Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
15 Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing2 wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook?
scythe
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
20 Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 3
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,?
25 While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows,0 borne aloft
willows
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
30 And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;0
region
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;'
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Sept. 19, 1819 1820
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream Late in 1818, at about the end of his twenty-third year and while he was serving as nurse to his dying brother Tom, Keats planned to undertake an epic poem, modeled on Paradise Lost, that he called Hyperion. Greek mythology gave Keats its subject?the displacement of Saturn and his fellow Titans by a new generation of gods, Zeus and the other Olympians. But in engaging this topic Keats addressed the epic question at the center of Paradise Lost: how did evil come into the world and why? Keats in his story set out to represent an answer, not according to any one religious creed but in terms informed by his reading in comparative religion and mythology. The Titans had been fair and benign gods, and their rule had been a golden age of happiness. Yet at the beginning of the poem all the Titans except Hyperion, god of the sun, have been dethroned; and the uncomprehending Saturn again and again raises the question of how this injustice could have come to be.
2. To 'winnow' is to fan the chaff from the grain. 3. An enclosed plot of farmland.
.
THE FALL OF HYPERION / 93 1
In book 3 of the original Hyperion, the scenes among the Titans are supplemented by the experience of the Olympian Apollo, still a youth but destined to displace Hyperion as the sun god among the heavenly powers. He lives in ''aching ignorance' of the universe and its processes but is aware of his ignorance and thirsts for knowledge. Suddenly Apollo reads in the face of his tutor Mnemosyne?goddess of memory, who will be mother of the Muses and so of all the arts?the silent record of the defeat of the Titans and at once soars to the knowledge that he seeks: the understanding, both intoxicating and agonizing, that life involves process, that process entails change and suffering, and that there can be no creative progress except by the defeat and destruction of the preceding stage. Apollo cries out:
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me. . . .
This opening out of Apollo's awareness to the tragic nature of life is what the Titans lacked. As the fragment breaks off, Apollo is transfigured?like one who should 'with fierce convulse / Die into life'?not only into one who has earned the right to displace Hyperion as god of the sun, but also into the god of the highest poetry.
Keats abandoned this extraordinary fragment in April 1819. Late that summer, however, he took up the theme again, under the title The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. This time his primary model is Dante, whom he had been studying in Henry Cary's verse translation of 1814. In The Divine Comedy all the narrated events are represented as a vision granted to the poet at the beginning of the poem. In the same way Keats begins The Fall of Hyperion with a frame story whose central event is that the poet-protagonist, in a dream, falls from a paradisal landscape into a wasteland and there earns the right to a vision. That vision reincorporates the events narrated in the first Hyperion: Moneta (her Latin name suggests 'the Admonisher'), who stands in the same relationship to the poet as, in the earlier tale, Mnemosyne stood to Apollo, permits, or challenges, this protagonist to remember, with her, her own memories of the fall of the Titans. By devising this frame story, Keats shifted his center of poetic concern from the narration of epic action to an account of the evolving consciousness of the epic poet, as he seeks to know his identity, to justify the morality of poetry, and to understand its place in the social world. The ordeal through which Apollo had become god of poetry is replaced in this second version of Hyperion by the ordeal of this one poet, who must prove himself able to endure the witnessing that Moneta demands of him and worthy of the power 'To see as a God sees' (line 304).
