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标题: Endymion (summary and commentary) [打印本页]
作者: 怀抱花朵的孩子    时间: 2007-11-19 23:01
标题: Endymion (summary and commentary)
Endymion (summary and commentary)

The Poem


Endymion is a long narrative poem in four books of about one thousand lines each, written mostly in heroic couplets. It is named after its hero, Endymion, a figure taken from Greek myth. According to the legend, Endymion was a shepherd who fell asleep on Mount Latmos and so entranced the goddess of the moon, Cynthia (also known as Diana or Phœbe), that she fell in love with him. In Endymion, John Keats transforms this basic story into a lengthy and complicated quest in which Endymion desperately searches for a beautiful and mysterious goddess first glimpsed in a dream.

Book I of Endymion begins with Keats’s famous line, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” and a brief argument that beauty, especially the beauty found in such “lovely tales” as the story of Endymion, “moves away the pall/ From our dark spirits.” After this introductory section, Keats describes the pastoral world of Endymion and his people, who are gathered to worship the shepherd-god Pan. Whereas the other shepherds are in a festive mood, Endymion appears dreamy and depressed; concerned about his trancelike state, his sister Peona leads him away to learn the reason for his sorrow. Endymion tells her that in a dream he saw and fell madly in love with the embodiment of feminine perfection—when he awoke, he was alone and heartbroken in a world that seemed hideous. When Peona urges him not to ruin his life for a mere dream, Endymion replies that love is far more important than earthly fame, especially “love immortal.” Since his first vision, he explains, he has seen the reflection of his dream-lover in a well and has heard her voice coming from a cave. The book ends, however, with Endymion telling Peona that he is resigned to a life of unrequited love.

In Book II, Endymion begins his quest for his dream vision. He encounters a naiad who warns him that he “must wander far/ In other regions” before his love can be consummated. Endymion despairs, but a voice urges him to descend, and Endymion continues his journey until he comes upon the Garden of Adonis, where Adonis, the favorite of Venus, is slumbering. Venus arrives as Adonis begins to awaken from his “winter-sleep” and asks Love to pity Endymion’s misery. When Venus and her minions vanish, Endymion wanders on until he sees a huge eagle, which he rides even farther down into the depths. After dismounting the eagle, he finally finds the goddess of his dream (having been given the “power to dream deliciously”), and the lovers embrace. Endymion’s mysterious lover tells him that she loves him passionately but cannot yet bring him to Olympus. Although she does not tell Endymion, she is Cynthia, a goddess who personifies chastity. After they have made love, Endymion falls asleep and the goddess departs. The remainder of Book II describes Endymion’s renewed sadness and the hopeless love of two streams, Alpheus and Arethusa, who want to intermingle but cannot because of Cynthia’s prohibition.

Endymion’s quest takes him to the bottom of the sea in Book III, and he encounters Glaucus, an ancient man who welcomes Endymion as a savior. Glaucus explains that he has been condemned to sit at the bottom of the ocean for one thousand years by the witch Circe, who was once his lover, because Glaucus spied on her as she tortured her deformed and bestialized victims. As he went into the sea to begin his punishment, Glaucus found the dead body of Scylla, his first love, and he placed her in a crystal structure far beneath the depths. After many years passed, a ship capsized, and Glaucus discovered a scroll clenched in a dead man’s hand. Glaucus learned from the scroll that at the end of his one thousand years of suffering he would be rescued by a youth, but until then it was his duty to place all drowned lovers side by side in the crystal edifice. Moved by Glaucus’ tale, Endymion agrees to help him; the two perform the necessary rituals to change Glaucus into a youth and reanimate the dead lovers in the crystal tomb. The lovers go to Neptune’s palace to rejoice, and Venus comes to tell Endymion that she has discovered the identity of his immortal lover. Overcome by the festivities in Neptune’s palace, Endymion faints and then hears (through his “inward senses”) the voice of his dream-lover assuring him that they will soon be together.

Book IV deals with Endymion’s final trials before he becomes “spiritualiz’d” enough to rise to heaven with Cynthia. After awakening from his swoon, he discovers a beautiful Indian Maiden who has been deserted by Bacchus and who longs desperately for love. Much to Endymion’s dismay, he falls hopelessly in love with this woman (who is actually Cynthia) and feels divided between the Indian Maiden and his dream-lover. He and the Indian Maiden then mount two flying horses and fall asleep in the air. In a dream, Endymion learns that the goddess of his vision and Diana are one, but he continues to feel an allegiance to the Indian Maiden. When she disappears, he enters a strange “Cave of Quietude,” a gloomy den which may represent a kind of despair or perhaps an important stage in Endymion’s spiritualization. After Endymion finally lands on Earth, he is still torn between his earthly and divine loves, and when the Indian woman tells him that his love for her is hopeless, Endymion decides to live as a hermit. The Indian Maiden then reveals that she is Cynthia, and, as Endymion’s sister Peona watches in amazement, the lovers abruptly vanish together.


Forms and Devices

Keats subtitled Endymion “A Poetic Romance,” and Endymion has some similarities to another verse romance, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Like The Faerie Queene, Endymion uses allegorical figures and presents unrealistic adventures in an enchanted world. The allegory in Endymion seems less systematic than the allegory in The Faerie Queene, however, and the poem as a whole has been criticized for its inconsistencies and its somewhat disappointing conclusion. These structural problems may have resulted from the fact that Endymion was Keats’s first effort at a long poem, completed when he was only twenty-two, and that his attitude toward his subject changed as the work progressed. In fact, toward the end of the poem Keats apologizes to his main character for taking so long to reach a happy ending (see Book IV, 770–773)—by Book IV, the themes introduced in Book I have become much harder to resolve. The ending of Endymion, which describes Cynthia and Endymion kissing Peona and then vanishing, seems oddly abrupt, as if Keats wanted to whisk the lovers away before any other complications could arise. Although the romance genre offered Keats some poetic freedom—he could dispense, for example, with realistic plot and focus on dream visions—Keats seems to have grown increasingly restive with the poem’s allegory. As a result, Endymion presents many problems for its interpreters.

Critics have, however, been able to agree that the poem contains considerable eroticism, despite that fact that Cynthia, the object of Endymion’s passions, has traditionally been considered a chaste, even cold, moon goddess. Certainly Endymion’s encounters with her seem more physical than spiritual, even though the object of Endymion’s trials is supposed to be his spiritualization. When the lovers meet they kiss, sigh, faint, entwine, pant, and caress, and the chaste Cynthia speaks of melting into Endymion—the love is far from platonic. In fact, in her encounters with Endymion, Cynthia seems more intent on tantalizing him than on making him happy—the descriptions of their passionate embraces are soon followed by Endymion’s sleep and her unnoticed departure.

Sexual imagery is also used in the Garden of Adonis and Glaucus-Circe sections of the poem. In the Garden of Adonis, Venus’ lover, Adonis is presented as a beautiful sleeping youth watched over by Cupids. When he awakes, Venus “scuds with summer breezes, to pant through/ The first long kiss,” and they begin their seasonal love-making. Although Venus’ love for him appears to be sincere, there is a sense that Adonis is dependent and almost infantile—his relationship with Venus can never develop or mature. The love affair of Circe and Glaucus, on the other hand, is demoniacal, especially when compared with Endymion’s more idealistic passion for Cynthia. Like Venus, Circe reduces her lover to the status of a child: She takes Glaucus “like a child of suckling time/ And cradle [him] in roses.” Circe proves to be a witch who has enchanted and deformed other men. She symbolizes the destructive lure of sexuality, and Glaucus’ story may serve as a warning to the lovelorn Endymion.

Themes and Meanings

As the first book makes clear, one of the main themes of Endymion is the nature of happiness. On January 30, 1818, Keats wrote to his publisher, John Taylor, that Endymion’s speech to Peona describes “the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer.” According to Endymion, there are several kinds of happiness: The lowest is fellowship with nature and man, the next two involve humanitarian friendship and heterosexual love, and the highest level of happiness on the pleasure thermometer results from loving an immortal. Thus, for Endymion, his love for the goddess of his dream represents the greatest happiness possible and, in comparison, makes his role as shepherd king or a normal life of action seem insignificant and worthless. So although Peona continues to question Endymion’s wisdom in searching for his goddess, Endymion pursues her throughout the poem, even though (as he suspects in Book IV) he may be loving “a nothing.” That loving a goddess can be potentially disastrous is suggested by Glaucus’ experience with the witch Circe—notwithstanding the conviction with which Endymion delivers his speech on happiness, his ideals often seem questionable. It is significant that Keats calls Endymion a “Brain-sick shepherd prince.”

Although the allegory in Endymion is never completely clear, the ideal represented by Cynthia seems to be spiritual in nature, and therefore Endymion cannot easily rise to the goddess’ level. While his fellow shepherds follow the more earthly god Pan, Endymion must overcome his ties to the physical world by forgoing a life of action, wandering in solitude, performing a selfless humanitarian service to Glaucus and the drowned lovers, and renouncing his love for the Indian Maiden. He must experience utter despair and be reduced to the stunned indifference of the “Cave of Quietude.” When, in Book IV, Endymion chooses to live the life of a hermit apart from the Indian Maiden, Cynthia finally pronounces him sufficiently spiritualized to join her in heaven. Yet Endymion’s choice between the Indian Maiden (passionate, physical, real) and Cynthia (elusive, spiritual, ideal) ultimately proves to be an illusion, as the Indian Maiden and Cynthia turn out to be the same being. Whereas the protagonist of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor (1816) ignores the Arab Maiden who loves him and dies pursuing his feminine ideal, Keats combines the Indian Maiden and Cynthia, thus allowing Endymion to enjoy both his earthly and spiritual loves.

In some ways Endymion is about the growth of a human mind through the imagination. By means of his dream visions, Endymion learns that the ideal can be attained through the real, that a life of contemplation and love is superior to a life of action, and that sorrow (as the Indian Maiden’s “Ode to Sorrow” attests) is an important element of both love and beauty. Any final declaration about Endymion, however, must take into account the fact that the poem ends abruptly and unconvincingly. Endymion and Cynthia vanish with almost unseemly haste—their final bliss in Olympus is never described. The reader, like the deserted Peona, is left in “wonderment,” and the highest level of Endymion’s pleasure thermometer is never glimpsed.

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2007-11-19 11:04 PM 编辑 ]
作者: keatslover    时间: 2007-11-20 09:21
Endymion isn't a very successful work . keats had an apological preface to it and even hazlitt , his supporter and aesthetic guide ,talked about it with mild reproach. inconsisitancy and a childish indulgence in sensuous descriptions and ardor are the charges laid again him. The reviewer lockhart gladly availed himself of the chance and attacked it savagely out of political spite.
  its redeeming feature ,ironically, is exactly those scattered pretty passages here and there and they can be read and enjoyed  with relish.

[ 本帖最后由 keatslover 于 2007-11-20 09:23 AM 编辑 ]
作者: 怀抱花朵的孩子    时间: 2007-11-20 23:40
标题: 回复 2# 的帖子
I agree with you that Endymion is not very successful, but I don't think it even doesn't worth reading. In considering his age while writting this poem, I think we have no need to over-request him for a more perfect piece of work.

Keats had said that it was impossible to write a long narrative poem like Farie Queene in his age. But he still want to have a try, and he do have great expectation in his writting of long poems to which he paid great attentions and also hard work. These long poems do reflect his philosophy toward literature,life and the world although some of which maybe childish or naive. Most critics favor his last long poem Hyperion whcih I havn't finished my reading. As to Endymion and Lamia, I do found some defects in them, but also some shining points which I appreciated  very much. Such as his search for the relationship between Beauty and Truth, his splendid language, his love for nature. He was always trying quaere verum and emblazon with his poems.

Nowadays I am reading some long poems of Keats and Tennyson, whcih give me great  enjoyment and sometimes also depression. I've heard many writers and readers saying that long-poems writting is impossible in our days. But why? Why we can't write long poems like Homer and Spencer?

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2007-11-21 12:28 AM 编辑 ]
作者: methos    时间: 2007-11-21 01:16
原帖由 keatslover 于 2007-11-20 09:21 AM 发表
Endymion isn't a very successful work.


By this statement do you mean that Endymion did not sell well, that it did not receive favourable reviews from contemporary critics, or that it fails to meet certain criteria by which you -- or Keats himself -- judge poetry? Can you elaborate on this and tell us why you judge it unsuccessful and why "those scattered pretty passages" are its "redeeming feature"?
作者: keatslover    时间: 2007-11-22 10:48
With regard to the craftmanship this poem is not mature but it marked an important stage in keats' development as a poet.  from this point on keats weaned himself off the Huntian influence.
   there are many great passages in the poem .they could be read seperately for their beauty.

[ 本帖最后由 keatslover 于 2008-4-25 08:28 编辑 ]
作者: keatslover    时间: 2008-1-7 12:27
about this poem ,a passage from Shelley's Adonais could be cited as a convinient footnote:
     o gentle child ,beautiful as thou wert ,
     why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
      too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
      dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
      defenceless as thou wert,oh ,where was then
      wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
      or hadst thou waited the full cycle ,when
       thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
       the monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer .
作者: keatslover    时间: 2008-4-19 09:51
in fact ,this poem marked the first serious attemp by john keats to "be among the English Poets". But unfortunately the poem proved unsucessful both in terms of  poetic technique and financial result. later , he talked about this poem with shame and through this poem he matured very quickly, which is a marvel in English literary history. The poem is useful if one tries to understand John Keasts' developement from the beginning to the end.

[ 本帖最后由 keatslover 于 2008-5-5 10:19 编辑 ]



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