John Keats

Stay, ruby breasted warbler, stay

TUNE – “Julia to the Wood Robin”
Stay, ruby breasted warbler, stay,
And let me see thy sparkling eye;
Oh brush not yet the pearl strung spray,
Nor bow thy pretty head to fly.
Stay while I tell thee, fluttering thing,
That thou of love an emblem art;

patient plume thy little wing

"Patient" as a verb means "be patient with" or "endure patiently." He's asking the bird to tolerate having its wing smoothed down while he talks—treating it like a fidgeting child.

Yes! patient plume thy little wing,
Whilst I my thoughts to thee impart.
When summer nights the dews bestow,
And summer suns enrich the day,
Thy notes the blossoms charm to blow,

Thy notes the blossoms charm to blow

"Blow" means "bloom" in period English. He's claiming the bird's song literally makes flowers open—the kind of nature-magic conceit that Romantic poets loved but Keats would later abandon.

Each opes delighted at thy lay.
So when in youth the eye’s dark glance
Speaks pleasure from its circle bright,
The tones of love our joys enhance,

make superiour each delight

The archaic spelling "superiour" appears in Keats's juvenilia. He's 18-19 here, still learning his craft, still spelling like his 18th-century predecessors.

And make superiour each delight.
And when bleak storms resistless rove,
And ev’ry rural bliss destroy,
Nought comforts then the leafless grove
But thy soft note – its only joy.
E’en so the words of love beguile,
When pleasure’s tree no longer bears,
And draw a soft endearing smile,
Amid the gloom of grief and tears.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Keats Before Keats

CONTEXT Keats wrote this around 1814-1815, age 18-19, when he was a surgeon's apprentice in Edmonton, not yet committed to poetry. It wasn't published until after his death.

This is juvenilia—apprentice work that shows what Keats had to unlearn. The poem runs on extended simile: bird in summer is like love in youth (stanzas 3-4), bird in winter is like love in hardship (stanzas 5-6). The structure is mechanical, the parallels too neat. Compare this to the Keats of five years later, who would write "The sedge has wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing" and stop there, trusting the image to carry the feeling.

The diction is telling. Words like "superiour," "e'en," "nought" are 18th-century poetic language—the kind of artificial elevation that Keats's mature style would reject. When he writes "Nought comforts then the leafless grove / But thy soft note," he's using "nought" because it sounds poetic, not because the poem needs it. The 1819 Keats would write "nothing" and make it sing.

What's already present: the attention to sensory detail ("pearl strung spray," "ruby breasted"), the interest in how beauty consoles us in "the gloom of grief and tears." The themes are Keatsian. The execution is still borrowed.

The Song Format

The tune reference matters because songs have different rules than poems. Songs need regular meter for singing, simple syntax that works with melody, refrains and repetitions that sound natural when performed. The six-stanza structure in perfect quatrains, the singsong rhythm, the parallel construction—all of this makes sense for a drawing-room ballad.

"Julia to the Wood Robin" was a popular air, probably Irish or Scottish in origin. Keats is writing a contrafactum—new words to an existing tune. This was how most people experienced poetry in Regency England: sung at the piano, printed in ladies' magazines, performed at social gatherings. The poem isn't trying to be "Ode to a Nightingale." It's trying to be something you could sing after dinner.

The bird itself is probably fictional. There's no "ruby breasted warbler" in British ornithology. Keats is either misremembering a robin (which has a red breast) or inventing a decorative bird for a decorative song. The mature Keats would spend hours watching actual nightingales; the young Keats is content with a pretty phrase.