| I look’d around upon the curved sides Of an old sanctuary, with roof august, Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds Might spread beneath as o’er the stars of heaven. So old the place was, I remember’d none The like upon the earth: what I had seen Of grey cathedrals, buttress’d walls, rent towers, The superannuations of sunk realms, Or Nature’s rocks toil’d hard in waves and winds, Seem’d but the faulture of decrepit things To that eternal domed monument. |
The sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within this temple; the black gates closed against the east,—which must symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense—a voice at once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step; his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet’s ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards, when in answer to the poet’s questions the priestess tells him that none can climb to the altar beside which he stands,—the altar, we must suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,—except those
| to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest. |
The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is answered,—
| ‘Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries’ Rejoin’d that voice; ‘they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice: They come not here, they have no thought to come; And thou art here, for thou art less than they. What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low— The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. |
What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic life and of the end that awaits it:—
| These are the living pleasures of the bard, But richer far posterity’s award. What shall he murmur with his latest breath, When his proud eye looks through the film of death? |
The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature anticipation of its maturity?
At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the more willingly if they are to extend to certain ‘hectorers in proud bad verse’ (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him, the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand, her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting. When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the world’s past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of Saturn, the poet relates:—