| Après sur la plus grosse corde D’un bruit qui tonnait jusqu’aux cieux, Le pouce des Muses accorde L’assaut des Géants et des Dieux. |
Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,—
| Cœus, and Gyges, and Briareus; Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion Were pent in regions of laborious breath Dungeon’d in opaque elements,— |
Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of Ronsard:—
| Styx d’un noir halecret rempare Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein, Sa fille amenant par la main Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2] ······ Neptune à la fourche estofée De trois crampons vint se mesler Par la troupe contre Typhée Qui rouoit une fonde en l’air: Ici Phoebus d’un trait qu’il jette Fit Encelade trébucher, Là Porphyre lui fit broncher Hors des poings l’arc et la sagette. |
For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton’s voice. Speaking generally of the blank verse of Hyperion, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as Milton’s own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls ‘solemn planetary wheelings’; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in Hyperion are rather matters of diction and construction—construction almost always derived from the Latin—than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of many:—
| For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he. |
It is only in Hyperion that Keats habitually thus puts the noun Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that ‘perplex’ are derived from the eclipse which in Paradise Lost ‘with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.’ Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the ‘turn’ or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley’s Defence of Poesy[3]:
| How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self. |
It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in Paradise Lost, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show—to take one point only—in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:—