“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” begins, like plenty of poems before it, with an invocation to a muse (that is, an apostrophe to a spirit of artistic inspiration). This one is different than most, though. Rather than begging the personified figure of “golden-tongued Romance” to guide his pen, this speaker summons her only to shush her.
“Romance,” here, doesn’t mean “romantic love.” Rather, the speaker alludes to a branch of literature that began in the Middle Ages: a fantastical genre that tells idealized tales of knights, damsels, quests, and magic. (One good example might be The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s elaborate 16th-century allegory—a work Keats loved.)
The speaker depicts Romance as an elegant lady. The “Queen of far-away,” she seems to emerge from fairyland itself. She plays a “serene Lute,” strumming gentle ditties on an instrument that evokes the courtly music of Spenser’s era—and if she’s “golden-tongued,” she sings beautifully, too.
The speaker still wants her to be quiet, though. There’s a hint as to why in the backhanded compliment he gives her in line 2. When he calls her a “fair plumed Syren,” he’s pointing out that she might be as deceitful as she’s lovely. Sirens (as they’re now more often spelled) were treacherous figures from Greek mythology. Spirits with bird bodies and women’s heads, they sang beautiful music to lure sailors toward rocks. This “Syren,” then, might have a gorgeous voice and lovely plumage, but she isn’t altogether trustworthy. Romance’s song has something deceitful about it.
On this “wintry day,” the speaker wants Romance to “leave melodizing” and “be mute”—to stop her seductive, dreamy, elegant singing so he can listen to a different kind of music. As the poem’s title tells us, he’s “sitting down to read King Lear once again”—and a romance, Shakespeare’s great and terrible tragedy is not. This will be a poem about the speaker’s longing to immerse himself in a richer, darker, more truthful kind of art than Romance can provide.
Keats will sing Shakespeare’s praises in a sonnet—fitting, considering Shakespeare was a great sonneteer. Oddly enough, however, Keats won’t write a Shakespearean sonnet (a.k.a. an English sonnet), which is built from three quatrains and a closing couplet. Rather, he picks the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet form, which begins with an eight-line stanza (or octave) and closes with a six-line sestet.
What both sonnet forms have in common is good old iambic pentameter, one of the most familiar and flexible meters in English poetry. Lines of iambic pentameter are built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here’s how that sounds:
Shut up | thine old- | en Pa- | ges, and | be mute.
Keep an ear on Keats’s meter as the poem goes on: this sonnet has some tricks up its sleeve.