Chapter 8

O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth—whether it existed before or not,—for I have the same idea of all our passions as ofLove: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream, he awoke and found it truth:—I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning—and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is ‘a Vision in the form of Youth,’ a shadow of reality to come—and this consideration has further convinced me,—for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,—that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam’s dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice,feltover again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer’s face—more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter—that delicious face you will see.

There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. Keats speaks of ‘the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.’ Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. Of ‘my last,’ that is of his preceding letter to Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which wentastray, seeing that none of Keats’s preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his own, are among the number. That beginning ‘Think not of it, sweet one, so,’ dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas ‘Unfelt, unheard, unseen,’ which one at least of Keats’s subtlest critics6considers (I cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning—

You say you love, but with a voiceChaster than a nun’s who singethThe soft vespers to herselfWhen the chime-bell ringeth—O love me truly!You say you love; but with a smileCold as sunrise in September,As you were St Cupid’s nun,And kept his week of Ember.O love me truly!—

You say you love, but with a voice

Chaster than a nun’s who singeth

The soft vespers to herself

When the chime-bell ringeth—

O love me truly!

You say you love; but with a smile

Cold as sunrise in September,

As you were St Cupid’s nun,

And kept his week of Ember.

O love me truly!—

and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats’s memory. Listen to the first three stanzas ofA Proper Wooing Song, written to the tune of theMerchant’s Daughterand printedin Clement Robinson’sHandful of Pleasant Delites, 1584:—

Maide will ye loue me yea or no?tell me the trothe and let me go.It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,trust me truly,To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,in due time duly.You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,as Venus and all the Muses nine:The Father Himselfe when He first made man,trust me truly,Made you for his helpe when the world began,in due time duly.Then sith God’s will was even sowhy should you disdaine your Louer tho?But rather with a willing heart,loue him truly;For in so doing you do your partlet reason rule ye.

Maide will ye loue me yea or no?

tell me the trothe and let me go.

It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,

trust me truly,

To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,

in due time duly.

You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,

as Venus and all the Muses nine:

The Father Himselfe when He first made man,

trust me truly,

Made you for his helpe when the world began,

in due time duly.

Then sith God’s will was even so

why should you disdaine your Louer tho?

But rather with a willing heart,

loue him truly;

For in so doing you do your part

let reason rule ye.

The metrical form of Keats’s verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind’s ear.7

A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little ‘drear-nighted December’ song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishingEndymionat BurfordBridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats’s verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown8:—

In drear-nighted December,Too happy, happy tree,Thy branches ne’er rememberTheir green felicity:The north cannot undo them,With a sleety whistle through them;Nor frozen thawings glue themFrom budding at the prime.In drear-nighted December,Too happy, happy brook,Thy bubblings ne’er rememberApollo’s summer look;But with a sweet forgetting,They stay their crystal fretting,Never, never pettingAbout the frozen time.Ah! would ‘twere so with manyA gentle girl and boy!But were there ever anyWrith’d not at passed joy?The feel ofnotto feel it,When there is none to heal it,Nor numbed sense to steel it,Was never said in rhyme.9

In drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,

Thy branches ne’er remember

Their green felicity:

The north cannot undo them,

With a sleety whistle through them;

Nor frozen thawings glue them

From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy brook,

Thy bubblings ne’er remember

Apollo’s summer look;

But with a sweet forgetting,

They stay their crystal fretting,

Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

Ah! would ‘twere so with many

A gentle girl and boy!

But were there ever any

Writh’d not at passed joy?

The feel ofnotto feel it,

When there is none to heal it,

Nor numbed sense to steel it,

Was never said in rhyme.9

Keats’s model in this instance is a song from Dryden’sSpanish Fryar, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey’s shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:—

Farewell ungrateful Traitor,Farewell my perjured swain,Let never injured creatureBelieve a man again.The pleasure of possessingSurpasses all expressing,But ’tis too short a blessing,And Love too long a pain.

Farewell ungrateful Traitor,

Farewell my perjured swain,

Let never injured creature

Believe a man again.

The pleasure of possessing

Surpasses all expressing,

But ’tis too short a blessing,

And Love too long a pain.

Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,—do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in theGarden of Proserpine?

But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats’s main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months’ task uponEndymion. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:—

Many and many a verse I hope to write,Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white,Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the beesHum about globes of clover and sweet peas,I must be near the middle of my story.O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,See it half finish’d: but let Autumn bold,With universal tinge of sober gold,Be all about me when I make an end.

Many and many a verse I hope to write,

Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white,

Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees

Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,

I must be near the middle of my story.

O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,

See it half finish’d: but let Autumn bold,

With universal tinge of sober gold,

Be all about me when I make an end.

The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the ‘drear-nighted December’ lyric:—

The CarianNo word return’d: both lovelorn, silent, wan,Into the vallies green together went.Far wandering, they were perforce contentTo sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;Nor at each other gaz’d, but heavilyPor’d on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

The Carian

No word return’d: both lovelorn, silent, wan,

Into the vallies green together went.

Far wandering, they were perforce content

To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;

Nor at each other gaz’d, but heavily

Por’d on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

and again:—

At this he press’dHis hands against his face, and then did restHis head upon a mossy hillock green,And so remain’d as he a corpse had beenAll the long day; save when he scantly liftedHis eyes abroad, to see how shadows shiftedWith the slow move of time,—sluggish and wearyUntil the poplar tops, in journey dreary,Had reach’d the river’s brim. Then up he rose,And slowly as that very river flows,Walk’d towards the temple grove with this lament:‘Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sentCareful and soft, that not a leaf may fallBefore the serene father of them allBows down his summer head below the west.Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,But at the setting I must bid adieuTo her for the last time. Night will strewOn the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,And with them shall I die; nor much it grievesTo die, when summer dies on the cold sward.’

At this he press’d

His hands against his face, and then did rest

His head upon a mossy hillock green,

And so remain’d as he a corpse had been

All the long day; save when he scantly lifted

His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted

With the slow move of time,—sluggish and weary

Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary,

Had reach’d the river’s brim. Then up he rose,

And slowly as that very river flows,

Walk’d towards the temple grove with this lament:

‘Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent

Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall

Before the serene father of them all

Bows down his summer head below the west.

Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,

But at the setting I must bid adieu

To her for the last time. Night will strew

On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,

And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves

To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.’

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river’s edge.

Opposite the last line in the manuscript ofEndymionKeats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the ‘drear-nighted December’ lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started.Endymionwas not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats’s mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

1‘Sad stories’ in the original text ofRichard II. The allusion is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.2‘Our friend’ of course is Leigh Hunt.3Houghton MSS.4Paradise Lost, viii, 288-311.5Ibid.viii, 452-490.6The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, inEssays and Studies(Cambridge, 1912).7If it is objected thatThe Handful of Pleasant Delitesis an excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier inHeliconia, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his circle.8Crewe MSS.9This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both inThe Gem, a periodical of theKeepsaketype then edited by Thomas Hood, and in Galignani’s collective edition of the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are altered and read ‘In a drear-nighted December,’ and the fifth line is made to run, ‘To know the change and feel it.’ The first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form ‘feel’ for feeling. But ‘feel,’ which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats’s meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a ‘change’ seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case ofThe Gem, Thomas Hood) editing him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version the poem is headedPain of Memory, an apt title, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:—But in the Soul’s DecemberThe fancy backward strays,And darkly doth rememberThe hue of golden days,In woe the thought appallingOf bliss gone past recallingBrings o’er the heart a fallingNot to be told in rhyme.This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats himself. The ‘Fallings from us, vanishings’ of Wordsworth’sOde on Intimations of Immortality, may be responsible for the ‘falling’ in the seventh line, and though ‘the thought appalling’ is a common-place phrase little in Keats’s manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in Bailey’s report of his spoken comment on this very passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).

2‘Our friend’ of course is Leigh Hunt.

3Houghton MSS.

4Paradise Lost, viii, 288-311.

5Ibid.viii, 452-490.

6The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, inEssays and Studies(Cambridge, 1912).

7If it is objected thatThe Handful of Pleasant Delitesis an excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier inHeliconia, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his circle.

8Crewe MSS.

9This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both inThe Gem, a periodical of theKeepsaketype then edited by Thomas Hood, and in Galignani’s collective edition of the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are altered and read ‘In a drear-nighted December,’ and the fifth line is made to run, ‘To know the change and feel it.’ The first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form ‘feel’ for feeling. But ‘feel,’ which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats’s meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a ‘change’ seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case ofThe Gem, Thomas Hood) editing him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version the poem is headedPain of Memory, an apt title, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:—

But in the Soul’s DecemberThe fancy backward strays,And darkly doth rememberThe hue of golden days,In woe the thought appallingOf bliss gone past recallingBrings o’er the heart a fallingNot to be told in rhyme.

But in the Soul’s December

The fancy backward strays,

And darkly doth remember

The hue of golden days,

In woe the thought appalling

Of bliss gone past recalling

Brings o’er the heart a falling

Not to be told in rhyme.

This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats himself. The ‘Fallings from us, vanishings’ of Wordsworth’sOde on Intimations of Immortality, may be responsible for the ‘falling’ in the seventh line, and though ‘the thought appalling’ is a common-place phrase little in Keats’s manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in Bailey’s report of his spoken comment on this very passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).

CHAPTER VI

ENDYMION.—I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Invention and imagination—What the moon meant to Keats—Elizabethan Precedents—Fletcher and Drayton—Drayton’s two versions—Debt of Keats to Drayton—Strain of allegory—The Soul’s quest for beauty—Phantasmagoric adventures—The four elements theory—Its error—Book I. The exordium—The forest scene—Confession to Peona—Her expostulation—Endymion’s defence—The ascending scale—The highest hope—Book II. The praise of love—Underworld marvels—The awakening of Adonis—Embraces in the Jasmine Bower—The quest renewed—New sympathies awakened—Book III. Exordium—Encounter with Glaucus—Glaucus relates his doom—The predestined deliverer—The deliverance—Meaning of the Parable—Its machinery explained—The happy sequel—Book IV. Address to the Muse—The Indian damsel—An ethereal flight—Olympian visions—Descent and renunciation—Distressful farewells—The mystery solved—A chastened victory—Above analysis justified.

Keatshad long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning ‘I stood tiptoe,’ finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a ‘poetical romance’ of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume ofPoems, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:—

As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to talk untilEndymionis finished, it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed—by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry—and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame—it makes me say—God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked—why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails—and Imagination the rudder.—Did our great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales. This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence—But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till I shall have finishedEndymion, and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made a Mockery at Hunt’s—

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton’s protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,—‘Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.’ But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats’s work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathywith the doings of nature working together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration ofEndymion. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion1as made known to him through the earlier English poets.

The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply their trade by sea, river, or canal, also of wanderers and vagabonds generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her transmuting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early poetry, and we have seen, in ‘I stood tiptoe,’ what a range of beneficent activities he attributesto her. Now, as he settles down to work onEndymion, we shall find her, by reason of that special glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself—what he calls in a letter ‘the principle of Beauty in all things,’ the principle which binds in a divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the moon-goddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of essential Beauty.

As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with theEndimionof John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with

—that night-wandering, pale, and watery star,When yawning dragons draw her thirling carFrom Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky,Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,She proudly sits.

—that night-wandering, pale, and watery star,

When yawning dragons draw her thirling car

From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky,

Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,

She proudly sits.

So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call—

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,And would not be awaked,

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,

And would not be awaked,

uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser’sEpithalamion, or the reference to ‘pale-changeful Cynthia’ and her Endymion in Browne’sBritannia’s Pastorals;2or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in theMaid’s Tragedyof Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in theFaithful Shepherdess, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats’s ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?Or whither go’st thou? Here be Woods as greenAs any, air likewise as fresh and sweet,As where smoothZephyrusplays on the fleetFace of the curled Streams, with Flowers as manyAs the young Spring gives, and as choise as any;Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells,Arbors o’rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells,Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing,Or gather Rushes to make many a RingFor thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love,How the palePhoebehunting in a Grove,First saw the BoyEndymion, from whose EyesShe took eternal fire that never dyes:How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,His temples bound with poppy, to the steepHead of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light,To kiss her sweetest.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?

Or whither go’st thou? Here be Woods as green

As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet,

As where smoothZephyrusplays on the fleet

Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many

As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any;

Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells,

Arbors o’rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells,

Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing,

Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring

For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love,

How the palePhoebehunting in a Grove,

First saw the BoyEndymion, from whose Eyes

She took eternal fire that never dyes:

How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,

His temples bound with poppy, to the steep

Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,

Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light,

To kiss her sweetest.

In regard to Drayton’s handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroiccouplets calledEndimion and Phoebe. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later piece in the same metre called theMan in the Moone. The volume containing Drayton’s earlierEndimion and Phoebebecame so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton’s poems in Smethwick’s edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). TheMan in the Mooneis included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediæval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton’s earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe’sHero and Leander: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere.

The particular points in Keats’sEndymionwhere I seem to find suggestions from Drayton’sMan in the Mooneare these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,—but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage in Drayton (which is also interestingfor its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse):—

Endymion now forsakesAll the delights that shepherds do prefer,And sets his mind so gen’rally on herThat, all neglected, to the groves and springs,He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,Where in clear rivers beautified with flowersThe silver Naides bathe them in the brack.Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back,Amongst the blue Nereides; and when,Weary of waters, goddess-like againShe the high mountains actively assays,And there amongst the light Oriades,That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort;Sometimes amongst those that with them comport,The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;And there she stays not; but incontinentCalls down the dragons that her chariot draw,And with Endymion pleased that she saw,Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye,Stripping the winds, beholding from the skyThe Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,—

Endymion now forsakes

All the delights that shepherds do prefer,

And sets his mind so gen’rally on her

That, all neglected, to the groves and springs,

He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings

(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,

Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers

The silver Naides bathe them in the brack.

Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back,

Amongst the blue Nereides; and when,

Weary of waters, goddess-like again

She the high mountains actively assays,

And there amongst the light Oriades,

That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort;

Sometimes amongst those that with them comport,

The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;

And there she stays not; but incontinent

Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,

And with Endymion pleased that she saw,

Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye,

Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky

The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,—

the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and construction that it matters not where it is broken off.

Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in Keats’s third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and dilate before the beholder’s eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment in a dozen lines3which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book hastaken a manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion’s lover.4

Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats was beyond all his contemporaries,—and it is the cardinal fact to be borne in mind about him,—the lineal descendant and direct heir of the Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this time most familiar—Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne and practically all the Spenserians,—were men apt to conceive alike of Grecian myth and mediæval romance as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid’sMetamorphoses, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself familiar with the details of classic fable; and Sandys, in the fine Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs conform to a fixed mediæval and Renaissance tradition by ‘mythologizing’ his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of illustrative parallel passages but of interpretations half rationalist, half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten that among Keats’s own contemporaries Shelley had in his first important poem,Alastor,set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme, and one shadowing forth, as we shall find thatEndymionshadows forth though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic soul in man.

The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail inEndymionare obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic meaning harder to detect. Keats’s letters referring to his poem contain only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it, and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon them wherever we can.

For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions, inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventureswhich befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.

In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out ‘the one bare circumstance,’ to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is something of Oriental bewilderment—an Arabian Night’s jugglery with space and time—in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected.

Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de Sélincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero’s probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,—the stithy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna wherethe giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.5Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind him and

wander farIn other regions, past the scanty barTo mortal steps,

wander far

In other regions, past the scanty bar

To mortal steps,

in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? ‘Our friend Keats,’ Endymion is made to say in one of the poet’s letters from Oxford, ‘has beenhauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance’: and in like manner in the poem itself the hero asks,

Why am I not as are the dead,Since to a woe like this I have been ledThrough the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

Why am I not as are the dead,

Since to a woe like this I have been led

Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire—an element from which Keats’s too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk, for except in telling of the blazing omens ofHyperion’sdownfall it is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats’s mind from various sources in his reading,—from the passage of Drayton above quoted,—from theArabian Nights,—it may be from like incidents in the mediæval Alexander romances (in which the hero’s crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea in a glass case), or possibly even from theEndimionof Gombauld, a very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance on Keats’s own theme.6

Book I.This book is entirely introductory, andcarries us no farther than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole passage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms in St Thomas’s Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to a new line he had just written,—‘A thing of beauty is a constant joy,’—and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’7Using this for the first line of his new poem, Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of beauty—sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales ofbeauty and heroism indiscriminately—which make for health and quietude amidst the gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the Chaucerian poem,The Floure and Lefe, in which he took so much pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new, unexplained soul-sickness.

The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the god: then come dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit apart among the elder shepherds, who pass the time imagining what happy tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their ‘homes ethereal’ after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of theFaerie Queene, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lemprière as a son of Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of the gods in theIliad, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep—his second, the first having been at the beginning ofSleep and Poetry. Endymion awakens refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future.She sings soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his troubles:—

Brother,’tis vain to hideThat thou dost know of things mysterious,Immortal, starry; such alone could thusWeigh down thy nature.

Brother,’tis vain to hide

That thou dost know of things mysterious,

Immortal, starry; such alone could thus

Weigh down thy nature.

When she has guessed in vain, he determines to confide in her: tells her how he fell asleep on a bed of poppies and other flowers which he had found magically new-blown on a place where there had been none before; how he dreamed that he was gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he again looked up and there came down to him a female apparition of incomparable beauty (in whom it does not yet occur to him to recognize the moon-goddess); how she took him by the hand, and they were lifted together through mystic altitudes

Where falling stars dart their artillery forthAnd eagles struggle with the buffeting northThat balances the heavy meteor stone;

Where falling stars dart their artillery forth

And eagles struggle with the buffeting north

That balances the heavy meteor stone;

how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze at intervals bringing him ‘Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled adieus,’ and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:—

All the pleasant huesOf heaven and earth had faded: deepest shadesWere deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shadesWere full of pestilent light; and taintless rillsSeem’d sooty, and o’erspread with upturn’d gillsOf dying fish; the vermeil rose had blownIn frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrownLike spikèd aloe.

All the pleasant hues

Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades

Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades

Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills

Seem’d sooty, and o’erspread with upturn’d gills

Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown

In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown

Like spikèd aloe.

Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next: but this was not Keats’s way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid state with his former virility and ambition:—

Yet it is strange and sad, alas!That one who through this middle earth should passMost like a sojourning demi-god, and leaveHis name upon the harp-string, should achieveNo higher bard than simple maidenhood,Sighing alone, and fearfully,—how the bloodLeft his young cheek; and how he used to strayHe knew not where; and how he would say,Nay,If any said ’twas love: and yet ’twas love;What could it be but love? How a ring-doveLet fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;And how he died: and then, that love doth scatheThe gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.And then the ballad of his sad life closesWith sighs, and an alas! Endymion!

Yet it is strange and sad, alas!

That one who through this middle earth should pass

Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave

His name upon the harp-string, should achieve

No higher bard than simple maidenhood,

Sighing alone, and fearfully,—how the blood

Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray

He knew not where; and how he would say,Nay,

If any said ’twas love: and yet ’twas love;

What could it be but love? How a ring-dove

Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;

And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe

The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.

And then the ballad of his sad life closes

With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!

His reply in his own defence is long and much of it beautiful: but we follow the chain of thought and argument with difficulty, so hidden is it in flowers of poetryand so little are its vital links made obvious. A letter of Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory comments on work of his own, shows that he attached great importance to the passage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher, he says—‘The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth. My having written that argument will perhaps be of the greatest service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first step towards the chief attempt in the drama.’ The first ten lines offer little difficulty:—

Peona! ever have I long’d to slakeMy thirst for the world’s praises: nothing base,No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlaceThe stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar’d—Though now ’tis tatter’d; leaving my bark bar’dAnd sullenly drifting: yet my higher hopeIs of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope,To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks.Wherein lies happiness? In that which becksOur ready minds to fellowship divine,A fellowship with essence; till we shine,Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. BeholdThe clear religion of heaven!

Peona! ever have I long’d to slake

My thirst for the world’s praises: nothing base,

No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlace

The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar’d—

Though now ’tis tatter’d; leaving my bark bar’d

And sullenly drifting: yet my higher hope

Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope,

To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks.

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks

Our ready minds to fellowship divine,

A fellowship with essence; till we shine,

Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold

The clear religion of heaven!

It seems clear that we have here shadowed forth the highest hope and craving of the poetic soul, the hope to be wedded in full communion or ‘fellowship divine’—or shall we say with Wordsworth in love and holy passion?—with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. In the next lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats, having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and endeavour which he asks us to consider. It differs from the ascending scale of the earlier poems inasmuchas it begins, not with the toying of nymphs in shady places and the like, but with thoughts of olden minstrelsy and romantic tales and prophecies. The verse here is of Keats’s finest:—

—hist, when the airy stressOf music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,And with a sympathetic touch unbindsÆolian magic from their lucid wombs:Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;Ghosts of melodious prophecyings raveRound every spot where trod Apollo’s foot;Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,Where long ago a giant battle was;And, from the turf, a lullaby doth passIn every place where infant Orpheus slept.

—hist, when the airy stress

Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,

And with a sympathetic touch unbinds

Æolian magic from their lucid wombs:

Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;

Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;

Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave

Round every spot where trod Apollo’s foot;

Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,

Where long ago a giant battle was;

And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass

In every place where infant Orpheus slept.

It is impressed upon us in the next lines that this is a relatively unexalted phase of imaginative feeling, and our thoughts are directed to other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more ‘self-destroying’ (that is more effectual in purging it of egotism), namely the experiences of friendship and love, those of love above all:—

Aye, so delicious is the unsating food,That men, who might have tower’d in the vanOf all the congregated world, to fanAnd winnow from the coming step of timeAll chaff of custom, wipe away all slimeLeft by men-slugs and human serpentry,Have been content to let occasion die,Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium.And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb,Than speak against this ardent listlessness:For I have ever thought that it might blessThe world with benefits unknowingly;As does the nightingale, upperched high,And cloister’d among cool and bunched leaves—She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceivesHow tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

Aye, so delicious is the unsating food,

That men, who might have tower’d in the van

Of all the congregated world, to fan

And winnow from the coming step of time

All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime

Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,

Have been content to let occasion die,

Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium.

And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb,

Than speak against this ardent listlessness:

For I have ever thought that it might bless

The world with benefits unknowingly;

As does the nightingale, upperched high,

And cloister’d among cool and bunched leaves—

She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceives

How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

If a man, next pleads Endymion, may thus reasonably give up even the noblest of worldly ambitions for thejoys of a merely mortal love, how much more may he do so for those of an immortal. No, he re-assures Peona in reply to her questioning glance, he is not fancy-sick:—

no, no, I’m sureMy restless spirit never could endureTo brood so long upon one luxury,Unless it did, though fearfully, espyA hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

no, no, I’m sure

My restless spirit never could endure

To brood so long upon one luxury,

Unless it did, though fearfully, espy

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

We have now been carried back to the top of the scale, and these lines again express, although vaguely, the aspirations of the poetic soul at their highest pitch, rising through thoughts and experiences of mortal love to the hope of communion with immortal Beauty. But that longed-for, loftiest phase of the imaginative life, that hope beyond the shadow of a dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the divinity of his dreams has favoured him—her face reflected at him from a spring—her voice murmuring to him from a cave—and how miserably in the intervals he has pined and hungered for her. But now, he ends by assuring his sister, he will be patient and pine no longer. Yet it is but a sickly half-assurance after all.

There is a paly flame of hope that playsWhere’er I look: but yet, I’ll say ’tis naught,And here I bid it die. Have I not caught,Already, a more healthy countenance?

There is a paly flame of hope that plays

Where’er I look: but yet, I’ll say ’tis naught,

And here I bid it die. Have I not caught,

Already, a more healthy countenance?

And with this, as she rows him back from her island, the anxious sister must rest content.

Book II.opens with a renewed declamation on the power and glory of love, and the relative unimportance of the wars and catastrophes of history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of Imogen, Hero wrongfully accused by Claudio, Spenser’s Pastorella among the bandits, he declares,

Are things to brood on with more ardencyThan the death-day of empires.

Are things to brood on with more ardency

Than the death-day of empires.

The passage has caused some critics to reproach Keats as a mere mawkish amorist indifferent to the great affairs and interests of the world. But must one not believe that all poor flawed and fragmentary human loves, real or fabled, happy or miserable, are far off symbols and shadowings of that Love which, unless the universe is quite other than we have trusted, ‘moves the sun and the other stars?’ Are they not related to it as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks back on today, even on today, a death-day of empires in a sterner and vaster sense than any the world has known, will all the waste and hatred and horror, all the hope and heroism of the time, its tremendous issues and catastrophes, be really found to have eclipsed and superseded love as the thing fittest to fill the soul and inspire the songs of a poet?

The invocation ended, we set out with the hero on the adventures that await him. He gathers a wild-rose bud which on expanding releases a butterfly from its heart: the butterfly takes wing and he follows its flight with eagerness. At last they reach a fountain spouting near the mouth of a cave, and in touching the water the butterfly is suddenly transformed into a nymph of the fountain, who speaking to Endymion pities, encourages, and warns him in one breath. Endymion sits and soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which express the ebb and flow of Keats’s own inner aspirations and misgivings about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin goddess Cynthia to quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of all; the goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of lovehigher and purer than the Cupids are concerned with; he prays to her to be propitious; dreams again that he is sailing through the sky with her; and makes a wild appeal to her which is answered by a voice from within the cavern bidding him descend ‘into the sparry hollows of the world.’ He obeys, (this plunge into a spring or fountain and thence into the under-world is a regular incident in a whole group of folk tales, one or another of which was no doubt in Keats’s mind): and we follow him at first into a region

nor bright, nor sombre wholly,But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy;A dusky empire and its diadems;One faint eternal eventide of gems.

nor bright, nor sombre wholly,

But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy;

A dusky empire and its diadems;

One faint eternal eventide of gems.

A vein of gold sparkling with jewels serves him for path, and leads him through twilight vaults and passages to a ridge that towers over many waterfalls: and the lustre of a pendant diamond guides him further till he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his passive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive and alluring, of natural and architectural marvels, huge sculptured caverns and glimmering palace-halls in endless vista? To such imaginings, fed by his readings and dreamings on

Memphis, and Nineveh, and Babylon,

Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. Now we find ourselves in a temple, described as complete and true to sacred custom, with an image of Diana; and in a trice either we have passed, or the temple itself has dissolved, into a structure which by its ‘abysmal depths of awe,’ its gloomy splendours and intricacies of aisle and vault and corridor, its dimly gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence, reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or some of the magical subterranean palaces of theArabian Nights. (Beckford’sVathekand theThousand and One Nightswere both among Keats’s familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to Diana to restore him to the pleasant light ofearth. Thereupon the marble floor breaks up beneath and before his footsteps into a flowery sward. Endymion walks on to the sound of a soft music which only intensifies his yearnings: is led by a light through the alleys of a myrtle grove; and comes to an embowered chamber where Adonis lies asleep among little ministering Loves, with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for their chief.

Here follows a long and highly wrought episode of the winter sleep of Adonis and the descent of Venus to awaken him. The original idea for the scene comes from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser (Faerie Queene, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail is entirely Keats’s own and on the whole is a happy example of his early luxuriant manner; especially the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks and presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the ancients,—the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of winter, with all the ulterior and associated hopes implied by such a resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat the favour of Venus for his quest when she anticipates him encouragingly, telling him that from her upper regions she has perceived his plight and has guessed (here is one of the echoes from Drayton to which I have referred above) that some goddess, she knows not which, has condescended to him. She bids her son be propitious to him, and she and Adonis depart. Endymion wanders on by miraculous grottoes and palaces, and then mounts by a diamond balustrade,

Leading afar past wild magnificence,Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thenceStretching across a void, then guiding o’erEnormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds;Then heighten’d just above the silvery headsOf a thousand fountains, so that he could dashThe waters with his spear; but at the splash,Done heedlessly, those spouting columns roseSudden a poplar’s height, and ‘gan to encloseHis diamond path with fretwork, streaming roundAlive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound,Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet shellsWelcome the float of Thetis.

Leading afar past wild magnificence,

Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thence

Stretching across a void, then guiding o’er

Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,

Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds;

Then heighten’d just above the silvery heads

Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash

The waters with his spear; but at the splash,

Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose

Sudden a poplar’s height, and ‘gan to enclose

His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round

Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound,

Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet shells

Welcome the float of Thetis.

The fountains assume all manner of changing and interlacing imitative shapes which he watches with delight (this and much else on the underground journey seems to be the outcome of pure fancy and day-dreaming on the poet’s part, without symbolic purpose). Then passing on through a dim tremendous region of vaults and precipices he has a momentary vision of the earth-goddess Cybele with her team of lions issuing from an arch below him. At this point the diamond balustrade suddenly breaks off in mid-space and ends in nothing.8Endymion calls to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle, (is this the eagle of Dante in thePurgatoryand of Chaucer in TheHouse of Fame?) who swoops down with him,—all this still happening, be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,—to a place of sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower, wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her. He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory ejaculation. It was a flaw in Keats’s artand a blot on his genius—or perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his youth?—that thinking nobly as he did of love, yet when he came to relate a love-passage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.

The visitant, whose identity is still unrecognized, again disappears; he resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory his past life and aspirations,

—the spurOf the old bards to mighty deeds: his plansTo nurse the golden age ‘mong shepherd clans:That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival:His sister’s sorrow; and his wanderings all,Until into the earth’s deep maw he rush’d:Then all its buried magic, till it flush’dHigh with excessive love. ‘And now,’ thought he,‘How long must I remain in jeopardyOf blank amazements that amaze no more?Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the coreAll other depths are shallow: essences,Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,Meant but to fertilize my earthly root,And make my branches lift a golden fruitInto the bloom of heaven: other light,Though it be quick and sharp enough to blightThe Olympian eagle’s vision, is dark,Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells;Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swellsOf noises far away?—list!—’

—the spur

Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans

To nurse the golden age ‘mong shepherd clans:

That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival:

His sister’s sorrow; and his wanderings all,

Until into the earth’s deep maw he rush’d:

Then all its buried magic, till it flush’d

High with excessive love. ‘And now,’ thought he,

‘How long must I remain in jeopardy

Of blank amazements that amaze no more?

Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core

All other depths are shallow: essences,

Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,

Meant but to fertilize my earthly root,

And make my branches lift a golden fruit

Into the bloom of heaven: other light,

Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight

The Olympian eagle’s vision, is dark,

Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!

My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells;

Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells

Of noises far away?—list!—’

The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker’s transient hour of union with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told most fully by Ovid and which Shelley’slyric has made familiar to all English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:

—and lo!More suddenly than doth a moment go,The visions of the earth were gone and fled—He saw the giant sea above his head.

—and lo!

More suddenly than doth a moment go,

The visions of the earth were gone and fled—

He saw the giant sea above his head.

Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery and ‘buried magic’ of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in theOdyssey, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of theAeneid. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as ‘Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,’ to refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet’s soul with joy and illumination even among the ‘dismal elements’ of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness, indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the sorrows ofothers, is a clear stage in the development of the poet’s scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.

Book III.Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly ‘regalities’ in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet ‘On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt’ written the previous March in the copy of hisPoemswhich he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as ‘baaing vanities,’ and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, ‘Are then regalities all gilded masks?’ The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe—cosmic powers, as we should now say—most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is ‘the gentlier-mightiest.’ Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey. Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon’s praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer’s attention is suddenly diverted,—

For as he lifted up his eyes to swearHow his own goddess was past all things fair,He saw far in the green concave of the seaAn old man sitting calm and peacefully.Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,And his white hair was awful, and a matOf weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

For as he lifted up his eyes to swear

How his own goddess was past all things fair,

He saw far in the green concave of the sea

An old man sitting calm and peacefully.

Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,

And his white hair was awful, and a mat

Of weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats’s reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:9but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from theArabian Nights.

Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him. But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man’s welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.

Had he then wrong’d a heart where sorrow kept?·······He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears.The penitent shower fell, as down he kneltBefore that careworn sage.

Had he then wrong’d a heart where sorrow kept?

·······

He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears.

The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt

Before that careworn sage.

Back to Index Next