HYPERION BY MARTHA HALE SHACKFORD. O latest born and loveliest vision far In the grassy, flower-studded valley of Olympia lie huge fragments from the temples of Jupiter and of Hera long ago overthrown and left to silence. Those ruined figures of colossal gods and goddesses possess wonderful impressiveness; desolation and decay have added majesty to the fallen marbles, arousing in the onlooker a sense of the imperishable greatness of Greek life. Hyperion in its incompleteness has something of the awe-inspiring power of a survival from antiquity. Its grandeur is sustained and austere. No other English poem of the nineteenth century can compare with Hyperion in faithfulness to classical tradition or in power of vitalizing the primitive world of Greek legend. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, despite its descriptive beauty, lacks the fundamental simplicity and depth of Hellenism. Matthew Arnold's Merope fails in roundness of tone, it has the nervous tenseness of the modern world; Swinburne's Greek plays are vitiated by his shallow externalism; Browning's poems on Balaustion betray too literal an acquaintance with the idiom of the Greek tongue. Hyperion is as fully and consistently classical as Endymion is not. With very few exceptions the allusions, the imagery, the tone, the diction, the flow of the verse are suited to interpret the primitive epoch of pre-historic mythology. A poet's surpassing imagination is shown here,-his power to enter into the very being of ancient deity and speak with the "large utterance of the early gods." In contrast with Endymion, Hyperion 1 shows matured strength, firmness of method and insight into fundamental truths of destiny. The youth who in 1817 had cried out: O for ten years, that I may overwhelm That my own soul has to itself decreed, had in 1820 achieved undeniable greatness. 1 Sleep and Poetry. Begun by Keats late in 1818, abandoned by September 1819. The very ignorance of Keats was the inspiration, the challenge which made him apply himself with indomitable effort to the study of classical story. Lacking technical instruction in Greek, he devoted his energy to attaining the knowledge that would be a substitute for formal training. The appeal which Greek life made to him was not factitious or merely visionary. For him, the remote past was a world of idealism, of escape out of the petty and tiring days of London. Like any true artist he abhorred convention, submission to routine, and trivial modernity. He demanded "room to wander in," a world large enough and old enough to allow him breathing space. He sought elemental, primitive experience. Chief among the influences affecting Hyperion is that of Greek sculpture. The hours spent in the British Museum studying the Elgin marbles under the expert guidance of Joseph Severn and of Benjamin Haydon, (the man who had done most to interpret them to the British public), reacted powerfully upon the poet. The freedom and natural expressiveness of Greek life were visibly outlined in the figures of horsemen, old men, burden bearers, blithe maidens, and other worshippers going to do reverence to Athena and her guests, those gods whose stately presences form the east frieze of the Parthenon. The buoyant energy of life depicted there, the absorption in the immediate occupation, the sense of grave and lofty musings regarding men's relation to the gods all contributed to make Keats understand the spirit of classicism. What this frieze meant to the poet is expressed in his sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles: My spirit is too weak-mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an indescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude But beyond understanding the sovereignty of these sculptured deities and their worshippers, Keats learned most about the nature of Greek art and of all great art. Perceiving that sculpture in its finest form gains its effects by the exclusion of ornament, by a rigorous choice of the most expressive line in the turn of a head or the pose of a body, Keats discovered the fundamental principles of selection and rejection, the Greek sense of "measure" and restraint. This utmost economy of line to give concentrated expressiveness, this bold throwing of light upon a perfect contour, this subordination of the part to achieve the symmetry of the whole, affected very profoundly the poet's ideals of artistic excellence. He became more and more skilled in the art of compression, of the gathering of energy to one central meaning, and his meaning grew steadily more poignant, more imaginatively significant. Also working upon his imagination were the scenes in the Lake Country and in the Scotch mountains which aroused his sense of awe and sublimity. His purpose in taking this journey was defined by him in one of his letters: I should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use [me] to more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should reach Homer. July 18, 1818. Since writing Endymion Keats had entered a world of primitive vastness. The Lake Country and Scotland had shown him people of strange, rustic habit, wholly apart from the sophisticated folk of city life; association with the wildness of nature, in that northern land full of strange, haunting lights and wild, barbaric spaces untouched by human association, stirred in him an appreciation of the great sweep and space of nature, a sense of the primitive, desolate universe. In climbing Ben Nevis, especially, Keats came into the presence of bare gigantic forces. He looked out over a landscape wholly wild and majestic, and in him were aroused appreciations, recognitions, thoughts that changed his whole outlook, helping him to a higher and more stern attitude of wonder at nature. We see this same mood aroused also at Staffa where Keats became still more powerfully aware of the boundlessness of time and of space. Frequent references, however, were made to the greenness and beauty of the country, references interesting in relation to Hyperion: When we left Cairn our Road lay half way up the sides of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally varying-some times up sometimes down, and over little Bridges going across green chasms of moss, rock and trees-winding about everywhere. After two or three Miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent glen finely wooded in Parts-seven Miles long-with a Mountain stream winding down the Midst.-July 10, 1818. First we stood upon the Bridge across the Doon; surrounded by every Phantasy of green in Tree, Meadow, and Hill,-the stream of the Doon, as a Farmer told us, is covered with trees "from head to foot "—you know those beautiful heaths so fresh against the weather of a summer's evening-there was one stretching along behind the trees.-July 13, 1818. The whole outlook of Keats had undergone a change. The charm and beauty of many of his early imaginings is undeniable, but compare with the grim solitudes of wild Scotland this pretty bit from I Stood Tiptoe: I sure should pray That nought less sweet, might call my thoughts away, Fanning away the dandelion's down; Than the light music of her nimble toes Patting against the sorrel as she goes. Keats had left behind him, forever, the gentle mood of these lines; he had been swept up into an atmosphere of tremendous impressiveness, introducing him to geological vastness, to awe and wonder over the littleness of individual man. The background of Hyperion is created with a sense of mystery and sublimity. Earth is beautiful with shadowy vales, forests, streams, and clouds, but it is an earth associated with primitive natural forces, sun, ocean, thunder, lightning, wind. The geographical allusions summon to the imagination conceptions of broad tracts of space, as well as of time," the Memphian Sphinx," the “dusking East," "chief isle of the embowered Cyclades." Many a fallen old Divinity Wandering in vain about bewildered shores. Even the allusions which are anachronistic serve an artistic purpose in suggesting immeasurable extent of time, space, and history, opening for the reader vistas of remote, dim epochs: like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, II, 34 ff. Palm-shaded temples, and high rival fanes, By Oxus or in Ganges' sacred isles. II, 59 ff. The one book which Keats carried on this journey was Cary's translation of the Divine Comedy. With an imagination already swept into the far reaches of natural and of spiritual grandeur through Wordsworth's Excursion which had exercised tremendous influence upon Keats, the poet was led by Dante to ponder over the medieval conception of the universe with its circling spheres, whose order was maintained by divine love that is divine law. Together with newly acquired sense of distance, of size, and power, and limitless stretch of time and space there was developing in Keats an almost portentous knowledge of human capability for suffering and loss and defeat. He was terribly alone and isolated. George was in America, Fanny was held apart, and the death of Tom, in December 1818, came as a climax to accentuate John's feeling of separation from things familiar. Turned thus to deep, melancholy philosophizing over the meaning of existence, John Keats's grief and loneliness gave passionate purport to his brooding reverie on fate and loss and change. During 1818-19 Keats was much at the theatre, admiring Kean's presentation of Richard, Duke of York (a condensation of the three parts of Henry VI), and receiving a strong impetus to dramatic composition. The grandeur of Shakespeare's dramas had been a powerful source of enlargement of Keats's sense of royalty of nature; the plays gave his imagination impetus to describe beings of exalted power, capable of profound and awful feeling. King Lear, Coriolanus, Richard II with their portrayal of dominion lost seem to have kinship with the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians. Richard says, Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king: Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest. And the spirit of rebellion in Keats himself, his pugnacity and vigor, may have found sympathy in the language of one of Shakes |