The plan of a poem on the war of the gods and Titans was already shaped or shaping in his mind when Keats set out for the north. As early as September 1817 he had had in view ‘a new romance’ for the following summer; in keeping with the new aspirations which that summer brought, the ‘romance’ was now to be an epic. The most potent influence governing the execution, that of Milton, is familiar, and does not directly concern us here. Still less can we consider the possible effect of companionship with those three little volumes of Cary’s Dante, the single book taken with him on this tour.[16] But while the spell of Paradise Lost is apparent in the cast of the plot, above all in the debate of the Titans, and in the style, an influence to which Milton’s is wholly alien asserts itself in the delineation of the Titanic ‘den’ itself. Clearly based upon the idea of an Inferno, this ‘sad place’ where ‘bruised Titans’ are ‘chained in torture,’ is yet full of traits which recall neither Milton nor Dante, but rather one of those amazing chasms on Nevis, which seemed to be the very ‘core’ of the great mountain. He had, even, as he looked down into that vaporous gulf, actually thought of the image of Hell. Milton’s Hell is a plain of burning earth vaulted with fire and verging on a sea of flame[17]; if there is a hill (i. 670) it is a volcano, belching fire, or coated with a sulphurous scurf. The Keatsian Inferno is genuinely, what he calls it, a ‘den,’ a yawning mountain dungeon overarched with jutting crags, floored with hard flint and slaty ridge, and encompassed by a deafening roar of waterfalls and torrents. A shattered rib of rock, with his iron mace beside it, attests the spent fury of Creus. Enceladus lies uneasily upon a craggy shelf. To render the spectacle of the ruined and almost lifeless bodies lying ‘vast and edgeways,’ he calls in a definite reminiscence, the ‘dismal cirque’ of Druid stones near Keswick. He has felt too the silence of the mountains in the pauses of the winter wind, though he speaks of it only to contrast it with the organ voice of Saturn preceding the expectant murmur of his audience of fallen divinities (ii. 123).[18] The darkness, too, in which they languish is not eternal and ordained like that of Milton’s Hell; the coming of the Sun-god will invade it with a splendour like the morn and
... all the beetling gloomy steeps,
All the sad spaces of oblivion,
And every gulf, and every chasm old,
And every height, and every sullen depth,
Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,
And all the everlasting cataracts,
And all the headlong torrents, far and near,
Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)
will stand revealed in that terrible splendour.