And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
10 In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,3
is They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions0 too; wings
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
20 At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:4
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true! O latest born and loveliest vision far
25 Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!5
2. The ridges in a lock that correspond to the notches of the key. 1. This poem initiated the sequence of great odes that Keats wrote in the spring of 1819. It is copied into the same journal-letter that included the 'Sonnet to Sleep' and several other sonnets as well as a comment about 'endeavoring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have.' It is therefore likely that Keats's experiments with sonnet schemes led to the development of the intricate and varied stanzas of his odes and also that he abandoned the sonnet on discovering the richer possibilities of the more spacious form. Psyche, which gives us our modern term psychology, means mind or soul (and also butterfly) in Greek. In the story told by the Roman author Apuleius in the 2nd century, Psyche was a lovely mortal beloved by Cupid, the 'winged boy' (line 21), son of Venus. To keep their love a secret from his mother, who envied Psyche's beauty, he visited his lover only in the dark of night, and had her promise never to try to discover his identity. After Psyche broke the promise, she endured various tribula
tions as a penance and then was finally wedded to Cupid and translated to heaven as an immortal. To this goddess, added to the pantheon of pagan gods too late to have been the center of a cult, Keats in the last two stanzas promises to establish a place of worship within his own mind, with himself as poet-priest and prophet.
2. Soft and shaped like a seashell. 3. The purple dye once made in ancient Tyre. 4. Aurora was the goddess of the dawn. 5. The ranks of the gods who lived on Mount Olympus, according to the classical mythology now eclipsed (made 'faded') by Christianity. 'You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshiped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour?and perhaps never thought of in the old religion?I am more orthodox tha[n] to let a hethen Goddess be so neglected' (Keats, in a long letter written over several months to George and Georgiana Keats in America, April 30, 1819).
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90 2 / JOHN KEATS
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,6 Or Vesper,0 amorous glow-worm of the sky;
evening star
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
30 Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
35 Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. 0 brightest! though too late for antique vows,7
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
spirit-filled
When holy were the haunted0 forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
40 Yet even in these days so far retir'd
shining wings
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,0
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
1 see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
