No More Learning

Critics have inclined to take for granted the supposition that an actual
battle was contemplated by Keats, but I do not believe that such was, at
least, his final intention. In the first place, he had the example of
Milton, whom he was studying very closely, to warn him of its dangers;
in the second, if Hyperion had been meant to fight he would hardly be
represented as already, before the battle, shorn of much of his
strength; thus making the victory of Apollo depend upon his enemy's
unnatural weakness and not upon his own strength. One may add that a
combat would have been completely alien to the whole idea of the poem as
Keats conceived it, and as, in fact, it is universally interpreted from
the speech of Oceanus in the second book. The resistance of Enceladus
and the Giants, themselves rebels against an order already established,
would have been dealt with summarily, and the poem would have closed
with a description of the new age which had been inaugurated by the
triumph of the Olympians, and, in particular, of Apollo the god of light
and song. '

The central idea, then, of the poem is that the new age triumphs over
the old by virtue of its acknowledged superiority--that intellectual
supremacy makes physical force feel its power and yield. Dignity and
moral conquest lies, for the conquered, in the capacity to recognize the
truth and look upon the inevitable undismayed.

Keats broke the poem off because it was too 'Miltonic', and it is easy
to see what he meant. Not only does the treatment of the subject recall
that of _Paradise Lost_, the council of the fallen gods bearing special
resemblance to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton's epic,
but in its style and syntax the influence of Milton is everywhere
apparent. It is to be seen in the restraint and concentration of the
language, which is in marked contrast to the wordiness of Keats's early
work, as well as in the constant use of classical constructions,[247:1]
Miltonic inversions[247:2] and repetitions,[247:3] and in occasional
reminiscences of actual lines and phrases in _Paradise Lost_. [247:4]

In _Hyperion_ we see, too, the influence of the study of Greek
sculpture upon Keats's mind and art. This study had taught him that the
highest beauty is not incompatible with definiteness of form and
clearness of detail. To his romantic appreciation of mystery was now
added an equal sense of the importance of simplicity, form, and
proportion, these being, from its nature, inevitable characteristics of
the art of sculpture. So we see that again and again the figures
described in _Hyperion_ are like great statues--clear-cut, massive, and
motionless. Such are the pictures of Saturn and Thea in Book I, and of
each of the group of Titans at the opening of Book II.

Striking too is Keats's very Greek identification of the gods with the
powers of Nature which they represent.
It is this attitude of mind which
has led some people--Shelley and Landor among them--to declare Keats, in
spite of his ignorance of the language, the most truly Greek of all
English poets. Very beautiful instances of this are the sunset and
sunrise in Book I, when the departure of the sun-god and his return to
earth are so described that the pictures we see are of an evening and
morning sky, an angry sunset, and a grey and misty dawn.

But neither Miltonic nor Greek is Keats's marvellous treatment of nature
as he feels, and makes us feel, the magic of its mystery in such a
picture as that of the

tall oaks
Branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

or of the

dismal cirque
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor,
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,
In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.

This Keats, and Keats alone, could do; and his achievement is unique in
throwing all the glamour of romance over a fragment 'sublime as
Aeschylus'.


NOTES ON HYPERION.

BOOK I.

PAGE 145. ll. 2-3. By thus giving us a vivid picture of the changing
day--at morning, noon, and night--Keats makes us realize the terrible
loneliness and gloom of a place too deep to feel these changes.

l. 10. See how the sense is expressed in the cadence of the line.

PAGE 146. l. 11.