ENDYMION FINISHED

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Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture, -do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the Garden of Proserpine?

But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon Endymion. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:

Many and many a verse I hope to write,

Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,

Be all about me when I make an end.

The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:

The Carian

No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan,
Into the vallies green together went.

Far wandering, they were perforce content
To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;

Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily

Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

and again:

At this he press'd
His hands against his face, and then did rest
His head upon a mossy hillock green,
And so remain'd as he a corpse had been

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AN AUTUMNAL CLOSE

All the long day; save when he scantly lifted
His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted
With the slow move of time,-sluggish and weary
Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary,

Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose,
And slowly as that very river flows,

Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament:
'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent
Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall
Before the serene father of them all

Bows down his summer head below the west.
Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,
But at the setting I must bid adieu

To her for the last time. Night will strew
On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,
And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves
To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river's edge.

Opposite the last line in the manuscript of Endymion Keats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started. Endymion

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was not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

CHAPTER VI

ENDYMION.-I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Invention and imagination-What the moon meant to Keats-Elizabethan Precedents-Fletcher and Drayton-Drayton's two versions-Debt of Keats to Drayton-Strain of allegory—The Soul's quest for beauty— Phantasmagoric adventures-The four elements theory-Its errorBook 1. The exordium--The forest scene-Confession to Peona-Her expostulation-Endymion's defence-The ascending scale-The highest hope-Book II. The praise of love-Underworld marvels-The awakening of Adonis-Embraces in the Jasmine Bower-The quest renewed-New sympathies awakened-Book III. Exordium-Encounter with Glaucus-Glaucus relates his doom-The predestined deliverer-The deliverance-Meaning of the Parable-Its machinery explained-The happy sequel-Book IV. Address to the Muse-The Indian damsel-An ethereal flight-Olympian visions-Descent and renunciation-Distressful farewells-The mystery solved-A chastened victory-Above analysis justified.

KEATS had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of Poems, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:

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165

As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to talk until Endymion is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed-by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry-and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame—it makes me say-God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have heard Hunt say, and I may be askedwhy endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading. . . . Besides, a long Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails -and Imagination the rudder.-Did our great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales. This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence-But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till I shall have finished Endymion, and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made a Mockery at Hunt's

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled, 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.' But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathy