Life of John Keats Part 14

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 h.e.l.l.' (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare's great sonnet against l.u.s.t--

This all the world well knows; but none know well To shun the heaven that leads men to this h.e.l.l?)

He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and dead, killed by Circe's arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a sea-monster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,--a doom which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in the _Arabian Nights_, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.

Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature--if moreover he would piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea--there would one day come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognizes the predestined youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old--or rather 'the young soul in age's mask'--go together to the submarine hall of burial where Scylla and the mult.i.tude of drowned lovers lie enshrined.

As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the poet's own words:--

'Let us commence,'

Whisper'd the guide, stuttering with joy, 'even now.'

He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough, Began to tear his scroll in pieces small, Uttering the while some mumblings funeral.

He tore it into pieces small as snow That drifts unfeather'd when bleak northerns blow; And having done it, took his dark blue cloak And bound it round Endymion: then struck His wand against the empty air times nine.-- 'What more there is to do, young man, is thine: But first a little patience; first undo This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue.

Ah, gentle! 'tis as weak as spider's skein; And shouldst thou break it--What, is it done so clean A power overshadows thee! O, brave!

The spite of h.e.l.l is tumbling to its grave.

Here is a sh.e.l.l; 'tis pearly blank to me, Nor mark'd with any sign or charactery-- Canst thou read aught? O read for pity's sake!

Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.'

'Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall Sweet music breath'd her soul away, and sigh'd A lullaby to silence.--'Youth! now strew These minced leaves on me, and pa.s.sing through Those files of dead, scatter the same around, And thou wilt see the issue.'--'Mid the sound Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart, Endymion from Glaucus stood apart, And scatter'd in his face some fragments light.

How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight Smiling beneath a coral diadem Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn'd gem, Appear'd, and, stepping to a beauteous corse, Kneel'd down beside it, and with tenderest force Press'd its cold hand, and wept,--and Scylla sigh'd!

Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply'd-- The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead.

And as he pa.s.sed, each lifted up his head, As doth a flower at Apollo's touch.

Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house.

The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air--while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly; and the rest Felt a high certainty of being blest.

They gaz'd upon Endymion. Enchantment Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent.

Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers, Budded, and swell'd, and, full-blown, shed full showers Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine.

The two deliverers tasted a pure wine Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz'd out.

Speechless they ey'd each other, and about The fair a.s.sembly wander'd to and fro, Distracted with the richest overflow Of joy that ever pour'd from heaven.

The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it, like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But bearing in mind what we have recognized as the general scope and symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit touched with the divine beam of Cynthia--that is aspiring to and chosen for communion with essential Beauty--in other words the spirit of the Poet--must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away the selfishness of its private pa.s.sion in sympathy with human loves and sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of the G.o.ds with the poetic gift and pa.s.sion, has only begun to awaken to sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid for this plunge into sensual debas.e.m.e.nt; the painful acquisition of the gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognizes in him the predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.

As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was mixing up with his cla.s.sic myth ideas taken from the _Thousand and One Nights_. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments, and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart of Circe,--let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man.

First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering 'some mumblings funeral' as he does so (compare the 'backward mutters of dissevering power' in Milton's _Comus_). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he waves his magic wand nine times in the air,--as a preliminary to the last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted?

Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate suggestion comes from the couplet in Sandys's Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-G.o.ds admitted him to their fellowship,--

Whom now they hallow, and with charms nine times Repeated, purge me from my human crimes.

The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of runes on the sh.e.l.l[10] which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher's wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of the drowned mult.i.tude to life and happiness.

The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the pageant's sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser's festival of the sea-G.o.ds at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book of the _Faerie Queene_. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful mult.i.tude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand, and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of Neptune--another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent architectural splendours--and find the G.o.d presiding on an emerald throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a speech of arch encouragement, where the poet's style (as almost always in moments of his hero's prosperous love) turns common and tasteless.

Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid.

This is interrupted by the entrance of Ocea.n.u.s and a train of Nereids.

The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion's human senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away; he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his G.o.ddess, written in starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is restored to earth, lying on the gra.s.s beside a forest pool in his native Caria.

BOOK IV. In this book Endymion has to make his last discovery. He has to learn that all transient and secondary loves, which may seem to come between him and his great ideal pursuit and lure him away from it, are really, when the truth is known, but encouragements to that pursuit, visitations and condescensions to him of his celestial love in disguise.

The narrative setting forth this discovery is pitched in a key which, following the triumphant close of the last book, seems curiously subdued and melancholy. An opening apostrophe by the poet to the Muse of his native land, long silent while Greece and Italy sang, but aroused in the fulness of time to happy utterance, begins joyously enough, but ends on no more confident note than this:--

Great Muse, thou know'st what prison Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets Our spirit's wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspir'd, snail-paced lives.

Long have I said, how happy he who shrives To thee! But then I thought on poets gone, And could not pray:--nor could I now--so on I move to the end in lowliness of heart.--

Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the G.o.ds, is interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the gra.s.s with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet's mind's eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his attempted sc.r.a.p of an Alexander romance in a fellow student's notebook).

Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the coming struggle between his hero's celestial love and this earthly beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself, laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing him a song of India to ease his pa.s.sing. Her song, telling of her desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to the new earthly love, not blindly, but realizing fully what he forfeits.

He bids the damsel--

Do gently murder half my soul, and I Shall feel the other half so utterly.

A cry of 'Woe to Endymion!' echoing through the forest has no sooner alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury descending. The G.o.ds intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he has touched,--the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of the same breed as those 'steeds with streamy manes' that paw up against the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in _Sleep and Poetry_. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other: they are borne aloft together,

--unseen, alone, Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free, The buoyant life of song, can floating be Above their heads, and follow them untired.

The poet, seeming to realize that the most difficult part of his tale is now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers, couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a G.o.ddess with a mortal. The narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of Hebe's cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose bugle it is and learns that it is Diana's; the next moment she is there in presence; he springs to his now recognized G.o.ddess, and in the act he awakes, and it is a case of Adam's dream having come true; he is aware of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the G.o.ddess disappears; the damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.

What is this soul then? Whence Came it? It does not seem my own, and I Have no self-pa.s.sion nor ident.i.ty.

This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his pa.s.sion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region, or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and constellations to the festival: (the picture of the Borghese Zodiac in Spence's _Polymetis_ has evidently given Keats his suggestion here).

Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has in a moment swept him down to earth again.

He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him, and in a long impa.s.sioned protestation renounces his past dreams, condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and (not forgetting to propitiate the Olympians) to shower upon her all the treasures of the pastoral earth:--

O I have been Presumptuous against love, against the sky, Against all elements, against the tie Of mortals each to each, against the blooms Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs Of heroes gone! Against his proper glory Has my own soul conspired: so my story Will I to children utter, and repent.

There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent His appet.i.te beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here, Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast My life from too thin breathing: gone and past Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell!

And air of visions, and the monstrous swell Of visionary seas! No, never more Shall airy voices cheat me to the sh.o.r.e Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.

Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous pa.s.sage in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea.[11] Apparently, though it was through sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and ambitions.

But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in with her lover's desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is forbidden her, or can only be compa.s.sed by the present death of both (that is, to the mortal in love with the spirit of poetry and poetic beauty no life of mere human and earthly contentment is possible); and so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together into the forest.

The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now (the word is 'ensky'd,' from _Measure for Measure_). In truth he has been so enthroned for many thousand years (that is to say, the poetic spirit in man has been wedded in full communion to the essential soul of Beauty in the world): the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his 'lute-voiced brother': that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first intimation of Keats's intention to write on the story of Hyperion's fall and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.

Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports, but his downcast eyes fail to recognize them. Peona appears; he dreads their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him; Endymion with a great effort, 'tw.a.n.ging his soul like a spiritual bow', says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chast.i.ty.

For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell.

They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove behind Diana's temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death (the mood of the _Nightingale Ode_ appearing here in Keats's work for the first time): then bitterly again:--

I did wed Myself to things of light from infancy; And thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die Is sure enough to make a mortal man Grow impious. So he inwardly began On things for which no wording can be found; Deeper and deeper sulking, until drown'd Beyond the reach of music: for the choir Of Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar Nor m.u.f.fling thicket interpos'd to dull The vesper hymn, far swollen, soft and full, Through the dark pillars of those sylvan aisles.

He saw not the two maidens, nor their smiles, Wan as primroses gather'd at midnight By chilly finger'd spring. 'Unhappy wight!

Endymion!' said Peona, 'we are here!

What wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier?'

Then he embrac'd her, and his lady's hand Press'd saying: 'Sister, I would have command, If it were heaven's will, on our sad fate.'

At which that dark-eyed stranger stood elate And said, in a new voice, but sweet as love, To Endymion's amaze: 'By Cupid's dove, And so thou shalt! and by the lily truth Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth!'

And as she spake, into her face there came Light, as reflected from a silver flame: Her long black hair swell'd ampler, in display Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day Dawn'd blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld Phoebe, his pa.s.sion!

And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved. _Vera incessu patuit dea_: the forsaken Indian maiden had been but a disguised incarnation of Cynthia herself. Endymion's earthly pa.s.sion, born of human pity and desire, was one all the while, had he but known it, with his heavenly pa.s.sion born of poetic aspiration and the soul's thirst for Beauty. The two pa.s.sions at their height and perfection are inseparable, and the crowned poet and the crowned lover are one. But these things are still a mystery to those who know not poetry, and when the happy lovers disappear the kind ministering sister Peona can only marvel:--