| Where’s the Poet? show him! show him, Muses nine! that I may know him. ’Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he King, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be’twixt ape and Plato; ’Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The Lion’s roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the Tiger’s yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue. |
Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:—
| It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill’d with worldly fear. Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in eagle’s claws— And is not this the cause Of madness?—God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through sights I scarce can bear; O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm’d! |
But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through.
When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on Endymion, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem, Hyperion, he still thought and spoke of it as a ‘romance.’ But a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more ‘naked and Grecian’ than that of Endymion. Was he trying an experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as I have just said, the Ode to Autumn. The words figuring what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,—considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats, despite his promise to finish it ‘all in good time,’ should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.
The next fragment we come to is colossal,—it is Hyperion itself. From the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a ‘feverous relief’ from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under Brown’s roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression Hyperion makes is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:—‘It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power’: and again,—‘the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.’ Woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived it:—
The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,—and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn’s reestablishment— with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet’s brain.
The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in 1820, that Hyperion was intended to be as long as Endymion, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet’s original idea. Mr de Sélincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory, and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence.
Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman’s Iliad would have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman’s Homer’s hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,—‘Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades’: Hesiod’s Theogony (which he had doubtless read in the translation of Pope’s butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans, and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from Sandys’s notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost, where Milton includes the fallen Titans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de l’Hôpital. We know by his translation of the sonnet Nature ornant Cassandre that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands—lent, it would seem, by Mr Taylor—exactly about this time. The ode in question, partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard’s own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their mother Mémoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father Jupiter, their mother’s consent, their undersea journey to the palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:—