He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old Mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration.
He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old Mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration.
To rescue men’s minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton’s horn, could for a moment hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination, whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to soothe her brother’s pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate verbal music and of imagination following out a classic myth, that of the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:—
’Twas a layMore subtle cadencèd, more forest wildThan Dryope’s lone lulling of her child:
’Twas a lay
More subtle cadencèd, more forest wild
Than Dryope’s lone lulling of her child:
Even in setting before us so trite a personification as the god of love, Keats manages to escape the traditional and the merely decorative, and to endow him with a new and subtle vitality—
awfully he stands;A sovereign quell is in his waving hands;No sight can bear the lightning of his bow;His quiver is mysterious, none can knowWhat themselves think of it; from forth his eyesThere darts strange light of varied hues and dyes:A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but whoLook full upon it feel anon the blueOf his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.
awfully he stands;
A sovereign quell is in his waving hands;
No sight can bear the lightning of his bow;
His quiver is mysterious, none can know
What themselves think of it; from forth his eyes
There darts strange light of varied hues and dyes:
A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but who
Look full upon it feel anon the blue
Of his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.
Keats in one place defines his purpose in his poem, if only he can find strength to carry it out, as a
striving to uprearLove’s standard on the battlements of song.
striving to uprear
Love’s standard on the battlements of song.
His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languishing is used to point an essential moral of the narrative:—
O love! how potent hast thou been to teachStrange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells,In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells,In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun,Thou pointest out the way, and straight ’tis won.
O love! how potent hast thou been to teach
Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells,
In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells,
In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun,
Thou pointest out the way, and straight ’tis won.
When the poet interrupts for a passing moment his tale of the might and mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we find, him able to condensethe whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into three potent lines,—
The woes of Troy, towers smothering o’er their blaze,Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades,Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.
The woes of Troy, towers smothering o’er their blaze,
Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades,
Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.
From a passage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of Keats’s day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover Glaucus:—
‘Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurseMade of rose leaves and thistledown, express,To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes,I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch.So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabiesUnheard of yet: and it shall still its criesUpon some breast more lily-feminine.Oh, no—it shall not pine, and pine, and pineMore than one pretty, trifling thousand years.... Mark me! Thou hast thewsImmortal, for thou art of heavenly race:But such a love is mine, that here I chaseEternally away from thee all bloomOf youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast;And there, ere many days be overpast,Disabled age shall seize thee: and even thenThou shalt not go the way of aged men;But live and wither, cripple and still breatheTen hundred years: which gone, I then bequeathThy fragile bones to unknown burial.Adieu, sweet love, adieu!’
‘Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse
Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express,
To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes,
I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:
My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch.
So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies
Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries
Upon some breast more lily-feminine.
Oh, no—it shall not pine, and pine, and pine
More than one pretty, trifling thousand years.
... Mark me! Thou hast thews
Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race:
But such a love is mine, that here I chase
Eternally away from thee all bloom
Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.
Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast;
And there, ere many days be overpast,
Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then
Thou shalt not go the way of aged men;
But live and wither, cripple and still breathe
Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath
Thy fragile bones to unknown burial.
Adieu, sweet love, adieu!’
A vein very characteristic of Keats at this stage of his mind’s growth is that of figurative confession or self-revelation. Many passages inEndymiongive poetical expression to the same alternating moods ofambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he confides to his friends in his letters. One of the most striking and original of these pieces of figurative psychology studied from his own moods is the description of the Cave of Quietude in Book IV:—
There lies a den,Beyond the seeming confines of the spaceMade for the soul to wander in and traceIts own existence, of remotest glooms.Dark regions are around it, where the tombsOf buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarceOne hour doth linger weeping, for the pierceOf new-born woe it feels more inly smart:And in these regions many a venom’d dartAt random flies; they are the proper homeOf every ill: the man is yet to comeWho hath not journeyed in this native hell.But few have ever felt how calm and wellSleep may be had in that deep den of all.There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,Yet all is still within and desolate.... Enter noneWho strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.
There lies a den,
Beyond the seeming confines of the space
Made for the soul to wander in and trace
Its own existence, of remotest glooms.
Dark regions are around it, where the tombs
Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce
One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce
Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart:
And in these regions many a venom’d dart
At random flies; they are the proper home
Of every ill: the man is yet to come
Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.
But few have ever felt how calm and well
Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.
There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:
Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,
Yet all is still within and desolate.
... Enter none
Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.
To the student ofEndymionthere are few things more interesting than to observe Keats’s technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys’sOvidwhich tells how Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions and yoking them to her car:—
The Mother, crown’dWith towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound,But that she thought that punishment too small.When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall;Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails;Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tailsWhisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread;For speech they roar: the woods become their bed.These Lions, fear’d by others, Cybel checksWith curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.
The Mother, crown’d
With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound,
But that she thought that punishment too small.
When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall;
Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails;
Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tails
Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread;
For speech they roar: the woods become their bed.
These Lions, fear’d by others, Cybel checks
With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.
This is a typical example of Ovid’s brilliantly clever, quite unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the marvels of an act of transformation. Keats’s recollection of it—and probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of Cybele and her yoked lions—inspires a vision of intense imaginative life expressed in verse of a noble solemnity and sonority:—
Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,Came mother Cybele! alone—alone—In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrownAbout her majesty, and front death-pale,With turrets crown’d. Four maned lions haleThe sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws,Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy pawsUplifted drowsily, and nervy tailsCowering their tawny brushes. Silent sailsThis shadowy queen athwart, and faints awayIn another gloomy arch.
Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,
Came mother Cybele! alone—alone—
In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown
About her majesty, and front death-pale,
With turrets crown’d. Four maned lions hale
The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws,
Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws
Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails
Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails
This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away
In another gloomy arch.
The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats’s imagination, and finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in theMetamorphosesand Keats inEndymion, let him turn to the passage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,—the same passage from which is derived the famous song in Handel’sAcis and Galatea: let him turn to this and compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.
But let us for our purpose rather take, as illustrating the relations of Keats to his classic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics inEndymionaltogether.Two of them are of small account,—the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats’s very finest achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison with two of Keats’s Elizabethan sources, Chapman’s translation of the Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson’s original hymns in his masque ofPan’s Anniversary. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:—
Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes’ love-got joys,Goat-footed, two-horn’d, amorous of noise,That through the fair greens, all adorn’d with trees,Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble kneesCan every dance foot, that affect to scaleThe most inaccessible tops of allUprightest rocks, and ever use to callOn Pan, the bright-haired God of pastoral;Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth oweBy lot all loftiest mountains crown’d with snow;All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses,All sylvan copses, and the fortressesOf thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,And sometimes, by allurement of his love,Will wade the wat’ry softnesses. Sometimes(In quite oppos’dcapriccios) he climbsThe hardest rocks, and highest, every wayRunning their ridges. Often will conveyHimself up to a watch-tow’r’s top, where sheepHave their observance. Oft through hills as steepHis goats he runs upon, and never rests.Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts,Mad of their slaughters...(When Hesp’rus calls to fold the flocks of men)From the green closets of his loftiest reedsHe rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds.When, under shadow of their motions set,He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet,As not the bird that in the flow’ry spring,Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ringOf her sour sorrows, sweeten’d with her song,Runs her divisions varied so and strong.
Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes’ love-got joys,
Goat-footed, two-horn’d, amorous of noise,
That through the fair greens, all adorn’d with trees,
Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees
Can every dance foot, that affect to scale
The most inaccessible tops of all
Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call
On Pan, the bright-haired God of pastoral;
Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe
By lot all loftiest mountains crown’d with snow;
All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses,
All sylvan copses, and the fortresses
Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,
And sometimes, by allurement of his love,
Will wade the wat’ry softnesses. Sometimes
(In quite oppos’dcapriccios) he climbs
The hardest rocks, and highest, every way
Running their ridges. Often will convey
Himself up to a watch-tow’r’s top, where sheep
Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep
His goats he runs upon, and never rests.
Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts,
Mad of their slaughters...
(When Hesp’rus calls to fold the flocks of men)
From the green closets of his loftiest reeds
He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds.
When, under shadow of their motions set,
He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet,
As not the bird that in the flow’ry spring,
Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring
Of her sour sorrows, sweeten’d with her song,
Runs her divisions varied so and strong.
And here are two of the most characteristic strophes from Ben Jonson’s hymns:—
Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live,We move, we are; ’tis he our lambs doth rear,Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth giveThe warm and finer fleeces that we wear.He keeps away all heats and colds,Drives all diseases from our folds:Makes every where the spring to dwell,The ewes to feed, their udders swell;But if he frown, the sheep (alas)The shepherds wither, and the grass.Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thusThe rites are due to him, who doth all right for us.···········Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure,Who giv’st us all this leisure,Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen prayFor this their holy-day,And how their vows to thee they in Lycæum pay.So may our ewes receive the mounting rams,And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs:So may the first of all our fells be thine,And both the breastning of our goats and kine.As thou our folds dost still secure,And keep’st our fountains sweet and pure,Driv’st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock,Or other vermin from the flock.That we preserv’d by thee, and thou observ’d by us,May both live safe in shade of thy lov’d Maenalus.
Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live,
We move, we are; ’tis he our lambs doth rear,
Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth give
The warm and finer fleeces that we wear.
He keeps away all heats and colds,
Drives all diseases from our folds:
Makes every where the spring to dwell,
The ewes to feed, their udders swell;
But if he frown, the sheep (alas)
The shepherds wither, and the grass.
Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thus
The rites are due to him, who doth all right for us.
···········
Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure,
Who giv’st us all this leisure,
Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray
For this their holy-day,
And how their vows to thee they in Lycæum pay.
So may our ewes receive the mounting rams,
And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs:
So may the first of all our fells be thine,
And both the breastning of our goats and kine.
As thou our folds dost still secure,
And keep’st our fountains sweet and pure,
Driv’st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock,
Or other vermin from the flock.
That we preserv’d by thee, and thou observ’d by us,
May both live safe in shade of thy lov’d Maenalus.
Comparing these strophes with the hymn inEndymion, we shall realize how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in classic poetry, emerged after near two centuries’ occultation to reappear in the poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature’s blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes Pan no longer asa shepherd’s god but as a symbol of the World-All. Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him, could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a ‘pretty piece of paganism,’ though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines, such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth himself:—
O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hangFrom jagged trunks, and overshadowethEternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, deathOf unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dressTheir ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearkenThe dreary melody of bedded reeds—In desolate places, where dank moisture breedsThe pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;Bethinking thee, how melancholy lothThou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now,By thy love’s milky brow!By all the trembling mazes that she ran,Hear us, great Pan!O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtlesPassion their voices cooingly ‘mong myrtles,What time thou wanderest at eventideThrough sunny meadows, that outskirt the sideOf thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whomBroad leaved fig trees even now foredoomTheir ripen’d fruitage; yellow girted beesTheir golden honeycombs; our village leasTheir fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn;The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,To sing for thee; low creeping strawberriesTheir summer coolness; pent up butterfliesTheir freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding yearAll its completions—be quickly near,By every wind that nods the mountain pine,O forester divine!Thou, to whom every faun and satyr fliesFor willing service; whether to surpriseThe squatted hare while in half sleeping fit;Or upward ragged precipices flitTo save poor lambkins from the eagle’s maw;Or by mysterious enticement drawBewildered shepherds to their path again;Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,And gather up all fancifullest shellsFor thee to tumble into Naiads’ cells,And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,The while they pelt each other on the crownWith silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown—By all the echoes that about thee ring,Hear us, O satyr king!O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,While ever and anon to his shorn peersA ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,When snouted wild-boars routing tender cornAnger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms,To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,That come a swooning over hollow grounds,And wither drearily on barren moors:3Dread opener of the mysterious doorsLeading to universal knowledge—see,Great son of Dryope,The many that are come to pay their vowsWith leaves about their brows!Be still the unimaginable lodgeFor solitary thinkings; such as dodgeConception to the very bourne of heaven,Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven,That spreading in this dull and clodded earthGives it a touch ethereal—a new birth:Be still a symbol of immensity;A firmament reflected in a sea;An element filling the space between;An unknown—but no more: we humbly screenWith uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,And giving out a shout most heaven rending,Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean,Upon thy Mount Lycean!
O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;
Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dress
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds—
In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now,
By thy love’s milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!
O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles
Passion their voices cooingly ‘mong myrtles,
What time thou wanderest at eventide
Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side
Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom
Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom
Their ripen’d fruitage; yellow girted bees
Their golden honeycombs; our village leas
Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,
To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries
Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies
Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year
All its completions—be quickly near,
By every wind that nods the mountain pine,
O forester divine!
Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies
For willing service; whether to surprise
The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit;
Or upward ragged precipices flit
To save poor lambkins from the eagle’s maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw
Bewildered shepherds to their path again;
Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,
And gather up all fancifullest shells
For thee to tumble into Naiads’ cells,
And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;
Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,
The while they pelt each other on the crown
With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown—
By all the echoes that about thee ring,
Hear us, O satyr king!
O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,
While ever and anon to his shorn peers
A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,
When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn
Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms,
To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:
Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors:3
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge—see,
Great son of Dryope,
The many that are come to pay their vows
With leaves about their brows!
Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown—but no more: we humbly screen
With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a shout most heaven rending,
Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!
The song of the Indian maiden in the fourth book is in a very different key from this, more strikingly original in form and conception, and but for a weak opening and one or two flaws of taste would be a masterpiece. Keats’s later and more famous lyrics, though they have fewer faults, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine’s of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of northern imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a ‘roundelay,’—a form which it only so far resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins by invoking and questioning sorrow in a series of dreamy musical stanzas of which the imagery embodies, a little redundantly and confusedly, the idea expressed elsewhere by Keats with greater perfection, that it is Sorrow which confers upon beautiful things their richest beauty. From these the song passes to tell what has happened to the singer:—
To Sorrow,I bade good-morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind:I would deceive herAnd so leave her,But ah! she is so constant and so kind.Beneath my palm tree, by the river side,I sat a weeping: in the whole world wideThere was no one to ask me why I wept,—And so I keptBrimming the water-lily cups with tearsCold as my fears.Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,I sat a weeping: what enamour’d bride,Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds,But hides and shroudsBeneath dark palm trees by a river side?
To Sorrow,
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.
Beneath my palm tree, by the river side,
I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide
There was no one to ask me why I wept,—
And so I kept
Brimming the water-lily cups with tears
Cold as my fears.
Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,
I sat a weeping: what enamour’d bride,
Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds,
But hides and shrouds
Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?
It is here that we seem to catch an echo, varied and new-modulated but in no sense weakened, from Coleridge’sKubla Khan,—
A savage place, as holy as enchantedAs e’er beneath the waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon lover.
A savage place, as holy as enchanted
As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
Then, with another change of measure comes the deserted maiden’s tale of the irruption of Bacchus on his march from India; and then, arranged as if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and satyrs and their choral answers:—
‘Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!So many and so many, and such glee?Why have ye left your bowers desolate,Your lutes, and gentler fate?’‘We follow Bacchus! good or ill betide,We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:Come hither, lady fair, and joined beTo our wild minstrelsy!’‘Whence came ye jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!So many, and so many, and such glee?Why have ye left your forest haunts, why leftYour nuts in oak-tree cleft?’‘For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,And cold mushrooms;For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!Come hither, lady fair, and joined beTo our mad minstrelsy!’‘Over wide streams and mountains great we went,And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,With Asian elephants:Onward these myriads—with song and dance,With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians’ prance,Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,Plump infant laughers mimicking the coilOf seamen, and stout galley-rowers’ toil:With toying oars and silken sails they glide,Nor care for wind and tide.
‘Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!
So many and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
Your lutes, and gentler fate?’
‘We follow Bacchus! good or ill betide,
We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our wild minstrelsy!’
‘Whence came ye jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left
Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?’
‘For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;
For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy!’
‘Over wide streams and mountains great we went,
And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,
Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,
With Asian elephants:
Onward these myriads—with song and dance,
With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians’ prance,
Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,
Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,
Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil
Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers’ toil:
With toying oars and silken sails they glide,
Nor care for wind and tide.
Pl.V
‘Onward the tiger and the leopard pantsWith Asian elephants’FROM A SARCOPHAGUS RELIEF AT WOBURN ABBEY
‘Onward the tiger and the leopard pants
With Asian elephants’
FROM A SARCOPHAGUS RELIEF AT WOBURN ABBEY
It is usually said that this description of Bacchus and his rout was suggested by Titian’s famous picture of Bacchus and Ariadne (after Catullus) which is now in the National Gallery, and which Severn took Keats to see when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1816. But this will account for a part at most of Keats’s vision. Tiger and leopard panting along with Asian elephants on the march are not present in that picture, nor anything like them. Keats might have found suggestions for them in the text both of Godwin’s little handbook just quoted and in Spence’sPolymetis: but it would have been much more like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals, with Indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features of the triumphal processions of Bacchus through India as represented on a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. From direct sight of such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such Keats, I feel sure, must have taken them,4while the children mounted on crocodiles may have been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the Nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood,from certain reliefs which Keats will have noticed in the Townley collection at the British Museum: so that the whole brilliant picture is a composite (as we shall see later was the case with the Grecian Urn) which had shaped itself from various sources in Keats’s imagination and become more real than any reality to his mind’s eye. But I am holding up the reader, with this digression as to sources, from the fine rush of verse with which the lyric sweeps on to tell how the singer dropped out of the train of Bacchus to wander alone into the Carian forest, and finally, returning to the opening motive, ends as it began with an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:—
Come then, sorrow!Sweetest sorrow!Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:I thought to leave thee,And deceive thee,But now of all the world I love thee best.There is not one,No, no, not oneBut thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;Thou art her motherAnd her brother,Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.
Come then, sorrow!
Sweetest sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.
There is not one,
No, no, not one
But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;
Thou art her mother
And her brother,
Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.
An intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense with scholarship, for the spirit of Greek and Greco-Asiatic myths and cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the nature-images Keats invokes in them are almost purely English. Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dewupon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak, hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the summer leafage of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of Pan but into the regions ranged over by Bacchus with his train of yoked tiger and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra.
Contemporary influences as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean are naturally discernible in the poem. The strongest and most permeating is that of Wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general spirit. We have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding sense of mystery, of ‘something far more deeply interfused,’ of the working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion’s prayer to Cynthia from underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and closely parallel with Wordsworth’s description of the huntress Diana in his account of the origin of Greek myths (see above, pp. 125-6). When Keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of Sleep to the fog on the top of Skiddaw from which the travellers may
With an eye-guess towards some pleasant valeDescry a favourite hamlet faint and far,
With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale
Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far,
we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by Wordsworth. But it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism inEndymionthat Keats will have owed the most to that master. Both Shelley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading ofThe Excursion, published when Shelley was in his twenty-second year and Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to heart Wordsworth’s inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of the doctrine that a poet must learn to goout of himself and to live and feel as a man among fellow men,—that it is a kind of spiritual suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
A large part ofEndymion, as we have seen, is devoted to the symbolical setting forth of this conviction. For the rest, that essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing Keats’s first volume continues to strike us in the second. In interpreting the relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth’s poetry is intensely personal and ‘subjective,’ Keats’s intensely impersonal and ‘objective.’ Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of Keats works by instantaneous imaginative participation, instinctive and self-oblivious, in nature’s doings and beings, especially those which make for human refreshment and delight.
The second contemporary influence to be considered is that of Shelley. Shelley’sAlastor, it will be remembered, published early in 1816, had been praised by Hunt inThe Examinerfor December of that year, and in the following January Hunt printed in the same paper Shelley’sHymn to Intellectual Beauty. In the course of that same December and January Keats had seen a good deal of Shelley at Hunt’s and taken part with him in many talks on poetry. It is certain that Keats read and was impressed byAlastor: doubtless he also read theHymn. How much did either or both influence him in the composition ofEndymion? Mr Andrew Bradley thinks he sees evidence thatAlastorinfluenced him strongly. That poem is a parable, asEndymionis, of the adventures of a poet’s soul; and it enforces, as much ofEndymiondoes, the doctrine that a poet cannot without ruin to himself live inisolation from human sympathies. But there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. InAlastorthe poet, having lived in solitary communion ‘with all that is most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world’s past’ (the words are Shelley’s own prose summary of the imagined experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse), is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Shelleyan phrase, ‘Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.’ The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks. Shelley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet’s dream is a purely abstract entity, an incarnation of the collective response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape of woman. Both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the private strain comes in, many passages of his life furnish a mournfully ironic comment on his dream. But in any case his conception is fundamentally different from that of Keats inEndymion. The essence of Keats’s task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion with the essential spirit of Beauty in the world, and the discipline by which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific achievement of his quest.
It is rather the preface toAlastorthan the poem itself which we can trace as having really worked in themind of Keats. In it the evil fate of those who shut themselves out from human sympathies is very eloquently set forth, in a passage which is only partly relevant to the design of the poem, inasmuch as its warning is addressed not only to the poet in particular but to human beings in general. The passage may have had some influence on Keats when he framed the scheme ofEndymion: what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty months later: let us therefore postpone its consideration until then. For the rest, it is not difficult to show correspondence between some of the descriptive passages ofAlastorandEndymion, especially those telling of the natural and architectural marvels amid which the heroes wander. Endymion’s wanderings we are fresh from tracing. Alastor before him had wandered—
where the secret cavesRugged and dark, winding amid the springsOf fire and poison, inaccessibleTo avarice or pride, their starry domesOf diamond and of gold expand aboveNumerous and immeasurable halls,Frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrinesOf pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
where the secret caves
Rugged and dark, winding amid the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible
To avarice or pride, their starry domes
Of diamond and of gold expand above
Numerous and immeasurable halls,
Frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrines
Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
But these are the kind of visions which may rise spontaneously in common in the minds of almost any pair of youthful dreamers. Shelley’s poetic style is of course as much sounder and less experimental than that of Keats at this time as his range and certainty of penetrating and vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and for its purity, and Keats might have learnt much from him as to what he should avoid. But as we have seen, Keats was firmly on his guard against letting any outside influence affect his own development, and would not visit Shelley at Marlow during the composition ofEndymion, in order ‘that he might have his own unfetteredscope’ and that the spirit of poetry might work out its own salvation in him.
As to theHymn to Intellectual Beauty, written though it was by Shelley under the fresh impression of the glory of the Alps and also in the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for Plato, I think Keats would have felt its strain of aspiration and invocation too painful, too near despair, to make much appeal to him, and that Shelley’s
Spirit ofBeauty, that dost consecrateWith thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,
Spirit ofBeauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,
would have seemed to him something abstract, remote, and uncomforting. His own imagination insisted on the existence of something in the ultimate nature of the universe to account for what he calls the ‘wild and harmonised tune’ which he found his spirit striking from all the scattered and broken beauties of the world. Vague and floating his conception of that something might be, but it was extraordinarily intense, partaking of the concentrated essence of a thousand thrilling joys of perception and imagination. He had read no Plato, though he was of course familiar enough with Spenser’s mellifluous dilution of Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine in his fourHymns. InEndymion, as in the speculative passages of the letters we have quoted, his mind has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost uncharted, mysteries of Love and Beauty. He does not as yet conceive himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober phrase, of the imagination towards truth. He does not light, he does not expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems to waver between the Adam’s dream idea of finding in some transcendental world all the several modes of earthly happiness ‘repeated in a finer tone’ but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the Platonic, of a single principle of absolute or abstract Beauty, the object of a purged and perfected spiritual contemplation, from which all the varietiesof beauty experienced on earth derive their quality and oneness. But in his search he strikes now and again, for the attentive reader, notes of far reaching symbolic significance that carry the mind to the verge of the great mysteries of things: he takes us with him on exploratory sweeps and fetches of figurative thought in regions almost beyond the reach of words, where we gain with him glimmering adumbrations of the super-sensual through distilled and spiritualized remembrance of the joys of sense-perception at their most intense.
So much for Keats’s possible debt to Shelley in regard toEndymion. There is an interesting small debt to be recorded on the other side, which critics, I think, have hitherto failed to notice. Shelley, notwithstanding his interest in Keats, did not readEndymiontill a year or more after its publication. He had in the meantime gone to live in Italy, and having had the volume sent out to him at Leghorn, writes: ‘much praise is due to me for having read it, the author’s intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of the highest and finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.’ Nothing can be more just; and in the same spirit eight months later, in May 1820, he writes, ‘Keats, I hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured his rising.’ About the same time, having heard of Keats’s hæmorrhage and sufferings and of their supposed cause in the hostility of the Tory critics, Shelley drafted, but did not send, his famous indignant letter to the editor of theQuarterly Review. In this draft he shows himself a careful student ofEndymionby pointing out particular passages for approval. One of these passages is that near the beginning of the third book describing the wreckage seen bythe hero as he traversed the ocean floor before meeting Glaucus. Everybody knows, in Shakespeare’sRichard III, Clarence’s dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the sea:—
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea.
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea.
Keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this passage, wrote,—
Far had he roam’d,With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d,Above, around, and at his feet; save thingsMore dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates largeOf gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;Rudders that for a hundred years had lostThe sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’dWith long-forgotten story, and whereinNo reveller had ever dipp’d a chinBut those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those soulsWho first were on the earth; and sculptures rudeIn ponderous stone, developing the moodOf ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,And elephant, and eagle, and huge jawOf nameless monster.
Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d,
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster.
Jeffrey in his review of theLamiavolume has a fine phrase about this passage. It ‘comes of no ignoble lineage,’ he says, ‘nor shames its high descent.’ How careful Shelley’s study of the passage had been, and how completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act ofPrometheus Unbound, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of the poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is not that of the sea, but that which the light flashingfrom the forehead of the infant Earth-spirit reveals at the earth’s centre.
The beams flash onAnd make appear the melancholy ruinsOf cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheelsOf scythèd chariots, and the emblazonryOf trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblemsOf dead destruction, ruin within ruin!The wrecks beside of many a city vast,Whose population which the earth grew overWas mortal, but not human; see, they lie,Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapesHuddled in gray annihilation, split,Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,The anatomies of unknown wingèd things,And fishes which were isles of living scale,And serpents, bony chains, twisted aroundThe iron crags, or within heaps of dustTo which the tortuous strength of their last pangsHad crushed the iron crags; and over theseThe jaggèd alligator, and the mightOf earth-convulsing behemoth, which onceWere monarch beasts.
The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown wingèd things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jaggèd alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts.
The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without name. Another possible debt of Shelley toEndymionhas also been suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage ofEpipsychidion, proposes to share with his spirit’s mate in their imagined island home in the Ægean. If Shelley indeed owes anything toEndymionhere, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been Shelley’s reading ofEndymionthat led himat this time to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own two lyrics,Arethusaand theHymn to Pan(both of 1820); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within Keats’s compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of emulating and improving on Keats Shelley’s beautifully accomplished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in theEpistle to Maria Gisborne(1819) andEpipsychidion(1820), but that he had already made a first experiment in the same kind withJulian and Maddalo, written before his copy ofEndymionhad reached him, so that we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.
1Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre ofEndymionKeats owed something to thePharonnidaof William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in Keats’s poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages ofPharonnida. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages ofPharonnidawhich do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on ‘in’ and ‘by’ and ‘to’ and ‘on’ and ‘of’ followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on ‘to’ followed by its infinitive,—on ‘it’ and ‘than’ and ‘be’ and ‘which,’ and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,—than can be found in any whole book ofEndymion. It is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is inPharonnidaabout ten to one, and inEndymionnot more than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure ofPharonnidais as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that ofEndymionis graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic.2The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word ‘unseam.’ The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it inMacbeth, in a sufficiently different sense and context—‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’The vision in Keats’s mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.3‘All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural scenery’ (Baldwin’sPantheon, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry.4Two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads. Now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke’s agent in the purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must have seen them in Haydon’s company some time in the winter of 1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other passages ofEndymion. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see plate opposite.
1Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre ofEndymionKeats owed something to thePharonnidaof William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in Keats’s poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages ofPharonnida. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages ofPharonnidawhich do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on ‘in’ and ‘by’ and ‘to’ and ‘on’ and ‘of’ followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on ‘to’ followed by its infinitive,—on ‘it’ and ‘than’ and ‘be’ and ‘which,’ and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,—than can be found in any whole book ofEndymion. It is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is inPharonnidaabout ten to one, and inEndymionnot more than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure ofPharonnidais as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that ofEndymionis graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic.
2The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word ‘unseam.’ The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it inMacbeth, in a sufficiently different sense and context—
‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’
‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’
The vision in Keats’s mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.
3‘All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural scenery’ (Baldwin’sPantheon, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry.
4Two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads. Now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke’s agent in the purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must have seen them in Haydon’s company some time in the winter of 1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other passages ofEndymion. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see plate opposite.