A Keats Mystery Explained

Never mind the wretched G-20! There are more important things. After almost two centuries of suspense, it can now finally be told: the speaker in Keats’s sonnet "Had I a man’s fair form" (written ca. February 14, 1816, and addressed “To--”), is a bee.

Theocritus’s Idyll III has his lovesick goatherd (who also wonders if he is not perhaps funny-looking) say: “O to be that buzzing bee, and fly into your cave, / Slipping through the ivy and fern you hide behind” (trans. Anthony Verity [OUP, 2002]). Dr. Johnson comments, apropos of Pope’s imitation of Theocritus: “Theocritus makes his lover wish to be a bee, that he might creep among the leaves that form the chaplet of his mistress.” Keats has simply reversed the conceit. Here the bee regrets not being a man:

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs
Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell
Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart, so well
Would passion arm me for the enterprize.
But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies,
No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;
I am no happy shepherd of the Dell
Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.
Yet must I dote upon thee--call thee sweet,
Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honeyed roses
When steeped in dew rich to intoxication.
Ah! I will taste that dew, for me 'tis meet
And when the moon her pallid face discloses,
I’ll gather some by spells and incantation.

Pope’s “First Pastoral, or Damon” alludes to Mt. Hybla, famous for bees and honey, and Leigh Hunt later wrote a book called A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla.

Nous sommes
le 12 Germinal, An 217