It is clear that in this great passage Keats has deliberately invoked the image of a sunrise among precipitous mountains; and these lines assure him a lasting place amongst our poet interpreters of mountain glory. We must beware, as we have seen, of overstressing the element of realism in the poem. Keats was not describing mountain scenery, English, Scotch, or any other, but using certain aspects of it, which had been vividly brought home to him as he climbed or trudged, to render poetic inspirations of far richer compass and wider scope. Much of the detail of this Titan prison belongs as little to his British mountain experience as do the Titans themselves. Iapetus grasps a strangled serpent; Asia, dreaming of palm-shaded temples and sacred isles, leans upon an elephant tusk. We are conscious of no discord, so pervading is the impress of a single potent imagination, whatever the material it employs. But it is not immaterial to note that, as Professor de Sélincourt has pointed out, Keats did alter the original draft of Hyperion’s coming in such a way as to give it a close resemblance to a sunrise among the mountains, omitting two lines which preceded the last but one quoted above:
And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,
Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.
The former of these lines may be described as a momentary reversion to the tender ‘mossy’ luxuriance of the Endymion scenery, like the ‘nest of pain’ (ii. 90), which, however, he allowed to stand.[19] Its excision, in the final version, marks Keats’s sense of the incongruity of that earlier symbolism with the sterner matter in hand, as does the transformation of the dreamy, pastoral Oceanus of the earlier poem into the master of Stoic wisdom, able ‘to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,’ who offers his bitter balm to the despairing Titans, in the later.
Hyperion, we know, was left a fragment, and with deliberate purpose. The mighty shade of Milton, he came to feel, deflected him from his proper purpose in poetry. It is less important, but not less true, that his passing vision of grand mountains was not in complete consonance with his genius, and that his brief anthem of mountain poetry had in it something of the nature of a tour de force. The mountains were for him neither strongholds of faith nor sources of sublime consolation. Even in the letters written in their presence he could speak somewhat impatiently, as we have seen, of ‘scenery’ compared with life and men. And if he places his ruined Titans in this wild den among the crags and torrents, it is because there was something in him, deeper than his reverence for Wordsworth or for mountain grandeur, which felt the very savagery of the scene, its naked aloofness from everything human, to be in accord with the primeval rudeness of an outdone and superseded race. It is not for nothing that, when the scene changes from the old order to the new, we are transported from Hyperion’s sun-smitten precipices to the sea-haunted lawns and woodlands of Delos, where the young Apollo is seen wandering forth in the morning twilight
Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.
Do we not hear in this the home-coming accents, as of one who has escaped from barbarous Thynia and Bithynia, and tastes the joy that is born
‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?