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John Keats
John Keats
John Keats
Keats—A Brief Biographical Sketch
Birth; Schooling; and the Deaths of Parents
John Keats was born on October 31, 1795. He was the eldest of the five children of
a stable-keeper. He went to school atEnfield, and found a friend in Charles Cowden
Clarke, son of the schoolmaster. He was remembered by his fellows for generosity,
pugnacity, and a passion for reading. He lost his father by a riding accident in 1804, and
his mother in 1810.
Keats published only one more volume, Hyperion and Other Poems, 1820. This
volume contains his great contributions to literature: the fragmentary Hyperion, The Eve
of St. Agnes, the splendid odes To Autumn, To a Nightingale, On Melancholy,and On a
Grecian. Urn; and the ballad. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. All these are precious treasures
of English poetry. Shelley was so impressed by the beauty and promise ofHyperion that
he sent a generous invitation to Keats to come to Pisa and live with him; but Keats
declined the invitation as he had little sympathy with Shelley’s social and political views.
His Premature Death Due to Tuberculoses
Keats had seen a premature death because he had always felt threatened by
consumption which ran in the family and which had already carried off his brother Tom.
His fear of death finds expression in his sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to
be”, and elsewhere. He was now definitely known to he suffering from consumption. As a
lost hope, in September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, he
left England for Italy. At Lulworth he wrote his last sonnet, “Bright Star, would I were
steadfast as thou art”. He died inRome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the old
Protestant cemetery near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Conscious to the last, and
attended by rare devotion bySevern, he chose his own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name
was writ in water”. Young as he died, he was one of the most germinal poets, and left a
deep mark on English literature.
In Memory of Keats
The first memorial to Keats was unveiled in the
parish church of Hampsteadon July 16, 1894, a bust sculptured by aBoston lady and
presented by Americans. In 1909, the house in which Keats died was opened as a Keats-
Shelley memorial. In connection with centenary celebrations a movement was started
which in 1925 acquired Lawn Bank, formerly Wentworth Place, Hampsteadt where Keats
lived during 1817-20, as a home for the Dilke collection of relics. There the poet is said to
have heard the nightingale of his famous ode. The KeatsMuseum was opened in 1931.
The Wretchedness of the Circumstances of His Life
Referring to the circumstances of Keats’s life, J.W. Beach writes: “There was, to
begin with, the somewhat low life background of the livery-stable where his father
worked. There was the want of refinement in his mother’s character and the early death
of both parents; the uncongenial profession of medicine to which he was apprenticed, the
vulgar companionship of young hospital attendants; the sickness and death of his brother
Tom, whom lie nursed during the three months of his decline; his own illness and his
somewhat neurotic disposition; his unhappy infatuation with Fanny Brawne; the ugly,
confining streets of London; and a general social tone and atmosphere that made him
what critics called a ‘Cockney’ poet. It all must have added up to something from which
his soul ardently craved relief.”
greatest moulders and creators of verse. The essential mark of his genius is that he unites
the ideals of oldGreece and modern romanticism. His poetic faith is summed up in the
close of the Ode On a Grecian Urn.
The Magic of His Use of Words
Keats was the most literary of great poets in his day in the sense that he used his
words with a keen awareness of the magic they had held for his predecessors. He was also
the poet for whom the world of beauty was an asylum, an escape from the dreary and
painful effects of ordinary experience. The beauties he has to offer are drawn, by selection,
from familiar native scenery, and they have great appeal for poetry lovers of all kinds.
His Felicities of Word and Phrase
Keats’s felicities of phrase and his sensitive insight into Nature are already seen
in I Stood Tiptoe:
Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.
His Challenge to Neo-Classic Poets
In Sleep and Poetry, the writer throws a challenge at the whole army of the neo-
classical critics. In Endymion, Keats’s art is still immature, but shows a great advance.
The narrative is confused, the allegory is dim, but there are many passages of exquisite
verse, wonderful gleams of landscape, fine philosophic ideals. While Keats was under the
spell of Hunt in thePoems of 1817, the predominant influences now are Spenser,
Wordsworth and Shakespeare. His best work at this time, particularly the great Ode To
Sorrow, has a vigorous morning freshness hardly to be found again in him. He does write
about Sorrow, but there is no real sadness in this ode which is an outpouring of the joy of
life. “It is a picture glowing with colour, instinct with animation—the-work of a young
bold mind which has neither regret for the past nor fear for the future.”
A Very Careful Artist
Keats was a very careful artist. He revised and remodelled his poems and took the
utmost pains in polishing them. He uses the choicest and most appropriate diction. There
are many jewelled phrases in his poems. A beautiful phrase delighted him with a sense of
intoxication. The extraordinary appeal of Keats’s poetry depends not only on his rich
sensuousness, his lush imagery, and the passionate exaltation of his feelings, but also on
his gift of phrase. The beauty of his phrases, the subtleties of rhythm in the combination
of words and their evocative power compel the imagination of the reader to the mood
which the poet seeks to produce in the reader. In some cases, this effect is achieved by the
use of the simplest words, as in the concluding lines of the sonnet, On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer, where the reaction of the sailors of Cortez to the discovery of the
Pacific is visualised:
and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon apeak in Darien...
The same is true of the wonderfully cadenced lines describing the song of the nightingale:
The same that oft times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerylands forlorn.
In other cases, there is a very skilful and intricate use of figurative expressions and
epithets:
When I behold, upon night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance...
and:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian...
In each of these cases, the meaning is enriched by a number of emotional associations and
by an appeal to the imagination.
The Sheer Music of His Verse
Keats excels, too, in the quality of sheer music. This quality appears even in his
early works; the Hymn to Apollo, for instance, moves with a springing vigour and a
fullness of tone. In the great Odes, we find musical effects that are unsurpassed in English
lyric poetry. To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, and To Autumn are a series
of rich and melancholy strains like those that a great master obtains from the varying
forces of an orchestra—raging bow high now low, from unearthly sweetness to solemn
undertones.
His Influence on Other Poets
Keats’s influence on the poets who came after him was operative in two ways. First,
he influenced the subject-matter of poetry in arousing in other writers the poetic love of
Nature for her own sake, and the love both of classic fable and of romance. Secondly, he
set before poets a certain standard of execution, and an example of “loading every rift of
a subject with ore”. He endeavoured after a continual poetic richness and felicity of
phrase. A typical example is to be found in the lines that tell us of the trembling hopes of
Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes:
But to her heart her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side.
The beauty of these lines is not merely a beauty of fancy or of sound; it is the beauty which
dwells in truth only, every word being chosen by a careful exercise of the imagination.
“The first line describes in perfection the quality of consciousness in such a moment of
suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the emotion on the
heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on ourselves.”
The Poets Who Fell Under His Influence
The first considerable writer among Keats’s successors on whom his example took
effect was Hood in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. Tennyson was
profoundly influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his work, and is indeed the
heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal measure. After or together with
Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most to the poetic method and ideal of Rossetti. He
himself, alike by gifts and training, a true child of the Elizabethans, stands in the most
direct line of descent between the great poets of that age and those of subsequent times.
Cazamian’s View of Him as a Poet
“Keats, when he died, gave promise of becoming of greatest poet of his generation;
and one who, better than any other, would have united the free inspiration of romanticism
with the formal principle of the schools of the past. Some hundreds of lines raise him to
the level of the highest. His influence has never ceased to grow; all those schools which
claim as their principles a plastic notion of art have seen in him their master; the Pre-
Raphaelites, just as the English aesthetes, originate in part from him. Despite the
concentrated and difficult quality of his language, the finer artists, in every nation, have
felt the magnetic power of his example.”
W.H. Hudson’s View of Him
Thus W.H. Hudson: “Historically, Keats is important for three reasons. First, on
the side of form and style he is the most romantic of the romantic poets, handling even
his Greek themes with a luxuriance of language and a wealth of detail as far as possible
removed from the temperance and restraint of Hellenic art. Here, in particular, we note
his entire rejection of the classic couplet, for which, following the lead of his friend Leigh
Hunt, he substituted the couplets of the loose romantic type. Secondly, more than any
other great poet of his time, he represents the exhaustion of the impulses generated by
the social upheaval and the humanitarian enthusiasms of the Revolution. With him poetry
breaks away from the interests of contemporary life, returns to the past, and devotes itself
to the service of beauty. It is for this reason that he seems to stand definitely at the end of
his age. Finally, his influence was none the less very strong upon the poets of the
succeeding generation.”
(From the sonnet on Chapman’sHomer to The Fall of Hyperion almost all of his
major and many minor poems deal with the nature and problems of the poet. That in itself
is a remarkable fact.)
His Rank as a Poet
As a poet, Keats ranks with the highest. “Much that he wrote is immature and
inferior certainly; but the gold left after sifting is so pure—the verse so noble alike in spirit
and in form—and the influence so wide and durable—that he takes his stand with
Wordsworth and with Shelley, above Byron or Coleridge.” Matthew Arnold said of Keats:
“He is with Shakespeare”.
indeed, of the pathos of Isabella, but of that alone, as equally powerful in its kind with the
Nature-magic of the Hymn to Pan and the Ode To a Nightingale, with the glow of
romance colour in St. Agnes’ Eve, the weirdness of romance sentiment in La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, the conflict of elemental force with fate inHyperion, the revelation of the soul
of ancient life and art in the Ode On a Grecian Urn and the fragment of an Ode to
Maia.”—(Sidney Colvin)
The View of Robert Bridges About His Work as a Poet
“To speculate upon the unrealised possibility of his genius would indeed be waste
of time. But when we note the immense development shown in the few years of his
activity, and further remember that, as his letters prove, his mind was ripening rapidly at
the end, we cannot but recognise the greatness of the loss which literature sustained in
his untimely death. ‘If one English poet might be recalled today from the dead to continue
the work which he left unfinished on earth, it is probable that the crown of his country’s
desire would be set on the head of John Keats’—(Robert Bridges). Even as it is, through
his direct influence on Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris, he has left a deep
mark on the later English poetry.”
precocious maturity. He lived a little longer than twenty-five years, and he passed with
surprisingly rapid progress from early efforts full of promise to masterpieces. His speedy
development as a poet is, indeed, one of the most wonderful phenomena in the history of
English poetry.
The Flaws of the Poem “Endymion”
In the beginning he had nearly all the defects of his qualities. Endymion has
admirable passages, but it represents the error of an undisciplined genius. The poet is
here dazzled by his own ardour. As a result, his attention is diffused over mere details,
and he shows no sense of an organised whole. The contours of the landscape, as those of
the action, are confused and blurred. The poet’s overwealthy imagination multiplies the
descriptive features. The language is often artificial, loaded with elaborate ornaments,
with rare, archaic, or affected, epithets. The poem is at the same time characterised by
over-refinement, profusion, the strain of an ever-present intensity, and somewhat of
morbidness. One feels in it an uncertain taste, and the effort of a literary endeavour
heroically carried through against an inspiration that is at times rebellious. On the whole,
the poem is tiring and disappointing, and yet there radiates out from it a youthful
enthusiasm so genuine and contagious as to leave a lasting impression upon the reader.
Everything Not on the Same Level in His Masterpieces
This exuberance, however, is of short duration, and the uncertainty of the poet in
his art soon gives place to the confidence of self-mastery. There is certainly a transition
from the immaturities of Endymion to the ripeness of poetic powers in the poet’s best
work. Lamia, for example, is not free from the failings which marked the first manner.
Again, among the masterpieces, everything is not on the same level. The delightful story
of The Eve of St. Agnes is too ornate, and somewhat decadent in style. In the pathos
ofIsabella, all the notes are not of equal sureness, and elements of too great a diversity
are unsatisfactorily blended.
His Best Work as a Poet
The best work of Keats is to be found in the original version of Hyperion, the Odes,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the most beautiful of the sonnets. Here we find a perfect
fusion of sobriety with the force of touch and the wealth of expression. Here we find a rare
union of classical discipline, guided by the example of the ancients, with the more
precious matter which Keats finds in romanticism. This work has all the positive
substance of which English poetry had long since been emptied by a school of correctness
based upon reason. Keats brings here a strong force of selection, order and harmony to
bear on an unlimited range of intensely felt sensations and emotions. Nothing could be
more truly romantic than this work, nor could the very figure of antiquity be animated
with more concrete life.
The Poem “Hyperion”
Hyperion is an epic poem which challenges comparison with Milton. It set out to
relate the celestial revolutions of pagan mythology, as did Milton the Christian cycle of a
Paradise Lost and Regained. Though incomplete, the poem is already arresting by the
vastness of conception which it promises, and by its visions of a gigantic and primitive
world. This poem stands out in wondrous majesty.
The Themes and the Style of His Great Odes
The Odes of Keats are constructed with harmonious skill. These poems deal with
the favourite themes in Keats’s romanticism—the sculptural beauty and grace of a Greek
urn, the charming myths of Hellas, the changing seasons and the joys of the earth, the
painful craving of the soul to find a beauty which endures, the fascination of death and
the bitter-sweet voluptuousness with which the poet meditates upon it. Everything here
cooperates to enchant a sensual and dreamy contemplation—the outlines, the colour, the
emotion and the melody. The tone is smooth and yet free from any excess of softness or
ease; indeed it is constantly relieved by notes of vigour. Each epithet is extra-ordinarily
rich in suggestion. Each image opens up to our view a far-reaching perception. The
language in these poems sparkles with all the gems of speech, without their brilliance
predominating over the conciseness and exactness of the whole. The rhythms are
perfectly adapted to the supreme unity of an impression.
Arthur Compton-Rickett’s View of His Poems
Arthur Compton-Rickett thus puts the case of Keats’s development: There is, in his
early work, an extravagance of speech and excess of emotion. Calidore, Sleep and
Poetry,and even Endymion, are overcharged with Spenserian imagery, and Elizabethan
conceits. But even in his early experiments there is an individual note. In / Stood
Tiptoe,there tie touches that no other poet than Keats could have given us:
A little noiseless noise among the leaves.
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
Sleep and Poetry is faulty in execution, but the point of view of the young Keats is
unmistakable:
Beauty was awake:
Why were ye not awake?
We cannot ignore in his early efforts the ornate extravagance, the abuse of double rhymes,
the faulty emphasis, the ugly vulgarities, the stammerings of a great poet. But the soul of
a poet is already there. Surely, we can expect splendid things from a youth of nineteen
who could write On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.
There is the glorious promise and immature fulfilment of Endymion. The old myth
is, no doubt, indifferently told, and much of the descriptive writing is weak and diffuse.
But there are songs by the way which no lover of poetry would forego—the lovely
“roundelay” to Sorrow, and the splendid Bacchanalian Ode.
No one could strike the note of “fine excess” more triumphantly than Keats. Yet in
his most perfect work, in the Odes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and The Eve of St.
Mark, he shows that the greatness of Poetry depends no less on the fine restraint. It is the
lack of this restraint that troubles us in the rarely imaginative version of the Italian
tale,Isabella; in the glowing diction of Lamia; in the tapestried beauty of The Eve of St.
Agnes.
Of these, perhaps, Isabella, despite its morbid sensibility, alone achieves its
purpose. Lamia certainly fails to grip the imagination in the way intended. The
atmosphere of mystery has imperfectly been realised here. The Eve of St. Agnes is a piece
of richly decorative verse, and is pleasant enough with its “lucent syrops, tinct with
cinnamon”. But the “lucent syrops” are too generously supplied, and there are times in
the poem when we would gladly welcome the romantic vigour and directness of Scott to
give life and zest to the story.
In these poems, medievalism serves as the inspiration, and though it gave him
ample opportunities for the richness of colouring that was at once his merit and his failing,
it did not appeal to the strongest side of his nature.
The Incomplete Poem “The Eve of St Mark”
The Eve of St. Mark is incomplete. We have here only the Prologue to the poem,
and the subject of the poem is not reached. But the scene is set consummately, and the
atmosphere is suggested most successfully—the quaint old-world town with its leisurely
quietude; the girl brooding intently on the legend, half-fascinated, half-afraid; the chilly
sunset tremulous with premonition. The picture is perfectly visualised, and the details
make the whole thing amazingly actual. The restraint, the balance, the simplicity, the ease,
are beyond praise; with rare economy of effort, the poet arrests the reader and makes him
feel the impending tragedy.
The Odes
In the Odes, Keats gives us most of his inmost self, and he does so with the sure
hand of a great artist. Not all the odes stand on an equal footing. The Odes to
Indolencefaithfully depicts a passing mood, but it has no high beauty to recommend it.
The Ode to Psyche which deals with mythological lovers shows too clearly the too-mark
of the craftsman. But the Ode to a Nightingale, theOde on a Grecian Urn, the Ode on
Melancholy,and the Ode to Autumn are among the mightiest of achievements of English
poetry. The note of sadness sounds through them all; and the vivid joy of the perceptive
life, the ideal permanence of art, the glamour of romance, the benison of Nature’s varying
moods, are contrasted with the mutability of life and the short duration of pleasure.
The “Ode to a Nightingale”
“The Ode to a Nightingale, embodying the very spirit of old romance, is the most
voluptuous and passionate in its emotion. At points the emotion threatens to overpower
the writer, and a hysterical euphuism here and there jars on the reader. But for the most
part the passion, for all its intensity, is focussed and controlled, as for instance, in such
inspired felicities as
end of poetry to the object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of
beauty. “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things”, he said.
Accused of Being a Poet of Escape
The world of beauty was for Keats an escape from the dreary and painful effects of
ordinary experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into
the realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained
absolutely untouched by revolutionary theories for the regeneration of mankind. His later
poems such as the Ode to a Nightingale and Hyperion, no doubt show an increasing
interest in humanity and human problems and, if he had lived, he would have established
a closer contact with reality. As it is, he may on the whole be termed as a poet of escape.
“With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical
doctrine, but for the expression of beauty.” Critics accuse him of being indifferent to
humanity but they should realise that he aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.
The Contrast Between Him and Two of His Contemporaries
In John Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and
with Shelley on the other. Keats was neither rebel nor Utopian dreamer. Endowed with a
purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time
a position of almost complete detachment. He knows nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of
antagonism to the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s
humanitarian real and passion for reforming the world. The famous opening line
of Endymion—‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’—strikes the key-note of his work. As the
modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold, and prosaic, he habitually sought an
imaginative escape from it, not like Shelley into the future land of promise, but into the
past of Greek mythology, as in Endymion, Lamia, and the fragmentary Hyperion, or of
medieval romance, as in The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella,and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In
his treatment of Nature, this same passion for sensuous beauty is still the dominant
feature. He loved Nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he
everywhere found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the
simple ‘poety of earth’; but there was nothing mystical in the love and Nature was never
fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual messages and meanings.
The Most Perfect of Romanticists
“Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the romanticists. While
Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the
moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and Byron voicing his own egoism
and the political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from men and from all political
measures, worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his
own heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be.
He had, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by
being devoted to philosophy or politics, or, indeed, to any cause, great or small.”
The Oneness of Truth and Beauty in His Opinion
Of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great
contemporaries, the first is the disinterested love of beauty. He grasped the essential
oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was
the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse as well as the
perfect form. And, precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to
preach.
His Early Sonnets; and His Later Poetry
It was poetry itself that first enlisted his enthusiasm—poetry and art. His early
sonnets are largely concerned with poets or with pictures, sculptures, or the rural
solitudes in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a
storied Grecian urn; a nightingale (light-winged Dryad of the trees, a singer, throughout
all ages made glamorous by poetry); the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid, in the flowery
tale of Apuleius; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to
which he turns from the songs of spring—’for thou hast thy music too’. What he asked of
poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret Here,
where men sit and hear each other groan.
This was the burden of his earlier poems in which he meditated upon his business as a
poet: I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill andSleep and Poetry. The theme of both these
poems is that lovely things in Nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and the great aim of
poetry is to
be a friend
To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man
He also gives here a hint of sterner themes:
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted this nobler life of poetry in poems
like Lamia and Hyperion, but it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had done
justice to this more elevated type of poetic creation.
His Delight in a Life of Sensations
Love for him was a bed of roses into which one sinks with a delicious sense of
release from pain, responsibility, and moral inhibition. He did try, in his long fantasy
ofEndymion, to rise above the notion of love as the “mere commingling of passionate
breath” and to depict love as “a sort of oneness”, “a fellowship with essence”. But the
delights of the senses, the free play of the fancy, and the relaxation of the tired nerves were
still the most familiar marks with him.
blighted by Augustan rationalism. It revived with the romantic religion of Nature and the
imagination. Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us” shows the
attraction of classical myth for Wordsworth. Wordsworth here points out that the Greeks,
who saw Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton blow his horn, were nearer
religion than Christian Englishmen bent upon making money and with no eye or ear for
Nature. Keats’s Sleep and Poetry contains echoes of Wordsworth’s sonnet.
No First Hand Knowledge of Greek Literature
Keats had no first-hand knowledge of Greek literature. He derived his knowledge
of the Greek classics from translations and books of reference like Chapman’s translation
of Homer, and Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary. His sonnet on Seeing the Elgin
Marbles reveals the important influence exerted on him by Greek sculpture. According to
a critic, Hyperion is in poetry what the Elgin Marbles are in sculpture. The calm grandeur
of Greek art, its majesty and symmetry and simplicity, its economy of ornament and
subordination of parts to the whole, came to Keats through his knowledge of these
marbles. This influence is most obvious in the two odes, On Indolence and On a Grecian
Urn.
His Limitations as a “Greek”
But Keats has his limitations as a Greek. He does not write of Greek things in a
Greek manner. Something indeed in Hyperion—at least in its first two books—he caught
from Paradise Lost of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and
Milton. But his palace of Hyperion, with its vague, far-dazzling pomps and phantom-
terrors of coming doom, shows how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity and
precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images. Similarly one of the most
characteristic images[1] of Nature from this poem shows not the simplicity of the Greek,
but the complexity of the modern, sentiment of Nature, with its concourse of metaphors
and epithets. Keats produces here every effect which a forest-scene by starlight can have
upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees, their aspect of human
venerableness, their verdure unseen in the darkness, the sense of their stillness and
suspended life, etc.
The Absence of Certain Greek Elements from His Poetry
The rooted artistic instincts of the Greeks were absent from Keats’s nature and
temperament. He did not have the Greek instinct of selection and simplification, or of a
rejection of all beauties except the vital and the essential. He did not have the capacity to
deal with his material in such a way that the main masses might stand out unconfused, in
just proportions and with outlines perfectly clear. And like his aims and his gifts, he was
in his workmanship essentially romantic, Gothic, English. At the time when he
wrote Endymion, he believed that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and the manner
in which Keats deals with the Greek story of Endymion, is as far from being a Greek or
classical manner as possible.
of the feast of Pan contains passages which in the quality of direct Nature-interpretation are
scarcely to be surpassed in poetry:
rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man’s voice was on the mountains, and the mass
Of Nature’s lives and wonders puls’d ten-fold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.
In Fancy, the poet shows his keen observation when he gives us an inventory of natural
phenomena by mentioning the field-mouse peeping from its cell, the snake casting away its
winter-skin, the freckled eggs being hatched in the hawthorn tree, the hen-bird’s wing resting on
her mossy nest, etc.—
Thou shall see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its called sleep,
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shall see
Hatching in the hawthorn tree,
When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
In the Ode to a Nightingale we have a couple of remarkable Nature-pictures owing Keats’s delight
in the purely sensuous appeal of Nature. One is the picture of the moon shining in the sky while
there is darkness on the grassy floor of the forest:
And happy the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by her starry fays; etc., etc.
The other is a picture of flowers—hawthorn, eglantine, violets, musk-roses:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
In the Ode to Psyche, we again have a couple of exquisite pictures of Nature. Cupid and Psyche
are seen lying side by side:
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet scarce espied:
Mid-hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed.
Blue, silver white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
This is, indeed, one of the best Nature-pictures in Keals’s poetry. We have the deep grass below
and the leaves and blossoms up on the branches of trees; there is a brooklet close by and, above
all, there are the hushed, cool-rooted, fragrant-eyed flowers of various colours. It is a most inviting
picture.
In the Ode on Melancholy, we have a beautiful picture of rain falling from a cloud above
on the drooping flowers below:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud:
Then, of course, we have the Ode to Autumnin which we have beautiful pictures of autumn’s fruits
and autumn’s songs. The ripe apples, the swollen gourd, the sweet kernel in the hazels, the honey
in bee-hives have all a rich sensuous appeal. The songs of autumn are the mournful sounds of
gnats, the bleating of lambs, the singing of crickets, the whistling of the redbreast and the
twittering of the swallows. The whole of this poem illustrates Keats’s extraordinary powers of
observation in the world of Nature. The brief picture of the sunset over the fields in this poem is
noteworthy:
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue:
The Greek Element in His Attitude to Nature
Keats’s attitude to Nature has been compared with that of the ancient Greeks. The ancient
Greeks personified the objects and forces of Nature. They called the moon Cynthia, and the sun
Apollo; they saw Dryads in the wood and Naiads in water. Keats, too, sometimes followed the
Greeks in this respect. In one of his poems he says:
I shall again sea Phoebus in the morning:
Or flushed Aurora in the rosiate dawning!
Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream.
Aurora in Greek mythology is the goddess of dawn; Phoebus is the god of sun and a Naiad is a
water-spirit. In other words, Keats possessed a myth-making faculty in regard to Nature. This is,
of course, best seen inEndymion and in Hyperion. Shelley, too, it may be observed, personified
the objects of Nature—he personified the west wind, the cloud, the Mediterranean, etc. But while,
in Shelley’s case, the objects of Nature retain their character as objects of Nature and are not given
any human character, Keats gives to his personifications of the objects and forces of Nature a
distinctly human character, thus following the Greeks. The moon is for him Cynthia who falls in
love with a mortal and has the same amorous desire as an earthly woman.
An Occasional Complex Sentiment in His Treatment of Nature
Occasionally Keats’s treatment of Nature shows a complex sentiment, as in the following
lines from Hyperion:
As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.
Here Keats employs several metaphors and epithets to express every effect which a forest scene
by star-light can have upon the mind.
One of the Supreme Poets of Nature
Keats was one of the supreme poets of Nature. To Wordsworth Nature is a living with
power to influence man for good or ill. Keats neither gives a moral life to Nature, as Wordsworth
did, nor attempts to pass beyond her familiar manifestations, as Shelley did. (Shelley is the poet
“of sky and sea and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. The world
of Nature that he paints is rarely a world that we know.”) But in Keats’s Nature poetry, realism or
the quest for pure truth informs every detail. He is the predecessor of .the Tennysonian school
because all his Nature-poetry is based on exact knowledge, and the knowledge of a man
deliberately observing and storing up the minutest details of what he sees.
Sidney Colvin’s View
Sidney Colvin observes: Keats’s character as a poet of Nature begins distinctly to declare
itself in his first volume, the Poems of 1817. He differs by it alike from Wordsworth and Shelley.
The instinct of Wordsworth was to interpret all the operations of Nature by those of his own
strenuous soul. For Shelley, natural beauty was symbolical in a two-fold sense. In the visible
glories of the world, his philosophy saw the evil of the unseen; and all the imagery of Nature’s
more remote and skyey phenomena was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future.
In Keats the sentiment of Nature was simpler than in either of these two men; more direct, and
more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret Nature more for her own sake, and
less for the sake of sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own workings and
aspirations. He was gifted with a delighted insight into all the beauties of the woods and fields.
Evidences of this gift appear in the longer poems of his first volume, with their lingering trains of
peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of “Nature’s gentle doings”; and pleasant
touches of the same kind are scattered also among the sonnets as in To Charles Wells:
As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert,—
or again in the one To Solitude:
let me thy vigils keep
‘Mongst boughs pavilion’d where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.
Keats’s Medievalism
The Spell of the Middle Ages Upon Keats
Keats was a great lover of the Middle Ages. He responded more than any other poet
to the spell of medieval romance. He was not interested in the political or social conditions
of his age nor did he dream of the Golden Age of man. He was more or less a poet of
escape, an idealist. The Middle Ages have always exercised a special charm on poets by
virtue of their chivalry, romance, knighterrantry, supernatural beliefs, etc. Keats, who was
chiefly a poet of pure imagination without much contact with reality, was naturally
fascinated by the charm of the Middle Ages. Keats pays his tribute to the Middle Ages
in The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of St. Mark, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and Isabella.
knights wandering about in search of adventure for the fun of it or for money. The knight
here suggests the chivalry and the spirit of adventure of the Middle Ages. The
supernaturalism of this poem is also a medieval quality. The beautiful lady here is not an
earthly woman. She is a witch who appears in the shape of a beautiful woman to entangle
unsuspecting men who fall in love with her. Another supernatural element is the horrible
dream in which the knight learns the real nature of the witch to whose deceptive charms
he has fallen a victim.
Yet Another Medieval Poem
The Eve of St. Mark again deals with a medieval superstition. This superstition was
that a person stationed near a church-porch at twilight on the Eve of St. Mark would see
the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the ensuing year.
However, this poem was not completed and remains a fragment.
Passion and the Romantic Background of Passion
An important point about Keats’s medievalism is its stress upon passion and the
romantic background of that passion rather than upon action and thrilling adventure. If
Sir Walter Scott had written The Eve of St. Agnes, he would have made Porphyro light
with his enemies in order to thrill us. But Keats shows his hero entering stealthily into the
castle with his heart on fire for Madeline, feasting his eyes upon her physical charms and
playing on a lute for her till she wakes up and the two “melt”‘ into each other. The note of
passion, indeed, is emphasised. When the moon throws its beautiful light on Madeline’s
breast, Porphyro grows faint with love and desire. On seeing Madeline undressing herself
in order logo to bed, Porphyro feels that he is in Paradise. His soul aches with love. When
she opens her eyes, he sinks upon her knees. She heaves many sighs and speaks in
voluptuous tones, while he keeps gazing on her in an appealing manner. Addressing her
passionately, he says, “My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!” Indeed the whole
poem throbs with passion. The same is the case in La Belle Dame Sans Merci. There is
hardly a story or a plot in this poem. Keats sets before us, with imagery drawn from the
medieval world of enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love.
The imagery powerfully expresses the passion of the knight.
Two Vivid Pictures in “The Eve of St. Mark”
The interest of The Eve of St. Mark, again, lies not in narrative but in pictorial
brilliance and charm or workmanship. There are two vivid pictures in the poem: the out-
door picture of the city streets, and the indoor picture of the maiden reading a book in her
fire-lit chamber.
Keats’s Sensuousness
Keats, Pre-eminently the Poet of the Senses
Sensuousness is the paramount quality of Keats’s poetical genius. Keats is pre-eminently
the poet of the senses and their delights. No one has catered to and gratified the five human senses
(touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing) to the same extent as Keats. He is a great lover of beauty
in the concrete. His religion is the adoration of the beautiful. In this respect he is a follower of
Spenser. “I have loved the principle of Beauty in all things”, he said. His Endymionbegins with
the famous line:
“Phoebe’s sapphire region’d star”, and “Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky”. A little later in
the poem we are given pictures of a forest, mountains, streams, birds, breezes, and Dryads lulled
to sleep on the moss. One of the most exquisitely sensuous pictures comes at the end where we
see a bright torch burning in the casement to make it possible for Cupid[1]to enter the temple in
order to make love to Psyche.
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
In the Ode on Melancholy, again, we have several sensuous pictures. There is the rain failing from
a cloud above and reviving the drooping flowers below and covering the green hill in an “April
shroud”. There is the morning rose; there are the colours produced by the sunlight playing on wet
sand; and there is the wealth of “globed peonies”. And then there is another exquisitely sensuous
picture.
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
The Ode on a Grecian Urn contains a series of sensuous pictures—passionate men and
gods chasing reluctant maidens, the flute-players playing their ecstatic music, the fair youth trying
to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the tree enjoying an everlasting spring, etc. The ecstasy
of the passion of love and of youth is beautifully depicted in the following lines:
More happy love! more happy happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young.
The Ode to a Nightingale is one of the finest examples of Keats’s rich sensuousness. The lines in
which the poet expresses of passionate desire for some Provencal wine or the red wine from the
fountain of the Muses appeal to both our senses of smell and taste:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene…….
These lines bring before us a delightful picture of Provence with its fun and frolic, merry-making,
drinking and dancing. Similarly the beaker full of the sparkling, blushful Hippocrene is highly
pleasing. Then there is the magnificent picture of the moon shining in the sky and surrounded by
stars. The rich feast of flowers described in the stanza that follows is one of the outstanding
beauties of the poem. Flowers, soft incense, the fruit trees, the white hawthorn, the eglantine, the
fast-fading violets, the coming musk-rose—all this is a delight for our senses.
In the Ode to Fancy, we have a series of pictures which please our senses. The fruits of
autumn, buds and bells of May, the sweet singing of the birds, the various flowers—the daisy, the
marigold, the lily, the primrose-are a kind of feast which we enjoy as we go through the poem.
In the Ode to Autumn, the bounty of the season has been described with all its sensuous
appeal. The whole landscape is made to appear fresh and scented. There is great concentration in
each line of the opening stanza. Each line is like the branch of a fruit tree laden with fruit to the
breaking point. The vines suggesting grapes, the apples, the gourds, the hazels with their sweet
kernel, the bees suggesting honey—all these appeal to our senses of taste and smell.
Sensuality Rather Than Sensuousness in Some of the Poems
Thus Keats always selects the objects of his description and imagery with a keen eye on
their sensuous appeal. This sensuousness is the principal charm of his poetry. Sometimes this
sensuousness deteriorates into sensuality. In other words, Keats often shows a tendency to dwell
too much upon the charms of the feminine body and refers to the lips, checks, and breasts a little
more than is necessary. In Sleep and Poetry, he describes that stage in his poetic career when he
will catch the beautiful nymphs in shady places and make love to them:
Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places,
To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,—
Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white Into a pretty shrinking with
a bite
As hard as lips can make it.
In the Ode to Fancy, he gives us a picture of Hebe whose skirt falls to, the ground and on seeing
whose naked beauty Jove is filled with passion:
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe’s, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held the goblet sweet,
And Jove grew languid.
In The Eve of St. Agnes, Porphyro almost swoons with passion. When he melts into the dream of
Madeline, there is “solution sweet”. This phrase is generally taken to mean the sexual love-making
of Porphyro and Madeline.
Sensuousness in the Sonnets
In a sonnet, I Cry Your Mercy, Keats, addressing a sweet-heart, says that he would like to
possess her wholly and completely:
O! let me have thee whole, all, all be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss; those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast:
In another sonnet, he expresses a desire to spend his life with his head resting upon the bosom of
his beloved:
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Thus sometimes Keats’s imagination runs riot.
wreathed silver. In the Ode to Autumn, the first stanza is a rich feast of apples, grapes,
hazels, gourd, and honey. InFancy, again, the poet appeals to our senses of smell and
sight by describing flowers of all kinds and colours: the daisy, the marigold, the lily, the
primrose, the hyacinth. Our fancy, says the poet, can mix up the pleasures of all seasons
for our enjoyment “like three fit wines in a cup”. Describing an imaginary sweetheart in
the same poem, he tells us that she will have a waist and a side as white as Hebe’s. And
then follows a lovely picture of Hebe’s petticoat slipping down to her feet, and Jove
becoming languid with passion on beholding her physical charms. The Ode on
Indolence contains a number of pictures which bear witness to Keats’s gift of concrete and
sensuous imagery. Each of the three figures is given a separate life in the poem and is fully
individualised. There is a lovely picture of a cloudy morning when the air smells of coming
rain.
More Examples
In the Ode to Psyche, again, we have several concrete and sensuous pictures. There
is the lovely picture of Cupid and Psyche lying in an embrace in the deep grass. An
exquisite picture is given in the two lines in which Keats describes, with rare felicity of
word and phrase, the flowers of different colours. The lines which describe the beauty of
Psyche and the paraphernalia of worship in a temple have also a sensuous quality.
The Ode to a Nightingale contains some of the finest pictures of Keats. The lines in which
the poet expresses a passionate desire for some Provencal wine or the red wine from the
fountain of the Muses, have a rich appeal. Then there is the magnificent picture of the
moon shining in the sky and surrounded by stars. The rich feast of flowers that Keats gives
us in the poem is one of its outstanding beauties. Apart from these sensuous pictures,
there is also a vivid and pathetic image of Ruth when, sick for home, she stood tearful
amid the alien corn. The following lines contain an unforgettable picture, wonderful for
its suggestiveness and mystery:
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Detailed and Elaborate Imagery
Much of the imagery in the poetry of Keats is detailed and elaborate and bears
witness to his powers of minute observation. This is particularly true of’ his pictures of
Nature for describing the beauties of which Keats had a rare gift. Picture of Nature are
plentiful in / Stood Tiptoe, Sleep and Poetry, Endymion, Hyperion, the Ode to
Autumn, and the Ode to a Nightingale.
The Concreteness of the Imagery and its Effect
The concreteness of Keats’s images impresses them on our minds. Many of these
images were drawn from his own observation of English woods and gardens, sea-side and
brook-side; and he is one of the most enthusiastic of poets in depicting these scenes. But
he also drew his images from regions far removed from his personal experience—from the
ancient world of “emperor and clown” the Biblical world of Ruth “amid the alien corn”, or
the world of medieval romance. Ancient Greece serves as the setting in
his Endymion, Lamia, and Hyperion. Boccaccio’s Italy is the setting of his Isabella, or
The Poet of Basil. And the Gothic Middle Ages form the background in both The Eve of
St. Agnes and The Eve of St. Mark. And in all cases he achieved conspicuous success, even
though his knowledge of past ‘ages in foreign lands was not based on a first-hand study of
foreign languages, but on a careful study of secondary sources and on his own poetic
intuition.
Keats' "Endymion"
An Allegorical Meaning in This Poem
Endymion was written between April and November, 1817. At first Keats thought of the
poem only as a vehicle for the story of Endymion which he would decorate as beautifully as he
could. But a perusal of the poem in the context of his letters of 1817 and early 1818, shows that
certain ideas had been gathering form in Keats’s mind, especially when he was writing Book III.
Consequently an allegorical meaning in the poem is definitely perceptible. Certain critics have
worked out extended allegories in their interpretation of the poem.
“The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy,
but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided,
the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the
thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following
pages.”
Written Independently But Without Judgment
In a letter he wrote: “J.S. is perfectly right in regard to the ‘slip-shod Endymion’.That it
is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as/I had power
to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view
asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written, for it is not in my
nature to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently without judgment—I
may write independently and with judgment,hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its
salvation in man…..I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the
greatest.”
The First and the Second Parts of the Poem
The first book of Endymion is entirely introductory, and merely sets forth the feeling of
puzzlement of the love-sick shepherd-prince, the hero, who appears at a festival of his people
held in honour of the god Pan, and who is afterwards urged by his sister Peona to reveal to her
the secret of the passion which is consuming him. Endymion tells Peona die story of those
celestial visits which he is not certain whether he has experienced or merely dreamed. In the
second book the hero sets out in search of the celestial visitor, and is led by obscure signs and
impulses through a mysterious and almost trackless region of adventure. Keats lets himself go
without a check in describing the natural and architectural wonders, unlocalised and half-
realised, in this book. A Naiad, in the disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and
there reveals herself and counsels him not to give up hope. An airy voice next invites him to
descend “into the sparry hollows of the world”, which done, he gropes his way to a subterranean
temple where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis and where Venus herself
appears to give encouragement to Endymion. From there the hero wanders on by dizzy paths
and precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. After seeing the vision of Cybele,
Endymion is conveyed on an eagle’s back down a deep descent. He soon sees a jasmine bower
where his celestial mistress again visits him. Next he encounters the streams, and hears the
voices, of Arethus and Alpheus; and utters a prayer to his goddess in their behalf.
The Next Part of the Poem
Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passions and adventures. But
now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of Alpheusand Arethusa, and next,
throughout nearly the whole of the third book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this
latter legend with great freedom omitting the transformation of Scylla by Circe into a devouring
monster, and making the enchantress punish her rival not by this vile transformation but by
death, or rather a trance resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by
Endymion’s help to rescue her and, together with her, the whole sorrowful community of true
lovers drowned at sea.
The Fourth Part
In the fourth book, Endymion goes through a chain of adventures which seem certainly
to have a moral and allegorical meaning. Returning to upper air, Endymion soon half-forgets
his celestial mistress for the charms of an Indian maiden. This mysterious Indian maiden proves
in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. But it is long before he discovers this,
and in the mean time he is conducted to her through a bewildering series of aerial ascents,
descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, his broodings in
the Cave of Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality and to Peona,
and his re-union with his celestial mistress in her own shape, make up a narrative which is very
involved and confusing.
A Parable of the Soul’s Pursuit of the Ideal
Endymion may be regarded as a parable of a soul’s experience in pursuit of the ideal.
The argument of the poem seems to be as follows: “Let a soul enamoured of the ideal once suffer
itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be
still haunted by that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude will still
dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which has thus allured it derives from the
ideal its power to charm,—that it is after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it.”
The Need of Service to Human Beings
The poem also implies that the pursuit of beauty as no aim in life is only justified when it
is accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. It is when Endymion, in his adventure
with Glaucus, allows himself to be diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the
sorrows of others, that the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last nearer to
fulfilment. Endymion, kissed by the moon-goddess, is the human soul awakened to ideal truth
and goodness, and the way to the ideal lies through experience and through sympathy with
human suffering. Endymion is the poet in his pursuit of ideal beauty. And he is also Keats
himself, learning about life and poetry.
An Immature Poem But a Beautiful One
Endymion is undoubtedly an immature poem and has its faults. But it is a poem of too
many beauties to be ignored or to die. Every reader must take pleasure in some of its passages
and episodes. The account of the feast of Pan, for instance, contains passages which in the
quality of direct Nature-interpretation are scarcely to be surpassed in poetry:
rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man’s voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of Nature’s lives and wonders puls’d ten-fold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.
No less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same episode, of the true spirit of ancient
pastoral life and worship; the hymn to Pan especially, expressing perfectly the meaning of the
Greek myth to Greeks and enriching it with touches of northern feeling.
In Book II, there shine out at intervals strokes of true poetry:
The high-water mark of poetry in Endymionis thus reached in the two lyrics of the first and
fourth books. Indeed, a reader’s taste for literature may be determined by the degree to which
he is able to appreciate and enjoy these two lyrics.
In rhythm, Keats here follows the method he had adopted in Sleep and Poetrykeeping the
sentence independent of the metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the
end and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought that Keats had carried
this method too far, even to the negation of metre. But Keats, even where his verse runs most
diffusely, rarely fails in delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of
sentence structure.
creative development. Keats himself was the first to value the poem in this fashion, and this was
all the value he eventually allowed it. “It is as good as I had power to make it—by myself, he
wrote. “Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and
fumbled over every page, it would not have been written.” In the end, he saw that, his having
written it mattered more than what he had written. The writing of this poem brought him
considerable valuable experience. Endymion made Keats a poet, whatever Keats made
of Endymion. In the very experience of failure, he discovered the truth of achievement: “That
which is creative must create itself.”
The Chief Fault of the Poem
The chief fault of the poem, Keats realised, was the inexperience of life underlying the
original conception. “The imagination of boy is healthy”, he wrote, “and the mature imagination
of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the
character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted”—and from this
sprang the “mawkishness” which he condemned in his preface to the poem.
Sidney Colvin on Endymion
Prodigality of Incidental and Superfluous Beauties
A general characteristic of Keats’s favourite Elizabethan poetry is its prodigality of
incidental and superfluous beauties. Even in drama, it takes the powers of a Shakespeare to keep
the vital play of character and passion unsmothered by such beauties and in most narrative
poems of the age the quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he
wrote Endymion, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constitution an essential, if not the
chief, charm of poetry. “I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess”, he writes. And with
reference to his own poem during its progress, he says, “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
four thousand lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry”.
Graham Hough on Endymion
The Leading Idea of the Poem
The theme of the poem is one that is endemic in romantic literature—the pursuit in the
world of an ideal love who has been glimpsed dimly in vision. So far it is the same as that of
Shelley’s Alastor. Keats embodies it in a rehandling of the Greek fable of Diana’s love for
Endymion, a mortal shepherd: but he lays emphasis on Endymion’s love for Diana rather than
on hers for him. The goddess visits Endymion in sleep, and when he awakes he resolves to seek
her through the world. Alter numerous confusing adventures he meets an Indian maiden who is
sad and home-sick, lamenting a lost love. He is sorry for her, and because he is sorry for her
comes to love her; and for a time he forgets his goddess. This seems an infidelity, but is not really
so, for in the end Diana and the Indian maiden turn out to be the same. That is to say, ideal
beauty can only be achieved by love and sympathy for the beauty imanent in human life. The
conclusion is quite different from that of Alastor where the hero, not finding his veiled maid, can
only die disappointed. Keats does not accept the frank Shelleyan dichotomy between the world
of experience and the world of imagination. Endymion succeeds in his quest, but only by
apparently compromising his love for a goddess by his love for a mortal. Keats is recurring here
to the idea we have met already in Sleep and Poetry, and that we are to meet again in the
second Hyperion; the idea that love of beauty, like other passions, cannot exist fruitfully in
isolation, that it can only fulfil itself through participation in the actual conditions of human life.
Thus the leading idea of Endymion is not something mawkish or undecided, but a quite vigorous
existentialist principle that Keats saw clearly from the beginning of his life.”
Keats' Isabella, The Eve of St. Mark, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Lamia
The image suggests that the kiss exists in order that a poet may write about it; it also
suggests that love is a mode of poetry conceived as a state of luxurious contemplation
beyond the cares of the ordinary world. A graceful and accomplished artifice of sorrow is
imposed on the story; there is a kind of self-conscious tuning-up of the poetry to make it
equal to contain a theme:
O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
The method may be described as a rhetorical lyricism. There are frequent apostrophes
like those above and those to ‘sad Melpomene’ and to ‘eloquent and famed Boccaccio’,
and many highly-mannered repetitions and declamations. The management of some of
these rhetorical construction is very beautiful, for instance, the description of Isabella’s
grief, a variation on the word ‘forget’:
And she forgot the stars, the moon, the sun.
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new mood she saw not…..
Sorrow is stylised like a mourning figure on an urn. The long declamatory passages
disperse the emotion and cause it to cling to detached and pictorial movement of the story.
A repetitive series of questions fruitlessly probes the origins of the brothers’ commercial
and family pride which has made them decide to dispose of their sister’s lover: ‘Why were
they proud ?......”
stanzas 14 and 15. Keats himself came to have serious doubts about the poem and would
have preferred not to publish it. With the experience of the hostile reviews behind him,
he wrote to Richard Woodhouse: “I will give you a few reasons why I should persist in not
publishing The Plot of Basil—it is too smokeable (that is, open to ridicule). There is too
much inexperience of life, and simplicity of knowledge in it Isabella is what I
should call, were I a reviewer, a weak-sided poem with an amusing sober-sadness about
it.”
“The Eve of St-Mark” an Unfinished Poem
The Eve of St. Mark is a fragment based on a popular belief connected with the Eve
of St. Mark, the belief namely, that a person stationed near a church porch at twilight on
that anniversary would see entering the church the apparitions of those about to die, or
to be brought near death, in the ensuing year. Keats’s fragment breaks off before the story
makes any headway, and it is not easy to see how this opening would have led up to
incidents illustrating this belief. There are two main pictures in the poem: the out-door
picture or the city streets in their young spring freshness and Sabbath peace; and the in-
door picture of the maiden reading in her quaint fire-lit chamber. Each picture is
admirably vivid and charming.
An Anticipation of the Pre-Raphaelite School
The interest of the poem lies not in moving narrative, but in (a) its pictorial
brilliance and charm of workmanship; and (b) its relation to and influence on later
English poetry. Keats here anticipates the feeling and method of the Pre-Raphaelite
school. The in-door scene of the girl over her book, with its vivid colour and the
minuteness of suggestive and picturesque detail, is thoroughly in the spirit of Rossetti;
while in the out-door picture we find anticipations of William Morris.
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
La Belle Dame Sans Merci can hardly be said to tell a story. It sets before us the
wasting power of love, when either the hostility of fate or a mistaken choice makes of love
not a blessing but a disaster. The wretchedness which the poet describes in the poem is
partly that of his own soul in relation to Fanny Brawne. The imagery of the poem is drawn
from the medieval world of enchantment and knight-errantry, and’ truly expresses the
passion. “To many students the union of infinite tenderness with a weird intensity, the
conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild yet simple magic of the cadences, the
perfect inevitable union of sound and sense, make of La Belle Dame Sans Merci the
masterpiece, not only among the shorter poems of Keats, but even among them all.
“Lamia”
Lamia is the tale of a serpent who in the form of a beautiful woman gains the love
of an Athenian youth, but is disenchanted at her wedding feast by a “bald-head
philosopher”, whose “demon eyes” make her “melt into a shade”. The serpent-lady here
is both an enchantress and a victim of enchantments. She builds, by her art, a palace of
delights for her lover, until their happiness is shattered by the scrutiny of the philosopher
who represents intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats himself made the following
observation about this poem: “I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take
hold of people in some way—give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation”. There is
undoubtedly much truth in this observation. There is perhaps nothing in all his poetry so
vivid as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the touch of Hermes to transform her,
followed by the painful process of the transformation itself. The introductory episode of
Hermes and his nymph is admirably told, though it occupies more space than it should.
Admirable again is the concluding stanza where the merciless gaze of the philosopher
shatters his pupil’s dream of love and beauty, and the lover in losing his illusion loses his
life
An Unequal Poem
The poem has a thrilling vividness of narration in certain parts of it, and much of
the verse has a fine melodious vigour. But the poem is in some parts too feverish, and in
others too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for instance that of
the palace built by Lamia’s magic. In certain reflective passages, Keats relapses into his
early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. The passage in the first book beginning
“Let the mad poets say whate’er they please”, and the first fifteen lines of the second book
belong to this category. Besides, there is a weakness in the moral of the story:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
But the poem is hardly Miltonic in any stricter sense. In the matter of rhythm, Keats’s blank verse
has not the flight ofMilton’s. “Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so
solemn and far-foreseen close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music.” It is still the verse
of Keats, but immensely purged and strengthened by contact with a severer master. Some of the
most beautiful images in their delicacy and precision are utterly unlike Milton’s generalised verbal
grandeur, and indeed could be by nobody but Keats:
………No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
The Subject-Matter of the First Two Books
The first book of Hyperion gives us a picture of the fallen Titans, with Saturn as the central
figure, but Hyperion as the only one who remains even potentially active. The second book shows
them in council and the vital part of it is undoubtedly the speech of Oceanus. The sum and
substance of his speech is as follows:
My voice is not a bellows unto ire.
Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof
How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop:
And in this proof much comfort will
I give, If ye will take that comfort in its truth.
We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force
Of thunder, or of Jove.
Saturn was not the first power in the universe, and should not expect to be the last. Chaos and
darkness produced light: light brought heaven and earth and life itself into existence; and the
Titans were the first-born of life. Just as heaven and earth are more beautiful than chaos and
darkness,
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us…..
The Titans should not grieve over the situation and should not envy their successors
……..for ‘tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might.
The simple Clymene follows and supports Oceanus by bearing testimony to the beauty of the
young Apollo’s music, which she has heard. The lesson of all this is thatHyperion is to be a
poem of evolution, of the supersession of lower forms by higher; and that the
successors are to prevail because they are superior in beauty.
The Fragmentary Third Book
In the fragment of the third book the interest shifts from the Titans to the young Apollo.
Mnemosyne (Memory) alone among the Titans has formed relations with the younger gods. She
has watched over the childhood of Apollo, and now she finds him wavering and uncertain of his
course. In his talk with her he finds the consciousness of his destiny and assumes his newfound
godhead. At this point the poem breaks off.
Keats’s Inability To Go On With-the Poem
It seems that what began as an epic poem about a mythological conflict has become a
symbolical poem of a different kind. But in the process new difficulties have arisen for the poet.
The conventional epic conflict would have afforded a wealth of scenes and incidents. The new
scheme, of an evolution in beauty, presents far greater problems. It could hardly be put forth in
events and actions, and would not therefore afford material for the ten books originally proposed.
Perhaps there were other difficulties as well. The poem remains unfinished because Keats did not
know how it was to go on.
Keats’s Greek Subject But His Un-Greek Treatment
Although Keats has been called a Greek, he does not write of Greek things in a Greek
manner. The very description of thepalace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling pomps and
phantom-terrors of coming doom, shows that. Keats is here far in workmanship from the Greek
purity and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images. Some of his pictures of
Nature, too, show not the simplicity of the Greek, but the complexity of the modern, sentiment of
Nature. But Keats shows a thorough grasp of the essential meaning of the war between Titans and
Olympians. He illustrates with great beauty and force (in the speech of Oceanus in the second
book) that essential meaning: the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one
more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place
beside ideas of Nature and her brute powers.
Keats’s Animation of the Colossal Figures
Again, Keats attains great success in conceiving and animating the colossal shapes of the
early gods. He shows a masterly instinct in the choice of comparisons, drawn from Nature by
which he tries to make us realise the voices of those gods, with their personalities between the
elemental and me human.
The Attempt at the Dramatic Presentation of Emotion
Indeed, Hyperion is Keats’s most serious and considerable attempt at the dramatic
presentation of emotion—for the Titans are conceived in human terms, and their sorrows are
human sorrows. There is far greater power, too, of discourse, of argument in verse, than ever
before; there is no parallel in Keats’s earlier work to the speech of Oceanus.
The Merits of the Three Books Which Comprise the Poem
The second book of Hyperion, relating the council of the dethroned Titans, has neither the
sublimity of the first, nor the intensity of the unfinished third. In the first book we have a solemn
vision of the fallen Saturn, followed by a resplendent vision of Hyperion threatened in his empire.
In the third book we see Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne,
and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. But the third book has a ripeness and
controlled power of its own which place it quite on a level with the other two.
………………………………………………..
………………………………………………..
Thou art a dreaming thing;
A fever of thyself: think of the earth:
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature bath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime of low—
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms are his days,
Bearing more we than all his sins deserve.”
Keats means to say that a poet is one who, in order to indulge in dreams, withdraws
himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is lulled to sleep by
the sweets of poetry (symbolised by the fruits of the garden): Awakening, he finds himself on the
floor of a solemn .temple, with Mnemosyne as the priestess. If he is indifferent to the troubles of
his fellow men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten. In the view Keats-here
expresses of the function and responsibility of poetry, there is nothing new. Almost from the
beginning, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry towards
a nobler life
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet’s lot even at its best. He is allowed
to approach the priestess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only on condition that
he shares all the troubles of his fellow-men and makes them his own. And even then, his lot is far
harder and less honourable than that of common men.
Other Merits of the Poem
The imagery and description in the second version of Hyperion are shorn of redundancies,
and are far finer for being kept within bounds; and there is an enormous gain of dignity and force
in the presentation of emotion. In that part of the second Hyperion which is merely a re-handling
of the first, Keats removes Miltonisms and other dispensable ornaments. But in the process, he
sacrifices some of his best lines, though there is nothing like the first three hundred lines of the
new Hyperion in Keats’s earlier work. The new induction is, after the Odes, surely Keats’s greatest
verse. Both in reflective and descriptive passages the verse seems to stride instead of to linger, as
Keats’s verse has mostly done hitherto. And the new-found decision of style reflects a new decision
in the handling of ideas.
Graham Hough’s observations
“The second Hyperion is cast in the form of a dream, and the added opening describes this
dream and its setting. It begins with a short prologue which affords an excellent example of the
new tense and muscular verse:
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven! Pity these have not
Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,—
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable chain
And dumb enchantment.
This is an attempt to define the position of poetry. The poet has his dreams in common with other
men, but he alone is able to secure them from oblivion. (Again, the thought of the Ode To a
Grecian Urn—only art can endure.) And the poet’s dream differs from the fanatic’s, because it is
for the world, the fanatic’s only for a sect.”
A Synopsis of the Poem
The dream that Keats sees begins in a wood where the poet eats of the fruits and falls into
a deep sleep to find himself, when he wakes up, in a vast shrine. There are steps leading up to an
altar. As the poet approaches the steps, the veiled priestess addresses him:
If thou canst not ascend
These steps, die on the marble where thou art.
When he asks the priestess to explain the mysteries around him,
“None can usurp this height”, returned that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”
This is the theme, already familiar in Sleep and Poetry and in the letters: that the poet must not
rest in poetical dreams but must share the sorrows of humanity. In the lines that follow, the theme
is carried further. The actively virtuous are not to be found in the shrine; they are working in the
world. The poet is here because of his weakness, because he is a dreamer. The priestess goes on
to distinguish the poet and the mere dreamer:
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.
She then reveals that the temple is Saturn’s, the only remaining shrine of the old gods, and she is
Moneta, the sole remaining priestess. (Moneta is the Latin name of Mnemosyne.) Then Moneta
unveils herself, and is thus described:
Then I saw a wan face,
Not pin’d by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
…………………………………………….
………..deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage, it had pass’d
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away.
The poet asks to be shown the hidden story that lies behind the mysterious temple. She agrees to
reveal it to him, and the story of Hyperion and the Titans, much as it was narrated in the version
of the poem, then begins.
The Place of the Poet in This World, According to Keats
This is Keats’s last attempt to define the place of the poet in the world. The poet is less
than the man of active virtue, and Keats is still absorbed by/ the contrast between the realm of
Flora and the other kingdom that he suspects to lie beyond. He has still not crossed the boundary,
but he knows more of what to expect on the journey. It is notable how much of Keats’s poetry is
about poetry, its function, its glories, and its limitations. It is as though he is perpetually trying to
find a bridge between art and life, but is perpetually led back to art itself. InHyperion, Keats draws
two distinctions: one between the practical and the visionary mind; and the other between the
creative visionary, the poet, and the mere dreamer who vexes the world with visions that he can
do nothing to transmute into reality.
The View Expressed by Robert Bridges
Robert Bridges points out that the subject of Hyperion “lacks the solid basis of outward
event by which an epic maintains its interest; there is little but imagination, and a one-sidedness
or incompleteness of that; a languor which lingers in the main design”.
H.W. Garrod’s Opinion
H.W. Garrod agrees with this opinion and goes on to add that it was because of his shyness
of the actual that Keats adopted an allegorical design in writing Hyperion (both
versions). Hyperion is, in an allegorical form, the epic of the Revolutionary Idea, an idea which is
figured as Jove deposing Saturn, and Apollo ousting Hyperion. Hyperion is the last of the Titans
to fall before the new order. It is in the nature of things that periodic storms of time should shatter
material institutions, the laboriously-built fabric of tradition and habit. Hyperion cannot stay; or
he stays only to view
The misery his radiance has betrayed
To the most hateful seeing of itself.
Hyperion has outlived his world. The hope which the older gods repose in him is half-hearted;
and in fact the order which they represent has fallen from their want of faith in him, or from a
mutual breach of sympathy.
Apollo, the usurping god of light, the new poetry, attains godhead in a fashion sufficiently
significant. Keats does not carry the poem further than the beginning of his godhead. This
godhead is not without its birth-pangs:
Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs,
Most like the struggle at the gates of death;
and Keats speaks of him plainly as “dying into life”.
To Live by Dying
Alike of the god of poetry and of the poet upon earth it is true, that their living must be by
dying. It is not by accident that, on the one hand, Hyperion (first version) ends with the death-
shriek of Apollo, with the anguish of the god dying into life, and that on the other hand, all the
emphasis of the second version is thrown on the necessity for the poet of seeing the beauty of the
world through its sorrows, through human suffering:
None can usurp this height, returned that Shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
In other words, the revolutionary Apollo is to the fallen god what a humanitarian is to a visionary.
Again and again does Keats carry us to this opposition of two kinds of poetry, and again and again
does he shrink back from his own conclusions. Pursuing his epic of the Revolutionary Idea, Keats
was startled into misgiving; some disquiet of the creating imagination assailed him; he felt himself
brought up sharply against the need of defining, the need of clarifying his own conception. What
truly was this god, who thus dies into life? and into what order of life does this dying in fact
conduct him? Hyperion, the first version (of the volume of 1820) leaves the question without
answer; indeed, that it puts the question we should scarcely know except for Hyperion, the second
version. It is even possible that, in the version printed in 1820, Keats was trying to save his work
out of allegory. It could not be done, and he gave up, coming back to allegory unashamed. The
recoil of intention leaves the first version a fragment of statuesque beauty.
published Ode to Fanny; and we must certainly include the Ode on Indolence. The Ode on
Indolence has close affinities with the five great odes of the 1820 volume. Robert Bridges seems
doubtful whether to rank it above or below the Grecian Urn. That is to depreciate the Urn,
paradoxically, and to elevate Indolence above its merit. Yet its merit is sufficient to entitle it to be
considered with the other five odes.”
“Ode to Psyche”, the Earliest of the Great Odes
Of these the earliest, it is now generally supposed, is the Ode To Psyche. The circumstances
in which it was written reveal to us more clearly than anything else Keats’s technique of
composition.
The Ode, Developed from the Sonnet-Form
The ode, as the six great odes illustrate it, develops with Keats, not from the ode or hymn
of the eighteenth century, but from a species which the eighteenth century despised, the sonnet.
The earlier odes look back, certainly, to that century—directly to that century, and indirectly to
the Pindarics of Cowley. With the irregular ode, again, as it had been practised by Wordsworth
and Coleridge Keats was familiar; and the influence of it may be discerned in some of the
characters of the Ode to Psyche. That ode, however, is before all else interesting as marking
decisively the transition to a type of quite different construction, a type built upon the sonnet.
An Analysis of the Structure of Keats’s Odes
Until the end of 1817, Keats composed sonnets upon the Petrarchian pattern exclusively—
in obvious dependence on Milton and Wordsworth. In the last days of January, 1818, he for the
first time essayed a sonnet on the English, or Shakespearean pattern; and followed it up in
February by five others on a like model;, returning to the Petrarchian pattern thereafter only
thrice. It was in May of this year that he began the unfinished Ode to Maia—which in its imperfect
form has so much of the perfection of a Shakespearean sonnet. Of Keats’s Shakespearean sonnets
all, save three, pursue the normal pattern—the pattern invented by Surrey, adopted by Spenser
(1591), and by Watson (1593), and followed by Drayton, Daniel, and Shakespeare, but never used
by Milton or Wordsworth; the pattern of which the formula is abab cdcd efefgg. The three
divergences from this pattern all occur in a letter dated April 30, 1819; and the same letter
contains the Ode to Psyche…..“I have been endeavouring”, Keats writes, “to discover a better
sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate (that is, the Petrarchian) does not-suit the language
over well from the pouncing rhymes; the other kind appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the
end of it seldom has a pleasing effect.” He propounds, accordingly, the rhyme-schemeabc abd cab
cde de. In all three experiments, he has two objects; he desires (1) to get rid of the end couplet,
which not even Shakespeare manages effectively; (2) to free the sonnet from the semblance of
three alternate-rhyming quatrains followed by such a couplet—the alternate-rhyming quatrains
are the source of the too elegiac character which he finds in the Shakespearean sonnet. ‘I do not
pretend to have succeeded’, Keats writes of his experiments; and he seems, in fact, to have ceased
the composition of sonnets from about this time. In any case, the month that followed, May, is the
month of the great odes, and the letter containing these experiments in the sonneteering contains
also the first draft of the Ode to Psyche. That ode, as the letter gives it, is divided into two stanzas,
the first of 35, the second of 32 lines. The thirty-five lines of the first stanza should have been
thirty-six; by an inadvertence a line is missing after line 16. The two stanzas of the letter are, in
the edition of 1820, resolved into four. The first stanza becomes two stanzas of twenty-four lines
and twelve lines respectively, the second two stanzas of 14 and 18 lines respectively. Of each
stanza, the first eight lines are the octave of a Shakespearean sonnet, abab cdcd (save that the
third stanza offers the variant abab cddc, and that the second reduces the number of feet in its
sixth and eighth lines to three). Of the,1 first stanza, lines 1-14 make a Shakespearean sonnet,
varying only in that the sestet takes the pattern, effe ef (that is to say, the octave is Shakespearean,
the sestet Petrarchian), and that the twelfth line is reduced to three feet. The second stanza, save
for the reduction of feet noted, is a normal Shakespearean sonnet, less the end-couplet. The first
14 lines of the fourth stanza, again, make a normal Shakespearean sonnet, save that the end-
couplet follows the octave instead of following the sestet, Even so much suffices to show how this
ode is in fact built up out of the sonnet.
The “Ode to Psyche”
The Ode To Psyche stands apart from the other odes by its much greater metrical variety.
Its stanzas are longer than those of any other. The line-lengths are diversified: of no two stanzas
is the scheme identical, and there is, in general, an approximation to the lyricism of the eighteenth
century Pindarics. Only in one other ode of the great six do we find any variation in line-length—
the Ode To a Nightingale.
The “Ode to a Nightingale”
The metrical pattern of that ode (To a Nightingale), if we disregard the isolated variation
in the eighth line which is reduced to three feet, is the pattern of all the others (save that To
Autumn). Each of them is built of stanzas of ten lines. These 10-line stanzas are in fact a kind of
mutilated sonnet. Keats’s trouble with the Petrarchian sonnet was the trouble of the ‘pouncing
rhymes’; a trouble that resides in the octave. His trouble with the Shakespearean sonnet was two-
fold; its over-elegiac character, and the end-couplet. The odes subsequent to Psyche offer his
solution of these troubles. Each stanza of each of them, save Autumn, consists of the first half of
the octave of a Shakespearean sonnet (that is to say, one elegiac quatrain, instead of two), followed
by a Petrarchian sestet. Of the Nightingale, Melancholy, andIndolence, the scheme is abab cde
cde; that of the Grecian Urn differs only by substituting, in the sestet, cde dee.
The “Ode to Autumn”
The Ode To Autumn, the latest of the six great odes, differs from all of them in employing
a stanza of eleven lines. The pattern, through the first seven lines, is that of the others: abab
cde; then follows, in the first stanza dcce, in the other two stanzascdde. The variation between the
first stanza and the other two is probably due to mere inattention; the scheme designed being that
of the other odes with the second line of the ‘sestet’ answered by two rhymes, a couplet, instead of
by a single rhyme. Out of the sonnet, Keats builds in the odes, a stanza of which the repetition
furnishes a metrical system more perfectly adjusted than any other in English poetry to elegiac
reflection.
H.W. Garrod on the Themes of Keats’s Great Odes
There are close connections of thought between all of the six great odes with the exception
of To Autumn (which was written towards the end of September, 1819). Just as each of these odes
is something in the nature of a sonnet-sequence, so the odes, taken together, are a sequence; an
ode-sequence of which the relations, not of time, but of mood, to some extent disclose
themselves. Psyche was the first in time of these odes, and in mood also it begins them.
Keats has thrown a very individual sentiment about the legend of Psyche. The appeal of
Psyche to him is not more her loveliness than her lateness. Of the faded Olympian hierarchy she
was the latest-born; of divinities that have all passed into unreality, the least real, the most a
“vision”. Too late for antique vows, for a poetry of faith, for the believing lyre,—her fascination for
Keats is that he himself creates her. Not any substance in the deity herself, but his own eyes, supply
his inspiration:
I see and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
To this deity, the poet promises a worship, melancholy and languorous enough. Keats will be the
priest of Psyche, priest and choir and shrine and grove; she shall have a fane “in some untrodden
region of the mind”, and shall enjoy:
all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win.
There shall be a bright torch burning for her, and the casement shall be open to let her in at night.
The open window and the lighted torch are to admit and attract a timorous moth-goddess, who
symbolises melancholic love. Keats has in fact identified the Psyche who is the soul (love’s soul)
with the Psyche which means moth.
It is a strange goddess whom he has thus brought from her native unrealities into the
reality of the imagination. But her identity is certain—we meet her again, brought into darker
shadow, in the Ode on Melancholy. The last stanza of Psyche—the moth stanza—should be read
in close connection with the first stanza of this later ode.
There is a deeper melancholy than melancholy itself. Lethe and wolf’s-bane, and the
deadly night-shade and the yew-berry—emblems of sadness obtained from the world of flowers—
are emblems only meagre and inadequate. In the world of living creatures; the beetle, the owl, the
moth, fall short of that for which we invoke their symbolism:
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries.
There is the same identification here of Psyche and the moth. This moth-godoess, this mournful
Psyche, who typifies melancholic love, is no partner in the mysteries of that deeper and truer
melancholy which the ode celebrates. It is the paradox of this deeper melancholy that she dwells
with beauty, that she has her sovereign shrine in the very temple ofDelight. The strenuous tongue
of the poet, his courage of eloquence, alone can burst joy’s grape, and taste the heart of
melancholy. Keats means to say not merely that the poet has a more delicate perception than
common men of the beauty of the world of sense: and not merely that this delicate perception is
intensified in him by the awareness that the perfections of sense are born and perish in the same
moment; not merely that; but that the top of poetry, its supreme mood, is precisely that mood in
which beauty is so apprehended that the awareness of it is anguish—a “wakeful anguish”, in
comparison with which all other dark effects come together as “shade to shade”, “drowsily” and
listlessly, mere melancholic fits of love-sick or repining men.
“Too drowsily”, Keats likes the word and the idea. The idea pervades the Psyche ode. Upon
the word, the Ode to a Nightingale opens:
My heart aches, and a drowsy, numbness pains
My sense.
It is used twice in the Ode on Indolence:
2. CRITICAL SUMMARY
Various Scenes Depicted on the Urn
Keats addresses the Grecian urn as an “unravished bride of quietness and a foster-child of
silence and slow time”. Thus Keats conveys to us the idea of the silent repose and the great age of
this piece of Greek sculpture. He also calls the Grecian urn a “Sylvan historian” because of the
rural and forest scenes carved on its surface. In a series of questions, which are also vivid pictures,
he gives us an idea of what those carvings represent. He refers to the human beings and the gods
depicted on the urn in the beautiful valleys of Tempe and Arcadia. He refers to the men in a
passionate mood chasing maidens who are struggling to escape from their clutches. Then there
are the flute-players playing wild and ecstatic music.
Art is Superior to Life
The poet goes on to say that music which is imagined is much sweeter than music which
is actually heard. The music of the flute-players depicted on the Grecian urn cannot be actually
heard by us: we must imagine what tunes they are playing. These unheard, but imaginable
melodies are sweeter than the songs that we actually hear. Besides, the lover who is trying to kiss
his beloved on the urn will always be seen in the same mood of pleasurable anticipation. In real
life, love and beauty decline and fade; but the love and beauty depicted on the urn will remain
ever fresh. In real life, spring is short, and the trees must shed their leaves. Similarly, in real life a
musician will at least feel tired of playing his music and will stop. The enjoyment of the pleasures
of love in real life is followed by disgust and satiety. But the trees depicted on the urn will never
shed their leaves; the melodist will for ever play his tunes, and the heart of the lover will always
throb with passion while the beauty of the beloved will never fade. In this way, the poet wishes to
convey the idea that art is, in one sense, superior to real life.
The Town Emptied of its Folk
Then follows a picture of a crowd of people going to some place of worship. A priest leads
a heifer which has been decorated with garlands and which is to be offered as a sacrifice. The
worshippers have come from some little town situated close to a river or on a sea-shore or at the
foot of a hill on which stands a fortress. The town which has been emptied of its people, will always
remain desolate, because the people shown on the urn will always be seen going away to the place
of worship but never returning to the town.
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
The poet then addresses the urn as “Attic shape”, “Fair altitude”, and “Cold pastoral”.
These expressions convey the beauty and the poise of the urn and refer also to the rural scenes
depicted on it. The feelings which the urn awakens in the poet are like the overwhelming feeling
which arise when the poet thinks of eternity. The urn, says Keats, will always be a friend to man.
The generations of men will come and pass, and will perhaps undergo sufferings and sorrows of
which we have no notion at present. But the urn will have a valuable message for those
generations, the message, namely, that, Beauty and Truth are not separate things but two sides of
one and the same thing. (Or, Beauty and Truth are not two things, not even twin things, but one
and the same thing seen from different aspects.) The knowledge of this great fact is of supreme
importance and this fact represents the very essence of wisdom. Having this knowledge, mankind
needs no other knowledge.
3. CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Inspired by Greek Sculpture
This poem was inspired by a collection of Greek sculpture which Keats saw in the British
museum. Partly, perhaps, the inspiration for the poem was derived from a marble urn which
belonged to Lord Holland. In giving us the imagery of the carvings on the urn, Keats was not
thinking of a single urn but of Greek sculpture in general. Keats had a native sympathy for, and a
natural affinity with, the Greek mind. This ode shows the full force of Hellenic influence acting on
a temperament essentially romantic.
Concrete and Sensuous Imagery
A striking quality of Keats’s entire poetry is fully revealed in this ode. Keats had a genius
for drawing vivid and concrete pictures mostly with a sensuous appeal. The whole of this poem is
a series of such pictures— passionate men and gods chasing reluctant maidens, the flute-players
playing their ecstatic music, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the
trees, the worshippers going to a place of worship in order to offer a sacrifice with a mysterious
priest to lead them, a little town which will always remain desolate—these are pictures which
Keats vividly brings before our minds. The passion of men and gods, and the reluctance of
maidens to be caught or seized is beautifully depicted in the following two lines:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
Here is the picture of a bold lover trying to get a kiss which will never materialise:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—
The ecstasy of the passion of youthful love is depicted in the following lines:
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d
For ever panting and for ever young.
The Superiority of Art Over Life
An important idea in this ode is that, art is superior to real life in certain respects. The
trees depicted on the urn will always enjoy spring. The flute-players shown on the urn will never
tire of playing tunes which are ever new. The passion of the lovers depicted on the urn will never
decline, and the beauty of the beloved will never fade. Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard
are sweeter. The music of the flute-players depicted on the urn has a sweetness which music in
real life can never possess.
Sidney Colvin’s Comment
“The second and third stanzas express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital
differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and
art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm
by imagined experience even richer than the real.”(Sidney Colvin)
Sidney Colvin perceives a dissonance between the idea of the second and the third stanzas
and that of the fourth. The fourth stanza, this critic points out, speaks of the arrest of life as though
it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the examples of such arrest given
in the preceding stanzas, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own
compensations. But Sidney Colvin would like the reader to reconcile himself to this dissonance.
Beauty and Truth
The central thought of this ode is the unity of Truth and Beauty. Beauty and Truth, says
Keats, are not two separate things. They are one and the same thing seen from two different
aspects. What is beautiful must be true, and what is true must be beautiful. There can be no
question of Beauty being separated from Truth. Every piece of art which is based on truth or reality
must be beautiful; and every beautiful work of art must have a hard core of truth in it. Thus Keats
seems to reject the school of gross realism in art on one side, and the school of ornament for
ornament’s sake on the other. Keats may have no right to frame a law for the artist, but the idea
contained in the final stanza of the poem may justly be regarded as his main contribution to
speculative thought.
Mingling of Intellectual and Emotional Elements
This ode represents the maturity and the height of Keats’s poetic power. His poetry is
essentially imaginative and emotional, but his greatest poems possess also an intellectual appeal.
This ode, for instance, represents an exquisite fusion of the imaginative, emotional, and
intellectual elements. The moral of the urn, namely, that Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty, has
an intellectual basis. But, apart from this, the poem is charged with emotion and shows rich
imagination. The first three stanzas, especially, have a passionate quality about them. Lines
already quoted above in a different context amply show that.
Technical Merits
This ode is written in a regular stanza of ten lines, consisting of a quatrain and a sestet.
Thus it does not follow the pattern of the long unequal stanzas of the Ode To Psyche. Like most of
his other poems, this ode shows Keats’s genius for coining original, striking, and appropriate
phrases. “Sylvan historian”, “leaf-fringed legend”, “a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d”, “Cold
pastoral”, and “Fair attitude” are some of the examples: while the statement “Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty”, is a neat and compact expression of a profound fact, an expression which is one of
the most often quoted from English poetry.
H.W. Garrod on the Theme of This Ode
H.W. Garrod writes: “The theme of what has gone before (in the first four stanzas) is the
arrest of beauty, the fixity given by art to forms which in life are fluid and impermanent, and the
appeal of art from the senses to the spirit. The theme of the final stanza is the relation of beauty
to truth or to thought. Nothing has prepared the transition to this…..The figures of the urn become
for Keats, suddenly, a “Cold Pastoral”—cold, the character of everything that is enduring…..The
second half of the stanza—of which the first, marring seriously, as I think, the effect of all that has
preceded, has called in question the appeal of art…..Down to the end of the fourth stanza there is
a very perfect development of the governing idea—the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because
of its unchanging expression of perfection. Perhaps the fourth stanza is more beautiful than any
of the others—and more true. The trouble is that it is a little too true. Truth to his own main theme
has taken Keats rather farther than he meant to go…..This pure cold art makes, in fact, a less
appeal to Keats than the ode as a whole pretends; and when, in the lines that follow these lines,
he indulges the jarring apostrophe ‘Cold Pastoral’, he has said more than he meant or wished to
mean.”
(Among other critics who have found fault with the last stanza are T.S. Eliot and Allen
Tate.)
Another Critic’s View
According to another critic (Robin Mayhead), the Ode on a Grecian Urn seems to
disparage sexual love, even though it sees to establish a balance between art and life. The poet
seems to imply that if only love could stop constantly at the stage of mere desire all would be well.
Although the poem admits the claims of a warm-blooded life, it seems to convey the feeling that
sexual love is something of a disaster. (The Ode To Psyche presents an altogether different view.)
The Urn as a Symbol
In the Grecian urn, Keats find a more satisfying symbol of permanence than the song of
the nightingale. But the deficiencies that the poem implies in the value of art wee ken its power as
a symbol, because one would certainly prefer the warm Impermanence of human life to the cold
permanence of the urn.
Charles Patterson on the Ode on a Grecian Urn
According to Charles Patterson, the Ode on a Grecian Urn gives as much importance to
passion as to the idea of permanence. This ode should not be regarded as a lyric of escape and
should not be taken to represent Keats as a young man unwilling to face life as it is. The duality of
the theme of this ode is indicated in the very opening stanza where we find a clue to Keats’s real
attitude toward the permanence of the urn and the supremacy of art. In this opening stanza Keats
gives us a contrast between something unchanging (the urn) because it is dead and something
transient because it is alive. This equipoise is continued in the second stanza, but the poet
continues to toy with his dual matter, without asserting or implying that lasting permanence is
superior to transient passion. Nor does he indicate any preference in the third stanza, though the
emphasis here, as in the second stanza, is upon the warmth and the turbulence of life. We have
not been made to feel that Keats has any distinct preference for an unrealised but permanent love
over an actually experienced and vital passion. In the fourth stanza we are carried into a world
(the little town) that is permanent, but permanently empty, just as the figures on the urn are
permanent but permanently lifeless. In the final stanza the poet ends his dual game. Here he
emphatically addresses this thing of beauty as just what it is, a Grecian urn. This work of art, he
says, has teased us out of thought, that is out of the world of actual into an ideal world in which
we can momentarily and imaginatively enjoy the life that is free from the particular imperfections
of our lot here. But this ideal world is not free of all imperfection; it has very grave deficiencies,
for it is lifeless, motionless, cold, unreal. The brief journey into fairyland is over, and Keats
unmistakably means it to be over.
The Duality of the Theme of the Poem
Keeping in mind the duality of his theme in the poem, it is clear that Keats deals with two
kinds of experience: (1) human life in actuality, and (2) the appreciation of an imaginary
representation of several human activities (love, music, community life, and religious ritual). The
two kinds of experience are related. Art alone can never satisfy us completely (because the urn is
a cold pastoral); it is only an imitation of reality. But this work of art can tell us something
important about the real or actual experience, the love passion that is so fleeting and transient.
That is, the essence of physical love is participation in the life-force and the continuing life
process; only the individual instance is transient and short-lived. “Beauty is Truth”, then, means
that beauty is total reality properly understood; that is, beauty is the true significance of things in
our world and in the ideal one.
The Significance of the Identification of Beauty and Truth
The line “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” has troubled almost all critics who have dealt
with this ode. T.S. Eliot looks upon this line as a serious flaw in a beautiful poem. Middleton Murry
calls this line a troubling assertion which is an intrusion upon the poem, which does not grow out
of the poem, and which is not dramatically accommodated to it. Such is essentially Garrod’s
objection also.
As Cleanth Brooks observes: “It is possible to emphasise the first part (“Beauty is Truth”)
and reach the conclusion that Keats is a pure aesthete, upholding art for art’s sake. But it is also
possible to emphasise the second part (“Truth is Beauty”), and argue with the Marxist critics that
Keats upholds art as a medium of propaganda.
Cleanth Brooks on the Ode on a Grecian Urn
The First Stanza
This critic makes a rapid survey of the Ode on a Grecian Urn to show that the last lines of
the poem (which seem to strike a discordant note in the eyes of some other critics) have
dramatically been prepared for. In the first stanza, Keats emphasises the silence of the urn—a
“bride of quietness”, and a “foster-child of Silence”. But the urn is a historian too, a rural historian.
This historian supplies no names and dates, and it gives the .actions of men or gods, of god-like
men or of superhuman gods. The action is intense even though the urn is cold marble. The scene
is one of violent love-making, but the urn itself is like an “unravished bride” or like a child of
Silence. The paradox is to be noted.
The Second Stanza
The second stanza begins rather with a bold paradox which runs through the stanza: action
goes on though the actors are motionless; the song will not cease; the maiden, always to be kissed
but never actually kissed will remain changelessly beautiful. The poet is obviously emphasising
the ever-fresh charm of the scene which can defy time and is deathless. The beauty portrayed is
deathless because it is lifeless.
The Third Stanza
The third stanza repeats some of the earlier ideas. The trees cannot shed their leaves; the
untiring melodist and the ever-passionate lover reappear. There is a tendency to linger over the
scene sentimentally. Whatever development there is in the stanza depends on the increased stress
on the paradoxical element. The musician plays sweeter music because he is unheard, but it is
implied that he does not tire of the song for the same reason that the lover does not tire of his love:
neither song nor love here can find fulfilment. The songs are “for ever new” because they cannot
be completed. The paradox is carried further in the case of the lover whose love is for ever warm
because it is still to be enjoyed. The love depicted on the urn remains warm and young because it
is not human flesh at all but cold ancient marble.
this wine to enable him to leave this world of reality and to escape into the forest where he can
join the nightingale.
An Atmosphere of Warmth in this Stanza
The nightingale and its songs have given way, in this stanza, to other thoughts—thoughts
of wine, the colourful lands in which its grapes are grown, and the gaiety which it brings, A general
atmosphere of warmth predominates in this stanza. “Sun-burnt mirth” combines the idea of the
sun’s warmth with the warmth of joy in the merry-makers. This is a richly sensuous stanza with
its references to gaiety and merrymaking, the cool wine, the dancing, the blushful wine with its
bubbles winking at the brim. The poet’s desire for wine does not mean a desire for warmth and
gaiety; it is a desire for escape from the world of realities.
Stanza 3
The Sorrows in Human Life
The poet wishes to forget himself and escape from this world of perplexity and sorrow into
the forest to be in the company of the nightingale. Life, he says, offers a depressing spectacle with
its weariness, fever, and fret. This is a world in which people hear, each other’s groans, a world in
which palsy may attack the old and consumption may attack the young, in which merely to think
is to become sad, and in which both beauty and love are short-lived.
Most Pessimistic Lines
Here we have some of the most pessimistic lines in English poetry. Of course the picture
of life depicted here is one-sided, but it is nonetheless realistic and convincing. It cannot be
doubted that the amount of suffering in this world is far greater than the amount of happiness.
Apart from that, these lines echo the poet’s personal grief caused by the premature death of his
brother Tom. Although these lines are prompted chiefly by personal grief, yet their universal
character has to be recognised.
The Nightingale’s Happiness
The Nightingale is believed by the poet to be happy because it is not human, because it has
never known the weariness, the fever and fret of human existence. “And the poet knows too well
that the happiness is mentally following the bird into its world among the leaves cannot last, for
he is a human being after all, and what is human must pass away. His depression is thus implicit
in the happiness itself.”
Stanza 4
The Poet’s Use of His Imagination to Escape from Life •
Dismissing the idea of wine, the poet decides to fly into the forest on the wings of his poetic
imagination. He rejects Bacchus and seeks the help of Poesy. The next moment he feels
transported into the forest. The moon is shining, surrounded by the stars, but the forest is dark
because very little light can penetrate the thickly-growing leaves of trees.
The Beauty of Nature
After having given expression to thoughts of human sorrow in the third stanza, the poet
here makes a vigorous effort to get back into a happy mood. Gloomy thoughts about the human
lot are now brushed aside, together with the possibility of wine. Seeking refuge in poetic fancy, he
draws pleasure from the glory of Nature. However, the picture of Nature in the second half of the
stanza has been criticised as being “affected” because of the reference to the “Queen-Moon”, and
the idea of the stars as fairies. “Keats is being self-consciously poetical in the bad sense, as though
he had gone back to the ‘pretty’ manner ofEndymion. It is not accidental that he has used the
rather affected word “Poesy” here. The lines are exceedingly charming, and when we have said
that, we have made a point against them. This kind of charm is not what we have come to accept
from the mature Keats.”-—(Robin Mayhead)
Stanza 5
The Flowers in the Forest
The poet cannot see what flowers grow at his feet in the forest and what blossoms are on
the fruit trees. However, by the scents that fill the dark air, he can guess that the forest is full of
white hawthorns, sweet-briers, violets, and buds of musk-roses which will in due course attract
multitudes of flies on summer evenings.
A Richly Sensuous Stanza
This is again a richly sensuous stanza. The poet makes a delighted response to the
sensuous beauty of the world of Nature.
Stanza 6
The Poet’s Desire for Death
As he hears the nightingale’s song in the darkness, he remembers how on many occasions
in his life he has wished for death that would bring a release from the burden of existence. More
than ever before, he now feels a desire to die, though he would like to die a painless death: “To
cease upon themidnight with no pain.” The nightingale will continue to pour forth its ecstatic
melody even when he is dead and become completely deaf to it.
A Morbid Mood
The mood of the poet has again changed. He started the poem in a mood of ecstasy which
changed, into a mood of extreme sorrow in the third stanza. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, he
changed back into a joyous mood. Now he expresses a wish to die. In this stanza he is therefore in
a most morbid mood. The desire for death is obviously an unhealthy one and, though the reader
may have been sharing the preceding moods of the poet, he may not be able to share this desire
for death.
Stanza 7
The Mortality of Human Beings Versus the Nightingale’s Immortality
The poet now contrasts the mortality of human beings with the immortality of the
nightingale. The nightingale’s song, he argues, has not changed for centuries. The voice of the
nightingale which he now hears is perhaps the same as was heard in ancient times by emperor
and clown, the same as was heard by the miserable Ruth as she stood in the alien corn. It is the
same voice which has often cast a spell upon the enchanted windows of a castle situated on the
shore of a dangerous ocean in “fairy lands forlorn”.
The mood of deep pessimism and despair gives way to a mood of delight occasioned by his
imaginative contact with the beauty and glory of Nature. He has flown into the forest on the wings
of his imagination in spite of the retarding effect of the dullness of the brain. (The pure reason or
intellect hinders the free play of the imagination.) The moon, the stars, the flowers growing at his
feet relieve his sense of the tragedy of life.
A Pessimistic Mood Once Again
Next, we find the poet “half in love with easeful death”. He refers to this desire for death
on earlier occasions but at this moment especially he thinks it “rich to die”. This desire for depth
shows a morbidity in the poet. He strikes an unduly pessimistic note. Life has its sorrows and
griefs; beauty and love and youth are short-lived; but Nature has its joys, its charm, its glory. The
reason why the poet yields to a feeling of utter despair is that his personal circumstances are at
the back of his mind when he is writing the poem. His brother Tom had died of tuberculosis; he
himself suffered from this dreaded disease; and his love for Fanny Brawne had not been fulfilled.
The Poet’s Envy of the Nightingale’s Joy
The thought of his own death makes the poet contrast the mortality of human beings with
the immortality of the nightingale. He feels that the song of nightingale which he is now hearing
is the same as was heard in ancient times by emperor and clown, and by the tearful Ruth, the same
that often in the past had unlocked magic casements in the solitary countries of the fairies or the
legendary countries of romance. Having denied a feeling of envy of the nightingale’s joy in the
opening stanza, he now is undoubtedly in a mood of envying the immortality of the nightingale.
A desire to die, expressed in the preceding stanza, here imperceptibly leads him, though implicitly,
to envy the supposed immortality of the bird. In the final stanza, he is again overcome by a feeling
of melancholy because, not only is the nightingale’s song fading away, but also because his
imaginative flight into the forest has ended and he finds himself face to face with the stern realities
of life. He finds that the nightingale’s song gives rise to an illusion, and illusion which fails, leaving
the listener alone with his cares and griefs.
4. CRITICAL APPRECIATION
A Masterpiece
The Ode to a Nightingale shows the ripeness and maturity of Keats’s poetic faculty. This
poem is truly a masterpiece, showing the splendour of Keats’s imagination on its pure romantic
side, and remarkable also for its note of reflection and meditation. The central idea here is the
contrast of the joy and beauty and apparent permanence of the nightingale’s song with the sorrows
of human life and the transitoriness of beauty and love in this world.
Its Melancholy, and the Note of Pessimism
A passionate melancholy broods over the whole poem. The passage describing the sorrows
and misfortunes of life is deeply pessimistic. The world is full of weariness, fever, and fret, and the
groans of suffering humanity. Palsy afflicts the old and premature, death overtakes the young. To
think here is to be full of sorrow; both beauty and love are short-lived.
The Reason for the Poet’s Despondency
Keats wrote this poem shortly after the death (from consumption) of his brother Tom to
whom he was deeply attached. He was also perhaps thinking of the premature death of Elizabeth
Taylor. He was therefore weighed down by a profound sense of the tragedy of life; and of that
sense of tragedy, this poem is a poignant expression.
The Desire to Die
The note of pessimism is found also in the lines where the poet expresses a desire to die,
“to cease upon the midnight with no pain”. When we remember that Keats actually died a
premature death, we realise the note of unconscious prophecy in these lines, which for this reason
become still more pathetic.
Sorrows of Life in General; and the Personal Griefs
The passionately personal and human character of this poem is thus obvious. It reveals
Keats’s sense of the tragedy of human life in general and his sense of personal suffering in
particular. The poem brings before our eyes a painful picture of the sorrows and griefs of human
life, and at the same time it conveys to us the melancholy and sadness which had afflicted Keats
for various reasons. The poem is the cry of a wounded soul.
Its Rich Sensuousness and Pictorial Quality
The poem is one of the finest examples of Keats’s pictorial quality and his rich
sensuousness. We have an abundance of rich, concrete, and sensuous imagery. The lines in which
the poet expresses a passionate desire for some Provincial wine or the red wine from the fountain
of the Muses have a rich appeal:
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
These lines bring before us a delightful picture of Provence with its fun and frolic, jollity, merry-
making, drinking and dancing. Similarly, the beaker full of the sparkling, blushful Hippocrene is
highly pleasing.
Then there is the magnificent picture of the moon shining in the sky and surrounded by
stars, looking like a queen surrounded by her attendant fairies:
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne.
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays.
The rich feast of flowers that awaits us in the next stanza is one of the outstanding beauties of the
poem. Flowers, soft incense, the fruit trees, the white hawthorn, the eglantine, the fast-fading
violets, the coming musk-rose full of sweet juice—all this is a delight for our senses.
Apart from these sensuous pictures, there is also the vivid and pathetic image of Ruth
when, sick for home, she stood tearful amid the alien corn. This is a highly suggestive picture
calling up many associations to the mind of one who is acquainted with the Bible.
Its Lyric Intensity
The poem is a beautiful example of lyrical poetry, poetry which is the impassioned
expression of passionate feelings. The poem opens with a passionate feeling of joy akin to the
benumbing effect of some drug. This is followed by a passionate desire for wine. Then comes
a passionate melancholy born of the spectacle of sorrow in this world. Next is
the passionate delight in flowers and blossoms, followed by & passionate desire for death. The
lyrical intensity of this ode is, indeed, one of the reasons of its greatness as poetry.
Its Style
The poem is written in a superb style. It displays Keats’s power as a master of poetic
language at its highest. Keats here shows consummate skill in a choice of words and in making
original and highly expressive phrases. Certain phrases, expressions and lines continue to haunt
the mind of the reader long after he has read the poem. The phrase “the blushful Hippocrene”
which refers to the fountain of the Muses and its red wine looking like the blushing cheeks of a
pretty girl is indeed beautiful. Again, this wine has beaded bubbles “winking at the brim”. The
word “winking” here means sparkling but how much more is suggested by this word! The bubbles
seem to be inviting a man to the wine as a girl’s wink would invite him to her company. Another
expressive phrase is “purple-stained mouth”, that is, a mouth which has been stained red by wine.
Memorable also are the following phrases and expressions—”verdurous blooms” (line 40);
“embalmed darkness” (line, 43); “Mid-May’s eldest child—the coming musk-rose” (lines 48-49);
“The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” (line 50). The line “the weariness, the fever and
the fret” admirably describes the sorrows and perplexities of life. “Leaden-eyed despair”
effectively conveys the dullness in the eyes of a man who is in a state of despair. Still another
memorable line is: “To thy high requiem become a sod.”
The Romantic Character of the Poem
The Ode to a Nightingale is a highly romantic poem. Its romanticism is due to (a)its rich
sensuousness, (b) its note of intense desire and its deep melancholy, (c) its suggestiveness, (d) its
sweet music, and its fresh and original phrases. Two lines in the poem represent the high water-
mark of pure romanticism:
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The touch of the supernatural, the mystery, and above all the suggestiveness of these lines have
made them a test by which purely romantic poetry can be judged and measured.
In form this poem is a “regular ode”. There is a uniformity of the number of lines and of
the rhyme-scheme in all the stanzas.
Sidney Colvin Observes
In the Ode on Melancholy, Keats expresses his experience of the habitual interchange and
alternation of the emotions of joy and pain. The same crossing and inter-mingling of opposite
currents of feeling finds expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet’s feeling for
Nature and romance, in the Ode to a Nightingale. It is not the particular nightingale he had heard
singing in the garden that he speaks about in the poem, but a type of the race imagined as singing
in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he tries to follow her: first by aid
of the spell of some southern wine—a spell which he makes us realise in lines suggestive of the
southern richness and joy. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind’s
sufferings which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bacchus. Poetic fancy alone
shall carry him thither. For a moment he mistrusts its power, but the next moment finds himself
where he longed to be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and imagining
in the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the
thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome now than
ever before. This nightingale would not cease her song—and here, by a breach of logic which is
also a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts the shortness of human life, meaning the life of the
individual, with the permanence of the nightingale’s life, meaning the life of the race. This last
thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back memorable touches of far-off Bible
and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words “in faery lands forlorn”. Then,
catching up his own last word “forlorn”, with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns
to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest-dream the poem closes.
According to Sidney Colvin, the Ode To a Nightingale is not strictly faultless, but its
revealing imaginative insight, its conquering poetic charm, its touch that strikes so lightly but so
deep, are preferable to faultlessness. With the Ode On a Grecian Urn, this poem is “among the
veriest glories of our poetry”.
Allen Tate calls the Nightingale Ode“an emblem of one limit of our experience: the
impossibility of synthesizing, in the order .of experience, the antinomy of the ideal and the
real”…..Allen Tate finds little to say in defence of the third stanza which, he says, is bad eighteenth-
century personification, without on the one hand Pope’s precision, or the energy of Blake on the
other. “It gives us,” says Tate, “a picture of common reality, in which the life of man is all
mutability and frustration. But here if anywhere in the poem the necessity to dramatise time or
the pressure of actuality, is paramount. Keats has no language of his own for this realm of
experience.”
F.R. Leavis has said that the Ode to a Nightingale records the poet’s mood of indulgence
and serves equally as an indulgence for the reader. Leavis is obviously being too severe or austere
in his disapproval-of the “fine excess” of the poem. Keats’s profusion and prodigality, one must
recognise, is here modified by a principle of sobriety. Wholeness, intensity, and naturalness are
the qualities of this ode. Nature is, indeed, the real norm, Nature as it appears to the romantic
imagination; wholeness and intensity are attributes of Nature, as are freedom, ease, spontaneity,
harmony, and sobriety. Imagined as the golden age of Flora and the country green, and more fully
as the forest of the nightingale, it becomes first the bird, the voice of Nature; then the ideal poet;
and finally the ideal itself. This Nature is the antithesis of the world of privation depicted in the
third stanza.
Cleanth Books and Robert Penn Warrenon the Ode to a Nightingale
A Striking Contrast in the Poem
In this poem the world of mankind and the world of the nightingale are contrasted with
each other. The listener in the human world responds to the song of the nightingale, and feels an
intense desire to find his way into the world in which the bird sings “of summer in full-throated
ease”. For the poet, the world of the nightingale is a world of richness and vitality, of deep
sensuousness, of natural beauty and fertility; this world appeals to the imagination and has its
own ideality.
“embalmed” primarily means “sweet with balm”, but the word is also suggestive of death. In
finding his way imaginatively into the dark forest, the poet has approached death.
The Nightingale’s Environment Described Realistically
Keats has described the flowery environment of the nightingale with full honesty. His
primary emphasis is on fertility and growth, but he accepts the fact that death and change have
their place here too: the violets, for instance, are thought of as “fast-fading”. But the atmosphere
of this world of Nature is very different from that of the human world haunted by death, where
men sit and hear each other groan. The world of Nature is a world of cyclic change: the “seasonable
month”, “the coming musk-rose”. Consequently the world of Nature can appear fresh and
immortal, like the bird whose song seems to be its spirit.
Man’s Alienation from Nature
The poem is not only about man’s world as contrasted with the world of Nature, or death
and deathlessness, but also about alienation and wholeness. It is man’s necessary alienation from
Nature that makes death so horrible. To dissolve, to fade into the warm darkness is to merge into
the eternal pattern of Nature. In such a communion, death itself becomes something positive—a
flowering, a fulfilment.
The Bird, Wholly Merged in Nature
The bird is not alienated from Nature, but wholly merged in Nature. The-bird shares in
the immortality of Nature which remains, through all its changes, unwearied and beautiful. The
poet does not think this particular bird to be immortal. The bird is in harmony with its world—
not, as man is, in competition with his (“No hungry generations tread thee down”); and the bird
cannot conceive of its separation from the world which it expresses and of which it is a part. It is
in this sense that the nightingale is immortal. Man knows that he is born to die, knows the
weariness, the fever, and the fret of the human world, knows in short “What thou among the leaves
hast never known” (line 22); and this knowledge overshadows man’s life and all his songs. Such
knowledge overshadows this poem and gives it its special poignancy.
The Effect of the Word “Forlorn”
With the word “forlorn” the poet’s attempt to enter the world of the nightingale collapses.
The music which almost succeeded in making him “fade far away” now itself fades and in a
moment is “buried deep in the next valley-glades” (lines 77-78).
Richard Harter Fogle on the Ode to a Nightingale
A Picture of the Opposites in the Poem
This critic considers the Ode to a Nightingale to be a romantic poem of the family of Kubla
Khan and The Eve of St. Agnes in that it describes a choice and rare experience which is remote
from the commonplace. A treatment of this sort of experience requires great skill. The principal
stress of the Nightingale Ode, according to this critic, is a struggle between ideal and actual. It
also implies the opposition between pleasure and pain, imagination and reason, fullness and
privation, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom and bondage,
waking and dream.
consideration. Keats is at once agonised and amused at the inescapable discrepancy between
them. He reconciles them by a prior imaginative acceptance of the unity of experience, by means
of which he invests them with a common extremity and intensity of feelirtg. He need not give
equal attention to both, for the actual can take care of itself; it is the trail ideal which requires
support.
The Romantic, Picturesque Fourth Stanza
The forest scene of the fourth stanza is romantically picturesque without being really
pictorial: one does not visualise it, but its composition is describable in visual metaphor. The
moonlight, a symbol of imagination, intermingling with darkness suggests the enchantment of
mystery. After thus using suggestion Keats goes on, in the fifth stanza, to specification. The
imagery in the fifth stanza is particular and sensuous, but not highly visual. Hawthorn, eglantine,
violets, and musk-rose are important chiefly for their pastoral association. Here, as in the second
stanza, the theme is fullness, but with an added pathos because of the introduction of darkness
and death in the sixth stanza. The generous fertility of Nature is inseparable from the grave.
A Reasonable Inference from the Experience of the Forest
The death mentioned in the sixth stanza is a reasonable inference from the experience of
the forest. As freedom, ease, intensity, fullness, and consummation the two are one. Death is
easeful and rich. “To cease upon the midnight” is in one respect the same as “pouring forth thy
soul abroad”. In each is an outpouring, and a release from the prisoning self. This imaginative
acceptance of death is not, however, without reservation. The poet has been only half in love with
easeful death. The acceptance, in fact, includes the reservation, since it is an acceptance of the
limits as well as the freedoms of this death:
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
The Nightingale’s Immortality
In a swift transition the death theme of the sixth stanza turns to a basis for the immortality
of the nightingale in the seventh stanza. The objection that the nightingale, is not immortal need
not trouble us. The objection has been met by the suggestion that Keats is thinking of the race of
nightingales, and not the individual nightingale. At any rate, the bird in this stanza is a universal
and undying voice: the voice of Nature, of imaginative sympathy, and therefore of an ideal
romantic poetry, infinitely powerful and profuse (compare the “profuse strains of unpremeditated
art” of Shelley’s To a Skylark, and the “music loud and long” of Kubla Khan). As sympathy, the
voice of the nightingale resolves all differences: it speaks to high and low (emperor and clown); it
comforts the human home-sickness of Ruth and frees her from bitter isolation; and equally it
opens the casements of the remote and magical. Lines 65-70 combine the two kinds of
romanticism— the domestic and the exotic. But both the kinds are linked by their common
purpose of fusing the usual with the strange. Ruth is distanced and framed by time and rich
association, but in relation to the magic casements she is homely and familiar. These magic
casements are the climax of the imaginative experience.
The Fancy Cannot Cheat So Well
The final stanza is a soft and quiet withdrawal from the heights. The word “forlorn” is like
a bell which tolls the death of the imagination. Ruth is forlorn in her loneliness. The faery lands
are pleasurably forlorn in a remoteness which is really the condition of their value. In any case,
the word brings the poet to the common, everyday world. The fact that fancy cannot cheat so well
is not a rejection of imagination but part of the total experience.
The Complexity of Feeling and Thought in the Poem
The Ode to a Nightingale contains the highest, the fullest, the most intense, the most
valuable mental experience which Keats can imagine. This experience is the centre of the poem,
and the basis of its unity. Within this unity, however, is a complex of feeling and thought which
moves in alternate rises and falls, a series of waves. These waves are not of equal height; they rise
gradually to a climax in the seventh stanza, and the rise subsides in the conclusion.
significance. Thus is the poem perfected, its sensuous imagery enveloping as it were its vital idea.”
(A. Compton-Rickett)
The Imagery in the Last Stanza; the Mood and the Thought of the Poem
Things reveal their essential identity most intensely at the moment if dying or readiness
to die. So the last stanza begins with the one comment the poet offers in his own person. “Where
are the songs of Spring?” but there is no rebellion in the answer: “Think not of them, thou hast
thy music too”. There follows an image of the day, which, like autumn, is about to end, and the
death is accompanied by a fulfilment; for as it dies the day blooms all flowers (“While barred
clouds bloom the soft-dying day”). The stanza proceeds with images of death or withdrawal, and
of song, and the songs are a funeral dirge for the dying year. At the same time, there is a tone of
tenderness in the stanza; and the objectivity of the last few lines suggests an acceptance which
includes even the fact of death. Death is here recognised as something inherent in the course of
things, the condition and price of all fulfilment, having like the spring and summer of life its own
distinctive character or “music” which is also to be prized and relished. In the last analysis,
perhaps, the serenity and acceptance here expressed are aesthetic. The ode is, after all, a poem of
contemplation. The symbol of autumn compels that attitude. The poet’s own fears, ambitions and
passions are not directly engaged, and hence he can be relatively withdrawn. The poet seems to
suggest that life in all its stages has a certain identity and beauty which man can appreciate by
disengaging his own ego. “Thus the symbol permits, and the poem as a whole expresses, an
emotional reconciliation to the human experience of process.”
Robin May head on the Ode to Autumn
An Acceptance of Impermanence
Superficially altogether different from the Ode On Melancholy, To Autumn, is deeply
related to that poem. The Melancholy ode accepts the impermanence of beauty and joy as
inevitable. In the Ode To Autumn, impermanence is again accepted, and accepted without the
least trace of sadness because Keats is able to see it as part of a larger and richer permanence.
The Continuity of Life
This greater permanence is the continuity of life itself, in which the impermanence of the
individual human existence is one tiny aspect of a vast and deathless pattern. The rotation of the
seasons offers a symbol of this continuity that is immediately satisfying. When Keats, in the last
stanza, refers to the “music” of autumn, he is obviously pointing out the futility of regretting that
spring has gone by. What is past is past. After all, autumn has its own characteristic sounds, which
are as much part of the year as the songs of spring. Moreover, although autumn will be followed
by the cold and barrenness of winter, winter will in turn give way to a fresh spring. Life goes on.
The individual year may be drawing to a close, but there will be a new year to take its place. This
is indirectly conveyed with wonderful effect in the concluding line of the ode: “And gathering
swallows twitter in the skies”. In one way the line gives a hint of the coming winter, for the
swallows are gathering to migrate to warmer climates. Yet we remember that migratory birds
return when the cold weather ends, so that the very hint of their 1’orihcoming departure carries
with it a suggestion of their re-appearance when warm days come again.
The Structure of the Poem
The handling of verse-structure is here wonderfully resourceful. The use of the run-on line
in the first stanza, for instance, is noteworthy. If “swell” and “plump” give the outward signs of fat
richness, the stress on “sweet kernel”, inevitable after the pause at the end of the previous line,
vividly makes us think of the lusciousness within. And the imagined sweetness leads to even
greater sweetness of the honey made by the bees. The loaded abundance is suggested by the heavy
movement in the last line which describes the over-brimming of their cells. There is so much
oozing sweetness here that the honey-combs are insufficient to hold it all.
As F.R. Leavis has shown (in Revaluation), Keats employs verse-structure in the last
four lines of the second stanza to enact the very movement of the gleaner. Keats is here able to
suggest the prudent hesitation of the man (or woman) carefully balancing his load before he
crosses the brook. Again, the extreme slowness with which the drops of cider issue from the press
is suggested by the line: “Thou watchest the last oozings, hour by hour.”
No Resentment or Horror About the Fact of Death
There are various hints of death in the final stanza, but the idea of death is not treated with
horror or resentment. The day is dying softly, the rosy “bloom” of sunset taking away from the
stark bareness of the now fully-reaped corn-fields. And, in any case, the very reference to the close
of the day, like the final line about the swallows, carries with it a suggestion of its opposite. Just
as the swallows will come back next year, so another day will down, for the great movement of life
goes on, however short the existence of the individual.
Walter Jackson Bate on the Ode to Autumn
One of the Most Nearly Perfect Poems
To Autumn is one of the most nearly perfect poems in English. The different parts of the
poem contribute directly to the whole, with nothing left dangling or independent. The Ode to a
Nightingale is a less “perfect” though a greater poem.
The Complete Objectivity of the Poem
The poet himself is completely absent from the poem; there is not “I”, no suggestion of the
discursive language that we find in the other odes; the poem is entirely concrete, and self-
sufficient in and through its concreteness. There is also a successful union of the ideal (that is, of
the heart’s desire) and reality. What the heart really wants is being found (in the first stanza,
fullness and completion; in the second, a prolonging of that fulfilment): Here at last is something
of a genuine paradise, therefore. It even has its deity—a benevolent deity that wants not only to
“load and bless”, but also to “spare”, to prolong, to “set budding more”. And yet all this is put with
concrete exactness and fidelity.
The Dominant Aspects of Autumn
Each of the three stanzas concentrates on a dominant aspect of autumn. The theme of the
first is ripeness, of growth now reaching its climax. Yet growth is still surprisingly going on. The
second stanza depicts stillness, for now autumn is conceived as a reaper or harvester, but a
harvester who is not harvesting. Movement begins only in the latter part of the stanza. Even then
it is suggested only in the momentary glimpse of the gleaner crossing a brook; and autumn then
stops again to watch the slow pressing of the apples into cider as the hours pass. There is a hint
that the end is approaching: these are the “last oozings”.
A Shift in the Final Stanza
In the final stanza, the personified figure of autumn is replaced by concrete images of life, and of
life unafflicted by any thought of death: the gnats, the hedge-crickets, the redbreasts. Moreover,
it is life that can exist in much the same way at other limes than autumn. Only two images are
peculiar to the season—the “stubble-plains” and the “full-grown lambs”. The mind is free to
associate the wailful mourning of the gnats with a funeral dirge for the dying year, but the sound
is no more confined to autumn alone than is the “soft-dying” of any day; and if the swallows are
gathering, they are not necessarily gathering for migration.
2. CRITICAL SUMMARY
The Fleeting Nature of the Pleasures of Reality
The pleasures of reality, says the poet, melt away soon, but the pleasures of the
imagination are ever-fresh and everlasting. We should, therefore, give free reins to our
imagination. Pleasure is never to be found at home. If we let our fancy loose, it will bring for us
from abroad all the pleasures that we wish to enjoy. (Lines 1-9)
The Temporary Pleasures of Three of the Seasons
Summer, spring, and autumn, all have their beauties. But these seasons can never give us
real and lasting pleasure, because of the imperfections which all the pleasures of reality suffer
from, and because of the feeling of weariness or disgust to which they all ultimately lead. The
flowers and fruits of these different seasons soon fade; and we soon tire of the pleasures which
these seasons provide. (Lines 10-15)
Winter, the True Season of Pleasure
The true season for pleasure, says the poet, is winter. (This is, of course, a paradoxical
statement because winter in England is a season of great hardship and suffering. What the poet
means is that in winter one can sit down in a cosy corner of the house and give free reins to one’s
fancy.) Sitting by the fireside on a wintry night, we can send our fancy on her travels, and we can
enjoy all the beauties of summer, spring, and autumn. The buds and bells of May, and the heaped
wealth of autumn, with all the delights of summer will be mingled together for us, and we can
enjoy these as we might enjoy three excellent wines mingled in a cup. We can hear the distant
harvest songs, the sweet birds welcoming the morning, and the rooks cawing and searching for
stick and straws. We can see in our imagination the flowers different seasons, such as the daisy,
the marigold, the lily, the primrose and the hyacinth. We can see the field-mouse and the snake
emerging from their underground abode after their winter-long hibernation. We can see the nest-
eggs being hatched; we can see the swarm of bees; we can hear the ripe acorns falling down to the
ground. (Lines 16-66)
The Ever-fresh and Ever-lasting Pleasures of Fancy
Only the pleasures of fancy are ever-fresh and everlasting. Pleasures of reality are lost as
soon as they are enjoyed. The beauty of even the loveliest woman becomes stale if we see her
everyday. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyes, and her voice lose all their appeal and charm as a result
of too much familiarity. But a beloved who has been created by fancy will retain her beauty and
charm always. It is better to have an imaginary sweetheart than to have a real woman as one’s
sweetheart. This imaginary sweetheart will have eyes as beautiful and sweet as Proserpina had
before she was carried off by Pluto, the god of the underworld. This imaginary sweetheart will
have a waist as beautiful as that of Hebe, the goddess of youth and the cup-bearer of the gods.
(Lines 67-89)
Fancy (or Imagination), a Great Blessing for Human Beings
Indeed, the pleasures of reality are as short-lived as the bubbles formed when rain is
falling. We should, therefore, remove all restraint and restrictions upon our fancy. If fancy is
allowed to roam and to soar freely, it will bring a multitude of pleasures. Let the winged fancy be
given unlimited freedom to wander abroad, and we shall find that it has the capacity to provide
us with those exquisite pleasures which cannot be found at home. (Lines 89-94)
3. CRITICAL APPRECIATION
The Main Idea
The subject of this poem is the pleasures of the “fancy”, which here means the
“imagination”. The pleasures of the imagination, says the poet, are ever-fresh and everlasting,
while the pleasures of reality are short-lived. The pleasures of reality are lost as soon as they are
enjoyed, but the pleasures of the imagination have the quality of permanence. The beauty of even
the loveliest woman becomes stale and tiresome as a result of too much familiarity; but the beauty
of an imaginary sweet-heart can never fade or decline. This poem is typical of Keats’s aesthetic
temperament. It teaches us the value of the imagination in lending a permanent appeal and
freshness to the pleasures of reality. One must observe the beautiful things in this world and then
one must use one’s imagination to re-call those things and to create new thing, and thus to enjoy
their charm:
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
Sensuous Quality
The poem has a richly sensuous appeal. We have numerous pictures of beautiful things
which please our senses. The fruits of autumn, buds and bells of May, the sweet singing of the
birds, the various flowers—the daisy, the marigold, the lily, the primrose—are a kind of feast which
we enjoy as we go through the poem. By the exercise of our fancy, we can see at one glance all the
flowers:
“With the great Odes, we are probably at the apex of Keats’s poetic
powers”. Trace the evolution of Keats’s art till the achievement in the
Odes.
Keats, a Conscious and Hard-Working Artist
Keats was a conscious artist, anxious to load his poetry as fully as possible, with its own
special kind of excellence. We see the result of it in the devoted critical care he gives to his own
poetical development. As we peruse his work, we become aware of a constant effort on his part to
correct faults in technique and emotional tone. He constantly rejects harmful models and chooses
better ones. Above all, he is always thinking out the essentials of his own kind of poetry to the
exclusion of everything else.
We find felicities of phrase and a sensitive insight into Nature in this poem:
Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.
In Sleep and Poetry, the writer throws a challenge at the whole army of the neo-classical critics.
This poem is faulty in execution, but the point of view of the young Keats is unmistakable:
Beauty was awake:
Why were ye not awake?
We cannot ignore in his early efforts the ornate extravagance, the abuse of double rhymes, the
faulty emphasis, the ugly vulgarities, the poetic stammerings, etc. But the soul of a poet is already
there. Surely, we can expect splendid things from a young man of nineteen who could write On
First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer which is certainly deserving of high praise.
stanzas describing the events in Madeline’s chamber. Keats shows himself capable of a new
firmness in outline and form, of new flexibility of attitude and expression.
The central thought of this ode is the unity of truth and beauty: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
The Transitoriness of Beauty and Joy
On Melancholy expresses the transitoriness of beauty and joy, and the idea that true
melancholy lies in the ache at the heart of felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die;
And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu……
An Acceptance of Impermanence
To Autumn is one of the most nearly perfect poems. The different parts of it contribute
directly to the whole, with nothing left dangling or independent. While On Melancholy accepts
the impermanence of beauty and joy as inevitable, To Autumn also accepts impermanence and
accepts it without the least trace of sadness because Keats is able to see it as part of a larger and
richer permanence.
The Odes at the Apex of Keats’s Poetic Achievement
The odes mark the highest development of Keats’s poetic genius and stand at the apex of
his poetic achievement. Here we find a perfect fusion of sobriety with the force of touch and the
wealth of expression. Here we find a rare union of classical discipline with what is greatest in
romanticism. Keats brings here a strong force of selection, order, and harmony to bear on an
unlimited range of intensely felt sensations and emotions.
All the Odes of Keats are closely bound up with the theme of
transience and permanence. Explain, analysing two of the Odes of
Keats, to show how this theme is handled.
The Odes, a Product of Keats’s Inner Conflicts
It would be true to say that the odes of Keats are the product of certain inner struggles or
conflicts. The principal stress in the most important of these odes is a struggle between ideal and
actual. They also imply the opposition between pleasure and pain, imagination and reason,
fullness and privation, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom and
bondage, waking and dream.
nightingale, though in the case of mankind he thinks not of the race but of the individual human
being. The bird here represents a universal and undying voice: the voice of Nature, of imaginative
sympathy, and therefore of an ideal romantic poetry, infinitely powerful and profuse. As
sympathy, the voice of the nightingale resolves all differences: it speaks to high and low (emperor
and clown): it comforts the human home-sickness of Ruth and frees her from bitter isolation; and
equally it opens the casements of the remote and magical. The “magic casements” are the climax
of the imaginative experience. In the final stanza, the word “forlorn” is like a bell which tolls the
death of the imagination. The poet realises that fancy cannot cheat so well.
The Human World Versus the World of Nature
This is a poem about man’s world as contrasted, with the world of Nature or death
contrasted with deathlessness. The bird shares in the immortality of Nature which remains,
through all its changes, unwearied and beautiful. The bird is in harmony with its environment,
unlike man who is in competition with his (“No hungry generations tread thee down”); and the
bird cannot conceive of its separation from the world which it expresses and of which’it is a part.
It is in this sense that the nightingale is immortal. Man knows that he is born to die, knows “What
thou among the leaves hast never known”; and this knowledge overshadows man’s life and all his
songs. Such knowledge overshadows this poem and gives it its special poignancy.
The “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Its Duality of Theme
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the duality of the theme is indicated in the very opening
stanza where Keats gives us a contrast between something unchanging (the urn) because it is
dead, and something transient because it is alive. This equipoise is continued in the second stanza,
but the poet continues to toy with his dual matter without asserting or implying that lifeless
permanence is superior or transient reality. Nor does he indicate any preference in the third
stanza, though the emphasis here, as in the second stanza, is upon the warmth and the turbulence
of life. We have not been made to feel that Keats has any distinct preference for an unrealised but
permanent love over an actually experienced but transient but actual passion. In the fourth stanza,
we are carried into a world (the little town) that is permanent, but permanently empty, just as the
figures on the urn are permanent but permanently lifeless. In the final stanza, the poet ends his
dual game. Here he emphatically addresses this thing of beauty as just what it is a Grecian urn.
This work of art, he says, has “teased” us out of thought, that is, out of the actual world into an
ideal world where we can momentarily and imaginatively enjoy the life that is free from the
imperfections of our lot here. But this ideal world is not free of all imperfections: it has very grave
deficiencies because it is lifeless, motionless, cold, unreal (“silent form”, “cold pastoral”, etc).
beauty is total reality properly understood; that is, beauty is the true significance of things in our
world and in the ideal world.
The “Ode on Melancholy”, Also a Poem of Contrasts
The Ode on Melancholy is another poem of contrasts. The general idea of this poem is that
true melancholy is to be found not in the sad and ugly things of life, such as wolf’s-bane,
nightshade, yew-berries, the beetle, and death-moth, but in the beauty and pleasures of the world.
The world’s true sadness dwells with beauty and joy, for the pain of suffering is less acute than the
pain of knowing that beauty and joy will soon fade. The poem expresses Keats’s experience of the
habitual interchange and alteration of the emotions of joy and pain.
The Dwelling-Place of Melancholy
True melancholy, says Keats, lies in the ache at the heart of felicity. It comes to a man
suddenly even as rain may suddenly begin to fall from a cloud above. In that state a man can have
his fill of sorrow by gazing at the beauty of a morning rose or by feeding deep upon the peerless
eyes of one’s mistress when she “some rich anger shows”.
The Transience of Beauty and Joy
The idea of the transitoriness of beauty and joy is vividly conveyed by means of a concrete
picture. Melancholy, we are told, dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die, and Joy whose hand
is ever at his lips bidding adieu. Pleasure, we are told, turns to poison, in the very process of being
enjoyed. True melancholy can be experienced only by him who has a capacity for enjoying the
keenest pleasures. “In the very temple of Delight, veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine.”
A Most Explicit Statement in the Final Stanza
Thus this poem too has a dual theme. It shows the inseparability of pain and pleasure, joy
and sorrow, transience and permanence. The poem is about the inter-relations of beauty that
must die, passing joy, aching pleasure. The final stanza is Keats’s most explicit statement about
one of his central themes. A full involvement in joy leads inevitably to intense melancholy, a
melancholy which becomes recurrent and incurable. Also, the intensity of the melancholy lends it
a queer pleasure, because intensity is part of full living.
vision that would comprehend all experience, joy and suffering, the natural and the ideal,
the transient and the eternal—all this made him capable of greater poetry than he actually
wrote, and makes him, more than his fellow romantics, our contemporary. Though his
poetry in general was is some measure limited and even weakened by the romantic
preoccupation with beauty, his finest writing is not merely beautiful, because he had seen
the boredom and the horror as well as the glory.”
are fleeting and transient, and “where but to think is to be full of sorrow”. Accordingly, the poet is
carried into the forest on the wings of Poesy and in the midst of the flowers and under the moon
he listens to the nightingale’s song and thinks of the bird’s immortality:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down.
The use of the word “forlorn”, however, summons him back from the world of beauty and romance
to the everyday world. The poet discovers that his imagination cannot provide him with a lasting
escape from the actual world. The conflict introduces several tensions in the poem, making it
highly dramatic. The desire to escape to a world of eternal beauty and joy ends in failure.
The Idea of the Immortality of Art in the “Grecian Urn”
The Ode on a Grecian Urn also begins with a symbol, in this case an inanimate object,
namely the urn which-has survived through many centuries and which therefore represents the
immortality of art. On the urn are depicted young people in a moment of sensuous ecstasy, men
pursuing women amid the music of pipes and timbrels; and there is the repeated question: Are
they deities or mortals, men or gods? But the question shifts to the central contrast between the
unending happiness arrested in art and the brevity of happiness in mortal life. This contrast is
developed in the second and third stanzas. To the crowded scene of amorous pursuit (in the first
stanza), is now added the piper beneath the trees, and in both stanzas the happiness of the piper
and the leafy trees is perfect: the piper on the urn will pipe songs for ever new without feeling
tired, and the trees on the urn will never shed their leaves. But the theme of love brings in
frustration and negation. The poet thinks first of the perpetual non-fulfilment of love on the urn:
“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss”, although there is the consolation that the beloved
cannot fade and that he will love her always: “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair”. Love
depicted on the urn has an ideal quality: it has all the joy and none of the suffering that goes with
actual human passion and satiety. Thus the first three stanzas interpret the scenes on the urn in
terms of the contrast between its happy and permanent world and the human world of mortality,
change, and suffering. But the poet finds refuge in the world of beauty and imagination (as
represented by the urn) only temporarily. In the fourth stanza, he realises that the little town
depicted on the urn will always remain empty and silent. Thus the eternity of joy and beauty (of
the town on the urn) becomes an eternity of silence and desolation. The illusion created by the
imagination fails, as it fails, in the Ode to a Nightingale. The message of the final stanza is that
beauty is the criterion and proof of truth and that truth is the criterion and proof of beauty.
(‘Truth” should here be interpreted as “reality”). Thus Keats, after escaping into the world of
beauty and permanence, finds himself compelled to return to the real world of impermanence and
suffering and to reach the conclusion that true beauty consists not in an escape from this world
but in an acceptance of it. This ode certainly celebrates the immortal beauty of art as contrasted
with the fleeting human life and love. But the poet cannot forget that a flesh-and-blood
experience, with all its pains, is more satisfying than the cold, remote perfection of the marble
urn.
Q.5. What are the qualities of Keats’s poetry that account for
its continued appeal to the modern reader?
The Essential Keats
The story of Keats is the story of a poet’s rise from the status of a very minor writer, in
orthodox circles, a despised minor writer, to a major rank. It did seem at first as if Keats’s name
had been “writ in water”. One reason for this was that his best poetry required more sophisticated
taste and insight than most early readers possessed. Roughly, it may be said that, during the first
decades after 1821, his general reputation grew very slowly, but that it did grow. But Milnes’s Life
Letters and Literary Remains (1848) changed the climate, though even Milnes said that Keats
would never be a popular poet, because he could be enjoyed only by the few who possessed the
poetic faculty. Milnes’s biography of Keats expressly rejected the common image of Keats as a
sensuous or sensual weakling who was killed by hostile reviews. This biography did much to
establish Keats’s real character and literary stature. Matthew Arnold, in an essay (1880), strongly
emphasised Keats’s strength of character, the “flint and iron” in him, as well as his Shakespearean
gift of “natural magic” and “rounded perfection and felicity of loneliness”. Arnold also wrote that,
although Keats was not ripe for Shakespeare’s “faculty of moral interpretation”, his passion for
beauty was not that of “the sensuous or sentimental poet” but that it was “an intellectual and
spiritual passion”.
Keats’s Poetry, Not Divorced from the Cares of Life
It is this picture of Keats, as defined by Matthew Arnold, that appeals to the modern mind.
Cazamian, for instance, has pointed out that the “aestheticism” of Keats has also an ‘intellectual’
side. No one has ever reaped such a rich harvest of thoughts out of the suggestions which life had
to offer. Keats’s letters show how closely the cult of Shakespeare was interwoven with his thinking.
From various sources, besides that of life, Keats had built for himself a personal store of reflections
and ideas. It was not Keats’s aim, says Sidney Colvin, merely to create a paradise of an and beauty
divorced from the cares and interests of the world. His conception of poetry covered the whole
range of life and imagination. It is true that, because he did not live long enough, he was not able
fully to illustrate the vast range of his conception of poetry. But his best work has the stamp of
poetic greatness. In the modern age the view of Keats as wholly or mainly a poet of the senses has
had few champions (H.W. Garrod being one). The modern view of Keats is overwhelmingly that
of a poet of philosophic reach and depth. (It is a view to which his letters have also contributed
much.) This view was first fully expounded in C.D. Thorpe’s book, The Mind of John Keats (1926),
and supported by the successive writings of John Middleton Murry. During the last fifty years, the
scope and seriousness, the dimensions and tensions of Keats’s mind and major poems have
thoroughly been appreciated. Indeed, the temptation of the modern critic has been to confuse the
actual performance of Keats with what he was potentially capable of. It would not be unfair to say
that Keats’s chief poems and letters have been assimilated by all serious modern poets. (One
eloquent testimony is the final discourse in Archibald MacLeish’s Poetry and Experience, 1961).
His influence may be traced by conventional literary techniques through a line of poets, from G.M.
Hopkins through W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot to the American, Wallace Stevens, much of whose fine
poetry seems like an attempt to develop some of Keats’s intentions, moral, and poetic, to their
further limits.
The First Truly Modern Poet, Besides Wordsworth
Shakespeare’s name occurs time and again in talk about Keats. Of course, Keats is not as
great as Shakespeare, nor as great as many other English poets. But he has, to a remarkable
degree, that same power of self-absorption, that wonderful sympathy and identification with all
things, that “Negative Capability” which he saw as essential to the creation of great poetry and
which Shakespeare possessed so abundantly. Keats’s tremendous value for literary and moral
experience in the modern time is the example he sets, the allegory he is. Here, he says to us, is a
way of learning to face life, and to create art. In this brave attitude, he is with Wordsworth the first
truly modern poet.
The Core of Keats’s Work and its Intellectual Appeal
The portion of Keats’s work that has its appeal and value for modern readers consists of
the original version of Hyperion, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, some of the sonnets and, above all,
the odes. Here we find no superfluities, no surplus age, no decorativeness for its own sake, no
swooning sensuousness or sensuality. This work is characterised by a perfect fusion of sobriety
with the force of touch and the wealth of expression. Here we find a rare union of classical
discipline, guided by the example of the ancients, with the more precious matter which Keats
found in romanticism. Keats brings here a strong force of selection, order, and harmony to bear
on an unlimited range of intensely felt sensations and emotions. And this accounts for the appeal
of this body of work for our times.
piping songs, for ever new”, and the uncloying love of the imaginary world of the artist are
contrasted with the inevitable imperfections of human existence. In the last stanza, Keats
proclaims that the sorrows and the meaninglessness of life can be transcended if we learn the
lesson that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”. The poet recognises the proposition that beauty is an
image of truth and that, therefore, if we see life steadily and see it whole, the disagreeable of life
will evaporate as they do in a great work of art. Thus art points to the fact that life can be as
meaningful as art. Keats is fully aware of the limitation of art. Even when he is congratulating the
lover on the permanence of his unsatisfied love, he hankers after “breathing human passion”.
When he is describing the scene of sacrifice which will remain for ever beautiful, he thinks of the
desolate town, emptied for ever of its inhabitants. Art is invaded by human suffering. The “cold
pastoral”, although perfect, is lacking in the warmth of reality.
The Link Between the Melancholy Ode and Several Other Odes
The Ode on Melancholy has links with several of the other odes. The song of the
nightingale had made the poet too happy, his heart aching, and his senses pained by a “drowsy
numbness”. There is a strain of melancholy in the scene of desolation in theOde on a Grecian
Urn. Now in the Ode on Melancholy, Keats introduces “Lethe”, “nightshade” and “Yew” but
rejects them as being unsuitable means of arousing melancholy. These, and even the “beetle”,
“death-moth”, and the “owl” are all to be avoided because they drown “the wakeful anguish of the
soul” and prevent us from experiencing to the full the subtler melancholy of which Keats is writing.
Melancholy is to be sought in beauty and joy—in a rose, a rainbow, or the anger of a beloved.
Because beauty is transient, because love and joy fade, the enjoyment of them must be
accompanied with melancholy. Beauty is lovely because it dies and impermanence is the essence
of joy; so that only those who are exquisitely sensuous and able to relish the finest joys can taste
true sadness. Keats is here writing really about the poetical character. The fine sensitivity
necessary for the writing of poetry makes the poet susceptible both to joy and sorrow. The
realisation that love and beauty are short-lived intensifies his joy in them. In fact, the relationship
between beauty and melancholy works both ways. That is, either joy or sadness is most intensely
felt when it is attended by a consciousness of the experience which is opposite and yet so closely
related to it. The theme is thus more complex and subtle than the aspect of it which appears on
the surface in this poem.
The Mood in the Ode to Autumn, Related to the Mood in Other Odes
To Autumn opens with a description of the sensuous abundance of the season—fruits,
flowers, bees, etc. But in the final lines of the opening stanza, slight implications about the passage
of time begin to operate. The flowers are called “later”; the bees are imagined as thinking that
warm days will never cease; and there is a reference to the summer which has already passed. In
the second stanza, we get a personification of the season in several appropriate postures and
settings. The whole stanza presents the paradoxical qualities of autumn, its aspects both of
lingering and passing. This is specially true of the last two lines in the stanza where we see autumn
as the season of dying as well as of fulfilling. It is with a patten; look that Autumn watches the last
oozings hours by hours. Oozing, or a steady dripping, is of course, well-known as a symbol of the
passage of time. But it is in the last stanza that the theme emerges in a most striking manner:
“Where are the songs of Spring?” This opening question implies that the season of youth and re-
birth, with its beauties of sight and sound, has passed, and that the season of autumn is passing.
The earlier imagery (of the first stanza) is that of ripeness which means ageing and ending as well
as ripening. The final imagery is more truly autumnal. The music of autumn is “wailful” and
“mournful”. Also, we have in the last stanza the “soft-dying day” after the passing of “hours and
hours” (of the second stanza); the imagery is that of sunset and deepening twilight when the
clouds impact their glow to the day and the plains. Thus the poem’s latent theme of transitoriness
and mortality is symbolically dramatised by the passing course of the day. (The opening stanza
suggested the height of day when the sun was strong.) All these characteristics of the poem are to
be found in its final image: “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Birds habitually gather
in flocks toward nightfall. This means that the day is coming to a close. Also, birds gather
particularly when they are preparing to fly southwards at the approach of winter. This means that
the season too is drawing to a close. A feeling of melancholy is inevitable because of these
suggestions. Thus the theme and mood of the Ode to Autumn are connected with the theme and
mood of the preceding odes, though the connection may not seem to be very intimate.
lost their power. Hyperion alone is not yet overthrown, and, like Milton’s Satan, he is the one hope
of further existence. The opening scene is followed by a council to discuss the regaining of the lost
dominion, in which Enceladus, like Moloch,[1] pronounces his sentence for open war, and
Oceanus, like Belial,[2] stands for more moderate measures. Externally, at least, this is modelled
on Paradise Lost, and marks a clear break with the loose and incoherent struc-ure of Endymion.
Keatsian Originality of Style Despite the Debt to Milton
In spite of its fragmentary condition,Hyperion remains Keats’s most imposing piece of
work. According to the publishers, ‘the hostile reception given to Endymiondiscouraged Keats
from continuing with the poem. Keats himself said that he gave it up because of the excessive
Miltonism of the style. “There were too many Miltonic inversions in it”, he wrote to Reynolds.
“Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather in an artist’s humour.” The Miltonic
influence is certainly obvious in the verse and diction of the first Hyperion as it is in the design.
There is, for instance, a constant use of inversions (“stride colossal”, “rest divine”) typical
of Milton’s Latinized style. Especially noticeable is the trick of sandwiching a noun between two
adjectives (“gold clouds metropolitan”). There are other fragmsnts of classical sentence-structure
too:
save what solemn tubes,
Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet
And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies.
But the poem is hardly Miltonic in any stricter sense. In the matter of rhythm, Keats’s blank verse
has not the flight ofMilton’s. “Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so
solemn and far-foreseen close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music.” It is still the verse
of Keats, but immensely purged and strengthened by contact with a severer master. Some of the
most beautiful images in their delicacy and precision are utterly unlike Milton’s generalised verbal
grandeur, and indeed could be by nobody but Keats:
. . . .No stir of air was there
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (1, 7-10)
Books I and II. The Speeches of Oceanus and Clyniene
The first book of Hyperion gives us a picture of the fallen Titans, with Saturn as the central
figure, but Hyperion as the only one who remains even potentially active. The second book shows
them in council and the vital part of it is undoubtedly the speech of Oceanus. The sum and
substance of his speech is as follows:
My voice is not a bellows unto ire.
Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof
How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop:
And in this proof much comfort will I give,
If ye will take that comfort in its truth.
We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force
might.” Then the goddess Ceymene spoke. She said that she had heard a music far superior to that
with which the Titans had been familiar and which they themselves could produce. What she
meant was that in the sphere of music too the Titans had been superseded by a new race of gods
represented by Apollo.
Enceladus’s Opposition to Oceanus and Clymene
While both Oceanus and Clymene wanted to convince the defeated gods that the best
course for them would be to reconcile themselves to their changed circumstances, Enceladus, the
Giant, felt deeply annoyed with what these two speakers had said. He regarded the dethronement
of the Titans as an unbearable humiliation and he therefore suggested that the Titans should not
give way to despair but should make a vigorous effort to regain their kingdoms. He said that their
fellow-god Hyperion was still undefeated and that therefore they should not lose hope altogether.
Just then Hyperion arrived at the scene in all his glory. On seeing him, some of the gods, especially
Enceladus, felt even more encouraged in the stand which Enceladus had taken.
BOOK THREE
At this point in the poem, Keats deviates from the story of the Titans and thinks of the
premature death of his brother Tom. A few lines later he says that he would like to sing about
Apollo, “the father of all verse.” He then goes on to describe the strange experience which Apollo
had on his native island of Delos. Apollo was roaming about in a valley on that island when he saw
an “awful godess” coming towards him. Apollo was surprised to see this mysterious figure who
seemed to have come from nowhere. He told the goddess that he had once dreamt of her and that
she must be goddess Mnemosyne. The goddess told him that she had certainly appeared to him
in a dream and that it was she who had placed a golden lyre by his side when he was asleep. From
this golden lyre, Apollo had been able to produce a kind of music which, in sweetness and melody,
exceeded all music which had previously been heard anywhere in the universe. The goddess now
asked Apollo why he had been feeling so sad and why he had been weeping. He replied that there
were certain things which he did not understand. He wanted to know the nature of the stars, the
identity of the power which controlled the forces of Nature, the divinity who ruled the universe,
and so on. He said that he had been feeling troubled by an “aching ignorance” of all these facts.
Mnemosyne made no reply to Apollo’s question. Apollo’s mind was now suddenly illumined by a
new discovery. Mnemosyne’s face brought to his mind the entire past history of mankind, with all
its joys and sorrows, its triumphs and defeats, its agonies, and all its “dire events”. This new
awareness and this new knowledge made Apollo feel that he had become immortal. Wild
convulsions shook his whole body. He experienced an unbearable agony and he seemed to be on
the verge of death. But the very next moment life seemed to return to him. He had “died into life.”
He shrieked in agony and ecstasy. Then he realized that he had become a god. This is how Keats
describes the deification of Apollo. In symbolic terms, Apollo represents Keats himself; and the
description of Apollo’s transfiguration or deification means the ripening or maturing of Keats’s
poetic powers.
threatened. The ill-omens almost unnerved Hyperion, but he was able to overcome his fear and,
gathering all his strength and will-power, he declared that he would use his terrible right arm to
infuse terror into the heart of Jove who had rebelled against the authority of Saturn and that he
would even succeed in restoring Saturn’s throne to Saturn.
Hyperion, Urged By Coelus to Go and Meet the Defeated Titans
There were still a few hours before the sun was due to rise. Hyperion had already prepared
himself to start the day’s journey. And, though he was impatient to begin the day, he could not
commence his task before the due hour. He therefore lay down to while away the few hours which
still remained. Although he had formed a strong resolution to fight against Jove, yet his mind was
not at ease. The fear of the danger which threatened his supremacy still weighed upon his mind.
In this state of mind he heard a voice whispering into his ears. It was the voice of his aged father,
Coelus (or Uranus) who now spoke to him from somewhere in heaven. This is what the aged god,
Uranus, said to Hyperion:
“You are the brightest of my children. You were born under mysterious circumstances, and
the mystery of your birth was not revealed even to me and to your mother. You as well as
your brothers and sisters are all manifestations of that beauty which pervades the whole
universe. It is very unfortunate that a civil war has taken place among the gods and
goddesses, as a result of which my eldest son, Saturn, has been defeated and dethroned. I
was in no position to give any help to him. You, my son, are still retaining your authority
and governing your dominion. I want you to go down to the earth and meet Saturn and his
fellow-gods to see what help you can give to them. It is a bad sign that, while you have all
lived and governed your kingdoms with dignity, you are all now experiencing such
emotions as fear, anger, and hope which are the feelings characteristic of mankind and not
of gods.”
At these words, Hyperion got up and, leaving the planet of the sun in the charge of his father who
had spoken to him, plunged noiselessly into the deep night in order to go down to the earth and
meet his fellow-Titans.
BOOK TWO
The Defeated Gods Feeling Miserable
In the meantime, Saturn and Thea had arrived at the place where most of the defeated
Titans had taken refuge in a cave among the rocks. As already pointed out, some of the gods and
goddesses were in prison where they were being tortured. These included Coeus, Gyges, Briareus,
Typhon, Dolor, and Porhyrion. Some others were wandering about aimlessly in the world. They
included Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; and Phoebs, a daughter of the moon-goddess.
Those who had taken shelter in this cave among the rocks included Creus, lapetus, Cottus, Caf,
Enceladus, Phorcus, Ocaanus, Tethys, Clymsne, Trutnis, Ops. These gods and goddessss included
also Asia, the daughter of the mountain-god Caf by his union with Tellus. All the gods and
goddesses assembled here were in a most wretched and miserable condition because of their
removal from their respective high positions of authority in the universe.
Saturn’s Address to His Fellow-Gods
On arriving at this place, Saturn felt even sadder than before. This god, who had once
wielded supreme authority in the universe, was now experiencing such distressing emotions as
rage, fear, anxiety, remorse, and revenge. And he experienced not only these emotions but also
that of despair. It seemed that Fate had robbed him of his divine powers and infected him with
the weaknesses and infirmities of human beings. Under the stress of these emotions, Saturn might
have collapsed to the ground but, by chance, he met the eyes of Enceladus of whose exceptional
strength and might he was fully aware. Seeing anger in Enceladus’s eyes, Saturn felt invigorated
and strengthened. The presence of Enceladus acted as a great stimulus upon him, and so he
shouted to the assembled Titans: “Titans, behold your supreme god”. At Saturn’s words some of
the gods groaned, some got up on their feet, some shouted, some wept, some wailed; but all of
them bowed to Saturn reverently. Saturn had now conquered his feelings of fear and despair, and
he spoke in a self-confident manner. Addressing his fellow-gods, he said:
“I do not understand why you should feel so dejected. Neither in my own heart nor in the book of
wisdom which I have always kept close to myself, am I able to discover any reason why
you should have given up all hope. There have been no portents to show that we are a
doomed race. Seeing you in this mood of dejection, I do not know what message I should
give to you. If I ask you to arise, you will groan because you are in no mood to fight; if I ask
you to cringe to the conqueror (Jove) you will still groan because your self-respect will be
hurt. What can I then do? Tell me, my brother-gods, how we can wreak vengeance upon
the rebellious gods who have won a victory over us. You, Oceanus, are a deep thinker. What
advice can you give me?”
Oceanus’s Reply
Saturn here ended his speech. Oceanus now replied to Saturn’s question. This is what
Oceanus said:
“What I have to say should be a source of comfort to you, provided you can find comfort
in what is true. The truth is that we have been defeated not by the power of Jove but in accordance
with Nature’s law. Great Saturn, you have studied this universe but, having been accustomed to
wield unlimited power, you have missed certain small points which lower minds could easily
understand. You should realize that, just as you were not the first power to rule the universe, so
you are not the last. You are not the beginning, and you are not the end. We all acquired our
positions and our authority after the original chaos and the primeval darkness had been
conquered. And just as we are fairer than that chaos and that darkness, those who have now
become the rulers of the universe are fairer than we are. On our heels a fresh perfection treads, a
power more strong in beauty, a power born of us but destined to surpass us just as we surpass the
original chaos and the primeval darkness. Besides, it is not a question of conquest; we have not
been conquered by Jove and his comrades just as we did not in any sense conquer chaos and
darkness; it is just a question of progress which proceeds inevitably according to the law of Nature.
We should not resent having been superseded just as the dull soil does not resent the existence of
the grand forests which it has itself nourished and fed, and just as a tree does not resent the dove
which sits on its branches and sings. We have ourselves begotten those who have now taken our
places as the rulers and, in course of time, they too would be ousted by another race because the
law of Nature is that “first in beauty should be first in “might”. I have been succeeded on my throne
by another god (Neptune) but I am not resentful of him because he is far more impressive in his
appearance and far more handsome than I am. I myself bade farewell to my empire in order to
make way for him, even though I felt sad to relinquish my authority. Now what I want is that you
should understand the principle which is behind our dethronement, and draw comfort from it.”
BOOK THREE
Keats to Sing About Apollo
At this point Keats deviates from the story of the Titans which he has been narrating and
from the role of Hyperion which he has been describing. He thinks of the premature death of his
brother Tom and says that he should turn rather to sing about his own sorrow than about the woes
of the gods. But he does not then proceed to sing even about his own personal sorrow. He says
that he would like to sing about Apollo, “the father of all verse.” The thought of Apollo fills him
with a great enthusiasm and joy, and he calls upon all Nature to put on fresh glory in order to join
him in celebrating the greatness of Apollo who was born on theisland of Delos. He announces to
all Nature that “Apollo is once more the golden theme” of his verse. Evidently, Keats’s purpose
now is to take up the theme of the dethronement of Hyperion by Apollo. But Apollo is not yet a
god. Keats therefore first takes up the theme of how Apollo became a god.
Apollo’s Encounter with an Awful Goddess
When Hyperion stood radiant in the midst of his grief-stricken fellow-Titans, Apollo left
his mother and his twin-sister sleeping in their bower and wandered forth in the morning twilight.
Walking through the lilies of the valley at that early hour, when the nightangale had just stopped
singing and when there were only a few stars left in the sky, Apollo came to a stop on the banks of
a stream and suddenly burst into tears. While he stood there weeping, with his golden bow in his
hand, an awful goddess came and stood before him. Apollo was surprised to see this mysterious
figure who seemed to have come from nowhere. He then realized that he had always been
conscious of the presence of this goddess on this island and that he had often heard the sweep of
her garments over the fallen leaves as she walked about in the valley and in the forest. He told the
goddess that he had either actually seen her before on this island or had dreamed of her. The
goddess replied that he had dreamed of her and that, on waking up from his dream, he had found
a golden lyre which she had placed for him by his side. From the strings of that lyre he had
produced sweet music which the whole universe had heard with both pain and pleasure, realizing
that a new kind of music had come into existence.
The Goddess’s Deep Interest in Apollo
The goddess now asked Apollo why he had been weeping and what it was that had been
making him so sad. She told him that she had been keeping a watch upon him during his hours of
sleep and during his hours of wakefulness ever since his childhood. She said that she had given
up her allegiance to the old gods for his sake and for the sake of the new loveliness which he
possessed and the new music which he had originated.
Apollo’s “Aching Ignorance”
Thereupon Apollo suddenly realized who this goddess was. He said that her name had
suddenly occurred to him and that she must be Mnemosyne. Then he said that his sorrow, which
had made him shed tears, was not a mystery to her and that she knew everything about him. He
went on to say that there were certain things which he did not understand. He wanted the goddess
Mnemosyne to clear his doubts about certain matters. He wanted to know the nature of the stars,
the identity of the power behind the forces of Nature, the divinity who ruled the universe, and the
reason why he was often overtaken by a melancholy which was so deep as to have a numbing effect
on his limbs. He asked her to tell him why he often listened to the sounds of the elements “in
fearless yet in aching ignorance.”
gradually is compared to a lithe serpent, vast and muscular, moving slowly forward, with head
and neck convulsed on account of over-strained might. Hyperion, plunging into the deep night, is
compared to a diver plunging into the pearly seas.
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Foreward he stoop’d over the airy shore,
And plung’d all noiseless into the deep night. (Lines 355-58)
Each of these similes is a vivid picture as well.
CRITICAL COMMENTS ON BOOK TWO
Several Sections of Book II
While Book I is in the nature of an exposition, Book II develops both the argument and
the action of the story, and is important in respect of characterization as well as ideas. This Book
is divisible into several sections which may thus be identified:
(1) The opening lines contain a vivid description of the cave where the defeated
Titans had taken shelter.
(2) This is followed by a description of the assembled gods themselves. Each of the
gods is named and introduced to us briefly with reference to his or her principal feature or
characteristic. Almost each of them is individualized.
(3) The arrival of Saturn and Thea at this cave is then described, with particular
reference to Saturn’s mood of despondency which deepens as Saturn nears the cave.
(4) Saturn then delivers a speech to the assembled gods, expressing his puzzlement
at their mood of hopelessness and despair in the face of their defeat. He seeks the opinion of
Oceanus who is regarded by him as a thinker and philosopher and who should therefore be in a
position to give some sound advice to Saturn in this common calamity.
(5) Oceanus, in his reply, says that the defeat which the Titans have suffered at the
hands of the Olympians was inevitable and follows Nature’s law. He urges the defeated Titans,
and especially Saturn, to reconcile themselves to their dethronement and to accept the inevitable.
(6) Then the goddess Clymene speaks. She gives to the Titans an account of her
experience in the woods when she had heard a music which she had never heard before, a music
which seemed to supersede all the melodies which had ever been heard in the universe before.
She had fled from that music but had been chased by a sweet voice which had again and again
uttered the name of Apollo, “the morning-bright Apollo”.
(7) Enceladus’s reaction to these two speeches, one by Oceanus and the other by
Clymene, is then described. Enceladus is not in favour of submitting to the new powers,
represented by Jove, which have now begun to rule the universe. He counsels the Titans to
undertake to fight against the new gods in order to regain the realms which they have lost.
(8) Finally, in this Book, we have a description of the arrival of the radiant Hyperion
who has come, in obedience to Coelus’s advice, to see with his own eyes the sad condition of his
fellow-Titans in the cave and to help them regain their lost realms, if he can.
though the questioner is a god). Thea only understands that disaster has befallen the
Titans. Saturn only understands the pain of defeat. Both of them want to understand
more; and Keats now sends them together to that sad place where Cybele and the
bruised Titans sat in mourning. Some of the defeated Titans are then named and
described, whereafter Saturn proceeds to address them. His speech goes deeper still into
the sheer puzzle of pain. He puts it thus:
Not in my own sad breast,
Which is its own great judge and searcher out,
Can I find reason why ye should be thus: (II, 129-31)
At the end of his speech he turns to Oceanus whose “severe content”, which is the result
of thought and musing, has surprised him and from whom he now seeks guidance.
Stoic Resignation to the Truth
It is Oceanus who, in his reply to Saturn’s question, urges his fellow-gods to see
their Titanic woes as part of a process called beauty’s triumph. Whether the process
justifies the pain involved is not easy to decide. Oceanus proclaims his message to be “the
pain of truth”; but at the same time he asserts that those who take his message to be
painful are foolish. The dominant note of the speech of Oceanus is Stoic resignation to
the truth rather than welcome of it. He concludes with the following advice:
Receive this truth, and let it be your balm.
But there is no suggestion that pain can be transformed into something else. In
other words, pain and suffering remain pain and suffering, and cannot undergo any
mystic transformation. All that Oceanus can say is that the defeated gods have to suffer
but that they are suffering in a good cause. So his mandate is that the sufferers must
achieve calm and tranquility.
The Superior Beauty of the New Sea-God and of the New God of Music
Oceanus cites his own individual defeat as an illustration of the general principle
which he has just laid down. He refers to the new Olympian god who has overthrown
him. He speaks about the new god of the sea in ardent terms, praising the beauty and
the glow of the new god. Oceanus was so impressed by the new god that he voluntarily
relinquished his position as the sovereign of his empire and came away from his
headquarters, so to speak. Following Oceanus, the goddess Clymene expresses her own
sense of bewilderment but then goes on to speak of Apollo in the same eloquent and
glowing terms in which Oceanus had spoken about his successor. Says she:
A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,
And still it cried, “Apollo ! Young Apollo!”
I fled, it follow’d me, and cried “Apollo”! (II, 292-94)
Thus the reference to Apollo emphasizes a singing voice of the utmost beauty. And the
beauty is, of course, the point, because the final triumph of beauty will be the triumph of
Apollo; and in this way Oceanus’s assertion of the eternal law of Nature will be
vindicated. No doubt, Enceladus, who speaks after Clymene, rejects both her opinion
and the view of Oceanus. Enceladus describes Oceanus as “over-wise” and he describes
Clymene as “over-foolish”. Enceladus speaks in a militant tone, and he relies on
Hyperion to come to the rescue of the defeated Titans. But the event described in Book
III, in which Apollo achieves his deification, clearly shows that Enceladus’s defiance and
militancy would come to nothing, if the poem had been continued, it would have
described the conflict between Hyperion and the new god Apollo, and it would have
described the triumph of the latter who is more beautiful by virtue of his music and
melody the like of which had never before been heard in the universe.
Discuss the theme of Hyperion. How far, in your view, has Keats
succeeded in dealing with the theme in the existing fragment of the
poem?
The Subject of the Epic: the War Between the Gods
Although Hyperion is an incomplete poem and was therefore described as a
fragment, yet the idea behind it emerges clearly as we go through it. The subject which
Keats chose for his poem was the war between the Titans and the Olympians, and the
victory of the latter over the former.
If the poem had been completed, Keats would almost certainly have described
retrospectively some of the main episodes in the war which has ended when the poem
begins. After describing the course of the war, he would have gone on to pick up the
thread of the narrative from the point where Apollo is transformed into a god. Then
would have come the crux of the whole saga, namely an encounter between Hyperion
and Apollo, and the triumph of the latter. As it stands, the first two books of the epic
describe the state of affairs after the war between the two classes of the gods has ended
in the defeat of the Titans, with the exception of Hyperion who still retains his
sovereignty over his realm of the sun. The Titans are feeling very despondent and are
on the verge of total despair, with exception of Encladus who is still in a defiant mood.
Oceanus, Asked For His Views
The chief of the Titans, namely Saturn, is feeling even more grief-stricken than
the others. Hyperion’s wife Thea comes to him and concurs with him so far as his bleak
view of the situation is concerned. Satan laments the loss of the power and authority,
which he says, he had always exercised in 3 benevolent manner so as to keep his subject
happy. Thea takes him to the den where the other Titans sit or lie in a despondent state.
There Saturn makes a speech to his fellow-gods, expressing his puzzlement over the
defeat which they have suffered. At the end of his speech he turns to’ Oceanus, the
“sophist and sage”, and asks him for help and guidance in the present situation. Saturn
has perceived an expression of “severe content” on the face of Oceanus; and this makes
him think that Oceanus may be able to throw some light on the problem which is baffling
Saturn.
The Underlying Idea of the Poem, Stated by Oceanus
It is the speech which Oceanus makes in reply to Saturn’s question that contains
the underlying idea of the whole poem. This underlying idea is that things can never
stand still in this universe and that change and development are the law of Nature.
According to Oceanus, progressive change must always take place (whether by
evolution or by revolution). That is why we may say that the concept of evolutionary
progress is the theme of the poem or that Keats is here writing an epic of the
revolutionary idea. Oceanus makes some very significant and memorable remarks, his
object being not to incite the gods against the victorious ones but to make it possible for
them to reconcile themselves to their defeat.
Saturn, Not the Beginning Nor the End
Oceanus tells the gods that the proper course for them to follow now is to be
contented with their lot and to accept it even if means a loss of dignity. He says that he
would be able to provide much comfort to them by his arguments provided they are
willing to draw comfort from the facts as they are. He says that the Titans have fallen
from their high positions as a result of the operation of the law of Nature and not because
of the destructive thunderbolts of Jove. He tells Saturn in particular that, having been
the supreme ruler of the universe and having held a position far above the others, he had
missed the small point which minds of a lower order would fully perceive. According to
Oceanus, Saturn has missed the route to wisdom and truth. Oceanus says that Saturn
should realize that just as he was not the first ruler of the universe so he cannot be the
last ruler. Saturn could not have remained the ruler of the universe for ever. “Thou art
not the beginning nor the end,” Oceanus tells him. Originally chaos and darkness had
prevailed in the universe. From the chaos and darkness had come light, and with light
had come life. It was at this point that the first gods, Heaven and Earth, came into being.
Then Saturn was born, the first issue of the union of Heaven and Earth. Then all the rest
of the race of Titans and the race of Giants followed, so that they all found themselves to
be the rulers of the various beautiful kingdoms. Oceanus points out to his fellow-gods
that they should not be depressed by the loss of their kingdoms, because the real height
of supremacy lies in the ability to look facts in the face in a spirit of complete calmless:
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty.
First in Beauty Should Be First in Might
Oceanus, countinuing his discourse, says that the Titans who were born of the
union of Heaven and Earth had surpassed their parents in beauty, in compactness, in
symmetry, in will-power, in the freedom of action, in the spirit of comradeship, and in
a thousand other ways. And just as they had surpassed their parents, so the next
generation of gods, led by Jove, had surpassed the Titans:
new “blissful golden melody” which she had suddenly heard had made her “sick with joy
and grief at once”. She had felt joyous because of the repturous notes of music which she
had heard, but she had felt sad at the thought that her own music had been superseded
by this new music. She had fled from the spot but had been chased by a sweet voice which
kept uttering the name of Apollo. Clymene’s experience implies that a new musician has
appeared on the scene and will now dethrone the existing deity governing the realm of
music. This again is a case of evolutionary or revolutionary change. Clymene herself is
reconciled to this change, but gods like Enceladus are not.
Enceladus’s Militancy, Unjustified
Enceladus refers to Oceanus as “over-wise” and to Clymene as “over-foolish”.
Enceladus is still in a defiant mood, and in his imagination is hurling mountains upon
his enemies. Enceladus speaks scornfully about Oceanus, calling him “thou sham
monarch of the waves.” Enceladus is burning with the fire of revenge. He is not only
sorry because the Titans have lost their realms but he is even more sorry at the loss of
those days of peace and “slumberous calm” which the Titans used to enjoy during
Saturn’s reign. Enceladus argues that Hyperion is still undefeated, and that there is still
a hope for the Titans to win a victory over the Olympians-and to re-establish themselves
as the rulers of the universe. The point here is that Enceladus’s whole approach is wrong
because Enceladus has not been able to grasp the truth contained in the speech of
Oceanus. Enceladus is an uncompromising militant. He would learn his lesson only
when Hyperion too is overthrown.
An Epic of Beauty’s Triumph: The Meaning of Beauty
One other point that deserves attention in connection with the theme of this
poem is that beauty is Oceanus’s criterion of superiority. The eternal law, according to
Oceanus, is that “first in beauty should be first in might.” now, we can understand the
idea of evolutionary progress and we can understand also the revolutionary idea; but
it is somewhat difficult to understand the concept of the progressive change brought
about by superior beauty. Science teaches us the theory of evolution. This biological
theory needs no explanation. We can also understand evolutionaty development or
revolutionary changes in the political, social, and cultural life of mankind. History
provides countless examples of such changes. In fact, changes of this kind are taking
place before our very eyes. But what does Oceanus or Keats mean by saying that first in
beauty should be first in might? Well, this poem is not a scientific discourse. Keats wants
us to look at the evolutionary development or progress with the eyes of a poet and not
with the eyes of a scientist. For Keats, beauty was the supreme consideration. Beauty
was the supreme power in his eyes. Beauty was a magnificent obsession with him. “A
thing of beauty is a joy for ever”, he had written. Later he was to write:
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Of course, beauty does not merely mean physical attractiveness. For the mature Keats,
beauty came to be identified with truth. Beauty has thus intellectual and philosophical
connotations in Keats’s eyes, Truth implies all the facts of life in the aggregate, all the
accumulated knowledge and wisdom of all mankind. It is only a man with a vast vision
who can accept the entire range of the life of the universe, including the life of mankind,
and who can be said to have a capacity to appreciate beauty. Interpreted thus, Oceanus’s
criterion of beauty does not conflict basically with the scientific view of evolution. Thus
considered, Keats’s poem becomes an epic of beauty’s triumph. Keats’s approach to the
whole issue is aesthetic, as is con-finned by the experience of Clymene who represents
the artistic temperament.
The Relevance of Apollo’s Deification in Book III
A discussion of the theme’ of theHyperion cannot end here. There is something
more to it. While the first two books form a compact unit, Book III marks an abrupt
transition which mars the structure of the poem. Book III contains an account of the
experience by which Apollo was transformed into a god. Now, if Keats had been able to
complete the poem, this particular episode would have fallen into place. After describing
the process of Apollo’s deification, Keats would have gone on to describe a second war
between the Titans (with Hyperion and Enceladus at their head) and the Olympians
(with Jove as their leader). The central episode in this second conflict would have been
an encounter between Hyperion and Apollo in which Apollo would have won, not by the
force of arms but by the sheer power of his enchanting music. Perhaps, Hyperion,
overwhelmed by that music, would have surrendered as readily to his opponent as
Oceanus had previously surrendered to Neptune. But the poem breaks off at the point
where Apollo has been transfigured and deified.
A Second Theme of the Poem: The Symbolism of Apollo’s Deification
The process by which Apollo becomes a god is itself significant because here we
have, in additions to its obvious meaning, a symbolic description by Keats of Keats’s
own emergence as a mature poet. In symbolic terms, Apollo is Keats himself. Apollo has
been feeling afflicated by a vague grief and has often wept because of this grief. When
he comes into contact with Mnemosyne, he experiences a strange exhiliration and asks
her several questions regarding the nature of this universe and the divinity who controls
the powers of Nature. He speaks to her of his “aching ignorance”. Mnemosyne makes no
reply. Apollo thereupon suddenly discovers a wonderful meaning in the expression of
her silent face. Her face proves to be a source of infinite knowledge to him and he says
that this new knowledge which he has derived from her face makes him think that he
has become a god. He reads in her face names, deeds, gray legends, dire events,
rebellions, majesties, sovran voices, agonies, creations and destroyings. Thereupon he
is shaken by convulsions and tortured by an indescribable agony. He experiences the
agony of a dying man but in the very moment of his death he is reborn. He dies into life,
and he is reborn as a celestial being. Apollo has become a god. In symbolic terms, Keats
the poet has attained matarity and the ripeness of his poetic powers. Keats has acquired
“the lore of good and ill” and, leaving the world of Flora and old Pan far behind, he has
passed to the nobler world of human suffering and human strife. Now he will write truer
and higher poetry than before (and the great odes were a specimen of that poetry). It is
to be noted that Mnemosyne’s face contains all life, past, present, and even to come. She
is the eternal existence of the universe, as it were. She belongs to the old order, and also
to the new, for she is immanent and everlasting. She is a mirror of all the essential facts
of life—”agonies, creations and destroyings.” And of her Keats had dreamed. She was
“the vast idea” that had come to him that night as he slept on Leighs Hunt’s sofa. She had
become the “might abstract idea of beauty in all things”; and Keats had struggled
through “purgatory blind” for a vision of her, face to face. Now he had achieved what he
sought, and “knowledge enormous mode a god of him” through the pain of a death and
a second birth. Keats has become a true poet through a comprehension of history and
change human suffering.
A Complete Poem in One Sense
Thus Hyperion is a complete poem so far as its basic themes are concerned.
What is not complete is the story of the conflict between Hyperion and Apollo.
To what extent does Hyperion meet the requirements of the epic form
of poetry?
Characteristics of an Epic Poem
An epic is a long narrative poem with a lofty theme treated in a lofty style. An epic
generally deals with the mighty deeds of heroes, be they men or gods or both. An epic Is always
written in the same metre throughout. The subject of an epic poem may be some well-known
legend or some momentous sequence of historical events. An epic poem portrays characters on
a grand scale. An epic is written in a grand style. An epic has a grand underlying idea. Thus
grandeur is the keynote of an epic poem. Some of the best-known epic poems in western
literature are the Iliad and theOdyssey by Homer, and the Divine Comedyby Dante. (In Indian
literature the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata are outstanding examples of epic poetry
recognized by the whole world).
poet as a creator. Since the poem is unfinished, we cannot be sure. In any case, it is obvious that
Keats’s poem has a lofty theme.
Very Little Action in This Epic Poem
An epic poem abounds in heroic actions. However, there is a dearth of action
in Hyperion. The reason for this dearth is that, when the poem begins, the Titans have already
been defeated by the Olympians. In other words, the main action of the story has already taken
place. Perhaps, if Keats had continued with the poem, he would have narrated some of the major
episodes in the warfare retrospectively. But as the poem stands, there is some talk of heroic
action, especially by Enceladus and Hyperion himself, but there is actually little of such action
in the poem. (The material for the poem has been drawn from Greek mythology, a knowledge of
which was derived by Keats from various sources.)
The Characters in The Poem: Saturn
As already indicated, an epic poem has an exalted theme treated in an exalted style, but
the portrayal of characters is perhaps even more important. The characters must be heroic
beings. They may be men or gods, or both. Hyperion deals only with gods. There is, to be sure,
one human being: namely Apollo, but he has a divine origin; and, what is more, he is deified in
the poem, thus becoming a. god (who will challenge the sovereignty of Hyperion). The leading
characters in Keats’s poem are Saturn, Thea, Hyperion, Oceanus, Enceladus, Clymene,
Mnemosyne, and Apollo. Keats’s portrayal of these characters is certainly very impressive, even
though most of the gods including a few from this list are suffering from a deep depression of
spirits on account of the defeat which they have suffered at the hands of the Olympians. We meet
Saturn in the very opening lines where he is hardly depicted as a heroic figure. Saturn is
described as sitting in a valley, silent and motionless, with “his old right hand” lying on the
ground “nerveless, listless, .dead, and unsceptred”. Subsequently also he produces as
impression, more of weakness and helplessness than of heroism. In reply to Thea’s speech, for
instance, he laments the defeat of the Titans in language which arouses our sympathy rather
than admiration. Later still, we find him experiencing all those emotions which would become a
human being more than an immortal god who had been the chief ruler of the universe. The ex-
ruler of the universe is described as experiencing such emotions as grief, rage, fear, anxiety, but
most of all despair. It seems that Fate has poured a mortal oil upon his head and deprived him
of his god-like qualities and attributes. In spite of all this, the figure of Saturn does create an
impression of hugeness and vastness. His very lament over the loss of his empire conveys to us
some idea of his past glory.
Character-Portrayal: Thea
The portrayal of Thea produces a slightly more favourable impression. Her very size
and stature give rise to a feeling of awe in our hearts. The tall Amazon, we are told, would have
looked like a pigmy by the side of this goddess. Thea would have seized Achilles by the hair and
twisted his neck. She could have, with one finger, brought to a stop the ever-revolving Ixion’s
wheel. Her face was as large as that of Memphian Sphinx pedestalled in an Egyptian palace.
Her face could be called beautiful if the expression of sorrow on it had not seemed to be even
more beautiful than the face. She has one hand upon her heart as if she were feeling a cruel pain
even though she is an immortal.
Character-Portrayal: Oceanus
Of Oceanus we are not given any physical description, but he emerges as one of the
most impressive figures in the poem. He is a sage and a philosopher. The defeat of the Titans has
not made him despondent. He has been able to reconcile himself to the defeat by his cogitation,
contemplation, and musing, so that there is an expression of “severe content” on his face. He
tries his utmost to provide comfort to the grief-stricken gods and goddesses by his philosophy.
His discourse is one of the grandest passages in the whole poem. It is, indeed, a memorable
exhortation, pregnant with wisdom. His heroism lies in this capacity to explain and justify the
defeat which the Titans have suffered at the hands of the younger gods. It is his great intellect
and his deep wisdom which make a hero of him in our eyes.
Character-Portrayal: Enceladus
Enceladus is another striking character in the poem. He was once tame and mild like
an ox grazing calmly in a pasture. But at this time he is tiger-passioned, lion-thoughted, and
wroth. In his imagination he is hurling mountains at his opponents in the second war which is
yet to come. Oceanus’s exhortation produces no effect at all on this fearless giant. He dismisses
the counsel offered by Oceanus as of no account at all. He addresses Oceanus as “thou, sham
monarch of the waves”, and reminds him of the scalding which Oceanus had received during the
war. Enceladus’s view is that the Titans must not lose heart because of their defeat but should
get ready to fight again in order “to stifle that puny essence in its tent” (that is, to destroy the
power of Jove who, in the eyes of Enceladus, is a puny or insignificant being as compared to the
older gods). Enceladus’s defiance reminds us of Satan’s in Paradise Lost.
Character-Portrayal: Clymene
Another character who wins our sympathy and even our admiration is Clymene. She is
a modest goddess who speaks somewhat shyly and timidly but who strikes us as an admirable
being by virtue of her sensitive and artistic temperament. She is fond of singing and playing on
musical instruments. When she suddenly hears a new kinds of music, which comes to her from
an island in the sea, she feels enchanted and bewitched. Although she tries to run away from
that music, she is chased by a voice which keeps shouting the name of Apollo. Evidently, Clymene
has felt completely overwhelmed by the sweetness of this new music the like of which had never
been heard before.
Character-Portrayal: Mnemosyne
Mnemosyne is another unforgettable character. It is she who confers godhood on
Apollo. She has appeared to him in a dream, and she had placed by his side a golden lyre from
the strings of which he was able to produce unprecedented music. It is by looking at her face that
Apollo undergoes a transformation and “dies into life.” In her face he reads a wondrous lesson;
there he reads names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, sovran voices,
creations and destroyings, all at once. She personifies the past, the present, and even the future.
She is undoubtedly a grand figure in the poem.
Character-Portrayal: Hyperion
However, it is the portrayal of Hyperion which stirs in us feelings of awe, terror,
admiration, and sympathy. Keats devotes plenty of space to a portrayal of Hyperion. Hyperion
still retains his sovereignty, his rule, and his majesty. Blazing Hyperion sits on his “orbed fire”,
inhaling the incense sent up from man to the sun’s god. He paces from hill to hill with “stride
colossal”. Entering his palace, he gives a roar which scares away the Hours. On he flares from
vault to vault till he reaches the gate of the central dome where he stamps his foot fiercely. And
yet, despite all this show of strength, the great sun-god is experiencing fear and apprehension
lest he too should be dethroned. However, he takes heart when Father Uranus speaks to him in
a whisper from heaven, urging him to rise above his fears and to go down to the earth in order
to give whatever comfort and help he can to the defeated Titans. If Keats had continued the
poem, he would have surely depicted Hyperion in action against Apollo, waging a mighty
though losing battle against the younger god.
A Grand Idea Behind the Poem: Evolutionary Progress
There is thus no doubt at all that the characters in this poem have been drawn on a
grand scale and are worthy of an epic. We then come to the idea behind the poem. As already
pointed out, this idea too is grand. In fact, there are two grand ideas behind the poem. One is to
be found in the speech of Oceanus who urges the defeated Titans to accept their defeat with a
good grace. He explains to them that evolution is the law of nature, and that no one can govern
the universe for all time. He says that just as chaos and darkness had given way to light and life,
and just as Heaven and Earth had been conquered by Saturn and his fellow-Titans, so the Titans
must now accept their dethronement by the Olympians as an essential and inevitable part of the
scheme of things. Saturn was not the first and he cannot be the last of powers. “So on our heels
a fresh perfection treads”, he says. Those who have conquered the Titans will themselves be
conquered one day by some other gods. We may define the principle underlying the speech of
Oceanus as evolutionary progress or as revolutionary development (coup d’etat). We can also
regard his speech as advocating the ideal of beauty. Perhaps the most important lines in this
speech are:
for ‘tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
From this point of view Hyperion may be regarded as an epic of beauty’s triumph.
The Other Grand Idea: A Knowledge of the Past
The other grand of idea underlying this poem is that a poet can attain the height of his
powers only if he comes into close contact with the stern and stark realities of human life. A poet
must not live in an ivory tower. Apollo has been experiencing a vague sorrow. His sorrow has
been a source of great perplexity to him because he cannot understand what is tormenting him.
There are several questions which he puts to Mnemosyne, and he receives an answer simply by
looking at her face more closely. From her face he derives enormous knowledge which makes a
god of him. What is this knowledge which he obtains? This is knowledge of the entire history of
mankind. Apollo’s attaining this knowledge means that he has become fully acquainted with the
sorrows, sufferings, agonies, and the tumults of the life of mankind. It is his acquisition of this
knowledge which transforms Apollo into a god. In symbolic terms, the transformation of Apollo
into a god means that the poet Keats has attained ripeness and maturity. So far Keats had only
been theoretically talking about the strife and the agonies of the human heart; but now he has
come into a direct contact with those aspects, of human life. Like Apollo, Keats now “dies into
life”.
is, the reader cannot see any connection between the first two books and the third. There is thus
a discontinuity.
Apollo is, after all, the god of poetry, and therefore the immortal poet. The portrayal of
Apollo must therefore have been determined completely by Keats’s own knowledge of
the poetic nature. In other words, in presenting the character of Apollo to us, Keats
had his own nature, and his own nature only, to draw upon for his material. The
legend about the Titans was rather vague, but the inward reality of Apollo had
nothing vague about it because Keats himself was the model for the portrayal of
Apollo. In Book III of Hyperion, Keats said all that he could possibly say at that point
of time concerning the poetic nature, and therefore concerning Apollo. And because he
said here whatever he could have said about the nature of Apollo and consequently
about himself as a poet, the poem is in one sense complete and not just a fragment. In
Book III Keats reveals the secret of the poetic nature, and therefore of his own nature
as a poem.Hyperion is therefore a complete poem. It can be understood wholly in and
for itself. It may be a fragment, but it is a finished fragment.
The Writing of “Hyperion”, An Escape From the Pains of Life
When Keats began to writeHyperion, he was in deep distress on account of the
continuing illness of his brother Tom, an illness which seemed to have reached its final
stage before killing the patient. Keats tried at that time to escaps from the pains of life
by creating a new world in his new poem. The greatest of those pains was, of course, the
continual watching of his brother’s lingering death. At the same time to watch Tom
moving towards death also meant a warning to him of his own premature end, because
he had returned from his tour of Scotland with the beginnings of consumption .in
himself. And then, to aggravate matter’s, there was the hostile criticism of his
poem Endymion,which too weighed heavily upon his mind. Yet another cause of anxiety
to him was his unsatisfied desire for a woman’s love. The only refuge from all these pains
could be a world of the imagination. And so he started writing Hyperion, the
mythological personalities of which would be a source of distraction and comfort to him.
However, he started writing the poem somewhat unwillingly because he knew that,
concerning the character and destiny of the poet-Apollo he was still in the condition of
“purgatory blind”. (He had used the phrase “purgatory blind” in one of his letters to
describe his mental condition of confusion and ignorance).
No Evidence of the Superiority of the Olympians Over the Titans
Hyperion begins with an elaborate description of the misery which god Saturn
experienced as a result of his defeat at the hands of the Olympians, a misery which
seemed to have almost paralyzed both his body and mind. Hyperion is one of the saddest
poems in English, but its sadness is not the icy chill of intellectual despair; it is the warm,
rich sadness of a suffering heart determined to control its pain. The poem throbs, even
though all its figures are divine and immortal, with “the still, sad music of
humanity.”[1] The characters in the poem, though divine and immortal, are essentially
human; their sufferings and anger are human, and their wisdom is human. Keats could
not help it. He was writing from his heart, of what he knew. The life of these Titans was
the life in which he himself was involved. That is why, although his story for its own
progress demanded that the defeated Titans should be inferior to the victorious
Olympians, yet no Olympian could be wiser, kinder, and more beautiful than Saturn.
That Saturn has been overthrown by other gods simply means the defeat of the wise,
kind, and beautiful by the wise, kind, and beautiful. That he should reconquer his throne
from the usurpers would be just another victory of good over good. Oceanus, indeed,
says that just as the Titans are far superior to Heaven and Earth, so the Olympians are
far superior to the Titans. According to Oceanus, there is a higher perfection than that
represented by the Titans, and that higher perfection is to be found in the Olympians.
The Titans have therefore to be succeeded by a power which is more beautiful and more
strong than they. That power (represented by Jove) is destined to surpass the Titans,
just as the Titans have surpassed the old darkness and chaos. Now, the speech made by
Oceanus is undoubtedly a noble utterance, but the poem itself does not confirm the views
expressed by Oceanus. Oceanus speaks about the new dynasty as being far more
beautiful and therefore more strong than the Titans, but when we consider the various
characters in the poem—Saturn, Rhea, Oceanus, Mnemosyne, and Clymene—we do not
think that any power can be more beautiful and therefore more strong than these
characters. Certainly we cannot conceive of a greater majesty than possessed by Saturn,
or of greater wisdom than is displayed by Oceanus, or of greater splendour than that of
Hyperion.
The Power of the True Poet Higher Than that of the Titans
The only one of the Olympians to appear actually before us in the poem is
Apollo. He is perhaps more beautiful than the dethroned Titans, but he has had no hand
in their defeat. He is a poet, and a divine singer, while the Titans have no singer except
the child-like Clymene. Perhaps Keats is here saying that the only “power more strong
in beauty” to excel the Titans was the power of the true poet. Just as the pain of the Titans
is the pain of life itself, inflicted without cause and suffered without demerit, so all that
can be added to the sufferers is first a comprehension of that pain, and then an utterance
of that comprehension. Oceanus comprehends it, but he comprehends it only partially.
The “fresh perfection” which he visualizes will not be what he thinks it will be. Jove is
certainly not going to be nobler than Saturn, and Neptune will not be wiser than
Oceanus. There is only one “fresh perfection” which may come, and that is the perfection
of a vaster knowledge than that of Oceanus. Yet even that perfection Mnemosyne
already possesses.
Apollo, Only a Golden Voice and No More in Books I and II
Mnemosyne, like Apollo himself, does not enter into the poem until Book III. She
is an entirely new conception, just as Book III itself is an entirely new phase of the poem.
The first two Books belong together; they were written mainly before Tom’s death. The
thought of Apollo had been kept in the distance in those two Books; we know no more of
him than that Clymene had heard the calling of the golden singer’s name. Clymene,
giving an account of her experience, to the assembled Titans, says that she had heard a
voice sweeter than all tunes, crying: “Apollo, young Apollo, themorning-bright Apollo.”
Evidently, Clymene had heard Apollo’s own voice crying his own name. Apollo was just
shouting in a sweet voice his own name because lie was drunk with his own lovely
destiny. And that golden voice, described by Clymene, echoed amid the Titans and their
cave. In the first two Books of Hyperion,Apollo is nothing more than a golden voice. Till
Tom was dead, Apollo could be no more than a golden voice. What Keats was to know
and to be, could not be decided till after Tom’s death; and Apollo could know only what
Keats knew, and Apollo could be only what Keat, was.
Sorrow, Joy, and Sorrow Again, in the Beginning of Book III
The opening lines of Book III touch directly on Tom’s death, when Keats asks
the Muse to leave the Titans to their woes and to concern itself with a “solitary sorrow”
and a lonely grief. The death of Tom had undoubtedly brought great sorrow to Keats,
but the ordeal through which Keats had been going had at last ended. With the death of
his brother, Keats was able to breathe freely again. He had starved himself of life for his
brother’s sake; now life passed into him again, and for a moment into his poem. There
is a burst of new confidence in the lines where Keats calls upon all Nature to
commemorate the Father of all verse, namely Apollo. Let the rose glow intense and
warm the air, says Keats. Let the clouds float in voluptuous fleeces over the hills ; let the
shells turn rosy through all their mysterious interiors; “let the maid blush keenly as with
some warm kiss surprised” ; and let the island of Delos rejoice with its olives, poplars,
palms, and beeches. All this because “Apollo is once more the golden theme.” We cannot
miss the inrush of new and intoxicating life in these lines. Nothing could be a more gay
prelude to he coming of Apollo. And yet, after only ten lines more, Apollo appears
weeping not joyfully but in an agony of pain:
He listened and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
Nor were those tears such that any immortal could wipe them away, not even
Mnemosyne.
Keats’s Frustration in Love, the Reason Behind the Sorrow
What had happened was simply this, Tom had died; Keats had entered into life
again, and he had fallen in love. There had really been a moment of triumphant
confidence. He had begun to pour it into his poem, but for a moment only. The rapture
soon faded away because a new sorrow came to him. This sorrow came from his
knowledge that he could not hope for the fulfilment of his passionate love. “The burden
of the mystery” had descended upon him more terribly than ever. Morning-bright
Apollo’s fleeting moment of radiance was over; and therefore he wept.
Apollo’s Encounter with Mnemosyne
To the weeping Apollo comes a stern comforter, the goddess Mnemosyne who
had been guarding him, unseen by him and unknown to him. But Apollo had seen or
rather felt traces of her great presence; and now, as she stands before him, he cries to
her that he had seen the eternal calm of her eyes and had seen her face, adding that he
had perhaps not seen her eyes and face but dreamed of them. The goddess confirms
Apollo’s view that he had dreamed of her. She also says that, on waking up from his
dream, he had found a lyre by his side and that the exquisite music, never heard before
had come from that lyre when he had played on it. She then asks what sorrow it is which
is troubling him. She gives him some idea of who she is by saying that she is an ancient
power who has forsaken old and sacred thrones for his sake and for the sake of the new
loveliness which he represents.
The Two Phases in Keats’s Knowledge of Mnemosyne
Who is this Mnemosyne who has forsaken the old order for the new, of whose
face the young Apollo had dreamed and then woke up into a possession of a matchless
power of song. In the present poem there are two phrases in Keats’s knowledge of
Mnemosyne: the first is Apollo’s dream of her, by which he becomes a poet; the second
is Apollo’s waking sight of her, by which his whole body is convulsed and, changed by
“knowledge enormous”, he become a god. This only shows that Apollo and Keats himself
are essentially the same.
The Deification of Apollo
Mnemosyne means memory; and she has forsaken the old gods to guard the
new-born loveliness of Apollo. When Apollo sees her before him, he cries, in answer to
her question about his sorrow, that she already knows the cause of his sorrow and that
he need not tell her anything. However, he expresses his dissatisfaction with the kind of
the life that he is leading, especially because he cannot comprehend the mystery of the
universe. He wants to know which is the power controlling the forces of Nature. He
speak of his own “aching ignorance” and he asks the goddess to tell him why he keeps
raving about the groves on the island. To Apollo’s appeal in aching ignorance,
Mnemosyne makes no reply. Apollo looks at her face again, and the secret is revealed to
him. He reads a wonderful lesson in her silent face. In that face he reads names, deeds,
gray legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, sovereign voices, agonies, creations and
destroyings. All this enormous knowledge makes a god of him; all this has the effect of
deifying him. He feels as if he had drunk some bright elixir and become immortal. The
poem ends with Keats’s description of the fierce convulsions through which Apollo goes
and as a result of which he “dies into life.” In other words, the poem ends with the
deification of Apollo. Apollo’s dreaming of Mnemosyne had made the boy Apollo a poet,
a lovely and unconcious singer. But his beholding her face to face has made of him a
great poet.
The Identification of Keats with Apollo
Apollo is Keats himself. In the pain of his death into life, brought upon him by
what he sees in the face of Mnemosyne, he had conquered that which he had sought
through the year of purgatory blind; he had conquered the lore of good and ill. For
Mnemosyne’s face contains all life, past, present, and future. She is the eternal existence
of the universe. She belongs to the new order as well as to the old because she is
immanent and ever-lasting; she is a pure mirror of what is—agonies, creations and
destroyings—and in that reflection what is revealed is what must be. And of her the boy
Keats had dreamed. She was “the vast idea” he had mentioned in his early poem Sleep
and Poetry. She had become “the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things”; and Keats
had struggled through “purgatory blind” for a vision of her, face to face. Now he had
achieved what he sought, and knowledge enormous made a god of him, through the pain
of a death in life and a second birth.
A Symbolic Emergence of Keats as a Mature Poet
And so the first Hyperion ends. Keats has become a great and true poet. The
great poet is not a mystic; he is a doer, a maker, a revealer, a creator. The continuation
of Hyperion is all the later poems which Keats wrote, the few that were written and the
many that he could not write on account of his premature death. Those which were
written are among the very loveliest and profoundest poems in the English language.
They are all the great odes, Lamia, and the second Hyperion. And they were only a
beginning, and in Keats’s own opinion a very small beginning. If Keats had lived, he
would certainly have equaled Shakespeare, and he might even have turned to the
writing of dramas and met the great Bard on his own ground.
Hyperion’s Apprehensions, a Reflection of Keats’s Own
There is something autobiographical in Keats’s portrayal of the sun-god
Hyperion also. Hyperion is represented as feeling very apprehensive about his future.
He yet retains his sovereignty over his planet of the sun but, having seen certain bad
omens, he has an uneasy feeling that he might be overthrown. In this state of mind he
asks himself if he is going to lose this “haven” of his rest, this “cradle of his glory”, this
“soft clime”, this “calm luxuriance of blissful light”. He asks himself if he is going to lose
his “lucent empire”, and if he is going to bid good-bye to “the blaze, the spelendour, and
the symmetry.” Now, the apprehensions and fears of Hyperion in a way reflect Keats’s
own fears and anxieties. His brother Tom died in the course of his writing this poem. He
had been much oppressed by his financial worries. His poem Endymion had been
bitterly criticized and condemned by reviewers. His love for Fanny Brawne did not seem
to be bearing any fruit. His own health had greatly deteriorated, and he was already
apprehending a premature death. All these facts of his life had made him feel miserable.
In the misery of the Titans, and especially in Hyperion’s misery, may be seen Keats’s
own misery.
This is the theme, already familiar in Sleep and Poetry and in the letters: that the poet
must not rest in poetical dreams but must share the sorrows of humanity. In the lines
that follow, the theme is carried further. The actively virtuous arc not to be found in the
shrine; they are working in the world. The poet is here because of his weakness, because
he is a dreamer. The priestess goes on to distinguish the poet and the mere dreamer:
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.
Moneta’s “Wan Face”
She then reveals that the temple is Saturn’s, the only remaining shrine of the old
gods, and she is Moneta, the sole remaining priestess. (Moneta is the Latin name of
Mnemosyne.) Then Moneta unveils herself, and is thus described:
Then I saw a wan face,
Not pin’d by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
…………………………………………………
………………deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage, it had pass’d
The lily and the snow ; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away.
The poet asks to be shown the hidden story that lies behind the mysterious temple. She
agrees to reveal it to him, and the story of Hyperion and the Titans, much as it was
narrated in the first version of the poem, then begins.
The Place of the Poet in the World
This is Keats’s last attempt to define the place of the poet in the world. The poet
is less than the man of active virtue, and Keats is still absorbed by the contrast between
the realm of Flora and the other kingdom that he suspects to lie beyond. He has still not
crossed the boundary, but he knows more of what to expect on the journey. It is notable
how much of Keats’s poetry is about poetry, its function, its glories, and its limitations.
It is as though lie is perpetually trying to find a bridge between art and life, but is
perpetually led back to art itself. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats draws two distinctions:
one between the practical and the visionary mind; and the other between the creative
visionary (the poet) and the mere dreamer who vexes the world with visions that he can
do nothing to transmute into reality.
The Symbolism in “The Fall of Hyperion”
The Fall of Hyperion was his last effort to integrate his faculties and impulses,
and to set forth his conception of the poet and the poet’s function in the world.
InHyperion the meaning of Apollo’s spiritual birth-pangs had been left somewhat
obscure; the objective manner of presentation was not natural to one who had always
written directly out of his own feelings, and perhaps he did not quite know what to do
with the god when he had got him. The narrative in The Pall of Hyperionseems to carry
out the general intention ofHyperion, but, by the late summer of 1819, Keats’s failing
health, the prolonged fever of his love for Fanny Brawne, pecuniary troubles, perhaps
most of all the conviction that the topmost heights of poetry were not to be won by a
divided soul, such causes as these had deepened and embittered his despair over himself,
his past and his future. In the symbolism of the garden, the temple, and the shrine, we
perhaps have another variation on the three Wardsworthian stages of development,
from sensuous pleasure to humanitarian concern for the world. But the sketch of poetic
evolution is not now, as inSleep and Poetry, partly wishful prophecy. Keats is here
looking back on what seem to him to be the facts of his brief career, and he condemns
himself, with harsh sincerity, for having dwelt in an ivory tower, for having given to
men the illusive balm of dreams, whereas true poets, by intense effort, seize upon the
reality which is not illusive. To them, as to active benefactors of humanity, the miseries
of the world are misery, and will not let them rest.
The Schism in Keats’s Thinking
One need not be a sentimentalist to feel the profound personal tragedy not only
in the self-laceration of this last effort to feel the giant agony of the world, but also in
Keats’s turning aside from The Fall of Hyperion to enjoy a last serene “sensation” in To
Autumn. We do not endorse his condemnation of a large part of his work, but we can
understand his attitude, can even see that the whole course of his development made it
inevitable. As he said himself, the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a
man, and we cannot guess, if he had health and some measure of contentment, what
would have been his ultimate solution and achievement. His house was. most of the time,
divided against itself, but his consciousness of the fissure, his unceasing endeavour to
solve the problem of sense and knowledge, art and humanity, are in themselves an index
of his stature. No other English poet of the century had his poetic endowment, and no
other strove so intensely to harmonize what may be called the Apollonian and the
Faustian ideals of poetry. However high one’s estimate of what he wrote, one may really
think that Keats was greater than his poems.