Life of John Keats Part 17

When the poet interrupts for a pa.s.sing moment his tale of the might and mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we find, him able to condense the whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into three potent lines,--

The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'er their blaze, Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.

From a pa.s.sage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of Keats's day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover Glaucus:--

'Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express, To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes, I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch: My tenderest squeeze is but a giant's clutch.

So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries Upon some breast more lily-feminine.

Oh, no--it shall not pine, and pine, and pine More than one pretty, trifling thousand years.

... Mark me! Thou hast thews Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race: But such a love is mine, that here I chase Eternally away from thee all bloom Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.

Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast; And there, ere many days be overpast, Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then Thou shalt not go the way of aged men; But live and wither, cripple and still breathe Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath Thy fragile bones to unknown burial.

Adieu, sweet love, adieu!'

A vein very characteristic of Keats at this stage of his mind's growth is that of figurative confession or self-revelation. Many pa.s.sages in _Endymion_ give poetical expression to the same alternating moods of ambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he confides to his friends in his letters. One of the most striking and original of these pieces of figurative psychology studied from his own moods is the description of the Cave of Quietude in Book IV:--

There lies a den, Beyond the seeming confines of the s.p.a.ce Made for the soul to wander in and trace Its own existence, of remotest glooms.

Dark regions are around it, where the tombs Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart: And in these regions many a venom'd dart At random flies; they are the proper home Of every ill: the man is yet to come Who hath not journeyed in this native h.e.l.l.

But few have ever felt how calm and well Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.

There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall: Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate, Yet all is still within and desolate.

... Enter none Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.

To the student of _Endymion_ there are few things more interesting than to observe Keats's technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in remembrance. Here is the pa.s.sage in Sandys's _Ovid_ which tells how Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions and yoking them to her car:--

The Mother, crown'd With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound, But that she thought that punishment too small.

When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall; Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails; Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s of wondrous strength: their tufted tails Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread; For speech they roar: the woods become their bed.

These Lions, fear'd by others, Cybel checks With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.

This is a typical example of Ovid's brilliantly clever, quite unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the marvels of an act of transformation. Keats's recollection of it--and probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of Cybele and her yoked lions--inspires a vision of intense imaginative life expressed in verse of a n.o.ble solemnity and sonority:--

Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, Came mother Cybele! alone--alone-- In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In another gloomy arch.

The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats's imagination, and finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_ and Keats in _Endymion_, let him turn to the pa.s.sage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,--the same pa.s.sage from which is derived the famous song in Handel's _Acis and Galatea_: let him turn to this and compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.

But let us for our purpose rather take, as ill.u.s.trating the relations of Keats to his cla.s.sic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics in _Endymion_ altogether.

Two of them are of small account,--the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats's very finest achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison with two of Keats's Elizabethan sources, Chapman's translation of the Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson's original hymns in his masque of _Pan's Anniversary_. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:--

Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes' love-got joys, Goat-footed, two-horn'd, amorous of noise, That through the fair greens, all adorn'd with trees, Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees Can every dance foot, that affect to scale The most inaccessible tops of all Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call On Pan, the bright-haired G.o.d of pastoral; Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe By lot all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow; All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses, All sylvan copses, and the fortresses Of th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t queaches here and there doth rove, And sometimes, by allurement of his love, Will wade the wat'ry softnesses. Sometimes (In quite oppos'd _capriccios_) he climbs The hardest rocks, and highest, every way Running their ridges. Often will convey Himself up to a watch-tow'r's top, where sheep Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep His goats he runs upon, and never rests.

Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts, Mad of their slaughters...

(When Hesp'rus calls to fold the flocks of men) From the green closets of his loftiest reeds He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds.

When, under shadow of their motions set, He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet, As not the bird that in the flow'ry spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song, Runs her divisions varied so and strong.

And here are two of the most characteristic strophes from Ben Jonson's hymns:--

Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live, We move, we are; 'tis he our lambs doth rear, Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth give The warm and finer fleeces that we wear.

He keeps away all heats and colds, Drives all diseases from our folds: Makes every where the spring to dwell, The ewes to feed, their udders swell; But if he frown, the sheep (alas) The shepherds wither, and the gra.s.s.

Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thus The rites are due to him, who doth all right for us.

Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure, Who giv'st us all this leisure, Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray For this their holy-day, And how their vows to thee they in Lycaeum pay.

So may our ewes receive the mounting rams, And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs: So may the first of all our fells be thine, And both the breastning of our goats and kine.

As thou our folds dost still secure, And keep'st our fountains sweet and pure, Driv'st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock, Or other vermin from the flock.

That we preserv'd by thee, and thou observ'd by us, May both live safe in shade of thy lov'd Maenalus.

Comparing these strophes with the hymn in _Endymion_, we shall realize how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in cla.s.sic poetry, emerged after near two centuries' occultation to reappear in the poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature's blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes Pan no longer as a shepherd's G.o.d but as a symbol of the World-All.

Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him, could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a 'pretty piece of paganism,' though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines, such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth himself:--

O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, By thy love's milky brow!

By all the trembling mazes that she ran, Hear us, great Pan!

O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles Pa.s.sion their voices cooingly 'mong myrtles, What time thou wanderest at eventide Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom Their ripen'd fruitage; yellow girted bees Their golden honeycombs; our village leas Their fairest blossom'd beans and poppied corn; The chuckling linnet its five young unborn, To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries Their summer coolness; pent up b.u.t.terflies Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year All its completions--be quickly near, By every wind that nods the mountain pine, O forester divine!

Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies For willing service; whether to surprise The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit; Or upward ragged precipices flit To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw; Or by mysterious enticement draw Bewildered shepherds to their path again; Or to tread breathless round the frothy main, And gather up all fancifullest sh.e.l.ls For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells, And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping; Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping, The while they pelt each other on the crown With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown-- By all the echoes that about thee ring, Hear us, O satyr king!

O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, While ever and anon to his shorn peers A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms, To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors:[3]

Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge--see, Great son of Dryope, The many that are come to pay their vows With leaves about their brows!

Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; An element filling the s.p.a.ce between; An unknown--but no more: we humbly screen With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, And giving out a shout most heaven rending, Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean, Upon thy Mount Lycean!

The song of the Indian maiden in the fourth book is in a very different key from this, more strikingly original in form and conception, and but for a weak opening and one or two flaws of taste would be a masterpiece.

Keats's later and more famous lyrics, though they have fewer faults, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful a.s.sociations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of northern imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual.

Keats calls the piece a 'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins by invoking and questioning sorrow in a series of dreamy musical stanzas of which the imagery embodies, a little redundantly and confusedly, the idea expressed elsewhere by Keats with greater perfection, that it is Sorrow which confers upon beautiful things their richest beauty. From these the song pa.s.ses to tell what has happened to the singer:--

To Sorrow, I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind: I would deceive her And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind.

Beneath my palm tree, by the river side, I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide There was no one to ask me why I wept,-- And so I kept Br.i.m.m.i.n.g the water-lily cups with tears Cold as my fears.

Beneath my palm trees, by the river side, I sat a weeping: what enamour'd bride, Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds, But hides and shrouds Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?

It is here that we seem to catch an echo, varied and new-modulated but in no sense weakened, from Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_,--

A savage place, as holy as enchanted As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover.

Then, with another change of measure comes the deserted maiden's tale of the irruption of Bacchus on his march from India; and then, arranged as if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and satyrs and their choral answers:--

'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!

So many and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your bowers desolate, Your lutes, and gentler fate?'

'We follow Bacchus! good or ill betide, We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide: Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our wild minstrelsy!'

'Whence came ye jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!

So many, and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'

'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, And cold mushrooms; For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; Great G.o.d of breathless cups and chirping mirth!

Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our mad minstrelsy!'

'Over wide streams and mountains great we went, And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent, Onward the tiger and the leopard pants, With Asian elephants: Onward these myriads--with song and dance, With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians' prance, Web-footed alligators, crocodiles, Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files, Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers' toil: With toying oars and silken sails they glide, Nor care for wind and tide.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. V

'Onward the tiger and the leopard pants With Asian elephants'