In Endymion Keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit. Three years later, writing to Shelley from his sickbed, he contrasts that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. The three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself in him. In them he is already an artist standing outside of his own conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject perhaps to some reservation in the case of Lamia), and scarcely letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to complicate or distract it.
For the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes, are the two great lyrics in Endymion, the choral hymn to Pan and the song of the Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he composed in quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of 1819 are of a reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal.
That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the group, the Ode to Psyche written in the last days of April, differs somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet’s delight in that late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton’s Anatomy may have set him on to reading the original source, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, in Adlington’s translation: there are passages in Lamia which suggest such a reading,[15] and the noble, rhythmical English of that Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the Musée Napoléon (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But that he had always loved the story we know from the passage ‘I stood tip-toe’ beginning—
| So felt he, who first told how Psyche went On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment, |
as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe.
Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, ‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.’ What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and of Spenser with his ‘sea-shouldering whales’ he is now more than the equal. The ‘azure-lidded sleep’ of the maiden in St Agnes’ Eve is matched in this ode by the ‘soft-conchèd ear’ of Psyche,—though the compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the ‘cirque-couchant’ snake in Lamia. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats’s felicity in style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:—
| Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. |
But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the Lakes or in Scotland,—
| Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep. |
For such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no praise, much as has been showered on it by Ruskin and lesser critics, can be too great.