SOURCE: Taylor, Anya. “Superhuman Silence: Language in Hyperion.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 19, no. 4 (autumn 1979): 673-87.

[In the following essay, Taylor looks at depictions of divine speech in Hyperion. The critic also focuses on the use of silence and figurative language in Keats's reworking of mythology within the Romantic period.]

Ever since Keats set down his Hyperion to take up the burden of his brother's death, readers have joined him in finding the epic too abstract, in finding it a detour in Keats's artistic development, or in finding it too discontinuous in style, with the antique, chiselled frigidity of books one and two falling into the regressive bathos of book three.¹ When the poet himself leads the way in dismissing his poem, it may seem quixotic to try to argue for its successful coherence. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that Hyperion consciously and consistently works through a difficult problem for narrative literature in general, one that becomes acute in the Romantic era: the problem of rendering the language of gods as they die, and of discovering to replace it a personal, human, imaginative language, which is all that remains of the divine. This problem gives unity to the poem, even as it points to the impossibility of bestirring the gods to speak to us again.

The silence in Hyperion is almost a weight in the first two books. The sculpted figures are frozen in postures as visible as a frieze; the naiad, Thea, Saturn himself, these early forms from archaic worship, hold fingers to lips, kneel with bowed heads, and bend their elbows on their knees; they hold their positions against a lush background that is imperceptibly shifting behind them. Into this silence the speech of the Titans breaks painfully, if at all, as if choked by stone. Keats emphasizes their difficulties with speech in order to show that Titans are fading into the silent natural world whence they arose (by a euhemerism learned perhaps from Wordsworth's Excursion, Book 4²) and are thus subject like men to an inevitable process of growth. Divinities rise up and subside into nature's ebb and flow; their powers of speech, by which they had distinguished themselves from natural forces, are correspondingly temporary.

The epic opens in silence—the silence of the immobile Saturn, “Quiet as a stone, / Still as the silence round about his lair.”³ The silence is muffled by the huge forests layered above Saturn like clouds; the air is unstirring, the stream “voiceless,” the leaf unmoved, the naiad's lips silenced by her cold finger. Into the silence of the first forty-five lines, like an eternity of marble gesture, the goddess's words venture. She is fearful of breaking the silence of a world where other things are voiceless and every lip is sealed. In slow motion Thea leans toward Saturn,

                                                                      and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone.

(I, 46-48)

Before we can hear the words that she is about to utter, the worried poet interposes his own sense of the provisional quality of the words in which he will render what he imagines she might have said:

Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!

(I, 49-51)

The poet apologizes for his pitiful rendition of a language more primary and huge even than Jove's; in a world “portion'd to a giant nerve,” these fragile lines on a page, these meters, syllables, and vowels in the air, are insufficient. When the goddess finally speaks, she herself begins and ends her utterance with apology: why am I bothering you, she asks in effect in lines 52 and 70, and suggests that she should not have spoken at all. What she does say, ringed with hesitations, passes over the silence like a solitary gust over a mighty woods: “So came these words and went …” (I, 79). If the language of a goddess is transitory and the goddess is conscious of its inadequacy, what can we expect of human language that aims to reproduce it? The poet will describe sorrow, all the while conscious of the fact that this sorrow is “too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe” (I, 160).

The fallen Titan, unable to believe in the finality of his loss, also struggles toward speech:

A little time, and then again he snatch'd
Utterance thus.—‘But cannot I create?
‘Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
‘Another world, another universe,
‘To overbear and crumble this to naught?
‘Where is another chaos? Where?’—That word
Found way unto Olympus.

(I, 140-46)

His snatching is desperate and rapacious, the utterance seems to exist apart from him, and he must retrieve it as it flies away from him. In his snatching, the questions become shredded, and anxious about the agonies of creativity which the fallen god must now suffer: is there nowhere else to begin? Out of what material can a new world be invented? Must his words henceforth be ineffective? He gives commands, but hears no response but the silence following his own voice: “‘I will give command: / Thea! Thea! Thea! Where is Saturn?’” (I, 133-34). Even Hyperion, retaining remnants of being, does not speak with ease: “He spake, and ceas'd, the while a heavier threat / Held struggle with his throat but came not forth.” Hyperion, however, has been granted a separate level of palpability by his father Coelus, who calls him an evident God, capable of acting, whereas Coelus is only a voice:

‘Yet do thou strive; as thou art capable,
‘As thou canst move about, an evident God;
‘And canst oppose to each malignant hour
‘Ethereal presence:—I am but a voice;
‘My life is but the life of winds and tides,
‘No more than winds and tides can I avail:—
‘But thou canst.’

(I, 337-43)

In Book II the Titans positioned in darkness also have difficulty bringing their words up, as if even their own bodies have ceased to obey them:

There is a roaring in the break-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines:
Which, when it ceases in this mountain'd world,
No other sound succeeds; but ceasing here,
Among these fallen, Saturn's voice therefrom
Grew up like organ, that begins anew
Its strain, when other harmonies, stopt short,
Leave the dinn'd air vibrating silverly.
Thus grew it up.

(II, 116-29)

Like the naiad 'mid her reeds, the god raises his finger to his lips, for building within his mouth is a weight of sound that he deliberately will unload. But this weight is of thought that is “utterless,” by which Keats may mean either that it is so original that it has never been uttered before, or that it cannot be uttered and will not be uttered here, or that it cannot be uttered except by analogy, as with the sounds of thunder or music. When the speech finally rises up, as if of its own accord, following its own laws, it pronounces the god's ignorance of the reasons for this catastrophe and of the riddles of nature's universal scroll (II, 148, 150). It is not an enabling speech, but a disabling one. It is organized around parallel denials, each beginning with “Not” (129, 132, 140, 147). “No, no-where,” (II, 150), Saturn cries, calling for help, “What can I then?”, “What can I?” (II, 158, 160). says the voice, doubting its own existence, getting fainter and fainter.

In answering his call for help, the voices of Oceanus, Clymene, and Enceladus are described as voices, not as the statements of certain beings, and they rumble up as emanating sounds. Oceanus responds “in murmurs, which his first-endeavoring tongue / Caught infant-like from the far-foamed seas” (II, 171-72). His famous speech urging the acceptance of process is an uprising of the tides of his being; he speaks in waves of growth, as the outpouring of natural force. His speech is itself a metaphor for the ocean. Clymene, whose voice is “the simplest voice” and all of whose knowledge is “that joy is gone” (II, 253), describes the elaborate process by which she goes about deflecting her voice through “a mouthed shell” (II, 270). The mouthed shell makes melody for her, as her song through the shell rouses the melody of an enchanted island; by this complex route she is able to hear the dull shell's echo and the distant song that both drowns her and keeps her alive. Simile after simile tries to capture the liquidity of this airy music. She tells how

‘[I] sat me down, and took a mouthed shell
‘And murmur'd into it, and made melody—
‘O melody no more! for while I sang,
‘And with poor skill let pass into the breeze
‘The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand
‘Just opposite, an island of the sea,
‘There came enchantment with the shifting wind,
‘That did both drown and keep alive my ears.
‘I threw my shell away upon the sand,
‘And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fill'd
‘With that new blissful golden melody.
‘A living death was in each gush of sounds,
‘Each family of rapturous hurried notes,
‘That fell, one after one, yet all at once,
‘Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:
‘And then another, then another strain,
‘Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,
‘With music wing'd instead of silent plumes
‘To hover round my head, and make me sick
‘Of joy and grief at once.’

(II, 270-89)

She seems to be speaking not only of her own melody but of the poet's creation of the melody she describes, a creation that proceeds “one after one, yet all at once / Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string” in the lines of the poem. Clymene's voice arises in this complicated process of deflection through the windings of the shell; the sound of her speaking in the assembly, at the present time of the poem, is also made self-aware, as her “too indulged tongue” (yet another mention of the organs of speech) is “thus venturing to be heard” (II, 298-99); again the voice and its cause operate on their own, without a living character impelling the voice with will and intention.

Clymene's advocacy of yielding, which is an aesthetic response to enchanting melody rather than a reasoned belief, is not so much disputed by Enceladus as overwhelmed by it. Her melody is a brook (II, 300) meeting an ocean, which “Swallow[s] it in wrath” (II, 304) when the two kinds of sound collide in the breath of the poem. The furious speech of Enceladus emphasizes that the basis of these divine words is the human syllables of the poem that is now being written and now being read:

The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus.

(II, 306-308)

Against Clymene's “baby-words” (II, 314), he rouses the Titans to “Speak! roar! shout! yell!” He shouts ponderous syllables and sees that his words have worked:

                                                  ‘What, have I rous'd
‘Your spleens with so few simple words as these?
‘O joy! for now I see ye are not lost
‘O joy! for now I see a thousand eyes
‘Wide-glaring for revenge!’

(II, 320-24)

In naming their “wide-glaring … revenge,” he creates it. He shouts the name of Hyperion, but after the waves of language have subsided, the poem is again bathed in “a pale and silver silence” (II, 356). In this silence Hyperion's radiance slowly illumines the postures of defeat:

                                                  There he stay'd to view
The misery his brilliance had betray'd
To the most hateful seeing of itself.

(II, 368-70)

Hyperion, in the silence, summons from the “hollow throats” of the Titans “the name of ‘Saturn!’” Oblivion, chasms, sighs, and voiceless depths swallow up these words. The shouting of names in the darkness has been to no avail. Speech, difficult to produce to begin with, has no effect once it is uttered, and rising up from hollow throats is itself hollow. Thus for a poem which is 58٪ dialogue,⁴ the struggle which precedes each utterance and the emptiness which follows it indicate that Keats is conscious of the difficulty of making the gods speak even after he has positioned them, bathed them in shadow, and surrounded them with silence.

Why should it be so difficult for these beings to speak at this moment? Keats has chosen the moment when the Titans move from being forever immortal to being forever mortal. It is a terrible moment of transition from one absolute state to another, from what Stuart Sperry calls timelessness to time, or myth to history.⁵ While it is hard enough to speak of eternity (as James Joyce's Jesuit priest in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man demonstrates with his allegory of the bird bringing grains to the mountain), it is even harder to do so when it has just slipped out of one's ken. Between worlds, in a muffling absence, the Titans try to assess what is lost. They do so by a kind of negative theology whereby they can only speak of the now unknown by what it is not, as the realization comes ever more intensely upon them that immortality is beyond reach forever. In trying to speak of such absence they resort to negations: Saturn is positioned in “no's”: “no stir of air,” “not so much life,” “the dead of leaf fell,” the stream is “deadened,” “the fallen divinity [is] spreading a shade.” Saturn's “old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, unsceptred.” “No force could wake him.” Thea, in the words that she wonders why she speaks, indicates that Saturn is already unknown; he is the deus absconditus, though it is his world that has absconded from him:

‘For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
‘Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
‘And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
‘Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
‘Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
‘Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
‘Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
‘And thy sharp lightning in unpracticed hands
‘Scorches and burns our once serene domain.’

(I, 55-63)

Order is gone, and Saturn is “smothered up,” “buried from all godlike exercise” and from “‘all those acts which Deity supreme / Doth ease its heart of love in’” (I, 111-12). Having lost his “strong identity” (I, 114), he sees a world of shadows and emptiness, “lorn of light,” a “barren void.” He wonders if his shadow is moving elsewhere:

‘Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest
‘A certain shape or shadow, making way
‘With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
‘A heaven he lost erewhile.’

(I, 121-24)

Even Hyperion's “lucent empire” is “deserted void … death and darkness” (I, 240, 242). The sun becomes black, secret hieroglyphs lose meaning (I, 277-83), and for all his glory Hyperion is starting to vanish from the center outward: “Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade / In midst of his own brightness” (II, 372-73). The Titans lie “Dungeon'd in opaque element” (II, 23); they are already scattered like Druid stones, remnants of past worship to be misunderstood by future times, their signs mere savage scratches.

To emphasize the condition of being between definable states, Keats describes the sensations pressing from one sense to another, from sound to light to weight, in similes and metaphors that squeeze a third unknown quality between their disparate terms. Things move from one form to another, or register in one sense and then inscrutably glide into being registered in another; transition, though incomprehensible in thought, is wincingly captured in the language of sense. How tight the passage is from one mode to another is demonstrated in Thea's image:

‘O aching time! O moments big as years!
‘All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
‘And press it so upon our weary griefs
‘That unbelief has not a space to breathe.’

(I, 64-67)

The Titans cannot recall how they used to be except as a kinesthetic pressure, nor can they imagine what they will be, as creatures who die. Their fall has happened, but their language has not caught up to the event. Consequently, Keats's poem, daring to try to describe a metamorphic condition without name, a sliding, a transforming, is at a loss for words, groping in the twilight.

Given the task of describing mythical lives that are no longer believed in, lives that existed inasmuch as they had power, but are now realmless, the Titans cannot reconstruct their ordered universe. Having no way of speaking about their realmlessness except in terms of realms, they ask Lear's questions, applied here to a lost supernatural rather than to an earthly world:⁶ Without power who are we? Without a field of action, have we any identity? Without actions in which to ease our hearts, are we any more than poor, bare, inarticulate animals?

The problem of recreating the speech of gods who are in the act of losing their power thus pervades the first two books of Hyperion. Moreover, aside from the difficulty of describing intermediary states between being and non-being, there are other reasons for Keats's consciousness of difficulties with speech: not only have the Titans become indecipherable ruins abandoned in overgrown groves, but also the epic form itself presents problems not troubling in romance narrative.

For Keats must dramatically project his voice through others, within an encircling epic voice, something he had not tried before. In the development of Keats's work to this point there have been two levels of mythological figures: on the first stand the mythological figures in Endymion—Peone, the hero himself, and Glaukos—half-borrowed and half-invented, who occasionally demonstrate unusual abilities such as living underwater, but who for the most part are described as human beings with human powers in a remote sylvan setting. On the second level are distant non-human figures such as the Moon in Endymion or Apollo in the early odes to him and in “Sleep and Poetry.” The Moon, given its traditionally recurring life, comes to represent the revitalizing powers of imagination reflected from reality; in its phases it is the external glittering form that the otherwise internal imagination takes to body forth its recrudescence. Like the Moon, Apollo, though he has in the early odes a separate superhuman identity, appears in direct relation to Keats the poet, for the purpose of inspiring him to song, and to indicate by his presence that the poet is inspired. Apollo's own singing is subsidiary to the singing he induces in the poet, who reflects Apollo's solar glory when coming to his own imaginative fullness. In other words, these earlier mythological figures are elaborations of natural forces or mysterious human beings living close to nature, or are embodiments of the poet's own creative powers.

With Hyperion, however, Keats, bracing himself for the epic labour, begins the task of creating superhuman beings who are not merely additions to or reflections of himself. They must exist with the wholeness of Milton's Satan, as well as being capable of an Ovidian fluidity as they participate in nature's metamorphoses. Such wholeness or autonomy demands that the figures should seem to exist apart from the words that describe them, and should seem to have will and desire behind the screen of the poet's own surrounding language (as Satan existed so forcefully that later commentators insisted that Milton had misunderstood him). Keats struggles to release these fictions from the block of his own lines to let them be believed.

In paying so much attention to the way the voices speak, Keats seems conscious that his epic medium imprisons them (as Michelangelo's huge slaves struggle to escape from stone), and that the words of the Titans cannot be sufficiently differentiated from the words he has written about them or for them to make their Titanic speech autonomous. The distinction, mentioned above, between the palpable reality ascribed by Coelus to Hyperion and Coelus's own sense of being by contrast only a voice, indicates that Keats is working with just this layering of speech. In thus attempting to escape from the gradations of speech from human to superhuman, levelled in the same lines, he approaches the awareness of modern structuralist critics that reality is a layering of words rendering other words. Tsvetan Todorov, for instance, writes that “the supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof: not only do the devil and vampires exist only in words, but language alone enables us to conceive what is always absent: the supernatural.” The fantastic universe for Todorov “has no reality outside language; the description and what is described are not of a different nature.”⁷ In suggesting that the worlds being created in words are not only secondary but tertiary, Todorov comes close to enunciating Keats's difficulty in this particular poem, the difficulty of presenting credible fictions about supernatural beings who are in the act of returning to the natural forces that they originally were, of giving speech to figures who exist as figures of speech.

In “Sleep and Poetry” (162-205), Keats had already challenged his contemporaries to prove their greatness by turning to large mythical themes—“prepare her steeds, / Paw up against the light” (165-66)—and now that he is taking up his own gauntlet, he must feel its weight. He had anticipated in “Sleep and Poetry” wanting to depict “the meaning of Jove's large eye-brow” (170), had imagined in advance the heavenly choir lifting “its mighty self of convoluting sound / Huge as a planet” (175-76), and had promised to erase neoclassical rules and return to the fallen angel of strength (241). Here he is then with this fallen angel, trying to approximate in his poet's words the “convoluting sound, / Huge as a planet.” Perhaps as a result of such an anguished imprisonment in the medium, Keats bursts out from the layering of fictions speaking fictions of books one and two, into the private voice of book three, guided by the familiar Apollo.

Moreover, to add to the complexity of his rendering of divine language in the mesh of his own language, Keats has chosen to vitalize these mythical beings at a moment in time when they have lost their vitality, even their identity, except as images for the mind. This moment is at once the moment in and of the poem and the moment of the late eighteenth century.⁸ The divine powers have slipped away “to hide themselves in forms of beast and bird” (II, 72). As they lie scattered around, they are already returning to metaphors and emblems, fixed in significance: Asia leans on a tusk; Enceladus remembers his animal forms as ox, now “tiger-passion'd” (II, 67-68). Fusing and merging, “no shape [is] distinguishable” (II, 79). Their names “can no longer be told” (II, 81). Oceanus reverts to metaphor, as Dante's sinners into the retributions symbolic of their lives. The metamorphosis has occurred in a moment—“Just at the self-same beat of Time's wide wings” (II, 1)—a moment the reverse of that eventful one that encompasses Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, when Prometheus's mind changes and simultaneously the earth revives and Jupiter falls, and like the moment in Blake's Milton when in the pulse of an artery renovation is achieved. This transformation is as irrevocable as it is quick; so sudden and uncaused, the fall seems to have been made necessary by a magic potion, not by an evitable sequence of events: “for Fate / Had pour'd a mortal oil upon his head, / A disanointing poison” (II, 96-98). In these moments big as years, Keats finds the Titans fallen, idle because lacking a field of activity to ease their large hearts in, and unable to describe even to themselves the glory that was lost and the selves that they were. Who were they? What are they now? They see their faces only by reflection on others (e.g., I, 96-102; II, 101-115; II, 320-24). They hear their voices as echoes or responses. Hyperion illuminates with a flash the hopelessness of their change:

                                                            ‘O dreams of day and night!
‘O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
‘O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
‘O lank-ear'd phantoms of black-weeded pools!
‘Why do I know ye?’

(I, 227-31)

As much as Hyperion may have wished to rally them, his flash shows their absence to themselves. It reveals their relapsing, by a reverse euhemerism, into the dreams, forms, effigies, spectres, phantoms, rocks, and streams from which they metaphorically grew. Unable to speak, barely gasping and groaning, they cannot recover their losses, and they revert to the Chaos that Ovid in three lines had lifted them from. Keats gives us divinities in absentia; they are not beings, but non-beings—shapes of shadows, wisps of darkness.⁹ Keats struggles to give them voice at the moment when they are subsiding back into the natural scene in the diminished forms of sound, shadow, and light, into “rocks that seem'd / Ever as if just rising from a sleep / Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns” (II, 10-12). Keats catches the mythological process at its ebb: where primitives had imagined gods from natural things (or so the eighteenth century mythologists had reconstructed their imaginings¹⁰), the Romantics now dissolve them back again. Keats glimpses the demythologizing as it happens. He records the mirror image, the reversal, of Ovid's compositions in these sorrowful decompositions.

Because Keats catches the Titans in his lines as they go, they have more than ever been reduced to having a life merely in language, constructed line by line, and then decomposed line by line while their imagined stage dims. Keats hears their long withdrawing roar, and tries to preserve it in a layer behind his own words, and yet is aware that the words of this roar are identical with the words that describe its disappearing. As, by some accounts, the supernatural first came into existence when figures of speech were elaborated into stories, emerging from the extended terms of metaphor, so the supernatural dies by being absorbed back into language, into being forms of speech or ways of speaking. Keats names the Titans, places them in the midst of other names; and thereby gives them existence, however fleeting. Keats struggles in the epic not only to face the epic labour which looms over every poet in Milton's shadow,¹¹ but he also struggles to describe a world of mythological figures who have, at the moment he watches, lost their realm, forgotten what it was like to have sway, and lost the power of speaking about it. They are mute, silent, doomed to wander along the riverbanks unnoticed except by poets who might reinvent them once again in the elaborations of metaphor.

At the beginning of book three, Keats throws off the fiction of presenting us with the words of beings who never were on land or sea. He leaves the Titans to their struggle between speaking and silence, “in alternate uproar and sad peace”: “O leave them to their woes.” He seems to mock both himself and these beings he has labored to present:

                                                            O leave them to their woes;
For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire:
A solitary sorrow best befits
Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.
Leave them, O Muse! for thou anon wilt find
Many a fallen Old Divinity
Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.

(III, 3-9)

He is more comfortable with private sorrows, and the old divinities can no longer force their meaningfulness onto the world. Keats turns in relief to his old theme of Apollo, so that he can worry now about the syllables rising in a poet's throat, instead of also worrying about them rising in the hollow throats of beings whose throats as well as whose words he must invent, and whose giant tongues must be conveyed in his description of them if they are to be conveyed at all. The young Apollo speaks to the visiting goddess of Memory,

                                                            While his white melodious throat
Throbb'd with the syllables.—‘Mnemosyne!
Thy name is on my tongue.’

(III, 81-83)

Once again in this poem, coming as a leitmotif, is the concentration on the mechanism of speech, on meaning as a weight felt pressuring tongue or throat, implying that for words to be real or sound real they must be experienced as a palpable physical sense. Here, instead of describing the gods being gods, indescribable in their hugeness, their utterances unutterable, Keats will speak in the voice of the new god, casting off the Titans' silent shapes. From his “aching ignorance” (III, 107) on his Delian island, he will take the Titans' place. “‘Knowledge enormous makes a God of me’” (III, 113). What he knows is the knowledge of reality, not of myth (though this reality also exists primarily for the time of the poem in the words of the poem), a reality of sensible, sensuous, tangible abundance—clouds, fleeces, goblets, olives, palms, rosiness, and goldenness (III, 15-28)—like the reality of the bedroom in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a knowledge of succulent things, intensely experienced at their centers, as the boy who presses his face against the sweet shop window would have wished.¹² When the thwarted, Keatsian Apollo is made to ask (III, 103), “‘Where is Power?’”, he wants to get through words to the stuff on the other side of the screen, to the viscous centers of things, to the felt life, to the physical thickness and oozing density, that assaults and nourishes sense and nerve, and that is beyond language.¹³ In books one and two he had been blocked in his reach toward this power at the core by the opacity, abstraction, and misting away of his shadowy figures. Keats himself had written of these two books as his “abstractions” (letter 108 to John Hamilton Reynolds, 22 September 1818) in the sense of being taken away from, drawn off, separated, or forced apart from any particular or material object. When Keats plunges into book three, he may display a certain feebleness in his opening invocations and in the almost “grotesque” scene when Apollo is hypnotized out of muteness by Mnemosyne, but it is with a burst of joy that Keats careens through this luxuriance; it is not a regression, or a “detour,” but an arrival at the real after watching the shadows die.

Keats has been criticized for the disjunction in style between books two and three, but it is possible that in saying “leave them to their woes,” he was acknowledging that the gods have simply dwindled away and cannot be resurrected by any artifice of gorgeously weighted vowels. The gods have been absorbed into the poetry of earth, shadowy, haunting reminiscences of past powers, the demonic hidden in nature, that may be summoned by an attentive poet.¹⁴ They cannot speak (it is futile to try to make them), but the poet can speak for himself.

The transition from book two to book three is thus a transition from drama to lyric, from a rendering of myth as it dies to the deployment of myth as psychology, from speaking as gods to becoming personally deified, from sensation being lost to sensation being immediately re-experienced, from the disappearance of god to the birth of self. When Apollo feels knowledge widening the interstices of his brain he exults:

‘Names, deeds, grey 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’

(III, 114-18)

In books one and two these grey legends, sovran voices, agonies, creations and destroyings were caught fading into myth, thence into the poetry of earth; in book three, they fill the hollows of the poet's brain until he includes previous divinity.

If we take account in some way of the epic's momentousness, we may balk at dismissing the epic as a failure. While it is possible that Keats felt he was combining too much—King Lear and Paradise Lost with Wordsworth, his Endymion, and Spenser, tragedy with the luxuriant growth of a poet's consciousness, loss with gain—he may also have deliberately used this incompatibility to describe the modern moment. For Keats moves from recreating a vanished mythology as it vanishes to showing us that the only mythology now possible to modern man is personal—where the myths potentially existing in figurative language project the allegories of the mind's stages. This change from book two to book three is so decisive that it might be called a revolution; language dies in the trammels of old myth and shrieks to birth shuddering in the new. Keats's labors to find a way of speaking about the material of a lost supernatural world foretell the labors of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is asking with Wallace Stevens, “What is Divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams?” and answering in book three as Stevens, too, will answer: “Divinity must live within [the] self.” This is the sole necessary angel when the gods have disappeared.

Notes

1. For such criticisms, see Keats's letter 108 to John Hamilton Reynolds, 22 September 1818, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 1:370; Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 186; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 400 ff. John Middleton Murry argues that Keats “was trying to achieve, at the cost of immense inward suffering, an attitude of detachment from ‘the miseries of the world.’ He was trying to control his pain, subdue his heart, and to write an ‘epic.’” But Milton encourages remoteness: he “does not … touch our depths.” Keats (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), pp. 263 and 268.

2. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 167 ff., argues that The Excursion not only influenced the ideas of Hyperion, but that, more specifically, Saturn is modelled on the inflexible and disillusioned Solitary of The Excursion, Books II and III.

3. All references to Hyperion and later to “Sleep and Poetry” are from The Poetical Works of John Keats, 2nd edn., ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958).

4. According to Bate's calculations, p. 391.

5. Sperry, p. 184. Walter Evert in Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 239 ff., finds this absolute distinction irreconcilable between books two and three. He asks how, if the Titans have fallen irrevocably out of eternity, can Apollo make himself eternal from within? In other words, if Apollo can do it, why can the Titans not?

6. For a discussion of the importance of King Lear for Hyperion, see Bate, pp. 391-400. Geoffrey Hartman points to Hyperion as a poem of painful “à-dieu” when he writes “the living and troubled development of the Hyperion sequence will allow us to see gods become ghosts despite themselves” in “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's ‘Hyperion,’” The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 59.

7. Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve Press, 1973), pp. 82 and 92.

8. See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1961), ch. 1.

9. They are perhaps the “nothings” in Keats's classification of levels of reality into three categories: real, semi-real; and nothings. See The Letters, 1:242.

10. The eighteenth-century reexamination of mythology has been amply described in different ways by Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963); by Albert J. Kuhn, “English Deism and Romantic Syncretism,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 71 (1956), 1094-1116; and by E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and “The Fall of Jerusalem”: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975.)

11. See Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961) and Harold Bloom's sequence beginning with The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

12. William Butler Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” Ille's fifth speech, The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 159.

13. See Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976) for a rich and delicate appreciation of Keats's sensuousness.

14. For the demonic as an embodiment of natural force and inner feeling see Charles I. Patterson, Jr., The Daemonic in the Poetry of Keats (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970).