Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.

As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how great, though qualified, was his admiration of the Excursion. These thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to ‘dream,’ and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the sorrows of others. They may have been suggested only by Wordsworth; but we must remember that Alastor had been published, and that Keats would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with Endymion I am obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.

Alastor, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of a young poet, who is ‘pure and tender-hearted,’ but who, in his search for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge, keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.’ But a time comes when he thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his ‘self-centred seclusion’ now avenges itself. The ‘spirit of sweet human love’ vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly seeking the ‘prototype’ of the vision until he dies.

In Endymion the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it, and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision, has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive, or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself; and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but for Alastor.

The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the descriptions in Alastor and Endymion, Book I., of the dreamer’s feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has fallen on the landscape, and of his ‘eager’ pursuit of the lost vision. Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious recollection of the passage in Alastor; but the conception is the same.[34]

Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of Endymion, Book III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon; and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon’s beauty. The passage continues thus:

On some bright essence could I lean, and lull Myself to immortality: I prest Nature’s soft pillow in a wakeful rest. But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss— My strange love came—Felicity’s abyss! She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.

In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the ‘wakeful rest’ here corresponds to the condition of the poet in Alastor prior to the dream. ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed’; but when his ‘strange love’ comes these objects, like the objects of Endymion’s earlier desires, no longer suffice him.

There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the effect of Alastor, and especially of its Preface, on Keats’s mind. In the revised version of Hyperion, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him the reason (I italicise certain words):