| —the spur Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans To nurse the golden age ‘mong shepherd clans: That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival: His sister’s sorrow; and his wanderings all, Until into the earth’s deep maw he rush’d: Then all its buried magic, till it flush’d High with excessive love. ‘And now,’ thought he, ‘How long must I remain in jeopardy Of blank amazements that amaze no more? Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle’s vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark! My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?—list!—’ |
The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker’s transient hour of union with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told most fully by Ovid and which Shelley’s lyric has made familiar to all English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:
| —and lo! More suddenly than doth a moment go, The visions of the earth were gone and fled— He saw the giant sea above his head. |
Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery and ‘buried magic’ of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in the Odyssey, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as ‘Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,’ to refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet’s soul with joy and illumination even among the ‘dismal elements’ of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness, indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet’s scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.
Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly ‘regalities’ in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet ‘On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt’ written the previous March in the copy of his Poems which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as ‘baaing vanities,’ and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, ‘Are then regalities all gilded masks?’ The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe—cosmic powers, as we should now say—most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is ‘the gentlier-mightiest.’ Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey. Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon’s praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer’s attention is suddenly diverted,—
The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats’s reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:[9] but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the Arabian Nights.
Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him. But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man’s welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.
| Had he then wrong’d a heart where sorrow kept? ······· He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears. The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt Before that careworn sage. |
They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures, even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of Neptune’s kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe, who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla was forgotten. How the witch, the ‘arbitrary queen of sense,’ one day revealed her true character, and ‘specious heaven was changed to real hell.’ (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s great sonnet against lust—