Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

st for beauty-Phantasmagoric adventures-The four elements theory-Its error-Book I. The exordium-The forest scene-Confession to Peona-Her expostulation-Endymion's defence-The ascend

le-Its machinery explained-The happy sequel-Book IV. Address to the Muse-The Indian damsel-An ethereal flight-Olympian

of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of

s is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame-it makes me say-God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked-why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Readin

me naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,-'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.'

ng together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration of Endymion. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility

pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early poetry, and we have seen, in 'I stood tiptoe,' what a range of beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to work on Endymion, we shall find her, by reason of that special glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first perhaps instinctively and unaware, but

eats was no doubt acquainted with the Endimion of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happe

dering, pale, a

ragons draw he

mount up to t

with blazing li

roudl

e have been certai

e moon sleeps

d not be

Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the Maid's Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael

thee stay, wher

t thou? Here be

ikewise as fr

h Zephyrus pla

ed Streams, with

ing gives, and a

Delights, cool S

with Woodbinds,

wilt, whilst I

shes to make

ngers; tell the

Phoebe huntin

Boy Endymion,

rnal fire th

y'd him softl

und with poppy

us, where she st

ntain with her

her sw

ayton's poems in Smethwick's edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The Man in the Moone is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of ast

truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth

n now f

ts that shephe

mind so gen

cted, to the gr

oebe, that hi

queen) unto the

rivers beautifi

des bathe them

er the sea-hors

blue Nereide

ters, godde

mountains act

ongst the li

wift roes, Phoe

st those that w

es, doth the

stays not; b

dragons that he

mion pleased

eon, in twink

winds, beholdi

oundness of a

e so loose in grammar and construction t

n a dozen lines3 which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts sup

other (I speak especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this time most familiar-Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne and practically all the Spenserians,-were men apt to conceive alike of Grecian myth and medi?val romance as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's Metamorphoses, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself familiar with the details of cla

so little obtruded or even made clear that they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earl

d when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of thin

the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out 'the one bare circumstance,' to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain o

the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.5 Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the cont

der

ions, past t

rtal

in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? 'Our friend Keats,' Endymion is made to say in one of the poet's lette

not as ar

e like this I

earth, and throug

dred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats's mind from various

g that he was not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'7 Using this for the first line of his new poem, Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of beauty-sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and heroism indiscriminately-which make for health and quietude amidst the gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in setting about his cherished task in

ul trance, during which there comes to him his sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lemprière as a son of Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of the gods in the Iliad, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and comforter; or very probably by all three togeth

'tis vai

t know of thi

rry; such alo

own thy

gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he

tars dart their

uggle with the

s the heavy

e alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to reality, he found himself alone on the bed o

pleasa

arth had faded:

ngeons: heaths

tilent light; an

d o'erspread wit

; the vermeil

arlet, and its

spikè

man, so the interpretation would seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation a fresh

strange an

ough this middle

journing demi-

he harp-string,

rd than simp

and fearfully

cheek; and how

re; and how he

was love: and

be but love? H

rig of yew-tr

and then, that

t, as Northern

allad of his s

and an ala

ortance to the passage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher, he says-'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that when I wrote it, it was a regular step

have I lon

e world's praise

berous phantas

anvas for my v

tatter'd; leav

drifting: yet

, too rainbow-

yriads of ea

appiness? In t

nds to fello

with essence;

d, and free of

religion

the world. In the next lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats, having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and endeavour which he asks us to co

en the ai

s impregnates

ympathetic t

from their

waken from en

gh above their

lodious prop

ot where trod

ns awake, and

ago a giant

turf, a lull

where infant

thoughts are directed to other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more 'self-destroying' (that is

ious is the u

might have tow

ongregated w

om the coming

custom, wipe

slugs and hu

ntent to let

id sleep in l

would rather b

inst this arde

r thought that

th benefits

ightingale, u

among cool and

o her love, nor

t holds back he

bitions for the joys of a merely mortal love, how much more may he do so for those of an i

o, I'

spirit never

long upon

d, though fe

d the shadow

ve life, that hope beyond the shadow of a dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the

ly flame of h

: but yet, I'll

d it die. Hav

ore healthy

back from her island, the anx

portance of the wars and catastrophes of history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of

brood on wit

eath-day o

usted, 'moves the sun and the other stars?' Are they not related to it as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks

on sits and soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which express the ebb and flow of Keats's own inner aspirations and misgivings about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin goddess Cynthia to quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of all; the goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of love higher and purer than the Cupids are concerned

, nor somb

up; a gleami

pire and i

ternal even

endant diamond guides him further till he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his passive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive an

d Nineveh,

gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence, reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or some of the magical subterranean palaces of the Arabian Nights. (Beckford's Vathek and the Thousand and One Nights were both among Keats's familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of earth. The

the looks and presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the ancients,-the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of winter, with all the ulterior and associated hopes implied by such a resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat the favour of Venus for his quest when she antic

past wild m

ruggedst loopho

oss a void, th

s, where, all

anean teaze the

d just above t

ountains, so th

his spear; but

y, those spout

's height, and

h with fretwork

zling cool, an

phin tumults, w

he float

id-space and ends in nothing.8 Endymion calls to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle, (is this the eagle of Dante in the Purgatory and of Chaucer 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

is quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full of sea treasures an

e s

ds to mighty d

lden age 'mong

night: the gre

orrow; and his

earth's deep

uried magic, t

ive love. 'And n

ust I remai

ements that a

ted her sweet

ths are shall

al, are like

fertilize my

ranches lift

om of heaven

ick and sharp e

eagle's vis

parentage of

ts are echoing f

t the ghosts,

far away

er-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

nd

y than doth

the earth wer

iant sea abo

shments in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as 'Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,' to refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet's soul with joy and illumination even among the 'dismal elements' of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground scenery and incidents it is hard to

imed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities all gilded masks?' The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe-cosmic powers, as we should now say-most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-mightiest.' Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sa

fted up his

dess was past a

the green conc

tting calm an

d rock this

hair was awf

old beneath his

iar with this story:9 but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown

But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man's welcome first with suspicious terr

ng'd a heart wh

··

, and he was

hower fell, as

hat care

ree 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

ld well knows; b

en that leads me

a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a sea-monster 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

his 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 recognizes the pr

s comm

de, stuttering wi

trembling like

his scroll i

hile some mumb

nto pieces s

ather'd when ble

e it, took his

round Endymio

st the empty a

e is to do, you

ittle patienc

hread, and win

is as weak as

break it-What, i

rshadows th

ell is tumblin

ll; 'tis pear

th any sign o

aught? O read

re safe! Now,

nst yon lyre o

traight with sudd

ath'd her soul

silence.-'You

aves on me, and

dead, scatter t

see the issue.

viols, ravis

om Glaucus

n his face some

ift the change!

neath a co

sudden like an

stepping to a b

ide it, and with

hand, and wept,-a

quick hand, the

e: he left the

ent upon his

powerful fragm

ed, each lifte

lower at Ap

o his inwards:

eeping in his

persever'd a

-animated.

armony, puls

in the air-w

utual arms de

h other madly

certainty of

pon Endymion

nd would have i

phonies, like

d, and, full-blown

unseen leaves

verers taste

from fairy-p

y ey'd each ot

embly wander

ith the rich

ever pour'd

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 deserti

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

llow, and with c

ge me from my

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 symbolis

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 ta

t 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 subdue

thou know'st

e, curbs, and co

wings: desp

and the fresh

forth its ligh

ninspir'd, sna

id, how happy

hen I thought

pray:-nor co

end in lowli

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

rder half my

he other hal

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 tho

en, a

ds and winds, b

ife of song,

ads, and follo

ence 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;

is soul th

oes not seem

f-passion n

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 sca

is past dreams, condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and declares his intention to live alone with

have

gainst love, a

elements, ag

h to each, aga

ush of rivers

e! Against hi

oul conspire

ildren utter

iv'd a mortal

beyond his na

died. My sweet

neel, for tho

o thin breathin

tasms. Caverns

ions, and the

y seas! No,

ices cheat me

nder, breathl

n, the famous passage in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea.11 Apparently, though it was through sympathy with the human sorrow

guished 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 a

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

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

ily, 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 g

id

ngs of light

e cast out, t

ugh to make

s. So he in

which no wordi

eper sulking,

ach of music:

heard not, tho

thicket inter

n, far swollen

pillars of thos

two maidens, no

oses gather'

er'd spring. '

aid Peona, '

ou ere we all a

c'd her, and

'Sister, I wou

ven's will, on

dark-eyed stra

new voice, bu

s amaze: 'By

halt! and by

st thou shalt,

ke, into her f

lected from a

hair swell'd am

in her eyes a

d full of love

, his

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

na

he gloomy wood

e. 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 o

te 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

ing sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. This legend was early crystallized in a lyric poem of Sappho now lost, and thereafter became part of the common heritage of Greek and Roman popular mythology. The separate moon-goddess, Seléné for the Greeks and Luna for the Romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform divinities of the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana respectively; so that in modern literatures derived from the Latin it is

ce with Elizabeth: just as in Lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of contemporary court intrigue,

on, iii.

ii. 569-572

31, Englished t

ng the quick and

nto the highes

levity and

ts to thicke

h weight: the Wa

ast, and soli

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

Richardson, professing to quote verbatim as follows f

er, Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, K

eauty is a c

wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more int

eauty is a j

t, Stephens?" "That it

ll 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' II. 80-84) musk-roses in a woodland brake (compare Sleep and Poetry I. 5), the life of great spirits aft

, 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'Anténor was itself founded on an earlier and much rarer French romance, Sethos, and

andys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the Imagines (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of Philostratus. Philostrat

ow-whi

p, and like tw

rinkles in his

e, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found h

xote 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

i, 810-840; Theocr.