As flowers turn their faces to the sun, So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze, And, as we shap’d our course, this, that way run, With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp’d amaze; Sweet in the air a mild-ton’d music plays, And progresses through its own labyrinth; Buds gather’d from the green spring’s middle-days, They scatter’d,—daisy, primrose, hyacinth,— Or round white columns wreath’d from capital to plinth.

After his mornings spent in Brown’s company over the strained frivolities of The Cap and Bells, Keats was in the same weeks striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being. He took up again the abandoned Hyperion, and began rewriting it no longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing, sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies.

The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the original Hyperion at the point where Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[6] he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, goddess of warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn, makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn’s temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.

They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre spirit, as had been present in Keats’s mind almost from the beginning: the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks: the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self, and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats in Sleep and Poetry; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in Endymion, especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in Keats’s letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats’s genius as well as of its highest promise,—there had appeared in his letters and some of his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on a calm evening of April, he anticipates the Tennysonian vision of ‘nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine.’ In letters written during the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the acuteness of his new sense that the world is ‘full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,’ and upon the poet’s need of knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away the heat and fever and ease ‘the Burden of the Mystery.’ The first passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known and deeply significant one:—

I find earlier days are gone by—I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society—some with their wit—some with their benevolence—some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet—and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great Nature—there is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.

The next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:—‘were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarcal coronation,—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers ... I am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death—without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose.’

The pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt meditative verse, as in the odes to the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn, and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends. Now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming passion, it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. It seems to him that every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a dreamer. If poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. Of such wisdom The Fall of Hyperion in its amended form, as revealed and commented by Mnemosyne-Moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,—or such an attempt at a sample as Keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply. But the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned.

The preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty thought conveyed in noble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite his own and independent of all models. Take the feast of fruits, symbolic of the poet’s early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:—

On a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, Which, nearer seen, seem’d refuse of a meal By angel tasted or our Mother Eve; For empty shells were scattered on the grass, And grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more Sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know. Still was more plenty than the fabled horn Thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting, For Proserpine return’d to her own fields, Where the white heifers low. And appetite, More yearning than on earth I ever felt, Growing within, I ate deliciously,— And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice Sipp’d by the wander’d bee, the which I took, And pledging all the mortals of the world, And all the dead whose names are in our lips, Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.

The draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a changed being among utterly changed surroundings. The world in which he finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august temple,—the noblest and most nobly described architectural vision in all Keats’s writings:—