Introduction: The Privacy of Death
In Chapter Three, I argued that Felicia Hemans’ “A Spirit’s Return” inhabits two forms of Romantic mortal consciousness. Embodying the death of the self and the death of the other, the poem stands at the threshold of the fundamental shift during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western attitudes toward death and dying, first identified by Ariès. The poem’s emotional impetus is the speaker’s grief over the death of her beloved. Thus, on the surface, the crisis of mortality in the poem appears to center on the cutting of an erotic connection. The speaker longs for and imagines a spiritual reunion with the deceased. In this way, “A Spirit’s Return” is an early expression of the Victorian culture of mourning, which many recent literary and cultural critics have described.
At the same time, however, “A Spirit’s Return” is less about the deceased or even the speaker’s relationship with the deceased than a culturally oriented interpretation of the poem might suggest. The speaker’s longed-for spiritual reunion only occurs after she has
thoroughly retraced and reevaluated her relationship with life and living in the wake of the death of an individual who, she now realizes, anchored her to the earth. For a poem ostensibly about the return of the deceased, “A Spirit’s Return” is a remarkably private poem; its emotional core is the speaker’s anxiety about her place in a living world whose foundations have crumbled, giving her, as it were, dual citizenship with death. In this way, the poem holds fast to and inhabits the death of the self: that early form of mortal
consciousness slowly dismantled during the Enlightenment and in its wake. It was the form, as I showed in Chapter One, that Cain inhabited until Lucifer, through instruction about the
earth’s appalling geological past, inspired him to extrapolate the bleak future in store for Cain’s posterity.
In Chapters One and Two, I argued that Romantic mortal consciousness, straddling the threshold between the death of the self and the death of the other, bears a striking resemblance to what we might now call a liberal political or social consciousness. In the wake of the Enlightenment, death transformed from the Great Leveler of human inequality into this inequality’s crystallizing agent: the event that sealed it into the annals of history. In “The Ruined Cottage” and to a much greater extent in Cain, ruminating on death and its victims enables both a critical examination of the world and a critical imagination of what the world ought to be, could be, and perhaps may be like one day. Margaret’s story teaches the reader how the forces of history, which arise in centers of power far away from her rural abode, ripple outwards and undermine her marriage, her family, her life, and finally her home, which, returning to the earth, serves as an organic and living memorial of an
individual who dwelt on history’s margins. In Byron’s play, Cain’s newfound perception of the world incites an act of rebellion against its creator and its most devout worshipper; right or wrong, the murder of Abel is a product of Cain’s cosmic politics.
If, as I have suggested in Chapter Three, Romantic mortal consciousness still retains part of its solitary core, then how is it compatible with this modern liberal political or social consciousness that I have identified in the works of Gray, Wordsworth, and Byron? After all, Hemans’ poem is not a politically or socially charged poem; the speaker’s reevaluation of her relationship to life does not inspire a critical examination of human inequality. The purpose of my last two chapters is to explore the question I have just posed by examining two works whose emotional core is very much the death of the self, but whose centripetal
mortuary forces are ultimately balanced by a centrifugal force that commands one, in Keats’ great phrase, to “think of the Earth” (1.169).
This chapter focuses on the work of Keats, particularly his protracted struggle with his epic poem Hyperion, which he began in late 1818, put aside for almost a year (an eon in Keatsian time), and recommenced in late 1819, only to abandon it a second and final time a few months later. Fundamentally, it argues that Keats’ dissatisfaction with the first Hyperion stemmed from a failure of mortal consciousness. This may be putting it too bluntly; I do not think Keats recognized this failure at the time he set the first poem aside. However, Keats’ revisions to the poem in late 1819, particularly his construction of a deeply personal frame narrative, help us understand what Keats, returning to his first mature long poem several months after putting it aside, felt that the first Hyperion lacked.
In The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, we see a marriage of the death of the self with the death of the other: a form of mortal consciousness in which fear of death is simultaneously magnified and tempered by the realization that death unites all of us, even the overthrown gods our ancestors worshipped. The poem reminds us that we will all be inhabitants of the undiscovered country, and soon. But this is not the work of Death the Leveler; rather, it is the work Death the Illuminator of shared humanity and suffering, who makes that suffering more visible, more poignant, and more compelling. Unlike Cain, the speaker of Keats’ revised Hyperion does not act upon his newfound mortal consciousness. Granted, Keats’ poem is unfinished; one can only guess how Keats’ speaker would have evolved had he continued to the poem. But perhaps that is beside the point. Perhaps what Keats’ Hyperion project shows us and tries to express is that mortality, however we respond to it, simply demands a response, whether political or, in this case, philosophical and poetical. That
mortality demands our attention, lest we forget what makes us human and what connects with all the other mortal creatures with whom, for a little while, we share the earth.
Keats and Hyperion
Central to my reading of The Fall of Hyperion is the dramatic moment, about halfway through the revised poem, where Keats’ speaker, after a near-fatal encounter with a goddess named Moneta, reenters his earlier poem Hyperion about the fall of the Titans and the ascent of a new race of gods. Keats began Hyperion in the closing months of 1818 but put it aside the following spring, not long after the death from tuberculosis of his brother Tom, whom Keats had nursed on his deathbed, and from whom he probably contracted the disease. The original poem, which Keats titled Hyperion: A Fragment, has three books. Book One begins “deep in the shady sadness of a vale” where Saturn, the old and deposed king of the Titans, has fallen to the earth. Midway through Book One, the narrator cuts to the solar palace of the sun god Hyperion, a Titan who still clings to power but sees omens of change. At the end of the book, he descends to earth to rally his fallen comrades. In Book Two, Saturn and the fallen Titans ponder what to do next: submit to the Olympians or begin a fresh assault? If this sounds familiar, it is because Keats modeled Book Two on the consultation in Hell at the beginning of Paradise Lost. In the fragment of Book Three, the narrator describes Apollo’s rise to godhood.
Keats returned to and began revising Hyperion in July 1819 but abandoned it a second and final time just two months later. To place the revised poem in the meteoric trajectory of Keats’ brief career, this was just after that period of dazzling creativity in May when he composed his great odes, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” However, to call The Fall of
Hyperion a “revision” of the earlier fragment is slightly inaccurate and misleading. It is really
a complete recasting and re-imagining of the earlier poem, following a profound moral and aesthetic reorientation toward it. At the core of the revised poem is the story of the Titans. Preceding it, however, is a ruminative frame narrative detailing the experiences of an unnamed poet-narrator who wanders into the temple of Saturn. Hyperion, that is to say Keats’ original poem, is secreted away in the mind of Moneta, Saturn’s last worshipper, and the speaker has to glean it from her. The frame narrative, which ends with the dramatic encounter with the goddess, takes up about half the fragment and comprises the thematic and emotional core of the poem.1
I begin my discussion of the revised poem by quoting the opening of the original fragment of Hyperion and showing where Keats’ poet-narrator reenters it in The Fall of
Hyperion. These are the first fourteen lines of the original poem:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung around his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
1 To avoid confusion when speaking of these two poems, I will refer to the “narrator” of
Hyperion and the “speaker” of The Fall of Hyperion, whose self-conscious frame narrative gives
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips. (1.1-14)2
Keats deploys three adverbial phrases in the first three lines to create an impression of profound spatial depth. This depth, with its attendant images of darkness, sorrow, and contagion, formally establishes Saturn’s sad condition, his ponderous state of “fallen
divinity,” well before the narrator encapsulates it with this poignant phrase in line 12. So do the images of silence and stillness in lines 4-5 and the string of negative and doubly negative accounts and descriptions (difficult to compute, even after several close passes) in lines 7-10. In line 4, the narrator provides a brief glimpse of “gray-haired Saturn,” who sits “quiet as a stone” in his miserable surroundings, “still as the silence round about his lair” (1.4-5). A stream flows nearby, but its waters provide neither nourishment nor comfort. Flowing without a sound, the “voiceless” steam is “still deadened more / By reason of [Saturn’s] fallen divinity / Spreading a shade” upon it (1.11-13).
In the next verse paragraph, the shortest in Hyperion, the narrator trains his gaze on the fallen god. The negative adjectives deployed by the poet to describe Saturn’s right hand, once the instrument of unlimited power, effectively sum up his current state:
Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, No further than to where his feet had stray’d, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. (1.17-21)
The adjective “unsceptered,” a sublime image of impotence, captures the tragic reversal in Saturn’s fortunes and the existential negativity of his condition. Indeed, the suffix “-less” appears three times in two lines.3
Much of this description of Saturn’s “fallen divinity” appears in The Fall of Hyperion, which Keats began in July 1819. In the revised poem, the narrative of the Titans’ fall exists in the mind of the goddess Moneta, who witnessed the tragedy and continually relives it, suffering a living death reminiscent of Coleridge’s ancient mariner. The speaker, after an arduous ascent to Moneta’s altar during which he nearly dies, makes a passionate plea to Moneta to uncover and share what she has experienced: “Let me behold, according as thou saidst, / What in thy brain so ferments to and fro!” (1.189-90). Moneta grants his request:
No sooner had this conjuration pass’d My devout lips, than side by side we stood (Like a stunt bramble by a solemn pine)
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star. (1.291-6, my italics)
It is not immediately clear to the reader why Moneta chooses to share her knowledge. It is obvious that the speaker has passed some kind of test, but a test of what? What aspects of the earlier poem does Keats feel he is now prepared to take up, and why? To phrase this important question another way, what did Keats have to do before he could give himself permission to reenter and perhaps attempt to complete his old poem? The form of the
3 The phrase “realmless eyes” is the first of many references to the organ of sight and seat of the creative imagination in the Hyperion project.
revised Hyperion permits us to ask these questions without taking the bait of biographical criticism hook, line, and sinker, a trap that students of Keats must always strive to avoid. They are important questions, too. As I will demonstrate, they strike not only at the
thematic heart of the poem but also at the core of Keats’ rapidly maturing thought about life, death, and everything that makes us human.
In this chapter, I argue that, in order to reenter Hyperion, Keats had to prove to himself that he truly grasped mortality: that he possessed a measure of mortal consciousness requisite to bear the weight of a poem about the massive suffering of fallen gods. The frame narrative of the revised Hyperion, a distillation of ideas Keats had been working through in his recent poems and letters, including the odes, functions as a demonstration of this proof. However, Keats’ victory had an unintended consequence, for by testing and proving his depth of mortal consciousness, he also came face-to-face with a vexing and perhaps
unanswerable question about the purpose of poetry in a world marred by human suffering. Fundamentally, The Fall of Hyperion asks whether the art of poetry can survive the injection of mortal consciousness that it needs to matter in – to be relevant to – a fallen world composed of immense suffering and woe.
The speaker’s reentry into the fragment of Hyperion occurs at line 124 of the revised poem. During the first 293 lines, he is examining and evaluating his poetic credentials, attempting to prove to himself that he has the ability to write about fallen gods, that his pen can sustain the colossal events he intends to record. This is only partly a question of his talent as a poet; it is also a question of something I will here call “spiritual fiber,” or the ability to withstand and comprehend the weight of a tragic situation. If this is unclear from the strange invocation at the beginning of the revised poem, which I will discuss shortly, that is because this invocation is a relic of a considerably less mature Keats, a poet driven by a