a condition of utter excess during hard times, and Keats would have had front-line exposure to it.


Keats could enjoy some of social mixing downtown London. Here he is at the residence
of Thomas Richards, where Keats says that he spends
so whoreson a Night that I stopped there all the next day
(writing to his friend,
Charles Cowden Clarke, 17 Dec 1816). What this
means is not perfectly clear, but it certainly suggests the evening involved much
drinking and
a hangover. Richards’ brother, Charles, is the
printer of Keats’s first volume of verse (published by the Ollier brothers), the 1817 Poems,
and like Keats and Clarke, was a student and Enfield. Richards is also a part-time
theatre
reviewer for The Examiner.
During this week, Keats likely completes I stood tip-toe upon a little hill. It becomes the opening poem for the 1817 volume, and so Keats must have thought something of its poetic worth. In December 1816, Keats is also publicly certified (listed) as a apothecary, has his thus-far best sonnet published (On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer), has an article partly about him published, and has a face-mask made by an established artist (Benjamin Robert Haydon). Perhaps some of this contributes to his celebration—and inebriation—at the Richards residence.
Like much of his early poetry, I stood tip-toe is mainly
about Keats’s desire to be an inspired poet—or any kind of poet, for that matter.
Here, this
desire is acted upon by, it seems, just arbitrarily looking around the landscape (on
tip-toe)
and hoping for the best. This situation is handled with little originality, efficiency
in
phrasing, or imaginative power. What the speaker looks at in the poem—mainly a accidental
catalog of drooping buds, long grasses, passionate flowers, skittish minnows, etc.—is
randomly
presented with equally random and often affected rhymes. Some things do not make much
sense;
even some poetic clichés are odd. For example, Keats writes, The clouds were pure and white
as flocks new shorn
(8), but freshly sheared sheep are neither white nor cloud-like in
the fluffy sense—not to mention that now that they are shaven, their pureness is a
little
dubious.

The envisioned landscape the speaker also seems to take us to at one point in the poem is not unlike the landscape the speaker actually stands tip-toe upon, though presumably the tip-toeing has stopped so that the speaker can either move around to note or envision other things.
And in the wandering, wayward spirit of the speaker’s imagination, he does indeed
get around:
he wonders what it might be like to lead a nimble-toed, auburn-haired, blushing maiden
over a
brook (95-106). But, alas, it cannot be: this little daydream abruptly ends, and the
poem’s
haphazard direction is revealed in the lame line immediately following: What next?
(107). Indeed. And then, it is back to the primroses and whatever is supposed to create
or
inspire a sweet poet
(116). What he really wonders about is what inspired the first
poet to imagine all those classical pastoral figures in the first place. Maybe he
stood upon a
hill (194-95). So perhaps, here too, our speaker, will be born a poet (241). Or not—or
not
yet.
There is also in Keats’s poem a kind of unprofitable reproduction of parts of a poem
that
early Keats thought highly of: Leigh Hunt’s
The Story of Rimini (1816), where, in a passage of Canto III,
we find a extended, random, and heavily poeticized cataloging of almost everything
you might
possibly see in an overgrown garden—all of it, as in Keats’s poem, bowery, flowery,
babbling,
and leafy (see lines 380-533 in particular). Keats knew this passage very well, since
he in
fact uses one line from it in—Places of nestling green for poets made
(430)—as the
epigraph for his tip-toe poem.

In short, the I stood tip-toe
does not work. It also reveals it is not sure what kind
of poem it is. Lyric? Apostrophe? Loco-descriptive? Transporting vision? Yes, with
all that
sweetness, lightness, softness, and greenery, the poem is vaguely and innocuously
agreeable.
And at best, its strivings are somewhat touching, since (like much of his early poetry)
these
strivings translate to I want to be a poet—but where, and how? Where do I find
inspiration? In nature? In the imagination? But again, relatively speaking, these are
early days.
In just about a year, as Keats goes on to develop a poetics in advance of poetry that
will
eventually enact those poetics, this kind of benign, tip-toeing poetic meandering
and
wandering—we could call it poetry lite
—gets left behind: Keats begins to take on and
deliberately study poets like Milton, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. In doing so, he then has better questions before
him: How does the poetry of these writers work to gain such lasting and meaningful
authority? What subjects are true to enduring poetry?—and in not too long this takes
him to investigate form as much as worthy subjects. He will come to make some remarkable
acute
critical statements about Wordsworth and Milton (some of them comparative)—both their
strengths and limitations—that set out his own unique direction. And then there’s
Shakespeare,
with his ability to be absorbed by all subjects.