Mythology As Poetics

Mythology as Poetics
Title
MYTHOLOGY AS POETICAL STRATEGY IN KEATS’S POETRY
[KEATSIAN REINVENTION OF MYTHOLOGY]
(WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE HYPERION POEMS)
BY SUPRATIM BASU
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE RABINDRA BHARTI UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD
OF THE DEGREE OF M.PHIL IN ENGLISH.
ROLL RAB –ENG, NO- 04/3

REG. NO-239,OF (97-98)
SESSION-2003-04
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Keats’s poetry is so often read and re-read that preparing a critical thesis on his poetry
involves increased rigours. Yet I have dared to go for as much, and I owe this daring to
those splendid teachers mainly who built me up academically. I also wish here to
acknowledge the varied support I received from my parents ,friends and relatives
who are responsible for helping me into doing this volume.
However , without the help and guidance of Professor Chidananda Bhattacharya I would
not have been able to compile and edit this volume .He not only supervised my endevour
through and through, , but also, generously allowed me to venture in my speculations
and rectified my inaccuracies .I am also profoundly grateful to Professor Nilagrib
DebRoy for consistent intellectual support and for advice and encouragement .I thank
him for patiently lending his ear through my work and offering helpful insights. I am
indebted to Professor Amitava Roy for his endless help and suggestion for improvement .
I am deeply grateful to my father whose loving wisdom is a constant boost behind my
study .He is also the artist of the sketch illustration of Keats (Cover Jacket).
Lastly I wish to express my deep gratitude to all those concerned in making my effort
possible.
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CONTENTS
Contents Page no.
1. Acknowledgement : 2
• Introduction : 4
2. Chapter One:
[“The Realm of Flora”] 15
3. Chapter Two: 48
[“Colossal Grandeur”]
4. Chapter Three : 69
[“Salvation of a Poet ”]
5. Conclusion : 80
6. Select Bibliography: 82
*****************************
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INTRODUCTION
Genius is a wild flower that blossoms in the strange crannies .The history of
Keats’s life and poetry is the product of the reaction of his poetic faculties to the facts of
his experience .The brief span of his poetic potential that extended form autumn 1816 to
autumn 1819 when he composed all of his poems of intrinsic value , is a rare blend of
turns and counter turns of creating mind. It is, in effect, the history of an internal warfare,
and the poems remain as monuments of battles won and lost in that anguished conflict .
The first thirty years of the nineteenth century are remarkable in England for the
number of men of the highest genius who in them gave their best work to the world .This
wonderful age is often called the second Renaissance , because its only parallel in our
literature is the first great Renaissance which gave us Shakespeare and his comrades.With
all their exalted philosophies the Romantics also showed a passion for the wonder of the
world , and to appreciation of all the glories of Greek and Roman mythologies .This
period drew its life largely from the renewed study of Greek letters.Keats shows us in
perfection the working of both the destructive and creative energies.But if Keats was a
Romantic, he was also a Classicist, not as Pope’s school understood the word, but in the
sense that he had much of spirit of the old Greeks - a desire for the perfected rather than
an adumbrated beauty, a delight in finished workmanship rather than in vague
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suggestiveness, a feeling for form .Added to this were a deep interest in the subject
matter of the old Greek writers - the myths of gods and titans, nymphs and fauns - and
that innocent pagan delight in the physical side of life .Perhaps none of our poet has been
so Greek as Keats who never saw Greece and did not read Greek .
It was this Greek strain in Keats, we may suppose , which made him discard the
literary excess of his early models and which showed him the merits even of the despised
Classical school . The history of Keats’s works, indeed, is the history of a series of
experiments : Keats was willing to learn from any poet who had anything to teach .
The present study attempts to elaborate Keats’s nexus with mythology as a major
creative and artistic impulse. It throws light on the substratum of mythical themes that
lend coherence and unity to entire range of his poetry. Mythologizing is an essential
component of his psychic and creative processes. The poet’s own experiences are woven
into the fabric of his larger mythical plot. Infact the mythical mode serves as the deepest
and most fertilizing source of his aesthetic outcome. Much troubled by his own tragic
circumstances, Keats instinctively turns to the cool, chaste world of the past. This is done
through an imaginative resurrection of ancient divinities, remodelling of myths with
symbolic overtones, and most important of all, through presenting on a single canvas
mythologies of different cultures. Keats exhibits a firm belief in the exclusive power of
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mytholgizing. Keats ‘mythic vision’ is an intuitive response to the unconscious designs
and patterns that were absorbed in his poetry.
Myths have an uncanny power to thrill us, uplift us, pull us out of the pettiness of
our ego-lives, and transport us to a realm of magic, noble deeds, and unearthly passion.
But myth does more than that: if we learn to listen it also gives us specific psycological
information and teaches us the deep truths of the psyche. Myths are like dreams. Dreams
are the messenger of the unconscious self. Through them the unconscious communicates
its contents and its concerns to the conscious mind. By learning the symbolic language of
dreams , a person learns to see what is going on within at an unconscious level and even
discovers what needs to be done about it . Yung demonstrated that mythological themes
are clothed in modern dress frequently appear. What is of particular importance for the
study of literature in these manifestations of the collective unconscious is that they are
compensatory to the conscious attitude. But though dream expresses the dynamics within
an individual ,a myth expresses the dynamics within a society, culture or race . A myth is
the collective dream of an entire people at a certain point in their history. It is as though
the entire population dreamed together, and that ‘dream’, the myth , burst forth through
its poetry, songs, paintings and sculptures . But a myth not only lives in literature and
imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behaviour and attitudes of the culture
into the practical daily lives of the people .
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Myth concerns us not only for the part they play in all primitive , illiterate, tribal
or non-urban cultures , which makes them one of the main objects of anthropological
interest , not only for the grip that versions of ancient Greek myths have gained through
the centuries on the literary culture of the Western nations ; but also because of men’s
endearing insistence on carrying quasi-mythical modes of thought, expression, and
communication into a supposedly scientific age .
There is no one definition of myth, no Platonic form of a myth against which all
actual instances can be measured. Etymology is a traditional point of departure, but in
this case an unhelpful one. For the Greeks ‘muthos’ just meant a tale, or something one
uttered, in a wide range of senses : a statement , a story, the plot of a play . The word
‘mythology’ can be confusing in English, since it may denote either the study of myths ,
or their content , or a particular set of myths. Even it is confusing in their admixture of
what might otherwise be called folktale, legend, theology or even sociology.
Myths, legend, fairy tales transmit in the purest form certain archetypal images
which inevitably reappear in all great literature . Myth is the key to artistic creation and
under the stimulus of it poets refashion their own poetics . The possession if this myth
gives the artists a greater opportunity than that afforded the Greek artist of the fifth
century B.C ;for the modern artist not only knows a greater number of myths, he knows
much more about very nature of myth . The increasing respect for the primitive and
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specifically for the myths and legends was actually a characteristic way of expressing
their own thoughts and views . If , as Kant argued, the mind is no passive mirror , merely
giving back the world reflected in it but is rather an active force that affects the very
shape of reality as perceived by us, then the symbolization of the primitive are not absurd
,but had their own interest and perhaps made their own contribution to 'truth' .It is
therefore to be expected of the poet that he will resort to mythology in order to give his
experience its most fitting expression . It would be serious a mistake to suppose that he
works with materials received at second hand .The primordial experience is the source of
his creativeness ; it can not be fathomed , and therefore requires mythological imagery to
give it form .In itself it offers no words or images , for it is a vision seen 'as in a glass,
darkly' . It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression .It is like a
whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and , by carrying it aloft , assumes a visible
shape . Since the particular expression can never exhaust the possibilities of the vision ,
but falls far short of it in richness of content , the poet must have at his disposal a huge
store of materials if he is to communicate even a few of his intimations.
The new stream incorporated a reorientation of the English mind and a
reinterpretation of the classics with special significance attached to mythology . The ideas
and spirit of ancient Greece served as renewed source of inspiration . The Greek
philosophers had been aware of the unity of being ,the ancient Athenian state had
practised political freedom . Helenic art represented beauty that did not adhere to rules ,
and mythology was a manifestation of the strength of the human imagination .
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By its very nature and genesis the Romantic Movement was myth oriented
. It subsisted on the myth of a golden past and the noble savage . From myth to
mythology is a natural corollary . Rational thinking gave way to individual reponse . The
mythological
imagination was reborn .It served as a suitable vehicle of communication . The search for
the ‘noble savage’( the ideal man of primitive society) and for the natural society from
which the rational expelled himself , led the poets to the very heart of mythology . In
order to recreate the atmoshphere of the Golden Age , which they felt would provide
clues for reforming the corrupt modern world , they reshuffled the mythological pattern ,
thus giving it a symbolic significance .
Mythology was remodelled with symbolic overtones . Keats's use of mythology is
personal and without any extra-literary design . Keats believed that the artist does not
proceed to the root of all feelings and impulses by the simplest path . His artistic intuition
leads him to the elemental forms of nature and human life incorporated in mythology . In
the mythology of classical antiquity he 'found' a readymade vocabulary and symbolism of
those natural forces and ideal concepts on the balance of which he believed the cultural
health of the individual to depend and which he thought to be artificially stifled by the
prevailing Christian culture . Perhaps it is inaccurate to imply with the word 'found' , that
he suddenly discovered this mine of elemental poetic ore , for his fascination with myth
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antedated his poetic career . But at some point very early in his writing life , certainly
before he had firmly settled upon poetry as a profession , he had discovered the utility of
myth and had constructed a fairly elaborate aesthetic upon its formulation .
Keats's primary interest was in deities and these are extraordinarily prominent
in his poetry . His earliest known poem , the Imitation of Spenser , contains
references to Morning (his name for , presumably , Arora) and Flora .
Endymion and Hyperion , the two long poems upon which Keats expended
perhaps the greatest efforts of his brief career , are entirely given to the
celebration and elaboration of myths centered in deity . Within Endymion are
embedded separate hymns to , characterisations of , or , addresses to Apollo and
Bacchus ,Cupid ,Diana , Neptune , Pan and Venus . In the remaining body of his
work there are odes to Apollo, Maia and Psyche , apostrophic sonnets and odes
to Autumn , Fame , Hope , Peace , Sleep and Solitude all conceived in the vein
of classical personification , and virtually innumerable allusions to and
inclusions of Olympian matter , throughout. Keats's mythopoeic tendencies are
implicit even in his immature early verses .
In his mature works Keats abandoned stereotypes and adopted mythology with
greater originality . The deep rooted philosophy is continued to be transported within the
framework of mythological plots .
Among his contemporaries , Leigh Hunt , who shared and sometimes engendered
Keats's sympathies , recognized and approved of the centrality of myth in Keats's poetic
imagination . For him it was sufficient commendation to say of the poet that ; " he never
beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad " .
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Courthope contended that Keats's natural feeling for " the mythological spirit of
Pagan times " , combined with " a voluptuous perception of beauty in natural things and a
brilliant fancy which enabled him readily to abstract ideal from the objects presented to
his eye led him toward a mythologized nature poetry which was essentially pictorial and
therefore static that his motive was the creation of an ideal atmoshphere , free from the
dynamic social flux of his own age* .
Before the end of Keats's own century , a French critic had questioned the extent
to which his extraordinary employment of myth conveyed any of the values associated
with the culture from which it was derived . He concluded that Keats's mythologizing ,
through Endymion , exists for its own sake , and while embodying great intensity of
feeling , is revelatory of nothing profound enough to warrant the use of its machinery**,
but that in his mature work , Keats's acute sensibility to external form and his perception
of the earth - and life centered quality of the Greek spirit entitle him to be called , " the
most Greek of the English poets " .
Much the best treatment of the subject and one of the best essays on Keats ever
written , is Margaret Sherwood's excellent discussion of Keats's mythological orientation
. Its essential statement is that myth was a necessary mode of utterance for the young
poets of Keats's time , who required a new poetic vocabulary for expression of a new
view of man's nature and destiny and that the special role of myth in Keats's work was a
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provision of a means by which he was enabled to interpret and express his insights into
the operative processes of nature , the principle of harmonious unity in all life , and the
fulfillment of individual destiny through obedience to nature's laws*** .
Keats's physique , particularly in the character alignment of forehead , nose and
chin reminded his friends , of the Greek ideal of manly beauty ." The form of his head " ,
Baily said , " was like that of a fine Greek statue , and he realised to my mind the
youthful Apollo, more than any head of a living man whom I have known " . " A painter
or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the Greek masters " , George Felton
Mathew said , " and have given him a station like the herald Mercury , new lighted on
some heaven-kissing hill " .
With the light of the above discussions we may conclude that without the
use of mythology Keats's poetry could not have touched the zenith as it did . Mythology
helped him to give voice to his deepest and most personal feelings . His greatness lies in
the fact that he has been able to formulate a poetics based upon the timeless relevance of
mythology .
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NOTES
Age * = William John Courthope , “A History of English Poetry,volume–6
“ The Romantic Movement in English Poetry ” (London , 1910) .
13
Machinery ** = Joseph Texte , “ Keats’s et le neo – hellenisime dans las
poise anglaise ” (Paris , 1898)
Laws *** = Margaret Sherwood , “ Keats’s Imaginative Approach to
Myth” , in undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry .
Cambridge , Massachusets , 1994 .
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CHAPTER I
REALM OF FLORA
KEATS’S MYTHIC VISION IN POETRY
Among the formative influences in Keats’s work, classical reading had
contributed a great deal to the maturation of his poetic style and vocabulary. Keats’s ideal
was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse as well as the
perfect form. The characters from classical antiquity had haunted him from the beginning
of his career and he cherished them throughout his life. One of Keats’s preoccupations
was to ensure his place among the ‘mighty dead’. To rise to these heights he chose, to fall
back upon, among other sources, the mythology of the ancient world. There might be
another obvious cause - his own troubled and tragic circumstances. He instinctively
turned to the cool, chaste world of the past. The response of Keats’s mythic vision is
developed throughout his poetry.
Keats’s earlier negotiations with mythology is found in Ode to Apollo (1815). In
it amidst the simplest tone of infantile poesy drawn from imitations of Odes of Gray,
Collins and others, there is a gleam of mythological fancy :
“In thy western halls of gold
when thou sittest in thy state.”
The young poet’s fealty to Apollo might be only a verbal inheritance but it acquired a
deeper meaning in the next four years, pointing to its culmination in Hyperion.
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Keats’s first series of mythological allusions is found in Epistle to George Felton
Mathew (Nov, 1815). The clairvoyant tone was only to trigger off a more mature future.
It also shows us statements of Keats’s conflicting poetic impulses and in the midst of
sensuous pictures lay scattered his focus on humanity, the celebration of the poets whose
genius has helped to cure the stings of the pitiless world. The letters addressed to George
Keats & C. C. Clarke (Aug. & Sept. 1816) show a similar gusto in incarnating these
themes & motives. Sensuous delights & humanitarian aspects were more instinctive and
congenial parts in Keats’s poetry than to be considered two poetic worlds set in
opposition.
I Stood Tip-toe (1816) is the product of a puerile effort in a transport of sensual
intoxication, “a poesy of luxuries”, as often described, but the essential thing is Keats’s
full affirmation of the identity of nature, myth & poetry. The allusions of the mythical
deities refer to Keats’s progressive adaptation of myth to humanitarian symbolism.
However, it was in the chapters of Wordsworth’s The Excursion where Keats found the
inspiration of mythology. It has transformed the boyish passion for myth into a ripened
understanding. But there were potent distinctions in identifying the nature of myth
between Wordsworth and Keats. Wordsworth was more preoccupied in philosophizing
rather than deciphering the element of pure myth. He did not see a dryad in every Oak
tree. Keats took delight in mythical tales in a half sophisticated, half-primitive manner.
He poured out his imagination to enshrine those mythological tales and deities in his
poetry.
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It was by the reading of the Elizabethans and especially Spenser that Keats came
to realize the “material sublime” in myth. In a more Modern romantic manner Keats was
able to equate poetry and myth, and was quite comfortable in accepting the allegorical
interpretations of myth. Keats was more inclined into humanizing the mythic figures in
order to convey and carry on his romantic experiences with a flavour of both symbolic
and subjective applications.
In Sleep and Poetry (1816) Keats seemed to have gathered more maturity as it
unraveled his contradictory impulses and ambitions in the process of poetic development.
In the tripartite stage divisions the poet gradually progresses from the realm of Flora and
old Pan to a futuristic anticipation of greater poetry. Keats felt urgency to pass the
luxuries and delights for a nobler kind of poetry, that dealt with the agonies, the strife of
human hearts.
In the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer (1816) Keats discovered a new imaginative
world. It was the new poet who had found the distinctive and authoritative tone and
imagery. The image of Cortes and his crew beholding the pacific magnifies and
transforms the subject, so that, the poem celebrates not just the private enlightening
encounter with Chapman’s volume but rather the human sense of awakening to awe-
inspiring beauties : it is as though Keats is truly recognizing his own destinies. Hunt said
that “the sonnet terminates with so energetic calmness --- completely announced the new
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poet taking possession”. Yet the conflict persisted (the confusion of Cortes with Balboa)
which suggests that even on this peak, Keats’s position was not fully secure.
It was March 1 or 2 in 1817 when Keats with Hay don, went to see the beauty of
the Elgin Marbles. These were a collection of sculptures brought from Greece by lord
Elgin and placed in the British museum in 1816. They consist chiefly of fragments from
the Parthenon at Athens, executed under the direction of Phidias. Keats immediately
composed a second sonnet, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles. The sonnet “reveals the
important and unusual influence exerted over Keats by Greek sculpture” (A. R. Weeks).
One critic has said that “Hyperion is in poetry what the Elgin Marbles are in sculpture”. It
was really an important encounter that the “clam grandeur” of Greek art evolved a thing
majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions and
grand in its simplicity. This influence is most poignant in the Odes On Indolence and On
a Greecian Urn.
The masculine and classic style of the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer was not
recaptured until Keats wrote Hyperion. However, the growth of craftsmanship continued
with Keats’s veneration for beauty. The inclination and philosophic apprehension of myth
is remarkable at this time. The personalization of myth with a youthful vigour is the
backdrop of Endymion (24th April, 1817), one of the longest poems on a classic myth in
English. Much like Alastor, Endymion poses to answer the fundamental questions about
the relation of the artist to his art and to the world. Shelley’s hero is a romantic idealist,
who being dissatisfied in the unlovely world of humanity, frustrated in his quest, dies in
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solitude : that matches with Shelley’s philosophy; “so to pursue the vision and perish than
to live, a finished and finite clod, untroubled by a spark”. But Keats Endymion’s search
for ideal love and beauty at last led him away from purely visionary idealism to the
knowledge that the actual world of human life can only be the ideal.
To furnish his epic poem Keats selected the Greek myth of Endymion and
Cynthia. Keats wanted to fabricate a new mythology out of the common myth connected
to Endymion. In a letter to sister Fanny, Keats had outlined the simple plot of Endymion;
“Many years ago there was a young handsome shepherd who fed his flocks on a
Mountain’s side called Latmus --- he was a very contemplative sort of a person and lived
solitry (sic) among the trees and plains little thinking --- that such a beautiful creature as
the Moon was growing mad with him. However, so it was, and when he was asleep on
the grass, she used to come down from Heaven and admire him excessively from (sic) a
long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of
that High mountain Latmus while he was dreaming”. This simple story hovers around the
composition of Book-I. Most of Endymion’s confusions in the poem arise from Diana’s
decision to visit the poet prince., first in the form of an unknown goddess, secondly in
guise of an Indian maid. Endymion is constantly bewildered and deceived by his own
feelings which ultimately is resolved in his understanding that all these forms are one.
The poem concludes with the immortalization of Endymion and his marriage to Diana.
Endymion completes his journey in search of ideal. The moon becomes the metaphor for
poetic inspiration, creativity and beauty. Her generative influence is transported to
Endymion who symbolizes the ideal poet. “Endymion’s poetic romance is the first
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sustained example of Keats’s style and highly personal use of mythology, artificial and
yet true to feelings”(John Barnard). With myriad allusions of Greek and Roman deities
and references to mythological motifs Endymion seeks to figure forth Keats’s recreation
of the Greek antiquity with a tincture of modern flavouring. In the preface to the poem
Keats wrote – “I hope I have not too late in the day touched the beautiful mythology of
Greece and dulled its brightness; for I wish to try once more before I bid it farewell”.
Though in Endymion Keats’s source is not the Greek literature itself, but an
amalgamation from second-hand sources, the bold affirmation quoted above lies at the
heart of Keats’s purpose of composing this long poem. Keats loved the ‘natural theology’
of the Greek. Severn reported once, that for Keats, the essence of Greek spirit was “the
religion of the Beautiful, the religion of joy, as he used to call it”. The Helenic revival of
the theme is an example of Keats’s working with pagan beliefs. Keats’s admiration for
the simplicity and the sensuousness of the ancient Greek and his response to the
mythological paintings were the origins of Keats’s understanding of myth. Mythological
paintings made the vitality of Greek myth live again for the modern viewer. Keats
encountered the paintings of Poussin, Claude, Titian, Raphael and had conceived the
theme of romance. But the static framework of a painting was hard to be communicated
through narrative poems. Paintings demonstrate only a modern recreation of the ancient
stories. Keats wanted to explore beauty and truth and he used Endymion’s mythological
painting and inset stories to carry on his project. “Endymion” is “a confessional poem
growing out of the immediate turmoil of spirit” (Douglas Bush), it is also an answer to
contemporary despair and despondency. The failure of the French Revolution had left a
trail of political and social repression and disaster. Fuelled by a shared anger at this
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hopelessness, the second generation Romantics all voiced their emotions in poems and
other writings. Endymion’s mythological Greece purposes an alternative to the dominant
values and beliefs represented by the repressive policies of Castlereagh and Sidmouth,
and the narrow puritanical beliefs of the society for the propagation of Christian
knowledge. The re-imagining of an ancient Greek myth expressed the potential of
humanity at large and Keats’s purpose was not unusual. From Voltaire to Hume everyone
of the Enlightenment era had cultured Pre-Christian mythology to question Christianity’s
claims to unique truth. As Marilyn Butler points out, in the second decade of the 19th
century, Greek mythology provided writers like Hunt, Peacock, Hazlitt, Keats and
Shelley with an important occasion for dissent from prevailing orthodoxies, (quoted from
john Barnard’s Keats ). Keats saw the Greek world as one which attested to the pre-
eminence of Art and Beauty.
In writing Endymion Keats’s primary instinct was to aspire after those high
regions of genius; as is exposed in several letters; He wrote to Bailey in October 1817;
“--- it (Endymion) will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination and chiefly of my
invention which is a rare thing indeed by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare
circumstance and fill them with poetry”. Keats felt thereafter, that “Besides a long poem
is a test of invention which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as Fancy is the sails and
Imagination the Rudder,” that it was the stimulus of Imagination the faculty that enables
a poet to create Beauty and to seize it as Truth. To Keats Imagination and Beauty were
inclusive terms, “the delicate snail thorn perception of Beauty” is caused by the power of
Imagination. Imagination, ‘the sine qua non’ for a poet, his only passport to the realm of
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Beauty, is used in Endymion as a kind of cosmic consciousness-that enables him to
transcend Time and Space and enter into a “fellowship with essence”.
By this time Keats had already begun to establish his philosophy, “a
comprehension (and a comprehension of a peculiar kind) of the mystery of human life”
(Keats & Shakespeare, J. M. Murry).
The touch of incidental mythology is seen in Hymn to Pan and the Ode to Sorrow.
These were Keats’s early vein of Elizabethan luxuriance. But if these were less satisfying
than Keats’s profounder treatments of myth, can safely be his first ever ventures to
recreate myth.
The spring of 1818 saw the emergence of a new poet. The sensuous, imaginative
and fanciful Endymion expressed “the virgin passion of a soul communing with the
glorious universe” (Douglas Bush). The heavy depression of feelings is revealed in the
letters of late April. In a letter to Bailey he spoke about the dark unpredictabilities of life.
He was a bit subjective while said; “I am not old enough or magnanimous enough to
annihilate self”. Here he was brooding over the final violent dislocation of what was left
of his family-one brother driven by the burden of society to America, and another with
his ‘exquisite’ love of life, so unaccountably and helplessly dying.
Certainly the eight and a half weeks stay at Devonshire was a time of profound
transition for Keats. Though he was tossing along a phase of dejection it was inevitable to
bring forth the mercurial temperament in him. The general spirit had not been
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diminished. There were infinite new horizons - he always loved a wide prospect that
seemed to beckon man’s enterprise, “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning”. He tried
to transcend the narrow boundaries of personal experience venturing to write once with
the impartial sympathy of Shakespeare and sometime with the epic sweep of Milton to
dominate a vast tract of knowledge.
During these weeks down in Teignmouth, with the rain pelting, and with Tom
fretful and coughing, Keats was left alone with his thoughts – “young men for sometime
have an idea such a thing as happiness is to be had”, he wrote to Taylor (Apr. 24,1818).
With every further step in knowledge the inscrutable mystery of things seems to deepen.
Keats was beginning to think that the life of a thinking man must be a search, and,
perhaps that poetry should take the path not of Shakespeare and Milton --- but rather of
Wordsworth, who can make discoveries in the dark passages”. By this time Keats began
to share and subsequently perceived history as a process in which the changes that take
place are fundamental. One can not write exactly as Milton or Shakespeare, out of all
these comes a new realization of crucial importance. This new self clarification was
indispensable to the poetry of his final year and a half.
A long letter to Reynolds on May 3,1818, begins by saying that he has been in so
“uneasy a state of Mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. I can not write to any length
under a disguised feeling”. He was tangled in the labyrinthian passages of life that
offered only perplexity. His ‘branchings out’ were the effect of Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth but at a time he was willing to face a sence of isolation from the work of
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them. He admitted that, “the greater poets of the past, had in their way, often been
explorers”. Keats was ready to set off a visit to those higher realms of poetry on his own
wings of feeling and thought. In the beginning of this exploration Keats realized; “An
extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people—it takes away the heat and fever; and
helps by widening speculation; to ease the Burden of the Mystery : a thing I begin to
understand a little … the difference of high sensations with and without knowledge
appears to me this – in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousands fathoms
deep and being blown up again without wings and with all (the) horror of a bare
shouldered creature - in the former case our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro’ the
same air and space without fear” (to Reynolds, on May 3,1818).
The fourth period of Keats’s poetry is a complex period in which he was
influenced deeply by opposing philosophies of poetry; he was struggling between the
humanism of Shakespeare and Milton and the humanitarianism of Wordsworth. In the
first place his study of Shakespeare and Milton drew him out of his long allegiance to
Spenser. The philosophy of negative capability which he developed out of Shakespeare’s
plays, absorbed gradually his neo-platonic philosophy of beauty; and the epic style of
Paradise Lost supplanted the romantic style of The Fairie Queene as his model of poetic
style. In the second place his study of Wordsworth drew him out of his allegiance to
Shakespeare and Milton. This vacillating allegiance was the clearest testimonials to the
conflict in himself. It centered around his intuition of Hyperion, in which he alternated
between negative capability and humanitarianism and between the artificial style of
Paradise Lost and the natural style of The Excursion.
24
After acknowledging that “Knowledge is sorrow”, to comply with Byron, Keats
realised that “sorrow is wisdom”. The removal of George to America, reviewer’s mauling
of Endymion, physical ailments aggravated by the Scottish tour, the sting of love and
finally, the fatal decline of Tom, all these compelled Keats to seek a “feverous relief” in
“abstract images” “those abstractions which are my only life”. “Poor Tom that woman –
and poetry were ringing changes in my senses”. In such circumstances the long planned
Hyperion got under way. That poem and the revised version must be held over by now,
meanwhile we may discuss Keats’s position in regard to ‘sensation’ and ‘thought’ that
were ripened by his nexus with mythology and is scattered all around his verse.
Keats was desperately in search of a medium that would suit his poetry better and
he found the vehicle in mythology. At this time also there is found in his poetry an
element which requires to be treated apart, the influence of Greece. There was a miracle
combination of the tumultuousness of Renaissance and the southern warmth of a highly
sensuous nature- the passion was vigorous and it was reflected in much of the 1820 work.
Mythic images frequented his poetry. Keats’s mythic sensibility is well captured in his
subtle modulation of the subjects to suit his context.
In January 18th (or 19th), 1819 [according to H. E. Rollins] Keats went to Chi-
chester. He was kept indoors all the time by his sore throat. He took down some sheets of
thin paper Which Haslam had given him to write to George in America. Probably Keats
took them in order to write to America. Instead he wrote on them The Eve of St. Agnes.
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It has “the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after his own
heart” – to describe St. Agnes with words used by Keats himself to Fanny Brawne to
show his ardent passion for her. The Italian legend supplies the thin thread on which were
woven the rich embroideries of The Eve of St. Agnes. This poem is a celebration of
medieval romance. Claude De Finney describes the poem as – “a spontaneous expression
of genius springing like Pallas Athena full grown from the forehead of the poet”. The
erotic fantasy of the poem was the result of Keats’s association with Fanny Brawne.
Keats had already a penchant for love themes. However, this poem was the first
production inspired by Keats’s own love affair. The rich sensuousness, deep rapture and
enchantment are encapsulated in an atmosphere, mythical, magical and supernatural. The
imagery that are of these kinds mark the rendering of Gothic tradition. Every stanza is
like some old painting imbued with the light of “St. Agnes moon”. Keats’s growing
dissatisfaction for his inability to do anything with the book III of Hyperion emphasized
his foray into some kind of romance. There might also be an inspiration bestowed upon
him by Isabella Jones for suggesting him to try that subject. Keats decided to write on
that subject, the legend of St. Agnes Eve (the Eve itself is on January 21). The writing
was completed within two weeks and half (probably within Feb 1 or 2). The Eve of St.
Agnes was in every way a relief from Hyperion. He got a temporary relief from the
“naked and Greecian manner” of Hyperion – that was for a moment seriously bogged
down the poet—he then chose the Spenserian stanza. Keats’s turning from Hyperion to
The Eve of St. Agnes gave him the opportunity to offer a theme more congenial to his
talent.
26
An ardent lover porphyro using the opportunity of St. Agnes’ Eve has an access to
the bedchamber of Madeline, his fiancée, and there he was able to seduce her while
Madeline is still half-asleep. After the consummation of their union they disappear into
the dark. The portrayal of old beadsman in penance is a typical blending of Christian
character and a mythic archetype. He is a foil character like Saturn. His premonition of
the evil and the subsequent death symbolizes the myth of seasonal cycle. The law of
necessity is preserved in the death of the old and by the union of porphyry and Madeline.
The death of the old order is inevitable to give way the new in order to preserve the
seasonal cycle. Angela also serves the same mythic concern by her death. Porphyro has
been treated as Keats’s negative hero. One critic describes him as – “a young pagan
ravisher with no regard for the religious taboo he is breaking”. [Maria Gilbraith, in The
Etymology of porphyro’s name in Keats St. Agnes in Keats-Shelley journal.] But he may
well be a substitute for Milton’s “rebel Angel” and Keats has given him the superiority in
accomplishing his job.
In The Eve of St. Agnes Keats discovers a beautiful blend of Christian and Pagan
mythology. He has in this course of writing transformed successfully his long quest for
meaning in religion into his love experiences that he found in the spectrum of mythology.
It is during the year or more following the writing of Isabella that the mature style
of Keats developed so rapidly. Isabella or the Pot of Basil is a poetical version of an
anecdote drawn from one of Keats’s favourite books, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Isabella first drafted between early March and 27th April 1818, immediately after
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Endymion, may have been suggested by a remark of Hazlitt’s in a lecture on Dryden and
Pope : “I should think that a translation of some of the other serious tales in Boccaccio
….. as that of Isabella … if executed with taste and spirit could not fail to succeed in the
present day”. Keats picked up the subject but gave it a shade of grotesque, both physical
and psychological violence in his story. The plot is stark and simple. Lorengo and
Isabella are in love. But the brothers who disapprove, murder Lorengo and bury him
secretly. Led by a dream, Isabella finds the corpse, cuts off its head, and conceals it at
home in a ‘garden pot’ under a bush of basil. Her brothers discover the secret, deprive her
of it and Isabella dies of grief.
Initially Keats was against the publication of Isabella. He was susceptible of his
difficulty in writing poetry describing erotic and sensual feelings that would soothe the
ears of fashionable drawing room readership as well as the audience which took poetry
seriously. He wrote in a letter to Woodhouse, “……. I shall persist in not publishing The
Pot of Basil – It is too smokeable … There is too much inexperience of life in it – which
might do very well after one’s death – but not while one is alive. There are very few
would look to the reality. I intend to use more finesse with the public. – Isabella is what I
should call were I a reviewer ‘A weak–sided poem’ with amusing sober sadness about
it”, (22 sept. 1819). Isabella would, he feared, be taken for a ‘feminine’ poem of
‘tenderness and excessive simplicity’. But apart from Keats’s apprehension Reviewers
praised the piece for its depiction of feeling and passion in ‘naked and affecting
simplicity’.
28
Like other poems of this period Isabella also has a concern for mythology. The
poem follows the seasonal cycle. The love story commences in May –
“A whole long month of May in this sad plight
Made their cheeks paler by the break of June”.
(Stz. IV, II . 254—56)
The lovers’ conversation also contains the substratum of the fertility myth –
“Love, thou art leading me from wintry cold,
Lady, thou leadest me to summer clime,
And I must taste the blossoms that unfold.
In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time”.
Their love reaches its peak in June. The romance comes to an end when Isabella
unearths her lover’s corpse “In the mid days of Autumn”. Isabella through her erotic
association with Lorenzo assumes some aspect of the great goddess. Love inculcates in
Lorenzo ‘the meekness of a child’. His murderers take him beyond the gurgling river into
a silent forest. Water is symbolic of the life principle in Keats’s mythic vision and the
green forest is symbolic of regeneration. Lorenzo is killed in summer. However, he
cannot return until the winter, when preparations for launching of the new seasonal cycle
are to be made. This is a ritual resurrection of the manhood of the lover.
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Isabella is certainly a poem which needs to be read with sympathy. It sets the bliss
of young love against pain and distortions of loss. In its most powerful passages the poem
forces the reader to enter into the heroine’s feelings. The poem claims that love never
dies, although love in the person of Lorezo may be dead, but the true reward of this love
lies in the dead Lorenzo, “the kernel of the grave” (line, 383). Clearly Isabella deals with
Keats’s sense of the indivisibility of joy and sorrow, beauty and pain, love and death. It is
an earlier version of the ‘Ode on Melancholy where the ‘aching pleasure’ turns ‘to poison
while the bee mouth sips’.
Isabella is a chaste and virtuous woman. Her pure, virginal attitudes represent one
aspect of the great goddess. But in a sinister shift, the love goddess becomes the death
goddess in Keats’s poem. Lamia and the Belle Dame, the heroines of the next two poems,
we shall discuss shortly, represent this evil aspect of the goddess of many aspects.
Keats had started composing Lamia in mid-June, 1819 and completed in
September. The poem is a tale of passion, agony & death. Keats’s primary notion behind
writing the poem was that, Lamia had, he believed, ‘that sort of fire in it which must take
hold of people in some way- give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation’ (Rollins,
ii, 189). It was expected to shock the ‘mawkish’ readers of romance and to give them the
taste of ‘knowledge of the world”. ‘Lamia treats the effect of a Circian enchantment upon
the impressionable mind of a young man (Lycius) who is open to the appeal of a magic
world, and who is unable to withstand reality when it is pointed out to him” (W. J. Bate
30
in Keats) thus setting the conflict between the illusory beauty and of the intellect and
moral dignity.
Keats derived the plot from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Thus it is a
story of how Lycius, a young student of philosophy at Corinth, meets Lamia, a serpent in
Woman’s guise. Debilitated and tantalized as Lycius is, he swoons into a deathlike trance
of love. The cruel lady now leads him to her ‘purple lined palace of sweet sin’. Finally
Apollonius’s intervention saved Lycius from his marriage to Lamia. Burton’s citation
from Philastratus proves the existence of Satanic succubi. Keats had reworked on this
theme. He adds an introductory episode showing Hermes, the messenger god, is in search
for a nymph. He meets an unusual snake with a woman’s mouth. A deal has been made
between them and Hermes’s magic wand helps the serpent to gain her woman shape. This
transformation of Lamia into human form is an arduous and hideous process. The Hermes
episode as explained by Mr. Edward T. Norris, is an integral part of the symbolism: “As
Hermes represents the industrious poet in contrast to Lycius, the poet of sensation, so the
nymph represents Keats’s true ideal of poetry in contrast to Lamia, the poetry of
sensation”. Lamia is a Romantic archetype, who is simultaneously attractive and
threatening and represents both the female principle and the ‘romance’ imagination. She
is at the same time a beautiful woman who loves and should be loved, and an evil
embodiment of the wasting power of love, a belle dame sans merci. The theme of
amorous enchantment was also there in Endymion but in Lamia this dilemma is pressed
upon Lycius with aesthetic and theoretical problems. Despite the exotic story and
trappings, the immediate source or the raw material of the poem was Keats’s actual
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experience, the musings from the derided soul of a lover. The conflict has been
interpreted in terms of poetry, of the senses and of intellect, it embodies not only Keats’s
moods but something of the general romantic protest against a purely scientific view of
the world.
According to Robert Graves the Lamiae of Greece were beautiful woman who
seduced and then sucked the blood of travelers. In Aristophanes’s day they were regarded
as emissaries of the Triple goddess Hecate (The White Goddess, Robert Graves). Keats’s
adaptation and elaboration of myth is a re-enactment of archetypal lure of illusory love
and the inevitable call of menace. The ominous outcome of such a liaison is a vivid
indication toward decay and degeneration. Lycius’s death symbolizes his release from the
clutches of evil. Apollonius plays the role of saviour. He is the ‘reformer of mankind’
who exposes the bestial call of the dark world and allows his foster son to escape into the
world of death which suggests the logical continuation of natural order.
Lamia, according to W. H. Evert, represents ‘Keats’s revised view of the poetic
imagination’ her ‘beauty is false and her effect on human life pernicious’. Not only does
she represent the effects of poetic imagination on Lycius, but she is herself a victim of
imagination. Only brief participation in the world is possible before she is destroyed by
reality. [Aesthetic and Myth in the poetry of Keats – W. H. Evert]
La Belle Dame Sans Merci is an example of the period’s fascination with
medieval poetry and Gothicism. It has many of the characteristics of the medieval ballad.
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Knight errantry was a fashionable poetic pose in those days, “it was a playful but clear
expression of the dependence of fair women upon men’s protection”. Though Keats had
rejected the practice he still fostered a condescending attitude towards women’s
weakness (‘bruised fairness’). The annihilating power of love of women and the threat of
liberated sexuality is the subject of many of Keats’s poems. He thought that if women are
either goddesses or enchantresses, and sexuality is a thing to be feared, then the
fulfilment of human love is a kind of death. Keats once frankly voiced this idea in a letter
to Fanny Brawne : “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and
the hour of my death”.
In Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes Keats deals with a celebratory dream of
love. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci the love has been transformed with an eerie,
destructive import. The poem is strongly influenced by memories of Spenser’s fatal
enchantress in The Faerie Queene and by traditional ballads expressing the
destructiveness of love. Keats was probably familiar with such ballads from Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). Robert Graves suggests that the Belle Dame is the
hag death, one of the triple forms of the ‘white Goddess’. Tom had died of consumption
few months earlier. Graves feels that the femme fatale specifically represents the plague
turberculosis which ‘leaves anguish moist and fever dew’ on the brow of its victim. The
Knight’s ‘wild’ experience and the final ‘thrall’ point out that ‘the exquisite rapture of
ruinous sensual allurement is an articulation of the self destructive psychological impulse
ever present in human mind’. Keats’s romantic heroines are the various projections of
33
poet’s attitudes. In their mythical plots they represent the mother figures who bind
mankind to the ever revolving wheel of time.
The odes are the most compatible transport to carry out “the genius of a major
poet … working in the material of minor poetry” [Revaluation, F. R. Leavis.]. They are
the most sustainable product of Keats as a mature poet. Together, the odes tend to
formulate a philosophy, enlarged, complicated by a dimension of human experience.
Here in the recesses of the odes the romantic poet tries desperately to find some
permanent refuge in a world of flux, longing for a golden age. The premature blight that
was inflicted upon him by the declining health – all joined together to wear out his spirit,
vitality and joyness of youth. The odes reverberate with a tone of solemnity, deepening
now and then to poignant suffering. Through all of them runs the haunting sense of
unreality. But to incorporate a myth dimension with the Odes will certainly result in the
manifestation of certain philosophy. This quest for philosophy leads the poet to
mythology. The array of Odes starting with Ode to Maia (May, 1818) and ending in To
Autumn (Sept. 1819) exhibits a ‘serene frame for a troubled picture’ [Douglas Bush,
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition]. Within his framework Keats had discovered the
highest manifestations of ‘beauty’ and ultimately of ‘truth’. Keats’s Odes are an enquiry
into the ‘truth’ of ideal visions. The essence of Romanticism seems to be a conflict
between spiritual desires and material realities, strong wishes and hard facts. Keats as a
fine Romantic grapples with this human dilemma. The Odes speak of desires and
yearnings, of the imagination and the frustrations of human state. Keats acknowledged
that our dreams and realities are not the same, and we live in a world where the ideal has
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to give way to the actual and that there is a coexistence on earth of beauty explored in the
Odes.
The intellectual and the physical meet in the Odes : indeed the idea of transience
is meditated and transformed through the sense. It is given substance and emotional
resonance by being associated with a sense impression which is part of a mood. The
sense of futility runs throughout;
“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream”.
Indolence is better than ambition. The nightingale’s song is an illusion, and an illusion
which soon fails, learning the listener alone with his cares and grief’s. The world’s truest
sadness dwells with beauty and joy, for the pain of suffering is less keen than the pain of
knowing that beauty and joy will fade. There is no refuge but in Art, the serene,
immortal, unchangeable: the temple of thought which the poet builds for himself in the
Ode To Psyche, the marble world which lives for ever on the carved shape of a Greecian
Urn.
Ode To Psyche is the only one of the major Odes that is based on a myth. In it
Keats unites myth, nature and literature. Keats has adopted the version of the legend from
William Adlington’s translation (1556) of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Mrs. Tighe’s
allegoric romance psyche also has some contribution. Lampriere’s Bibliotheea Classica
had provided the idea of Psyche’s tardy godhead [“The word (psyche) signifies ‘the soul’
35
and this personification of psyche, first mentioned by Apuleius, is consequently posterior
to the Augustan age, though it is connected with ancient mythology”.] { Kenneth Allott;
The Ode to Psyche, John Keats: Odes (Suffolk, 1971) ed. G. S. Fraser, Casebook Series}
Spenser’s description of “The Garden of Adonis” in The Faerie Queene (Book III, Canto
VI) and Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” probably provided further
descriptive hints. What emerges is a celebratory vision of idealised love.
In classical legend, Cupid the winged love-god, had fallen in love with the nymph
Psyche and had often made love to her by night in blissful, Arcadian bowers; eventually
after Cupid’s intercession with Jupiter Psyche became a winged goddess. In the Ode
Keats does not embody the traditional allegory of Cupid and Psyche. Keats discovers his
philosophy in the myth of Cupid and psyche and has fused the two domains – the
mythological & the intellectual.
In the Ode, the poet first describes his vision of the two lovers embracing ‘on the
bedded grass’. The trauma and trials are over and the two have been united. The vision of
this true love proves to be a vision of truth itself for Keats – “I am certain of nothing but
of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination – what the
imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not --- the
imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth”. [Rollins;
I; 184-185]. Through this imaginative reinvention of mythology Keats discovers a vision
of purity and truth. Psyche has cast a spell over Keats and led him “onto expanded
consciousness regarding human intellect. Thus mythology has created within Keats a
36
kind of renaissance or a reawakening of consciousness … Not only does he experience
this consciousness with her but he also tries to act in accordance with this experience”.
[Myth & Mythology in Keats’s Major Poetry –Seemin Hasan.]
Keats then praises the beauty of Psyche, regrets that she was admitted too late to
the Pantheon to be the object of rituals of worship. The process of deification has begun
and the poet behaves like an ancient bard. After admitting that the world is full of
corruption, impurity and degeneration the poet decides to make Psyche’s altar within his
mind – “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane,/ In some untrodden region of my
mind”.
This is “a recognition by Keats that his own exploration is to be of the interior
landscape, that his ultimate devotion is to be neither to the objective world, nor to any
power outside himself”. [The Romantic Poets, Graham Hough.]
Next to Psyche was Ode On a Greecian Urn in Keats’s nexus to mythology. The
very title suggests that Keats had in mind a particular work of Greek art, which he first
describes, then goes on to interpret which culminates in and develops Keats own theory
of poetics. Keats’s fascination with Greek mythology was intense, Severn quotes Keats’s
comments “… the Greek spirit- the Religion of the beautiful; the Religion of Joy …”.
The imaginary vase is a product of Keats’s recollection of the Sosibios vase, still to be
seen in the Louvre. There are also other certain influences; Lampriere’s classical
37
dictionary, the Elgin Marbles, the Borghese vase, the Townley vase, the Portland vase,
the Bacchic pictures of Poussin etc.
The Greecian urn crystallizes those ancient days of Greece. The engravings are
recreated and reverberated with Keats’s touch of imagination. Keats observes those
scenes and his perception of eternal beauty combined with a universal experience of
endurance is presented with a colouring of imagination. Keats draws inspirations from
such mythological thinking and has revived the permanence of the truth of life. In Ode
On a Greecian Urn, the poet establishes a contrast between life as it is depicted on the
Urn and life as it is lived. In contemplating the Greecian Urn, the poet is struck by its
permanence and silence, it is an art object that represents human action frozen in mute
gestures for all time. Although made by a specific Greek artisan (its real parent). It is
nevertheless a timeless objective, a ‘child’ adopted and loved through the ages but not
engendered in any one epoch. The contrast between real life and the Urn depends on the
urn’s special liberation from temporality. Instead of the ‘heard melody’ of, for example,
the nightingale, the ‘unheard’ melodies piped on the silent friezes of the Greecian urn
stimulate the poet to contemplate time and eternity, life and art. The urn is more than an
inanimate piece of architecture. The opening lines of the ode sound like an invocation to
a classic deity;
“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time”
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The urn is thus enigmatic and enchanting like any mythical goddess. It is a
divinity like Psyche, who has withstood the challenges and ravages of time and purity
and loyalty. The poet, like Apollo, acts as a votary to the urn. The urn is mysterious and
teasing, the poet, as he speculates, seems to be lost in the labyrinthian trellis of the
engravings. He ends the first stanza with a flurry of inquiries. The stanza II gives us the
paradoxical quality of the urn. Here the lovers are like Cupid and Psyche, and also like
poet himself and Fanny, inspite of intense feeling for each other, are not able to attain
fulfilment. In stanza III the poet enthuses over the happiness of the urn’s world, where
spring is permanent. “Placed in proper mythological context, the urn represents the
‘mythic consciousness’ of Keats. Owen Barfield defines the term as “a renewal of lost
insights”. The ‘happy melodist’ may be said to be an Orpheus, whose music is so
captivating that its spellbinding effect is seen even on rocks and stones :
“All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high—sorrowful and cloyed
A burning forehead and a parching tongue”.
The picture of the sacrificial heifer reminds us at once of the Greek religion. The
scene was perhaps motivated by a painting of Claude’s ‘sacrifice of Apollo’. Ian Jack
says, “the elegiac tone of Keats’s lines is profoundly in sympathy with the serene
nostalgia of Claude’s religious processions”.
The final maxim “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty”, as pronounced by the urn,
captures the whole gamut of Keats’s philosophy. The urn has long been suffered the
39
endurance and has achieved a considerable store of wisdom. Now it begins to tease us out
of thought. In its paradoxical statement the urn acquires the status of Sibyl Erythraean of
Greek mythology. It is a prophecy of message to mankind. The oracular qualities of the
ancient Sibyl find expression in this apparent paradox.
Ode On a Greecian Urn represents the arresting of life by art as both profit and
loss – it represents the escape from change and decay into eternity, but at the expense of
eternal unfulfilment : “the unravished bride’ remains forever between the wedding
ceremony & the bridal bed, as it were” (David Daiches). The Ode shows Keats in his last
and greatest phase finding a way to substantiate his growing concern with the relation
between art and life, beauty and reality. Earnst De Selincourt suggests as its motto a
phrase of Leonardo’s : “cosa bella mortal passa e non’d’arte” – Mortal beauties pass
away, but not those of art.
Ode to a Nightingale does not reinterpret any particular Greek myth. The only
myth connection is found in a few allusions. Mythology has become, by then, so intrinsic
a part in Keats’s writing that he could at once resort to it in order to associate his
ideology. Here Keats’s thought is a kind of belief that when momentary beauty is
sojourning, the ideal embodiment of that moment, captured in the bird’s song, is an
imperishable source of Joy. “It is the very acme of melancholy that the joy he celebrates
is joy in beauty that must die” (Douglus Bush). The ode encapsulates poet’s immediately
experienced happiness in the bird’s song, his imaginative participation in an untroubled
life and then a more enduring knowledge of sorrow. But when Keats says that the song of
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the bird is immortal that is beyond the pains of human world, his deepest emotion is fixed
on the obverse side of his theme. The poem represents the exquisite awarness of the
existence, that no mood on earth is unalloyed with other feelings, for it is the very
condition, the impossibility of maintaining the mood of exaltation. The general criteria of
human existence is presented with a set of alternatives, infact paradoxes. And the verbal
ambiguity consolidates the meaning.
The nightingale is a bird with a long literary pedigree. The Romantics sought
refuge in the spontaneous lyrical utterance of this bird. Keats was probably familiar with
Cowden Clarke’s The Nightingale and Coleridge’s two Nightingale poems. Edmund
Blunden notes some possible Horatian parallels with the Nightingale. He also suggests
that it might have been a volume of Horace that Keats had with him when he sat under
the tree to compose his Ode. William Michael Rossetti has found in the Nightingale “a
surfeit of mythological allusions” (Life of John Keats). Keats’s taste in the matter of
allusions is generally that of the Elizabethans & Jacobeans from whom he drew so much
of his mythology (Douglas Bush). If we draw nightingale’s classical inheritance we shall
find that nightingale’s singing heralded Apollo’s arrival. Apollo’s arrival brought vitality
and energy of spring, the freedom from autumnal disease. It can be considered an
emblem of hope. The magical notes of nightingale, like Hermes the conductor of the
souls of the dead to the underworld, carry the poet ‘Lethe wards’. ‘Lethe’ in Greek
mythology is a river in Hades beyond the Elysian Fields where those souls about to
reborn drink oblivion of former lives. The nightingale appears to be an agency who can
relieve the poet from the dreadful misery of his present life. The bird, to the poet, is a
41
light winged Dryad’ or a tree nymph of Greek mythology. The poet, like Endymion, then
ventures into the magic forest leaving behind the diseased and maimed world full of
palsied old people and ‘pale and specter thin’ youths. Keats has drawn inspiration from
Hippocrene (Spring on mount Helicon, the haunt of Muses). Being saturated in the depths
of Earth, the wine has imbibed the wisdom, strength, maturity and beneficence of Gaia or
the mother Earth. It also combines the dream or fancy of the poet. The nightingale is a
kind of divinity which can transport the poet beyond mortality. In the stanza IV this
means of wine is rejected, instead the poet chooses ‘poesy’. Here the immediate
association of wine is Bacchus, the God of wine and also the symbol of destructive
potentialities. Stanza VI commences Keats’s ‘courtship with death’ (G. Wilson Knight).
In his voluptuous longing for death Keats again compromises with mythology. Exhausted
by the trauma and trials of life the poet wants to return to the ‘seed’ state of life that will
revitalize his creativity. Stanza VII, as Mr. Riddley suggested of it, offers us “the distilled
sorceries of Romanticism” (Keats’s Craftsmanship). It takes us from ‘Death’ to
deathlessness. The immortality of the bird’s song and the temporality of the fugitive
happiness is strongly insisted upon the lines. The last word ‘forlorn’ breaks in like the
tolling of a bell to signal the end of the poet’s emotional exaltation. ‘Faery lands forlorn’
reads like an exquisite pastiche of a Miltonic cadence: ‘stygian caves forlorn’ (L’Allegro,
line 3); ‘these wild wood forlorn’ (Paradise Lost, IX, 910). The immediate attachment to
this ‘forlorn’ is remoteness and strangeness of an enchanted world. The second ‘forlorn’,
that introduces the next Stanza, has a homely and familiar connotation. It sets the tone of
the poet upon the common world, to which he now returns. The last Stanza exposes
Keats’s rational mind. The sweet melody becomes ‘plaintive anthem’ to the poet. The
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‘still stream’, an oxymoronic patterning of words, refers to the frozen lake or in the
picture. This indicates the lifelessness of Keats’s vision. The poet is in a quandary by
getting back the world of reality. This completes the full circle of the poem. “The
experience has exposed mythology before the poet as a channel for evolution” (Seemin
Hasan).
The Ode on Melancholy witnesses the deification of melancholy in the tradition
of Psyche, Greecian Urn, Maia and Keats’s treatment of other deities. The central idea of
the poem is the contrast between the melancholy that causes life a halt, brings stagnation
and the true melancholy that produces creativity. Here ‘melancholy’ does not signify
those hackneyed terms – clinical gloominess, sad and aching memories, pensive mood,
solitary wanderings. For Romantic Keats it is incorporated with positive, heightened
sensibility that could bring inspiration. Paradoxical romantic belief that pain is an
essential part in happiness and pleasure – was explored in a letter of Keats to George and
Georgiana Keats on April, 1819; “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and
troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?”
In the first Stanza, Mythological motifs, essentially associated with the sense of
death and oblivion, heightens the negative connotation that the word ‘melancholy’
generally carries with it. Keats says that to seek oblivion through any of the means
described in the first Stanza is to “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul”. Keats’s
heterodox idea appears to be that if you poison the body you drug the soul, so that in the
after-life the soul will be stupefied. The second Stanza presents the ‘melancholy’ with an
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affirmation of life forces. Melancholy becomes associated with rare and precious
moments, even if they are painful like the anger of a loved one. True melancholy is a
constructive gift of the ‘vale of soul making’, a guide towards creative evolution of the
energies. The Stanza is laden with images of fertility and purity. The use of a hyperbolic
verb, ‘glut’, subsumes the negatives of sorrow. Melancholy appears like an independent,
established myth in Keats’s investment life into melancholy.
The third Stanza recognizes that sadness is the inevitable complement of the
moments of intense sensuous happiness. Melancholy springs from the transience of
beauty and joy, that is a part of their nature, With a model shift to abstraction, this Stanza
introduces the resolution of the conflicts presented in the first two Stanzas. The final six
lines articulates the underlying matrix of the entire text. It represents that crossroad in
mental progress where the conscious meets the sub-conscious, they do not overwhelm
each other instead grow side by side to bring forth a complete knowledge. The poet,
being a privileged person can enter melancholy’s ‘Sovran Shrine and confront her ‘veiled
figure’. He alone can taste ‘the sadness of her might leaving himself one of melancholy’s
conquests (‘trophies’). The use of an Oxymoron ‘aching pleasure’ means that even the
intensities of sexual pleasure entail sorrow. That melancholy is to be found at the heart of
every pleasure evokes the traditional maxim, ‘post coitum homo tristis’ – that after coitus
comes the cloyness. The central paradox anticipates Blake’s philosophy: “without
contraries is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven & Hell). Though Keats’s major
force is on melancholy, he asks us to seek the palliatives – the beauties and pleasures of
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life, when impeded by melancholy. The amalgamation of the opposites can bring forth
the ‘third state’, the sense of higher imagination, a synthesis of joy and melancholy.
‘Ode on Indolence’ does not evoke any particular myth but it shapes a mythic
pattern in the way of Keats’s invocation of ‘indolence’. It is almost like the call of Muse.
Hermes, the god of dreams and sleep, infuses in Keats the bliss of a dream and the entire
thought process of the poet is projected in the form of that dream. In a letter to George
Keats the poet wrote—“This morning I am in a sort of a temper indolent and supremely
careless: I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence. Neither poetry,
nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem
rather like three figures on a Greek vase – A Man and two Women …. This is the only
happiness”. (Rollins, I, 78).
Now once again these three ‘white robed’ figures tease the poet in his dream. The
poet remains in a strong sense of déjà vu. Together the figures form a trinity, the most
important and dominating forces of his poetic life. But the poet determines to follow the
Biblical precept, as is expressed in the epigraph; “they toil not, neither do they spin”: a
quotation from the gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter VI, verse 28, in which Jesus has been
commending the example of the idle and beautiful lilies of the field. After this supreme
identification, his initial longing has been resolved to a dismissal of all three. ‘Sloth’ one
of the seven deadly sins, has been regarded as a process of degeneration and decay. Keats
is deviating from that conventional idea, here he is not repudiating ‘indolence’, instead
creating a new dimension out of the olden myth. Indolence is a mother figure, the
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ultimate provider of comfort, solace, security and Peace. Indolence signifies not lethargy
but a fertile visionary state where truth is clearly visible. Keats in his present condition, is
undergoing a symbolic burial after which he will emerge resurrected as a creative poet.
To Autumn is a celebration of nature in its ultimate fruition. The author sings a
paean for autumn. Keats’s Autumn is a divinity in human shape: she sets hand to all
manner of work, and direct every operation of harvest. In a letter to Reynolds on 21st
September, 1819, Keats had left a genesis of his poem; “How beautiful the season is now
… How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really without joking chaste weather
– Dian skies – I never liked stubble fields as now – Aye better than the chilly green of
spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm … this struck me so much in my Sunday’s
walk that I composed upon it”. Keats associates autumn with ‘Dian skies’. Diana in
Roman mythology is the goddess of fertility. Ian Jack associates Keats’s autumn with
Ceres, the Roman deity who stands for the generation power of nature. Demeter is the
Greecian counterpart of Ceres. Demeter was the goddess of corn and agriculture. The
personifications of autumn with the attributes of such deities combine to create the
“benevolent deity ‘Autumn’ that wants not only to ‘load and bless’”, but also to ‘spare’,
to prolong, to ‘set budding more’ (W. J. Bate). Douglas Bush writes … “the delicate
personifications … exhibit Keats’s mythmaking interest at its ripest and surest
(Mythology & The Romantic Tradition).
The second stanza evokes an image of Ruth – that she lay down at Boaz’ feet in
the ‘threshing floor’ where after ‘winnowing’, he ‘lay at the end of the heap of corn’
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(Ruth, iii, 2-7); that she ‘gleaned in the field and Boaz filled her veil with six measures of
Barley and ‘laid it on her’ (ii, 17; iii, 15) [Arnold Devenport, in John Keats, A
Reassessment. ed. Kenneth Muir]. The final images of swallows may also be influenced
by Keats’s translation of Aeneid. In the sixth book where in a striking show virgil
describes the souls of all generations come together on the banks of the river of the
underworld. Birds, in Keats’s poem, gathering for migration, have a link with that image.
The stress is on both the passing away of autumn and the decay of the dead
generations of mankind. But the main link is one of that direct themes of Hyperion where
the glory of the new gods shines out to eclipse the Titans, the loss of whose old grandeur
is the price that must be paid for the new beauty.
Thus in Keats’s hand the mythological imagination was reborn. Keats’s mythic
vision was so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he could easily communicate the
ancient deities through his poem. It was Keats’s instinctive purpose to transport those
fictionalized experiences into his poetry in order to reveal the poetic potential with which
he wanted to profess his self-discovery.
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CHAPTER -II
“Colossal Grandeur”
:- Hyperion, A Fragment :-
Mythology turns to Aesthetics

After the completion of Endymion in late Nov. 1817 Keats wrote few serious poetry.
Everything except a few sonnets, written in this period was extemporaneous or
occational. This hiatus in serious composition reflects the poet’s disenchantment with the
ideas that governed his poetry so far, and his consequent uncertainty about how, or on
what basis, to proceed.
Mythology had always been a subject to Cherish. The ‘south’ provided the later
Romantics with a repertoire of themes which were used as an ideological, philosophical
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and aesthetic alternatives. Keats, in his poetic career, never got rid of imaginative
inebriation which he sought for.
On April 10, 1818, in his revision of the preface to Endymion, Keats wrote, “I
hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled
its brightness: for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewell”. In such contemplation
was hidden Keats’s wish to project a specific work on some mythological theme. But he
also gave clues for his specific theme in his letters and poetry. In the last book of
Endymion (IV, 770-74). Keats apostrophizes his hero, Apollo, while writing;
“Ensky’d ere this, but truly that I
Truth the best music in a first deem born-song,
Thy lute voiced brother will I sing ere long,
And thou shalt aid …”
On 23rd January, 1818 Keats wrote to Haydon; “… in Endymion I think, you may
have many bits of deep and sentimental cast – the nature of Hyperion will lead me totreat
it in a more naked and Greecian manner … and the march of passion and endeavour will
be undeviating … and one great contrast between them will be … that the hero of the
written tale being mortal is led on; like Bonaparte, by circumstances; whereas Apollo in
Hyperion being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one”.
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The golden theme was once again in his bag but this time Keats wanted to
decorate his idea with a finesse only for the sake of poetry and poet. His fascination was
too deep and he could easily chisel out his purpose from the rocky myths of Greek,
Roman and even of Egyptian legends. Keats conceived the wild and high imaginations of
ancient mythology, the mysterious being and awful histories of the deities of Greece and
Rome and sketched them boldly and skillfully to suit his power in delineating the
immortal spirit of mythology.
“Hyperion is the greatest of poetical torsos” (The Revd. George Gilfillan). It is an
epic fragment in two versions. The second one, an unfinished version is more specifically
named as The Fall of Hyperion, A Dream on which we will focus later in the next
chapter.
Hyperion ushers in the remarkable twelve months in which all the greatest poetry
of Keats was written. It was begun in Autumn 1818, at the start of what is usually
regarded as Keats’s greatest creative year. Keats got down once more to try the “beautiful
mythology” of Greece. But several events combined to intervene the gradual progress of
his poetry. While nursing his dying brother, Tom, Keats found that “His identity presses
upon me so … I am obliged to write, and plunge into abstract images” (Let. I. 369).
These abstract images were drawn from classical mythology. Keats’s primary intension
was to fill out the old myth with poetical ornament. He had studied and thought deeply;
he had been reading Milton, Wordsworth, Dante and he had derived from them some
valuable lessons. The letters show the extent to which his earlier youthful hedonism was
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giving way to more thoughtful attitudes. He understood the lack of depth and security in
his own work hither to and even contemplated that “nothing is fine for the purposes of
great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers”; he wrote to his
brothers in January 1912. In Hyperion Keats strove for impersonality and objectivity.
Keats was inclined to avoid the “deep and sentimental cast” of Endymion in favour of a
more naked and Greecian manner”. Keats concentrates on the psychological
undercurrents that pervade the Titan-Olympian myth rather than retelling the chronology
and the disciplined style which was inspired by a number of sources. On the outset the
story is the expulsion of Saturn and the Titanian deities by Jupiter and his younger
adherents. The Titans in their horrid cave meditating revenge on the usurper, the only
hope being the sun god Hyperion, still unfallen. On the other side, there is a picture of
Apollo breathing in the dawn of his joyous existence. The specific theme, the supplanting
of Hyperion the old Sun God by Apollo the new, is Keats’s own.
As we enter from the outer rim of the conditions we are filled with a host of
complex feelings – fear, wonder, a feeling of unimaginable ghastliness and savagery and
yet a sheer lyrical strain of pulsating rhythms of beauty.
Keats was familiar with the myth of Hyperion long before he selected it as the
subject of his next long poem. He had known about the battle between the Titans and the
Olympians and the consequent defeat of the latter from Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary,
Hesiod’s Theogony, Edward Baldwin’s. The Pantheon, Hyginus’s ‘Fabluae’ printed in
Actores Mythographi Lahiri. Greek and Egyptian sculptures mostly drawn from
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mythological tales had cast a spell over Keats’s imagination. He, though did not visualize
all of them, had an instinctive possession and subjective contemplation in his mind and it
enabled Keats to shape his ‘palpable Gods’ all serene and statuesque in the abstract
identification in Hyperion.
According to Hesiod’s Thegony, from which Keats derived the prime source of
his mythological rendering of Hyperion, Chaos was the first to come into existence. Next
came Earth, Erebus and Eros. Earth bore Heaven, Hills and Sea and Heaven & Earth
mating together, produced Oceanus, Coeus, Creus, Hyperion, Japhet, Thea, Rhea,
Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Saturn, the youngest and the most terrible.
Then came the Brontes, Steropes and Arges, followed by Cottus, Gyges and Briareus.
Heaven confined his third brood in a secret place within Earth. But the strain proving too
much for her, Earth appealed to Saturn for help. Saturn castrated Heaven with a scythe
given to him by Earth. The blood which dripped on to Earth produced the Giants and the
Furies and the Nymphs called Melial. The members, thrown into the sea produced Venus.
According to Hesiod, Heaven named his first brood Titans.
Saturn taking Rhea as wife, became the ruler of the universe. He was
warned by his mother that he would be dethroned by one of his offsprings.
So, soon as each child was born, he swalloed it. Rhea, unhappy at the loss of
her children, gave him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow
when her sixth child was born. This child was Jupiter, when he grew to
maturity, he tricked Saturn into vomiting his children. Led by Jupiter, the
younger Gods declared war against the Titans. They took their stand on
mount Olympus and thus came to be known as the Olympians. The war
continued for ten years. Jupiter now released Cottus, Gyges and Briareus
who had been imprisoned in Earth. They supplied him with thunder and
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lightening in return for their freedom. Ultimately, the Titans fell before the
thunderbolts and the Olympians came to rule over the universe.
Keats uses this myth as the background of Hyperion and he eventually offered a
variation from this traditional myth. He invested the Titans with majestic beauty. To
make the Olympians more beautiful he inculcated the intellectual beauty in them, so that
“the first in beauty, should be first in might”. Traditionally the Titans were monsters
associated with planets and furious elements of nature. The Olympians were a refined
sect and more humanized. The Titans fell short of the intellectual superiority of the
Olympians. Keats deviates from the traditional mythology. He deliberately alters the
conventional concepts in order to employ his own ideas. Keats’s technique of re-
interpreting the myth is a part of his philosophy.
Keats conceived of myth as a comprehensive system that reveals and unfolds the
poetic experiences and the mythic vision of the poet each time it is reconstructed. Keats’s
manipulation of the traditional myth gains a new dimension as it attempts to embody
Keats’s purpose and philosophy. Keats uses it as a vehicle to define the law of succession
but at the same time tries to promulgate several ideals that he had fostered so far; (1) the
role of a poet with relation to major intellectual, political and historical movements of his
time. (2) the attainment of a poethood after incorporating the highest ideals of poetic
values in him (3) Certain competing ideas of the poetic character and method and (4) to
formulate the higher ideal of beauty. Keats wanted to dramatize these truths of ‘heart-
knowledge’ through a return to mythology.
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The Titans led by Saturn, were deposed in a revolutionary coup by the Olympians
led by Jupiter. Here Keats deliberately excludes the epic battles and refers to wars only in
allusive retrospect. The silent grandeur of the opening of the poem exhibits Saturn in his
solitude:
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quite as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud, 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.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray’d,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, Listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
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while his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet”.
The claustrophobic images in these lines evoke a funereal environment. The still
serenity and the blank darkness refer to a paralysis of the time. The tragic grimness as it
befalls Saturn is a perfect setting of an epic rendering. The shadow of Miltonic influence
is obvious in the description of the scene but Keats’s choice of the mythological subject
matter is more than decorative. Its paganism gave Keats a latitude to explore his subject
without constraints of Christianity. Like Medieval and Elizabethan poets, Keats altered
mythology freely, and he welcomed the post-classical accretions thatold stories had
gathered in passing through many hands. Unlike Milton’s exaggerate rendition of
Christian cosmology and the concept of Sin, Hyperion deals with an optimistic and
progressive view of mankind’s history. The ‘reanimation’ of the Greek myth is not
simply to imply past modes of belief. A number of mythological allusions suggestive of
the fall refers to the end of Saturnian epoch. Saturn’s reign was characterized by ‘calm
grandeur’. Change, progress, dynamism all were unknown to the Titan world. Now the
overthrow has crippled the king, like a forlorn child he now turns to his ancient mother,
Gaia. Thus the first two paragraphs set the tone for the coming revival, after the
dethronement of a dynasty. Keats describes to Reynolds of the fundamental change from
“the infant or thoughtless chamber” to a realization that the world is “full of Misery and
Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression” (vol-I, 280-81). The loss, endemic to the
times is one of those changes from a golden age of innocence to a modern awareness of
the “burden of the Mystery”. It was also a change from an era of godlike assurance to the
55
evidences of post revolutionary disillutionment that Keats could observe in the political
and literary thinking of his time.
Saturn in his desperate state, can be interpreted as a lapsed artist, bereft and
impotent. Now comes Thea, wife of the Sun-God Hyperion, to comfort Saturn, but
herself weeps, placing her hand on “that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there;
Though an immortal, she felt a cruel pain”—
A sign that the immortal gods are becoming mortal (Book, I- 42-44). Saturn feels a crisis
of identity, he is frantically is search of the mystery, that stripped him of his power,
authority and glory. Saturn is also divested of his divinity. His tragedy lies in his inability
to perceive the necessity for a change and to accept the inevitable turn of the cycle.
Saturn can only look to the past, to a heaven he has lost, for the rehabilitation of his god
head. Blinded by his egoism, he is unaware of a strong irony implicit in his words;
It must – it must
Be of ripe-progress—Saturn must be king.
[I, 124-25]
Thea assists Saturn to lift himself up from his stupor and advises to conjoin the defeated
rebels’ council.
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The scene now shifts to Hyperion’s palace. The majestic splendour in these
descriptive passages indicates Hyperion’s still intact divinity. According to the myth the
prominent feature of this god is the cult of the culture hero — and the cult of a soterial
god. This soterial trait is a legacy that the solar redeemer usually saves from ignorance,
sin, damnation or rebirth. But Hyperion is also castrated of his solemn supremacy. He is
also a victim of anxiety and apprehension. Coelus, puts forward and eventually reasons
the downfall of the Titans. According to him the loss of Godhead defines the condition of
manhood.
“For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods.
Divine ye were created and divine
In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb’d,
Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv’d and ruled;
Now I behold in your fear, hope and wrath;
Actions of rage and passion; even as
I see them, on the mortal world beneath,
In men who die – This is the grief, O Son!
Sad sign of ruin, sudden dismay, and fall!
[I, 328-36]
The point is not merely that the gods have fallen but that the change of condition
is a change of kind, which in turn, implies an unbridgeable gulf between the mortal and
the divine. Hyperion now plunges into the deep night, threatens to “scare that infant
thunderer, rebel Jove/And bid old Saturn take his throne again”.
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Thus ends the book I, Keats’s main preoccupation in these passages is to set the
theme for the next book. The whole passage is based on a fundamental sense of suffering.
Keats’s main purpose to choose a classical myth is to express chiefly an experience of
pain and suffering, of agony and strife, and also the troublesome question of how human
misery is to be endured and how it is explained. A number of mythic motifs help to set an
image of numbness, cold and constriction that surround the god. Naiads are stream
nymphs. In her ‘voiceless state’ these Naiad is reminiscent of the tongueless Procne. The
Naiad presses “her cold finger closer to her lips”—suggest Saturn’s loss of power and
vital creativity. Thea’s physical proportion elicits the marbels of Egyptian statuary.
Hyperion’s royal mansion may well be an instance of his superlative omnipotence but the
fear within is implicit and the palace becomes the devil’s palace of pandemonium in
Paradise Lost, Keats, though primarily depicting the ancient gods and goddesses, his
immediate purpose is to deal with a human problem. The Titans have been reduced to a
mortal level precisely because of their downfall, they have given themselves up to
desperate mortal feelings, including hope for the impossible. Book I is an expression of
giant agony and strife:of Saturn in all the anguished dejection of his overthrow; of Thea
in her impotence to offer any solace to Saturn; and of Hyperion afflicted with dark omens
of his imminent doom. Keats’s mastery in the assimilation of different systems of
mythology bring about a fusion of different techniques of philosophy that gives an
additional dimention to his treatment of the classical myth.
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The second book opens with the arrival of Saturn, accompanied by Thea, at the
dark cave where the dethroned Titans are mourning their downfall. The place is
surrounded by waterfalls and huge cliffs. The scene shows a close similarity with the
infernos of both Milton and Dante. The dungeons and nightmarish crags are symbolic of
fear, frustration and anxiety. The colossal gods have lost their godheads; they have been
reduced to a mortal level. Saturn also experiences such distressing emotions as rage, fear,
remorse and revenge. It seems that Fate had robbed him of his divine powers, and
infected him with the weakness and infirmities of human beings. Saturn blows words that
act as a stimulus to the chill despair among the ruined comrades. The vital part of the
book is undoubtedly the speech of Oceanus, when he encourages a wide endurance:
“We fall by course of Nature’s Law, not force
Of thunder, or of Jove” [II, 180-82]
They easy optimism of Keats’s earlier view that man, by making a relatively
simple adjustment of his understanding, can participate directly to the divine, is implicitly
denied, for even the gods once lost to godhead, are impotent and frail.
“Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ‘tis pain;
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty” [II, 202-05].
‘The pain of truth’ is, Oceanus says, that life involves change, but it is only pain
to those who resist, because the change he refers to, which has involved their deposition,
is a kind of progress:
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“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us”. (II, 212-14).
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”. [228-29]
The words of Oceanus are no incidental exhortation, this is not simply an
advocacy of stoicism. Rather Oceanus sees that there is a connection between pain or
sorrow and its apparent opposite, beauty. Oceanus’s speech cast back to the speech of
Coleus in the first book and they are essential to Keats’s whole conception of the Titans
and the significance of their defeat; that beauty is the principle determinant of the
progressive evolutionary stages of the superiority.
When writing those lines, Keats was aware of the concept of evolutions of consciousness.
As Oceanus lays down the theory of evolutions he was, to some degree, aware of the
multidimentional nature of its manifestation all around himself. Keats believed in
cosmological evolution and understood that we live in not in a static universe but in one
that is part and parcel of a deep time development process. He also believed in the
biological evolution and had little difficulty comprehending how life itself has evolved
from lower to higher levels of development.
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Evolution is a creative process and as a living potential inherent in our own
subjective experience or fact of consciousness that enables Oceanus to adopt the theory
of change and when Keats writes these lines he is pointing to something which is the
living potential inherent in consciousness itself for development and growth.
Oceanus sets out both a chaos theory and a genesis myth. In the beginning was
chaos and darkness and out of this primeval, prelapsarian condition comes light, at the
right, ripe moment;
“From Chaos and Parental Darkness came
Light, the first fruit of that intestine broil,
That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,
And with it Light, and Light engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touch’d
The whole enormous matter into Life”. [II, 191-97]
There are of course Biblical hints in the language and concepts here but, Oceanus
offers a Pagan explanation of mythology, of the origins of the universe. There is no
creator, not even a mind or will behind it all, simply light coupling with its own producer
(Darkness), triggering off the whole of the material universe. However, in time, as light
and substance materialize so too does ‘form and shape’ and then even the Titans
themselves, “The first born of all shaped and palpable Gods”(II,153). These messages lie
at the heart of Oceanus’s conciliatory message to the Titans: in other words, rather than
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feel humiliated by defeat they should view their overthrow as merely an inevitable
consequence of evolution. So, as consequence of evolution. So, as ‘first born’ they
became part of the time sequence, caught up in events emerging from chaos and
darkness: since time caused them to become supreme in the first place they should not
grumble now they are subject to change and casualties of that process. At the very heart
of Hyperion, his anxiety or uncertainty betrays a deficit of truth—and it is this truth
which is the integral premise of Oceanus’s concept of beauty. Only Oceanus, except
weak Clymene, whose glimpse of truth is only sensuous and emotional, can see the glow
of superior beauty in the eyes of his successor and acknowledge the rightness of defeat.
Oceanus is very much a mouthpiece for Keats’s own ideas at this time. Oceanus
also touches another very important thematic element, the role of suffering as an essential
ordeal in the development of a poet. The characteristic Keatsian theme of ripeness is a
familiar facet of Oceanus’s theme of time. Keats was keenly sensitive to the possibility of
his own moment of ripening as a poet. In mythological terms, the poet guides the psyche
from darkness to enlightenment. He defines growth as cyclic. Knowledge in Biblical
mythology, comes through suffering and defeat. Oceanus’s words echo the same
sentiment. The ideas also find parallels in one of Keats’s letters to the same period: “…
there is really a grand march of intellect … it proves that a mighty providence subdues
the mightiest mind of the service of the time being”. [II, Page-282]
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Oceanus’s concern with time draws out the whole central thrust of the poem and
directs it towards Apollo’s climactic moment in Book III, his moment of ripeness and
thus of apotheosis.
The last phase of the book contains Enceladus reacting angrily and reminds the
Titans of their humiliations. War with the Olympians must be continued until the Titans
can “… singe away the swollen clouds of Jove stifling that puny essence in its
tent”[ii,330-31].
Upon the scene now arrives Hyperion, silent, morbid and dejected. The brilliance that he
radiates is too full of heat to be generative. The flare of Hyperion’s radiance matches the
anger of Enceladus but this can only be treated as blind obstinacy.
In these passages Keats’s treatment of mythology seems to explore a symbolic
vista of his philosophy and aesthetics. Hyperion’s retelling of a classical myth also gives
a radical re-reading of human history and its possible future.
The first two books are a series of sculptural friezes, they seem to be too much a
stage setting for Apollo who first appears in the third book. Book III opens with an
invocation of the Muse to leave behind the agony and tension of the Titans and to shift
her attention to Apollo, “the father of all verse” (Book III,13). Apollo has always been
the most symbolically weighted of mythological names for Keats. In pre-Hellenic days,
Delphi was the temple of Mother-Earth, guarded by a python. Apollo slew the serpent
63
and established his oracle at Delphi. We found in the previous book Clymene’s account
of the rapturous terror accompanying her premonitory experience of Apollo’s power ;
“A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,
And still it cried, “Apollo; young Apollo!”
The morning-bright Apollo! Young Apollo!”
I fled, it followed me, and cried “Apollo”!”
These portend the entrance of Apollo, in the third book where the scene changes to a
Greek island. Apollo is wandering by a rivulet, weeping with an inexplicable sadness,
when he is approached by Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and the mother of the
Muses. She had watched over him all his life, she tells him, and their conversation brings
him to the sudden realization that his ‘aching pleasure’ is being displaced by ‘knowledge
enormous’, which makes him immortal. He convulsively “die[s] into life”, and the true
poet is born. Here ends the fragment. Thus the action of the poem reaches its climax with
Apollo’s apotheosis. The book forms the crux of Keats’s true poetic soul rising
resplendent above the relic of the old. Thus it seems that what began as an epic poem
about a mythological conflict has become a symbolical poem of a different kind.
Given the beauty might principle expounded by Oceanus the basic premise of Apollo’s
triumph over Hyperion is that he is ‘first in beauty’.De Selincourt suggests that, Apollo,
after being confirmed in his supremacy by Jove, “would have gone forth to meet
64
Hyperion who, struck by the power of supreme beauty would have found resistance
impossible”. It is Keats’s view of ‘suffering’ and his view of ‘progress’ that are crucial
here, Keats wished to show that sorrow could be creative: and it has even been said that
his whole poetic output can be regarded as an attempt to find a justification for suffering.
The younger gods in Hyperion are not antipathetic to the forebears, only more vigorous
and capable of facing and transcending the new complexities and oppositions the Titan
can not endure. Apollo achieves his godhead not by shrinking from the burden of the
modern consciousness – the Sense of sorrow, impermanence, and loss but by being
baptized into the agony of full historical awareness and its immensity of pain. Apollo,
prompted by Mnemosyne, discovers the truth about his own nature, instilling in him a
radiant self-assurance, leading him on to deification.
In this context Mnemosyne is a key figure because, as the Call, she represents a
particular type of enlightenment, for Apollo. Mnemosyne belongs to the world both of
the conquered and the conquering ,she was a Titan, but she becomes the foster mother of
Apollo; she is both orders of deity and transition from one to another; she is the womb in
the old order out of which the new order has been born. What Apollo receives from
Mnemosyne, is knowledge of human suffering, which together with feeling, makes the
artist godlike.
Agonies,
65
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain
And deify me, … [III, 117-20]”.
Apollo, like Endymion, is John Keats. The untried idealism of Endymion has under the
stress of realities, become stronger, sterner. The fact of death and love have been proved
on the poet’s pulses. “Sensations” without knowledge have ripened and deepened into
sensations with knowledge. Apollo’s godhead is also his poet hood. He comes to see as a
god sees, as it is the high and final achievement of the poet to see. The poet may come to
the divine vision such as a god has. Apollo and Hyperion are, infact, complementary
figures. They represent the lighter and darker sides, the potential strengths and actual
liabilities of the broad criterion of Negative Capability Keats was seeking to articulate
and refine `into a moral ideal of the poet. In this way Hyperion is, by way of being an
exposition of what poetry, in its highest reaches. Keats is trying to tell us the aim and
object of the poet. The agony and the ecstasy that Apollo suffers in the process of his
apotheosis symbolizes the final stage in Keats’s poetic development. Thus Hyperion
becomes a poem where narrative and contemplation, story and symbol, myth and
meaning clash with and annul each other.
Keats abandoned the poem in about April 1819 – the month that he wrote the
‘vale of soul – making’ letter. We may conjecture about his reasons for this decisions.
Perhaps, with the Titans defeated and Apollo deified, Keats felt the climax of his story
had already been reached. Very probably Keats himself was not fully seized of the deeper
possibilities of his design as he told a close friend that Apollo’s speech “seemed to come
66
by chance or magic” rather than by his own intension. Keats proposed to write ten books
over the epic subject but in the process new difficulties had arisen. The new scheme of
evolution in beauty could hardly be embodied in events and actions, and Keats could not
afford such wealth of scenes and incidents. By this time Keats was also wavering among
a series of conflicts. He was frantically in search of an asylum where he could find a state
of changeless happiness and on the other hand an urgent sense of the necessity for change
and development, the necessity to emerge from the chamber of Maiden-Thought was
drastically sought for. Thus reaching the first great point of climax Keats abandones the
subject, for he never knew how to go on after filling one’s mind (Apollo’s) with the
potential of highest knowledge.
C. D. Thorpe [ed] suggests the possibility of Keats’s discontent with the direction
his poem was taking in its third book, i.e. veering away from epic action toward the
expression of incongruous aesthetic ideas, which dated back as far as “sleep and poetry”,
through the person of a Keats like Apollo who seemed to be developing into a prototytpe
of the poet rather than of the hero. [Poems, pp. 309-10]. The Miltonisms of the style seem
to have been a worry to Keats. In one of his letters he explained; “I’ve given up Hyperion
– there were too many Miltonic inversions in it – Miltonic verse can not be written but in
an artful, or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English
ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion
and put a mark χ to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one | | to the true voice of
feeling. Upon my soul, ‘twas imagination I can not make the distinction – Every now and
67
then there is a Miltonic intonation – But I can not make the division properly …” [to J H.
Reynolds, 21st sept. 1819]
But Keats himself was in general the first to discovers his own defects and the
first to see how to remedy them. He deliberately chose Milton as a corrective to his lack
of restraint; he also deliberately abandoned Hyperion when he discovered that it was
becoming “too Miltonic”, and that his own natural style was in danger of being
submerged. None has been so successfully imitative and original at the same time, as
Keats.
Hyperion marked the watershed in Keats’s carrer. The virtuoso in Keats made its
final cut with this epic attempt. The poem is a vision of spiritual and aesthetic growth,
Keats’s own of course, and a growth of his powers as a narrator. Byron announced that it
was “proof of his poetic genius” and Shelly called it second to nothing that was produced
by the deification of Apollo announces the arrival of the mature Keats. So the momentous
acclaim of his contemporaries confirms that Keats had at last fulfilled the desire in Sleep
& Poetry that he might become a ‘glorious denizen’ of poesy. Whatever be his reasons
for leaving Hyperion unfinished, however, Keats returned to the subject three of four
months later, probably in July 1819, with the intension of reworking the poem under a
new name, ridding it of its heavy Miltonic flavour.
68
CHAPTER-III
“THE FALL OF HYPERION, A DREAM”
SALVATION OF A POET
With the recast of Hyperion in September 1819, Keats embarked into a new
philosophy.It took a different way and Keats used his mythic vision in a more complex
manner, in the hypnotic framework of a dream vision. In the first version Keats had failed
to unite idea and narrative. In the second version he plays boldly and simply sunders
them. Hyperion was always in Keats’s mind The Fall of Hyperion. It discovers a mythic
order of vision for Keats’s secular humanism, paradoxically attaining a severe
impersonality through intense objectivity. Hyperion was to be dethroned by Apollo who
had come at the abrupt end of the first version of the poem, through the pain of a death
into life, to a full consciousness of his own godhead. “Knowledge enormous makes a god
of me”. That was the projection, into an imagined world of immortals, of the knowledge
which the the mortal poet Keats had achieved through death into life.at the end of the
third book of Hyperion Keats himself read those lines which Apollo read in the eyes of
Mnemosyne:
“Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, Sovran voices, agonies
Creations and destroyings” –
This knowledge of the beauty and necessity of human destinies, Keats personified
in Mnemosyne. In the new Hyperion the liquid and lovely name is changed to a sterner
69
one: the Greek Mnemosyne becomes the Latin Moneta. The Apollo of the first version
becomes the Keats of the second. The Fall of Hyperion creates a purgatorial and
redemptive pattern in which the modern poet is forced to question the limits and
sufficiency of the imagination’s claims to truth. The poem was Keats’s last effort to
integrate his conception of the poet and the poet’s function in the world.
The very style of the poem authenticates Keats’s fidelity to his mythic
vision. The poem is cast in a dream. And in the mask of dream vision the the
poet enters the.In the mask of the myth he presents his poetic theory and
within the poetic theory is the seed of his mythologizing imagination.
With the Fall of Hyperion Keats develops from sensuous pleasure to humanitarian
concern for the world. Keats’s is here looking back on what seem to him to be the facts of
his brief carrer 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 poet 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.
In The Fall of Hyperion Keats’s guide is Moneta, a much more powerful, vivid
and sinister figure than Mnemosyne. The poem opens with a short prologue and with
distinction between self absorbed ‘dreamers’ and true poets. The prologue affords an
excellent example of the new tense and muscular verse, much in a Greek manner:
“Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
70
Guesses at Heaven: pity these have not
Trac’d 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 charm
And dumb enchantment”. [The Fall of Hyperion, Canto I, (1-11)]
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. The thought
is same here as in The Greecian Urn – only art can endure.
The narrator finds himself in a strange forest – he drinks a potion, after which he
swoons. The magic potion that lulls him to sleep is actually the eternal natural source
from which life is sustained and renewed, the dreamer now absorbs the divine grace of
the Great Goddess and thus prepares himself for the spiritual experience to come.
Waking up from the slumber, the poet finds himself in a vast shrine. This apparent
awakening from a swoon symbolizes the movement from the subconscious to the
unconscious resulting in a more profound involvement with the myth. The primeval
construction of the temple and its architecture is Greecian in from. It is here when he
71
hears a voice, which turns out to be his guide’s, Moneta. Moneta now throws a challenge
to the poet:
“If thou canst not ascend
These steps, die on that marble where thou art.”
Now the poet must accept his destiny of knowledge and make the fearful effort
towards mastery and comprehension, travelling along the road from birth to death. He
struggles to obey the summons, and the struggle is terrible. A palsied Chill strikes upward
from the paved floor. He is on the very brink of death.
“One minute before death, my ice’d foot touched
The lowest stair, and as it touch’d, life seem’d
To pour in at the toes: I mounted up,
As once fair Angels on a ladder flew
From the green turf to heaven.”
In the first version Apollo also had “died into life”. Now the mortal poet turns to
the veiled ministrant and cries; “What am I that should be so saved from death?” And the
veiled shadow explains;
“…Thou hast felt
What ’tis to die and live again before
Thy fated hour. That thou hadst power to do so
Is thy own safety ;thou hast dated on
Thy doom.” …
72
This death in life, which is also a death into life is necessary to the progress of the
poet, as Keats conceives it. It is a profound acceptance of death, it is a deliberate
submission of the conscious self which rebels against death. By thus symbolically
confronting his own death he becomes enlightened, since the only one who can climb the
steps are,
“… those to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery.” It is, as it were, the
pressing to one’s heart of the pang that includes all pangs. This mysterious conception of
the death into life is undergone by Apollo in the final book of the first Hyperion. That
death and deification comes through the “Knowledge enormous” seen in the eyes of
Mnemosyne; something of the same kind was to befall the poet. Here Keats has entered
into a fuller possession of his own intuition; and declares that the power to feel what it is
to die and live again before his fated hour is the very condition of achieving his
“knowledge enormous”. Moneta is the central figure in this second version of Hyperion.
Keats felt that Moneta was more appropriate to his new conception of the priestess’s
wisdom and prohetic power. Some classical authorities associate Moneta with Minena,
the Greek adaptation of the Egyptian Isis. Isis represents the productive force of nature.
She is also linked with universal knowledge and truth. Lempriere relates that inscriptions
on the statues of the goddess were often in these words:
“I am all that has been, that shall be, and none among
the mortals has hitherto taken off my veil.”
Keats seems to have created the same awe and mystery in his portrayal of
Moneta. Moneta functions as a catalyst both for the poet and for the narrative, in a life
changing way. The problem of the first version is solved here by taking Moneta out of the
73
story and present himself inside the story line. But the delineation of Moneta is a complex
one for she combines within a single person both human reason and wisdom-in-suffering.
The fact that she can speak to gods and to poets also emphasizes another duality, the
divine in art, which may infact be the mission of the artist. Both of these roles together
point to a further element of her complex role in the poem, her transcendentalism. Like
Diana, she has the freedom to act equally in human and immortal worlds. She seems to
exist out side of time and accordingly she directs the poet towards the immortality hinted
at in the induction.
The veiled Moneta after giving a rigorous classification of men identifies the
fallen images of Saturn and promises to impart knowledge unto the poet, which would
wonder him, though it will be without pain. The scenes the same parts of the earlier epic
and they are needed only to provide examples of pain and loss. At this Moneta parts her
veils, and in her face we confront the impersonal stoicism that knowledge of endless
suffering has brought:
“… Then saw I a wan face,
Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d
By an immortal sickness which kills not;”
The confrontation of Moneta and the Dreamer is similar to the confrontation of
the hero of the Ode on Melancholy with ‘veil’d Melancholy in her Sovran shrine’.
74
Thus Moneta is an archetypal Keatsian woman: dominant, drawing man to
knowledge, controlling, initiating, evading. The poet is permitted a privileged sight, to
see into the fall and the purgatorial suffering of the Titans. Thus the coming together of
the poet and Moneta, via ordeal and judgement, represents the essence of Romantic
creativity. The vision of Moneta’s face symbolizes the role of the true poet: impersonal,
immortal, compelling and comforting. Here Keats is offering a significant poetic
doctrine; “The vale of soul Making”, by which he means that when a human soul comes
to the earth it is only part formed and it becomes completed through its experiences
(chiefly suffering) in this world: “A place where the heart must feel and suffer a thousand
diverse ways” (14th February – 3rd May, 1819).
The dreamer must undergo a trial, a sort of dying into life and it is to take place
on the steps of Saturn’s ancient temple. Moneta draws the poet into a trial of his morality.
This is a moment of ripening and even of withering. The poet’s time has arrived but his
mood is still wavering, as if he were about to be annihilated. At the heart of this trial lies
the dilemma, the crisis in Keats’s mind about which type of dreamer he himself might be.
Keats fails to solve this crisis because fanatics and savages inhabit the same circle of the
dreamers and Moneta further torments the poet by pointing out that the poet, a dreamer
merely “vexes” the world, the dreamer “venoms all his days”. Nevertheless the poet
replies that poetry has a social as well as a life giving function,
“Sure not all
Those melodies sung into the world’s ear
Are useless: sure a poet is a sage,
75
A humanist, physician to all men”.
Accordingly Moneta must concede, poetry is after all ‘a balm upon the world’. It
were indeed better, Keats is saying, not to have entered the temple of consciousness, not
to suffer unending pain. But for that pain there is a reward: At last he stands safe on the
altar steps.
The fate of Saturn is a symbol of destiny of the world, and Moneta is a symbol of
the world made conscious of its own vicissitude. In Moneta’s ‘cold lips’ and ‘planetary
eyes’ Keats visualizes those ‘high tragedies’, the fallen Saturn:
“Like to the image pedestall’d so high
In Saturn’s temple, Then Moneta’s voice
Came brief upon mine ear, ‘so Saturn sat
When he had lost his realms’ – where on there grew
A power within me of enormous ken,
To see as a god sees, and take the depth
Of things as nimbly as the outward eye
Can size and shape pervade. The loftly theme
At those few words hung vast before my mind,
With half unravel’d web. I set myself
Upon an Eagle’s watch, that I might see,
And seeing ne’er forget”.
76
Moneta’s otherness has a weird familiarity: in imagining her capacity to
contemplate suffering, without in any way losing the ability to feel with its victims, Keats
recognizes and so creates his own spectral self. It is a moment of profound self-
realization. In the earlier poem the description of the heavens in Saturn’s speech leads to
an expectation of the arrival of Hyperion,
“to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile.”(Hyperion, 1, 123-24)
But now the stars lead Saturn to the destructive thought:
“There is no death in all the Universe
No smell of death – there shall be death
-Moan moan”(The Fall of Hyperion, Canto I, 423-24).
His earlier semi-hopeful, semi-questioning—
“But can not I create,
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth?
Another world, another Universe[?]” – is in the new version now missing
(Hyperion, I. 141-43). The change is a remarkable one. Keats, here, looking on Thea and
Saturn, endures a ghastly agony. It is infact to Keats, “the giant agony of the world”, and
they represented chiefly that heaped portion of agony which he himself had to bear. For a
moment, looking at the benign eyes of Moneta, Keats could look upon the pattern of life
without pain and know the beauty and accept the necessity, that it must be so and not
otherwise, but he could not remain at that height of comprehension. His own pain broke
through his resolution and the agony becomes so heavy that he says;
77
Oftentimes I pray’d
Intense, that death would take me from the vale
And all its burdens – Gasping with despair
Of change, hour after hour I curs’d myself:”
These terrible lines contain the mood in which he was struggling to cope with his
final poetic harmony. Poetry was a revealation of soul-knowledge, and soul-knowledge
was an attitude of the complete being. Keats had struggled for an abiding knowledge, and
in the new Hyperion he recounts the steps of his strange progress. Keats has skillfully
incorporated myth into mystery. The study of all things ends in a mystery, and the
knowledge that does not end in a mystery is not a true knowledge at all.
Again the poem breaks off. Although Keats attributed the impasse in the poem to
the obstinate influence of Milton it is clear that his verse benefits immeasurably from the
assimilation of his literary research, underpinning theme and plot and opening up diverse
allegorical and metaphysical possibilities.
The Fall of Hyperion is an attempt, once more to summon up a bygone mythology
in modern times. The poem suggests Keats’s rendezvous with that poetic impulse that he
had to assertain before his doomsday. The intense autobiographical touch that fashion
forth the whole poem brings out the subjective interpretations of his own ego both poetic
and characteristic.
78
The abandoned version of the second Hyperion story constitute Keats’s further
refinements in the ‘beautiful mythology of Greece’. It reveals Keats’s brilliance in
transporting ancient myth into the substance of modern allegory. Mythology serves as the
sensual and fertile metaphor for his poetic vision.In his treatment of the Hyperion myth,
the poet is offering a mythical elaboration of his own poetic desires.
Apart from Miltonisms, Keats’s poetry also frequently echoes Shakespeare’s King
Lear, spenser’s Faeric Queene and Beckford’s Vathek. But Keats’s retelling of the myth
of Hyperion, its adaptation, expansion and treatment are essentially individual. Loaded
with symbolic significance and used as a mode for defining not only his poetic theory but
also his mythic vision and ultimately the attempt to use it as a vehicle for defining the law
of evolution are Keats’s own contributions. Keats’s personal credo has by now reached
such elegance that in The Fall of Hyperion he strongly hints that metaphysical
speculation is no longer the province of the sage but of the poet.
By the fall of 1819, Keats’s tuberculosis had progressed so far that he no longer
considered producing the new work and did little but revised old work, preparing it for
publication. The Fall of Hyperion was left unfinished.
79
CONCLUSION
Keats was the most highly endowed of all our poets in the nineteenth century . His
major preoccupations were to identify the energy and impulses that exist at the root of all
feelings and to bring them alive with objective experiences . Keats’s artistic inclination
led him to the elemental forms of nature and human life incorporated in mythology . But
his use of mythology was different from his contemporaries . Keats did not know Greek .
And the mistiness of mythology drove him to find a new cult based on the primordial
sources . Keatsian doctrine of Negative Capability is the essential base that supplies his
mythic vision . In one of his letters to George and Tom Keats , 21 Dec ,1817 Keats lays
down these lines :
“ …….. I mean Negative Capability , that is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties , Mysteries , doubts , without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason ”. These lines can generate the rich faculty of Keats’s mythologizing
power . But at the same time mythology provides him the substance not only for his
poetry but for his philosophy .
Keats’s philosophy of beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict . It
has an meaning to him . Without them souls could not be made and the business of the
world is the making of the souls. Therefore it is essential for a poetic soul to preserve its
80
natural receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it .
This champion of mankind died at Rome at the age of twenty five , paralysed by
tuberculosis , Keats’s parentage was not so remarkable and it can be said that Keats
inherited nothing but the disease of consumption . He had been brought to the warmer
winter of Italy in a vain attempt to prolong his life . This was eked out miserably in
rented rooms in the Piaza di Spagna ,where he was looked after by a young painter friend,
Joseph Severn . He sleeps beneath the pyramid of Caius Cestius , a spot so beautiful that
,in the phrase of Shelley , whose heart was soon to be rest beside him ,“ It makes one in
love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place “.
The inscription on the grave is of his own devising : “ Here lies one whose name
is writ in water” . The lovely, touching words are idle .That name is written, not in the
water, but on the everlasting rock of time .
81
Select Bibliography
 Aileen Ward , John Keats’s ;

“The making of a Poet”
( New york , and London , Paperback 1966).
 Brian Wilkie ;
“ Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition”
( Madison and Milwankee , 1965 ) .
 Claude De Finney ;
“ The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry,vols
I,II”
( New york , Harvard University Press , 1966) .
 D. J . James ;
“ The Romantic Comedy ” (1948) .
 Douglus Bush ;
“ Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in
English Poetry” ( Massachusetts ; Havrard University
Press, 1969).
 E.R.Wasserman ;
“ The Finer Tone : Keats’s Major Poems”
(Baltimore , 1953) .
82
79
 George Santayana ;
“ Interpretations of Poetry and Religion”
(New York ,1926) .
 G.M.Matthews ;
“ Keats , The Critical Heritage ”
( Reprinted , London , Routledge , 1971) .
 Graham Hough ;
“ The Romantic Poets ”
( London : Hutchinson & co , ltd ,1953) .
 G.S.Kirk ;
“ Myth : Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient
and Other Cultures ” ( Cambridge University Press , 1970 ).
 Hyder Edwards Rollins ;

“ The Letters oh John Keats , vol I , II ”
(Cambridge University Press , 1958 ) .
 John Barnard ;
“John Keats , 1795-1821- Criticism and
Interpretation ”
( Cambridge University Press , 1970) .
 John Keats’s ;
“ Selected Poetry.ed.Elizabeth Cook”
(Oxford world’s classics , 1996) .
83
80
 John Middleton Murry ;
“ Keats and Shakespeare ”
( London , Oxford University Press , 1951) .
 Lionel Trilling ;
“ The Opposing Self ”
( New York and London , 1955 ) .
 N.F.Ford ;
“ The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats”
( Stanford , California ,1951 ) .
 Seemin Hasan ;
“ The Voice of Feeling , Myth and Mythology
in Keats major Poems ”( The Academic press ,
Gurgaon ,1998 ) .
 Sir Herbert Read ;
“ The True Voice of Feeling ”
( London , 1953 ) .
 Stuart M . Sperry , Jnr. ;
“ Keats ,The Poet ”
( Princeton , 1974 University Press).
 Walter H. Evert ;
“ Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of
Keats”
( Princeton , 1965 ) .
 Walter Jackson Bate ;
84
“ John Keats”
( Cambridge , Massachusetts , 1964 ) .
85

Mythology As Poetics

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Mythology as Poetics

DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE RABINDRA BHARTI UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD

OF THE DEGREE OF M.PHIL IN ENGLISH.

ROLL RAB –ENG, NO- 04/3

who are responsible for helping me into doing this volume.

through and through, , but also, generously allowed me to venture in my speculations

and rectified my inaccuracies .I am also profoundly grateful to Professor Nilagrib

I am deeply grateful to my father whose loving wisdom is a constant boost behind my

Contents Page no.

an adumbrated beauty, a delight in finished workmanship rather than in vague

through an imaginative resurrection of ancient divinities, remodelling of myths with

mytholgizing. Keats ‘mythic vision’ is an intuitive response to the unconscious designs

and patterns that were absorbed in his poetry.

into the practical daily lives of the people .

endearing insistence on carrying quasi-mythical modes of thought, expression, and

communication into a supposedly scientific age .

actual instances can be measured. Etymology is a traditional point of departure, but in

or their content , or a particular set of myths. Even it is confusing in their admixture of

what might otherwise be called folktale, legend, theology or even sociology.

store of materials if he is to communicate even a few of his intimations.

The new stream incorporated a reorientation of the English mind and a

and mythology was a manifestation of the strength of the human imagination .

thus giving it a symbolic significance .

Mythology was remodelled with symbolic overtones . Keats's use of mythology is

the mythology of classical antiquity he 'found' a readymade vocabulary and symbolism of

framework of mythological plots .

beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad " .

dynamic social flux of his own age* .

most Greek of the English poets " .

written , is Margaret Sherwood's excellent discussion of Keats's mythological orientation

fulfillment of individual destiny through obedience to nature's laws*** .

Keats's physique , particularly in the character alignment of forehead , nose and

some heaven-kissing hill " .

Age * = William John Courthope , “A History of English Poetry,volume–6

“ The Romantic Movement in English Poetry ” (London , 1910) .

Machinery ** = Joseph Texte , “ Keats’s et le neo – hellenisime dans las

poise anglaise ” (Paris , 1898)

Laws *** = Margaret Sherwood , “ Keats’s Imaginative Approach to

Myth” , in undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry .

Cambridge , Massachusets , 1994 .

Among the formative influences in Keats’s work, classical reading had

developed throughout his poetry.

Keats’s earlier negotiations with mythology is found in Ode to Apollo (1815). In

Collins and others, there is a gleam of mythological fancy :

“In thy western halls of gold

when thou sittest in thy state.”

Keats’s first series of mythological allusions is found in Epistle to George Felton

I Stood Tip-toe (1816) is the product of a puerile effort in a transport of sensual

deities refer to Keats’s progressive adaptation of myth to humanitarian symbolism.

between Wordsworth and Keats. Wordsworth was more preoccupied in philosophizing

and subjective applications.

In the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer (1816) Keats discovered a new imaginative

poetic inspiration, creativity and beauty. Her generative influence is transported to

mythological paintings were the origins of Keats’s understanding of myth. Mythological

other writings. Endymion’s mythological Greece purposes an alternative to the dominant

knowledge. The re-imagining of an ancient Greek myth expressed the potential of

of the Enlightenment era had cultured Pre-Christian mythology to question Christianity’s