eyes. Still downward with capacious whirl they glide; And now I see them on a green-hill's side 135 In breezy rest among the nodding stalks. The charioteer with wond'rous gesture talks To the trees and mountains; and there soon appear Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear, Passing along before a dusky space uo Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase Some ever-fleeting music on they sweep. Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep: Some with upholden hand and mouth severe; Some with their faces muffled to the ear 145 Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom, Go glad and smilingly athwart' the gloom; against Some looking back, and some with upward gaze; Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward?now a lovely wreath of girls 150 Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls; And now broad wings. Most awfully intent, The driver of those steeds is forward bent, And seems to listen: O that I might know All that he writes with such a hurrying glow. 155 The visions all are fled?the car is fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness: but I will strive 160 Against all doubtings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey it went. $ *
Oct.?Dec. 1816 1817
3. Chariot. The description that follows recalls the tion, which bodies forth the matters 'of delight, of traditional portrayal of Apollo, god of the sun and mystery, and fear' (line 138) that characterize the poetry, and represents the higher poetic imagina-grander poetic genres.
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ENDYMION: A POETIC ROMANCE / 88 3
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles1
My spirit is too weak?mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
5 Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
10 Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time?with a billowy main0? ocean
A sun?a shadow of a magnitude.
Mar. 1 or 2, 1817 1817
From Endymion: A Poetic Romance1
'The stretched metre of an antique song'
INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS CHATTERTON
Preface
Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.
What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished. The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press; nor should they if I thought a years castigation would do them any good;?it will not: the foundations are too sandy. It is just that this youngster
I. Lord Elgin had brought to England in 1806 many of the marble statues and friezes that adorned the Parthenon at Athens. In 1817 Keats, along with his artist friend Haydon, viewed the marbles at the British Museum, which had just purchased them, an acqusition that was and remains controversial. Keats's sonnet first appeared on the same day in both Leigh Hunt's Examiner and, through Keats's friend Reynolds, The Champion., and then was reprinted in Haydon's magazine Annals of the Fine Arts. 1. This poem of more than four thousand lines (based on the classical myth of a mortal beloved by the goddess of the moon) tells of Endymion's long and agonized search for an immortal goddess whom he had seen in several visions. In the course of his wanderings, he comes upon an Indian maid who had been abandoned by the followers of Bacchus, god of wine and revelry. To his utter despair, he succumbs to a sensual passion for her, in apparent betrayal of his love for his heavenly ideal. The conclusion to Keats's 'romance' offers a way of resolving this opposition, which runs throughout the poem, between the inevitably mortal pleasures of this world and the possibility of delights that would be eternal: the Indian maid reveals that she is herself Cynthia (Diana), goddess of the moon, the celestial subject of his earlier visions.
The verse epigraph is adapted from Shakespeare's Sonnet 17, line 12: 'And stretched metre of an antique song.' Thomas Chatterton (1752? 1770), to whom Endymion is dedicated, and who is the 'marvellous Boy' of Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence,' wrote a number of brilliant pseudoarchaic poems that he attributed to an imaginary 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley. Keats described him as 'the most English of poets except Shakespeare.'
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88 4 / JOHN KEATS
should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.
This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a punishment: but no feeling man will be
