RomAntics: Spotlight on... Keats's 'To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent’

Keats Grove, Hampstead

John Keats was not just a poet – although he was certainly that: a wonderfully 'haunting' poet, bard of the 'frozen ecstasy', the fatalistic 'erotic sensibility' and the simultaneity of 'sensuality and stasis', as Rowan Williams says. But Keats had a medical career too. He worked as the apprentice to the apothecary Thomas Hammond in Edmonton and then in Guy's Hospital, studying under the renowned surgeon Sir Astley Cooper.

To one who has been long in city pent,

         'Tis very sweet to look into the fair

         And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer

Full in the smile of the blue firmament.

Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,

         Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair

         Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair

And gentle tale of love and languishment?

Returning home at evening, with an ear

         Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye

Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,

         He mourns that day so soon has glided by:

E'en like the passage of an angel's tear

         That falls through the clear ether silently.

Keats, John, “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent., Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44486/to-one-who-has-been-long-in-city-pent

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Here's Johnny!

‘To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent’ (1817) is testament to a journey 'returning home at evening', perhaps from work, and evokes a feeling directly transferrable to the twenty-first century. Up and down the country, folk plough home, 'mourn[ing] that day so soon has glided by', over-worked in demeaning, humiliating jobs for cruddy pay. Nature, the sky, the clouds, do indeed seem to have a better, 'bright[er] career'. The day – the quiescent time for creativity, sensibility-development, joys and amusement – has dribbled away in agonisingly tepid, worthless excel cells, corporate calls and extended toilet breaks, just like a 'silent' 'angel's tear', reflected both by the dismal rain dripping down train windows, and the city pentee's internal, quiet sobbing. 

But Keats's sonnet is about far more than the spiritual impoverishment precipitated by the undertaking of a job sitting somewhere on the spectrum of downright-morally-reprehensible-to-ethically-ambivalent. It speaks more generally to anyone 'pent', sequestered, confined, stifled, by the city – by its greys, drabness, eyeless faces, brutalism, dead-ends, straggling apologies for hedges and trees, polluted sounds and sights.

His poetic structure is interesting: instead of moving from the cause for sadness to a solution, it is as if he is so keen to escape from the city that he has to leap straight into the inspired dream of better places and better times, before remembering that the direction of his address is 'to one [...] long in city pent', and so reverts to their movements, 'returning home' at line 9 across the dismal urban conglomeration.         

From the very opening line, Keats directly alludes to the Romantic tradition which shunned ‘the din/ Of towns and cities’, echoing Coleridge’s hauntingly beautiful ode to a newborn child, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798). In Coleridge’s poem, the poet mourns how he was ‘reared/ In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim’ – just like Keats’s character ‘long in city pent’ – but Coleridge celebrates his child’s difference from such an upbringing: ‘thou’, however, ‘shalt wander like a breeze’.

A similar difference, or distance, is conjured by Keats – but it stems, as so often with him, from the detachment from the real world via the imagination, rather than from Coleridge’s generational passage or migration to a rural, more salubrious habitat. Instead of ‘Frost at Midnight’’s temporal or tangibly geographical distancing effect, Keats’s distance lies in the liminal gap between reality and the imagination. The key to Keats’s poem lies not in any delineation of actual movement out of the city; in fact neither the poet nor the vaguely adumbrated urban inhabitant ever leave. Instead, it is in the contemplation of nature – or even just in tentative snatches of it – where solace is found. It is in glimpses of the fresh sky above rooftops (the ‘blue firmament’), in the ‘wavy grass’ of, say, Keats’s Hampstead Heath (not dramatic Lakeland precipices), and in seasonal shifts (the ‘sailing cloudlet’) where greater, more sublime forces of nature can be pondered and enjoyed, just in attenuated, muted form.

These small tokens of a bigger, broader nature serve as a reminder to the poet of the existence of something greater. That is why, from Keats’s opening line, the poem sets up the experience of the natural world as a relative relationship. All that is really happening is that the city-dweller is looking at the sky (the ‘open face of heaven’). But, to one long in city pent, this simple pleasure is all the more to be revelled in for what it more widely entails. The sky becomes a synecdoche for the natural world’s entirety – it signifies and promises nature’s full extent. It is gentle and humble, a merely ‘smil[ing]’ firmament, equipped with the further personifying ‘face’ and ‘career’ (and perhaps thereby an example of nature’s corruption at the hands of the city’s overweening humanness), far from the gushing, nightmarish cataracts of Burkean, sublime Romanticism – but in their scarcity, the city’s self-effacing relics of nature are all the more prized.

Keats’s final lines, having leapt into the ‘solution’ (contemplation of nature) before fully outlining the poem’s issue (being cramped and confined by the city) in the first place, are masterful. Without ever using the words ‘sun’ or ‘sunset’, a serene, lambent evening sky is painted by the beautiful ‘sailing cloudlet's bright career’. The ‘eye’ and ‘ear’ are attuned to the day’s reliance on the natural world’s axes – they are Romanticism’s prized senses: prized, as Wordsworth wrote, both for what they ‘half-create’ and ‘perceive’.

And indeed, in the poem, the ‘eye’ and ‘ear’ have combined ‘half-creation’ and real ‘perception’; the poet’s senses have picked up on the nominal strands of nature withstanding the urban conglomeration, and from there, have ‘created’ fresh and comforting thoughts of nature in the imagination, extrapolating from and building on the truth. The ‘notes of Philomel’ do the same thing in an audial mode. Instead of seeing elements of the natural world and feeling comforted by their implication of a greater natural world, hearing birdsong (Philomela was attacked and turned into a nightingale, Keats’s Philip Pullman-ian daemon) corroborates the poet’s knowledge of greater spiritual beings and the world’s beautiful sounds in their entirety.

The sonnet is a collection of synecdoche and promises. The sky, the sounds, the grasses and the clouds which straggle through the city’s murk are harbingers of the earth’s dormant beauty, promising that even when only available to experience in half-whispers and stolen glimpses, something greater exists beyond.

Keats’s use of scale is masterful; every image represents something broader – from Philomel’s collocation with song, music, the aesthetic and the sounds of nature, to the singular ‘cloudlet’’s representation of the sky, the sun, the moon and the universe. Both examples are further respectively descaled – Philomel is rendered more nominal by her mythologised muteness and loss of agency, and the cloudlet is patronised by its diminishing suffix ‘-let’.

But these are red herrings: the images’ ostensible smallness is at loggerheads with their hugeness in the mind of the poet – even the smallest elements of nature can be invaluable in their capacity to spiritually restore their witness, powerful reminders of nature’s immensity.

© - Bea Wood, 2025