Chaucer<\/a> in The House of Fame?), who swoops down with him,–all this still happening, be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,–to a place of sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower, wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her. He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory ejaculation. It was a flaw in Keats’s art and a blot on his genius–or perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his youth?–that thinking nobly as he did of love, yet when he came to relate a lovepassage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.<\/p>\nThe visitant, whose identity is still unrecognized, again disappears; he resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory his past life and aspirations,<\/p>\n
–the spur
\nOf the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans
\nTo nurse the golden age ‘mong shepherd clans:
\nThat wondrous night: the great Pan-festival:
\nHis sister’s sorrow; and his wanderings all,
\nUntil into the earth’s deep maw he rush’d:
\nThen all its buried magic, till it flush’d
\nHigh with excessive love. ‘And now,’ thought he,
\n‘How long must I remain in jeopardy
\nOf blank amazements that amaze no more?
\nNow I have tasted her sweet soul to the core
\nAll other depths are shallow: essences,
\nOnce spiritual, are like muddy lees,
\nMeant but to fertilize my earthly root,
\nAnd make my branches lift a golden fruit
\nInto the bloom of heaven: other light,
\nThough it be quick and sharp enough to blight
\nThe Olympian eagle’s vision, is dark,
\nDark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!
\nMy silent thoughts are echoing from these shells;
\nOr they are but the ghosts, the dying swells
\nOf noises far away?–list!–‘<\/p>\n
The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker’s transient hour of union with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told most fully by Ovid and which Shelley’s lyric has made familiar to all English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:<\/p>\n
–and lo!
\nMore suddenly than doth a moment go,
\nThe visions of the earth were gone and fled–
\nHe saw the giant sea above his head.<\/p>\n
Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery and ‘buried magic’ of the underworld reveal itself in nothing of more original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts nothing like the callingup of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in the Odyssey, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the Eneid. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as ‘Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,’ to refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet’s soul with joy and illumination even among the ‘dismal elements’ of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the under-ground scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or anything but the uncontrolled and aimlessseeming play of invention. But in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness, indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet’s scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.<\/p>\n
Book III . Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly ‘regalities’ in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet ‘On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt’ written the previous March in the copy of his Poems which he gave to Reynolds. When Keats read this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as ‘baaing vanities,’ and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an overdone defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, ‘Are then regalities all gilded masks?’ The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe –cosmic powers, as we should now say–most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is ‘the gentliermightiest.’ Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey. Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon’s praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer’s attention is suddenly diverted,–<\/p>\n
For as he lifted up his eyes to swear
\nHow his own goddess was past all things fair,<\/p>\n
He saw far in the green concave of the sea
\nAn old man sitting calm and peacefully.
\nUpon a weeded rock this old man sat,
\nAnd his white hair was awful, and a mat
\nOf weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.<\/p>\n
The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats’s reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:(17) but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the Arabian Nights.<\/p>\n
Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him. But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man’s welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.<\/p>\n
Had he then wrong’d a heart where sorrow kept?
\n. . . . . . .
\nHe had indeed, and he was ripe for tears.
\nThe penitent shower fell, as down he knelt
\nBefore that careworn sage.<\/p>\n
They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures, even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of Neptune’s kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe, who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla was forgotten. How the witch, the ‘arbitrary queen of sense,’ one day revealed her true character, and ‘specious heaven was changed to real hell.’ (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s great sonnet against lust–<\/p>\n
This all the world well knows; but none know well
\nTo shun the heaven that leads men to this hell?)<\/p>\n
He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and dead, killed by Circe’s arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a seamonster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,–a doom which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in the Arabian Nights, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.<\/p>\n
Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature–if moreover he would piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea–there would one day come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognises the predestined youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old–or rather ‘the young soul in age’s mask’–go together to the submarine hall of burial where–Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers lie enshrined. As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the poet’s own words:–<\/p>\n
‘Let us commence,’
\nWhisper’d the guide, stuttering with joy, ‘even now.’
\nHe spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough,
\nBegan to tear his scroll in pieces small,
\nUttering the while some mumblings funeral.
\nHe tore it into pieces small as snow
\nThat drifts unfeather’d when bleak northerns blow;
\nAnd having done it, took his dark blue cloak
\nAnd bound it round Endymion: then struck
\nHis wand against the empty air times nine.–
\n‘What more there is to do, young man, is thine:
\nBut first a little patience; first undo
\nThis tangled thread, and wind it to a clue.
\nAh, gentle! ’tis as weak as spider’s skein;
\nAnd shouldst thou break it–What, is it done so clean
\nA power overshadows thee! O, brave!
\nThe spite of hell is tumbling to its grave.
\nHere is a shell; ’tis pearly blank to me,
\nNor mark’d with any sign or charactery–
\nCanst thou read aught? O read for pity’s sake!
\nOlympus ! we are safe! Now, Carian, break
\nThis wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.’<\/p>\n
….<\/p>\n
The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it, like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But bearing in mind what we have recognised as the general scope and symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit touched with the divine beam of Cynthia–that is aspiring to and chosen for communion with essential Beauty–in other words the spirit of the Poet–must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away the selfishness of its private passion in sympathy with human loves and sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of the gods with the poetic gift and passion, has only -begun to awaken to sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid for this plunge into sensual debasement; the painful acquisition of the gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognises in him the predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.<\/p>\n
As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was mixing up with his classic myth ideas taken from the Thousand and One Nights. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of Ovid Metamorphoses, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments, and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart of Circe,–let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man. First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering ‘some mumblings funeral’ as he does so (compare the ‘backward mutters of dissevering power’ in Milton Comus). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he waves his magic wand nine times in the air,–as a preliminary to the last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted? Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate sugges tion comes from the couplet in Sandys’s Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-gods admitted him to their fellowship,–<\/p>\n
Whom now they hallow, and with charm nine times
\nRepeated, purge me from my human crimes.<\/p>\n
The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of runes on the shell(18) which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher’s wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of the drowned multitude to life and happiness.<\/p>\n
The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the pageant’s sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser’s festival of the sea-gods at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful multitude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand, and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of Neptune-another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent architectural splendours–and find the god presiding on an emerald throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a speech of arch encouragement, where the poet’s style (as almost always in moments of his hero’s prosperous love) turns common and tasteless. Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid. This is interrupted by the entrance of Oceanus and a train of Nereids. The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion’s human senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away; he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his goddess, written in starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is restored to earth, lying on the grass beside a forest pool in his native Caria.<\/p>\n
BOOK IV. In this book Endymion has to make his last discovery. He has to learn that all transient and secondary loves, which may seem to come between him and his great ideal pursuit and lure him away from it, are really, when the truth is known, but encouragements to that pursuit, visitations and condescensions to him of his celestial love in disguise. The narrative setting forth this discovery is pitched in a key which, following the triumphant close of the last book, seems curiously subdued and melancholy. An opening apostrophe by the poet to the Muse of his native land, long silent while Greece and Italy sang, but aroused in the fulness of time to happy utterance, begins joyously enough, but ends on no more confident note than this:–<\/p>\n
Great Muse, thou know’st what prison
\nOf flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets
\nOur spirit’s wings: despondency besets
\nOur pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn
\nSeems to give forth its light in very scorn
\nOf our dull, uninspir’d, snail-paced lives.
\nLong have I said, how happy he who shrives
\nTo thee! But then I thought on poets gone,
\nAnd could not pray:–nor could I now–so on
\nI move to the end in lowliness of heart.–<\/p>\n
Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the gods, is interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet’s mind’s eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his attempted scrap of an Alexander romance in a fellow-student’s notebook.) Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the coming struggle between his hero’s celestial love and this earthly beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself, laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing him a song of India to ease his passing. Her song, telling of her desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to the new earthly love, not blindly, but realising fully what he forfeits. He bids the damsel–<\/p>\n
Do gently murder half my soul, and I Shall feel the other half so utterly.<\/p>\n
A cry of ‘Woe to Endymion!’ echoing through the forest has no sooner alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury descending. The gods intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he has touched,-the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of the same breed as those ‘steeds with streamy manes’ that paw up against the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in Sleep and Poetry. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other: they are borne aloft together,<\/p>\n
–unseen, alone, Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free, The buoyant life of song, can floating be Above their heads, and follow them untired.<\/p>\n
The poet, seeming to realise that the most difficult part of his tale is now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers, couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a goddess with a mortal. The narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of Hebe’s cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose bugle it is and learns that it is Diana’s; the next moment she is there in presence; he springs to his now recognized goddess, and in the act he awakes, and it is a case of Adam’s dream having come true; he is aware of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the goddess disappears; the damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.<\/p>\n
What is this soul then? Whence
\nCame it? It does not seem my own, and I
\nHave no self-passion nor identity.<\/p>\n
This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his passion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region, or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and constellations to the festival: (the picture of the Borghese Zodiac in Spence Polymetis has evidently given Keats his suggestion here). Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has in a moment swept him down to earth again.<\/p>\n
He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him, and in a long impassioned protestation renounces his past dreams, condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and (not forgetting to propitiate the Olympians) to shower upon her all the treasures of the pastoral earth:–<\/p>\n
O I have been
\nPresumptuous against love, against the sky,
\nAgainst all elements, against the tie
\nOf mortals each to each, against the blooms
\nOf flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs
\nOf heroes gone! Against his proper glory
\nHas my own soul conspired: so my story
\nWill I to children utter, and repent.
\nThere never liv’d a mortal man, who bent
\nHis appetite beyond his natural sphere,
\nBut starv’d and died. My sweetest Indian, here,
\nHere will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast
\nMy life from too thin breathing: gone and past
\nAre cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell!
\nAnd air of visions, and the monstrous swell
\nOf visionary seas! No, never more
\nShall airy voices cheat me to the shore
\nOf tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.<\/p>\n
Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous passage in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where Polyphemus wooes the nymph Galatea.(19) Apparently, though it was through sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and ambitions.<\/p>\n
But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in with her lover’s desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is forbidden her, or can only be compassed by the present death of both (that is, to the mortal in love with the spirit of poetry and poetic beauty no life of mere human and earthly contentment is possible); and so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together into the forest.<\/p>\n
The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now (the word is ‘ensky’d,’ from Measure for Measure). In truth he has been so enthroned for many thousand years (that is to say, the poetic spirit in man has been wedded in full communion to the essential soul of Beauty in the world): the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his ‘lute-voiced brother’: that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first intimation of Keats’s intention to write on the story of Hyperion’s fall and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.<\/p>\n
Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports, but his downcast eyes fail to recognise them. Peona appears; he dreads their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him; Endymion with a great effort, ‘twanging his soul like a spiritual bow’, says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chastity.<\/p>\n
For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell. They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove behind Diana’s temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death (the mood of the Nightingale Ode appearing here in Keats’s work for the first time): then bitterly again:–<\/p>\n
I did wed
\nMyself to things of light from infancy;
\nAnd thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die
\nIs sure enough to make a mortal man
\nGrow impious. So he inwardly began
\nOn things for which no wording can be found;
\nDeeper and deeper sinking, until drown’d
\nBeyond the reach of music: for the choir
\nOf Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar
\nNor muffling thicket interpos’d to dull
\nThe vesper hymn, far swollen, soft and full,
\nThrough the dark pillars of those sylvan aisles.
\nHe saw not the two maidens, nor their smiles,
\nWan as primroses gather’d at midnight
\nBy chilly finger’d spring. ‘Unhappy wight!
\nEndymion!’ said Peona, ‘we are here!
\nWhat wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier?’
\nThen he embrac’d her, and his lady’s hand
\nPress’d saying: ‘Sister, I would have command,
\nIf it were heaven’s will, on our sad fate.’
\nAt which that dark-eyed stranger stood elate
\nAnd said, in a new voice, but sweet as love,
\nTo Endymion’s amaze: ‘By Cupid’s dove,
\nAnd so thou shalt I and by the lily truth
\nOf my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth!’
\nAnd as she spake, into her face there came
\nLight, as reflected from a silver flame:
\nHer long black hair swell’d ampler, in display
\nFull golden; in her eyes a brighter day
\nDawn’d blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld
\nPhoebe, his passion!<\/p>\n
And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved. Vera incessu patuit dea: the forsaken Indian maiden had been but a disguised incarnation of Cynthia herself. Endymion’s earthly passion, born of human pity and desire, was one all the while, had he but known it, with his heavenly passion born of poetic aspiration and the soul’s thirst for Beauty. The two passions at their height and perfection are inseparable, and the crowned poet and the crowned lover are one. But these things are still a mystery to those who know not poetry, and when the happy lovers disappear the kind ministering sister Peona can only marvel:–<\/p>\n
Peona went<\/p>\n
Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.<\/p>\n
The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot tell.<\/p>\n
But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story? The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers in their search for beautiful passages and to dull their enjoyment of them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and passionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us pass to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats’s time.<\/p>\n
FOOTNOTES<\/h4>\n
11. Endymion, iii. 196-209.<\/p>\n
12. Endymion, ii. 569-572 and 908-916.<\/p>\n
13. Metam. i. 26-31, Englished thus by Sandys:–<\/p>\n
Forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless Fire,
\nWhose flames unto the highest Arch aspire:
\nThe next, in levity and peace, is Air:
\nGross elements to thicker Earth repair
\nSelf-clogg’d with weight: the flowing round
\nPossess the last, and solid Tellus bound.<\/p>\n
14. Keats was more widely read in out-of-the-way French literature than could have been expected from his opportunities, and there are passages in Endymion which run closely parallel to Gombauld’s romance, notably the first apparition of Cynthia with the description of her hair (End. I, 605-618) and the account of the sudden distaste which afterwards seizes him for former pleasures and companions. But these may be mere coincidences, and the whole series of the hero’s subsequent adventures according to Gombauld, his dream-flight to the Caspian under the spell of the Theesalian enchantress Ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there, are entirely unlike anything that happens in Keats’s poem.<\/p>\n
15. The authority for this story is the late Sir B. W. Richardson, professing to quote verbatim as follows from Mr Stephens’ own statement to him in conversation.<\/p>\n
‘One evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together, Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, Keats breaks out to Stephens that he has composed a new line:–<\/p>\n
A thing of beauty is a constant joy.<\/p>\n
“What think you of that, Stephens?””It has the true ring, but is wanting in some way,” replies the latter, as he dips once more into his medical studies. An interval of silence, and again the poet:–<\/p>\n
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.<\/p>\n
“What think you of that, Stephens?””That it will live for ever.”‘<\/p>\n
The conversation as thus related at second hand reads certainly as though it had been more or less dressed up for effect, but we cannot suppose the circumstance to have been wholly invented. A careful reading of the first twenty-four lines of Endymion will show that they have close affinities with much both in Sleep and Poetry and ‘I stood tip-toe’ in thought as well as style, and especially in their manner of bringing together, by reason of the common property of beauty, things otherwise so unlike as the cloak of weeds which rivulets are conceived as making to keep themselves cool in summertime (compare ‘I stood tip-toe’ ll. 80-84) musk-roses in a woodland brake (compare Sleep and Poetry 1. 5), the life of great spirits after death, and beautiful stories in general. My own inference is that Keats, having written these two dozen lines some time in 1816, used them the next spring as a suitable exordium for Endymion, and added the following lines, 25-33, as a (somewhat clumsy) transition to the actual beginning of the poem ‘Therefore with full happiness,’ etc., as written at Carisbrooke.<\/p>\n
16. There is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a romance of travel, which Keats may very well have read the Voyage d’Ant\u00e9nor, then popular both in France and in an English translation. Ant\u00e9nor is permitted by the Egyptian priests to pass through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of Osiris. The points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from within the entrance, the rushing of the water streams, and the ascent by a path between balustrades. The Voyage d’Ant\u00e9nor was itself found on an earlier and much rarer French romance, Sethos, and both were freely and avowedly imitated by Thomas Moore in his prose tale, the Epicurean ( 1827). Mr Robert Bridges has noticed a point in common between Endymion and the Epicurean in the sudden breaking off or crumbling away of the balustrade under the wayfarer’s feet. This does not occur in Sethos or Ant\u00e9nor, and was probably borrowed by Moore from Keats.<\/p>\n
17. How familiar, both with the text and the translator’s commentary, is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase which Sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the Imagines (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how the painter had given him ‘thick and arched eyebrows which touched one another.’ Keats writes,-his snow-white brows Went arching up, and like two magic ploughs Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large. It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later.<\/p>\n
18. Mr Mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of The Prelude. I owe so very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later, it is scarcely possible that any passages from The Prelude should have come to Keats’s knowledge until after Endymion was finished.<\/p>\n
19. Ovid, Metam. xiii, 810-840; Theocr. Idyll. xi, 30 sqq.<\/p>\n
I have some lively thoughts that rove about,
\nAnd loudly knock to have their passage out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHAPTER VI ENDYMION.–I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM Invention and imagination– What the moon meant to Keats– Elizabethan Precedents– Fletcher and Drayton– Drayton’s two versions– Debt of Keats to Drayton– Strain of allegory–T he Soul’s quest for beauty-Phantasmagoric adventures– The four elements theory– Its error-Book I. The exordium– The forest scene– Confession to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4992,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions\/4992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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