—smother’d up, And buried from all godlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonition to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man’s harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in.

Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his father Coelus (the Greek Uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of the crudest barbarity, Keats in Hyperion makes benignant and sympathetic.

Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends attributed to him,—that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over the Titans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main theme, but that he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory vision of the world’s future. To such a supposition some colour is surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the ‘knowledge enormous’ just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his Apollo to be above all things a god of action.

Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:—

I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul ’twas imagination—I cannot make the distinction—Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation—But I cannot make the division properly.

And again: ‘I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.’ This re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats’s mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in The Eve of St Agnes, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward, Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry his task through with felicity and ease.

This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January. Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief, The Eve of St Mark. The belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before St Mark’s day (April 24th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert; the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet’s stay there in 1817 mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester. Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days’ work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines’ length. Why? Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:—‘I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.’ I can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it.

The fragment of The Eve of St Mark is Keats’s only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace and movement are nearer to Chaucer in The Romaunt of the Rose or The House of Fame than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats’s own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer’s actual style and vocabulary, thus:—

Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight— Amiddes of the blacke night— Righte in the churche porch, pardie Ye wol behold a companie Approchen thee full dolourouse For sooth to sain from everich house Be it in city or village Wol come the Phantom and image Of ilka gent and ilka carle Who coldè Deathè hath in parle And wol some day that very year Touchen with foulè venime spear And sadly do them all to die— Hem all shalt thou see verilie— And everichon shall by thee pass All who must die that year, Alas.

These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem anticipate the very cadences of Chaucer’s great latter-day disciple, William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have come straight from The Man born to be King or The Land East of the Sun, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:—