“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
It’s loveliness increases; it will never…”
Yes! This is the same epic poem, which starts with these celebrated lines of Keats.
In the spring of 1817, Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight, where he started working on Endymion based on the Greek Legend of Endymion, the shepherded beloved of the Moon goddess Selene. The quarterly review ran him down for the work and denounced his “the Endymion”, this is what they said,
“We confess that we have not read his work, Not that we have been wanting in our duty -far from it- indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be to get through it but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books….
QUARTERLY REVIEW
This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unintelligible almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype… He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line.”
Along with Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, this was my second foray into the classic long poem books, last year. I swooped down on an unforeseeable terrain of epic long poems, like a hungry bird. I was doubtful if I would succeed. But when I finished this long epic poem of Keats last year, which was 130 pages long and consist of four books, I read all of them, all four books, unlike that professional reviewer who did not trouble his soul to read it fully and still reached to a conclusion, shaking the belief of a young poet.
I felt bad knowing that Keats was 22 years old when he was writing it and this work should not have deserved such a harsh replication at that time. This should not have been that way, I think. I liked the individual parts of the poems, at some places it is very beautiful and at some places a little disconcerting. But this is also true that I too could not connect myself with this poetic romance fully, first of all, you need to have some knowledge of Greek legends to get things on track, and second, you must like a rhyming pattern that tells a story in verse. First thing I lacked, the second thing I loved.
Yet the structure of the poem was a bit coarse, and its sentimentality was not fully grown, the characters that appeared in the poems looked confusing too. Knowing the characters beforehand will make your life easy. My life was neither easy nor too much burdensome. It was somewhere in between as I have always liked Keats. There are a few places that rang the bell. The melodious tone in the tale reverberated as if a sound echoed from the mountain. Despite its coarseness, I somehow managed to like it.
“Have I been able to endure that voice?
Fair Melody! kind Syren! I’ve no choice;
I must be thy sad servant evermore:
I cannot choose but kneel here and adore.
Alas, I must not think—by Phoebe, no!
Let me not think, soft Angel! shall it be so?
Say, beautifullest, shall I never think?
O thou could’st foster me beyond the brink
Of recollection! make my watchful care
Close up its bloodshot eyes, nor see despair!
“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev
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