Study guide
Endymion
Open the interactive study guide →
Overview
- Composed
- April to November 1817, begun on the Isle of Wight and finished at Burford Bridge, Surrey, on 28 November
- Published
- April 1818, by Taylor and Hessey, London, as Endymion: A Poetic Romance
- Genre
- Mythological romance in four books
- Length
- Some 4,050 lines (Book I c. 990, II c. 1,020, III c. 1,030, IV c. 1,000)
- Verse form
- Heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter), loose and run-on, with inset lyrics in shorter measures
- Setting
- Mount Latmos in Caria; the caverns of the earth; the bottom of the sea; the air and the forests of Latmos again
- Sources
- The Greek myth of the shepherd Endymion and the moon goddess, known to Keats through Ovid, Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, Drayton, Spenser and others
- Dedication
- Inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton; title-page epigraph from Shakespeare's Sonnet 17
- Reception
- Savaged by the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1818, giving rise to the legend that the critics killed Keats
Context
John Keats (1795–1821) was twenty-one, a newly qualified apothecary who had abandoned medicine for poetry, when he began Endymion in April 1817. His first book, Poems (March 1817), had sold poorly, and he set himself a deliberate trial of strength: a long poem of some four thousand lines, written to a schedule of about fifty lines a day. A long poem, he told his friend Benjamin Bailey in October 1817, was 'a test of Invention'. He drafted it on the Isle of Wight, at Margate and Canterbury, in Oxford with Bailey, and at Hampstead, finishing at Burford Bridge in Surrey on 28 November 1817. The fair copy and proofs occupied the early months of 1818, and the publishers John Taylor and James Hessey issued the book in late April 1818 (Gittings 1968) (Bate 1963) (Motion 1997).
The subject is a Greek myth that had already attracted English poets. Endymion, a shepherd prince (or, in some versions, a king) of Mount Latmos in Caria, was loved by the moon goddess, called Selene, Phoebe, Cynthia or Diana; in most accounts she cast him into an endless sleep so that she could visit him unseen. Keats knew the story from Ovid and the classical handbooks, above all Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, and from English poems such as Michael Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe (1595) and its revision The Man in the Moone (1606), John Lyly's play Endimion and John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. He enlarged the slender legend into a quest: an Endymion who wakes, wanders through earth, sea and air in search of the goddess, and gathers on the way the stories of Venus and Adonis, Glaucus and Scylla, and Alpheus and Arethusa (Bush 1937) (Allott 1970).
The poem is written in heroic couplets, but not the closed, balanced couplets of Pope. Following Leigh Hunt, whose Story of Rimini (1816) had revived the looser couplet of the Elizabethans, Keats lets his sentences run on across line-ends and rhyme-words, so that the rhyme often seems to generate the next idea rather than to close the last. The method gives the verse its luxuriance and its sense of improvisation; it also produced the rambling and the strained rhymes that hostile critics seized upon. Keats added a Preface, dated Teignmouth, 10 April 1818, after his friends persuaded him to withdraw a first (dated 19 March), more defiant draft. In the printed version he calls the poem 'a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished', speaks of its 'mawkishness', and describes the stage of life 'between' boyhood and manhood in which 'the soul is in a ferment' (Stillinger 1978) (Ricks 1974).
Keats had political as well as literary friends. Hunt, editor of the radical weekly the Examiner, had been imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent, and Keats was publicly identified as his protégé. In 1817 John Gibson Lockhart began a series of attacks in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on 'the Cockney School of Poetry', mocking Hunt and his circle for their vulgar diction, suburban classicism and liberal politics. The fourth article (August 1818) was devoted to Keats, and John Wilson Croker reviewed Endymion contemptuously in the Quarterly Review (in the number dated April 1818, which appeared in the autumn). Recent critics have read these attacks as attacks on class and politics as much as on style (Cox 1998) (Roe 1997) (Matthews 1971).
Keats was hurt but not broken. 'In Endymion,' he wrote to his publisher James Hessey in October 1818, 'I leaped headlong into the Sea', learning more about its soundings and quicksands than if he had stayed on the shore. Within months of finishing it he had begun Hyperion, and in 1819 he wrote the great odes, Lamia and The Eve of St Agnes. After his death in Rome in February 1821, Shelley's elegy Adonais and Byron's joke in Don Juan that Keats had let his mind be 'snuffed out by an article' fixed the image of a fragile genius destroyed by reviewers. Modern scholarship has discarded the legend, but Endymion remains the poem in which Keats found his subject, the relation between the dream of ideal beauty and the claims of the human world (Rollins 1958) (Roe 2012).
Plot overview
On Mount Latmos the shepherds gather for a festival of Pan, and a chorus sings a hymn to the god. Their young prince Endymion stands apart, sunk in a melancholy that his sister Peona cannot break. She takes him by boat to a bower on an island, where he confesses the cause: in a dream he was carried up among the stars by a goddess of more than mortal beauty, and since waking he has seen her face in a well and heard her voice in a cave. Earthly life now seems empty to him, although he promises Peona to bear it patiently.
In Book II a naiad tells Endymion that he must wander in other regions before he can be united with his love, and a voice calls him down into the hollows of the earth. Lost in a vast underground world of marble and gems, he comes upon the bower where Adonis sleeps through the winter and sees Venus wake him; she promises Endymion happiness. Carried by an eagle into a jasmine bower, he is visited in darkness by his unseen goddess, and the two make love. He then witnesses the river-god Alpheus pursuing the nymph Arethusa, prays for their happiness, and finds the sea above his head.
In Book III, on the ocean floor, Endymion meets the ancient Glaucus, who has been condemned by the enchantress Circe to a thousand years of withered old age for loving the nymph Scylla, whom Circe also killed. A magic scroll has told Glaucus that a youth loved by heaven will free him. Together they restore Glaucus' youth and bring Scylla and a multitude of drowned lovers back to life; at the palace of Neptune there is a festival of rejoicing, and Endymion, fainting, receives a message from the goddess that his reward is near.
In Book IV Endymion meets an Indian Maid, lost and grieving, who sings a song to Sorrow, telling how she followed the triumphal procession of Bacchus. He falls in love with her and feels he has betrayed the goddess. They are carried into the sky on winged horses, where the Maid fades in the moonlight; Endymion passes through the Cave of Quietude, returns to earth and renounces his dreams for the mortal girl, who tells him that she is forbidden to love him. The three, with Peona, resolve on lives of solitude, but in the evening, at Diana's grove, the Maid is transformed: she is the moon goddess herself, who has tested and 'spiritualized' Endymion, and the lovers vanish together.
Book by book
Book 1: Latmos and the Dream
Summary
The poem opens with a meditation on beauty, which binds us to the earth in spite of despondency, and announces 'the story of Endymion'. On the slopes of Latmos the shepherds and maidens assemble at dawn for a festival of Pan. An aged priest leads the sacrifice, and the people sing a hymn to the god of the woods and of all wild places, the central lyric of the book. Endymion appears in a chariot, beautiful but abstracted, and during the games and story-telling that follow he falls into a trance.
Peona leads her brother away to a bower on an island in a river, where he sleeps and she sings to him. When he wakes he tells her the cause of his sorrow. Sleeping in a bed of poppies, he dreamed that the moon was outshone by a lovelier being, who took him up into the heavens; he woke to a world drained of colour. Peona gently rebukes him for wasting his life on a dream, and he answers with a long speech on the degrees of happiness, which rise from the beauties of nature and art to friendship and finally to love.
He then describes two further encounters: the goddess's face seen in a well, and her voice in a cave, promising kisses in a place 'secreter / Than the isle of Delos'. He vows to bear his grief calmly, and the two return to the shore. The Preface, written after the poem was finished, invites us to read this first book as the work of an apprentice: Keats feared that its 'mawkishness' would put off readers, and hoped the reviewers would let him go quietly on to better work.
Analysis
The opening line, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever', is the most famous Keats wrote, and the paragraph it begins is a manifesto. Beauty, in sun, moon, daffodils, and also in 'the grandeur of the dooms / We have imagined for the mighty dead', becomes a 'flowery band to bind us to the earth'. The claim is not that beauty takes us away from the world but that it ties us to it, and the poem will spend four books testing that claim against Endymion's longing to escape into a heavenly love. The rhyme-led couplets, flowing over line-ends, enact the luxuriance they describe (Ricks 1974).
The Hymn to Pan (1.232–306) is the set piece Keats's friends admired most. Pan is not only the goat-god of the shepherds but a symbol of 'immensity', of the unknown power that fills the space between earth and heaven. When Keats recited it to Wordsworth in December 1817, the older poet reportedly called it 'a very pretty piece of Paganism'; Keats's circle took this as a snub, though it may have been half a compliment. The hymn shows Keats's 'Cockney' paganism, a religion of nature and imagination drawn from Hunt and the classical handbooks (Roe 1997) (Bush 1937).
Endymion's speech to Peona (1.777–842) is the philosophical heart of the poem. Happiness lies in 'fellowship with essence': we lose ourselves first in nature and music, then in the 'richer entanglements' of friendship and love, which are 'self-destroying' and raise us to the 'chief intensity'. Keats told John Taylor on 30 January 1818 that writing this 'Argument' set before him 'the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer'. Critics have read the passage as a Neoplatonic ladder from sense to spirit; others stress that it begins and ends in the body, and that love's value lies in what it does for the world, as the nightingale sings without knowing who listens (Wasserman 1953) (Bate 1963) (Rollins 1958).
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
The poem's keynote. Beauty does not fade but grows, and offers a 'bower' and a 'sleep' that are healing rather than escapist. Note how the sentence runs over the line-ends, the open couplet Keats learned from Hunt.
Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain:
From the Hymn to Pan. The god becomes a dwelling for thoughts that outrun our powers of conception, a figure for the unknown that the imagination reaches towards and cannot grasp.
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz'd, and free of space.
The beginning of the 'pleasure thermometer'. The self is transmuted, as base metal into gold, by losing itself in something beyond it; the image of alchemy suggests both transformation and a hint of the illusory.
Book 2: The Underworld and the Bower of Adonis
Summary
Book II opens with a prologue in praise of love: the 'woes of Troy' and the deeds of history fade from memory, but the stories of lovers (Troilus and Cressida, Juliet, Hero, Imogen) live in our very souls. Endymion, still wandering, follows a golden butterfly to a fountain, where a naiad tells him that he must travel 'past the scanty bar / To mortal steps' before he can be united with his love. In despair he cries out to the moon, and a voice from a cavern commands him to descend into 'the silent mysteries of earth'.
He wanders through a vast underground world of crystal, marble and gems, finds a shrine of Diana, and then, overcome by loneliness, takes a path that brings him to a myrtle bower where the young Adonis lies sleeping, watched over by Cupids. A Cupid tells him the story: when Adonis was killed by a boar, Venus's tears won from Jove the decree that he should sleep through each winter and wake every summer. Venus arrives in her dove-drawn car, wakes her lover, and promises that Endymion, too, will one day be blessed.
Endymion passes the chariot of Cybele and is carried by an eagle down to a jasmine bower. There his goddess comes to him in darkness; they make love, and she confesses her fear of the other gods and her shame at loving a mortal, but will not reveal her name. When he wakes alone, he sees two streams, the river-god Alpheus and the nymph Arethusa, who flees him at Diana's command. Endymion prays that the goddess will make them happy, and the book ends as the earth opens and he finds 'the giant sea above his head'.
Analysis
The prologue's preference for lovers over 'pageant history' is a statement of Keats's poetics in 1817. Epic deeds, the 'death-day of empires', matter less than the private life of feeling, and the poet who has 'dared to tread' the path of 'love and poesy' must accept that choice. The passage is also self-aware: Keats knows he is writing a romance, not an epic, and he defends it in the language of chivalric challenge, raising 'Love's standard on the battlements of song' (Wolfson 1986).
The descent into the earth is the first of the poem's journeys into the unknown, and it is curiously lonely. Endymion is dazzled by the underground marvels, but the strongest passage describes 'the journey homeward to habitual self', the moment when wonder fades and 'the deadly feel of solitude' sets in. This alternation between ecstasy and the return to self, between vision and disappointment, structures the whole romance and anticipates the close of the 'Ode to a Nightingale' (Sperry 1973).
The Bower of Adonis owes much to Spenser's Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene (III.vi), and the episode of the dark bower to the story of Cupid and Psyche, where the lover may not see the divine beloved. Both give the poem's idealism a frankly erotic body. Here the goddess's love-making is physical, and her worry about being seen with a mortal is almost social. The scene troubled Victorian readers and has interested modern ones: as Christopher Ricks argued, Keats's willingness to risk embarrassment, in lines his critics found cloying, is part of his human generosity (Ricks 1974) (Levinson 1988).
Yet, in our very souls, we feel amain The close of Troilus and Cressid sweet. Hence, pageant history! hence, gilded cheat!
The prologue sets the love stories of romance against the 'gilded cheat' of political history. The allusion to Chaucer and Shakespeare's Troilus places Keats's poem in an English tradition of love narrative.
He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead:
The voice that commands Endymion's descent. The lines can be read as a motto of the visionary quest, though Book IV will turn them around: there Endymion resolves that 'airy voices' shall no longer cheat him.
how crude and sore The journey homeward to habitual self!
The loneliness that follows wonder. 'Habitual self' is a striking phrase for the ordinary consciousness to which every visionary must return.
Book 3: Glaucus and the Drowned Lovers
Summary
Book III begins with a satirical attack on the rulers of the world, who 'lord it o'er their fellow-men / With most prevailing tinsel', and contrasts them with the true royalty of the moon. Beneath the sea, among the wrecks of ships and armies, Endymion addresses the moon, whom he has loved since childhood, and confesses that he now prizes his unknown goddess even above her. He then meets an old man sitting on a rock, wrapped in a blue cloak embroidered with symbols, who greets him joyfully with the words 'Thou art the man!'
The old man is Glaucus, once a fisherman who became a sea-god. He tells his story: he loved the nymph Scylla, who fled him; seeking help, he fell under the spell of the enchantress Circe, who seemed to love him, until he discovered her bestial court and her cruelty. She condemned him to a thousand years of old age, and killed Scylla. Wandering the sea, he saved a scroll from a shipwreck, which told him that if he studied all the depths of magic and laid side by side the bodies of all drowned lovers, a youth loved by heaven would come to set him free.
Endymion is that youth. Following the scroll's instructions, he breaks Glaucus' wand and scatters a magic thread over him; Glaucus becomes young again, and together they revive Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers, who rise in joy. All go to the palace of Neptune for a festival, where Venus encourages Endymion and the sea-gods sing a hymn to Neptune. Overwhelmed, Endymion faints, and sees written in starlight a message from his goddess: 'Immortal bliss for me too hast thou won.' He wakes beside a forest lake.
Analysis
The opening attack on 'regalities' is the most openly political passage in Keats, and it was noticed. Nicholas Roe reads it as the work of a poet raised in a Dissenting, liberal culture, contemptuous of the post-Waterloo monarchies and their 'tiptop nothings'; reviewers who called Keats a Cockney radical were not simply inventing his politics. The satire also connects with the book's story, in which the hero's quest becomes an act of public service (Roe 1997) (Cox 1998).
The Glaucus episode, drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Books XIII–XIV) and freely reworked, is a mirror-story. Like Endymion, Glaucus loved a nymph and was diverted by a false enchantress; his fate warns of what a love that strays from the true object can bring. But the crucial event is collaborative: Endymion can reach his own fulfilment only by helping others. His reward from the goddess comes immediately after the raising of the drowned lovers, so that personal desire is completed by compassion (Bate 1963) (Finney 1936).
The scroll's command that Glaucus explore 'all forms and substances / Straight homeward to their symbol-essences' is close to a description of Keats's own poetic ambition, and many allegorical readers have made it central. Yet the book's climax is not a symbol but a resurrection, comic and tender, of ordinary lovers lost at sea; even 'Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house'. Book III is the one in which the poem's humanitarian strand, so important in Keats's letters of 1818, becomes most visible (Sperry 1973).
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel:
The opening of Book III's political satire. The 'tinsel' of crowns and empurpled vests is set against the true sovereignty of the moon and of the patient poet.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences;
From the scroll that Glaucus reads. To understand the world one must trace each form back to what it signifies, a programme that suggests both magic and poetry.
Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house.
The raising of the drowned lovers. Death is personified as a mourner overcome by joy, a characteristically daring and slightly comic touch.
Book 4: The Indian Maid and the Revelation
Summary
Book IV opens with an invocation to the 'Muse of my native land', the English Muse, who waited long while Greece and Italy enjoyed their poetic glory. Endymion, wandering in a forest, hears a girl lamenting her loneliness. She is an Indian Maid, and he falls in love with her at once, although he knows this betrays the goddess. She sings a roundelay to Sorrow: she cannot escape grief, and once tried to leave it by joining the triumphal procession of Bacchus from the East, but Sorrow remains her only companion, 'her mother' and 'her brother'.
Mercury appears and two winged horses carry Endymion and the Maid into the sky. Endymion dreams of the goddess in heaven, and when he wakes he finds himself torn between the two loves. As the moon rises the Maid fades in the moonlight and vanishes from his grasp, and Endymion's steed bears him into the Cave of Quietude, a region of the soul beyond grief and pleasure, where he is calm while the wedding of Cynthia is being prepared in the heavens. Back on earth he finds the Maid again and renounces 'cloudy phantasms': he will love her and live with her among the forests.
The Maid replies that she is forbidden to love him. In despair they go to Peona, and all three agree to separate: Endymion will live as a hermit, the Maid will serve Diana. At evening Endymion goes to the appointed grove, bitterly reflecting on his fate. There the Maid takes his hand and her black hair turns golden: she is Phoebe, the moon goddess herself, who had to wait until Endymion was 'spiritualiz'd' by mortal suffering and love. She kisses Peona good night, and the lovers vanish together.
Analysis
The Indian Maid seems at first to stand for the real world against the ideal: a lost, grieving woman rather than a goddess. Endymion's choice of her, and his speech beginning 'I have clung / To nothing, lov'd a nothing', appears to repudiate the visionary quest. The revelation that she is Cynthia then dissolves the opposition. One reading takes this as the poem's thesis: ideal beauty is to be found only through human love and suffering, not by turning from them. Another sees it as a contrivance, a happy ending that avoids the choice the book has posed (Bate 1963) (Stillinger 1971).
The song to Sorrow (4.146–290) is a fine lyric in its own right, with its short-lined refrains and its Bacchic procession of satyrs, elephants and leopards drawn from Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne and the classical sources. It gives Sorrow a central place in a poem that began with 'a joy for ever', and looks forward to the 'Ode on Melancholy', where Melancholy dwells with Beauty and Joy. The Cave of Quietude (4.512–548), a 'Dark Paradise' where 'silence dreariest / Is most articulate', is another region of the mind, a numbness beyond feeling that brings Endymion relief (Jack 1967) (Wolfson 2001).
Book IV is full of signs of Keats's impatience to be done. The narrator breaks in to apologise for delaying his hero's reward, pleading 'Truth the best music in a first-born song', and promises a poem on Endymion's 'lute-voic'd brother', the future Hyperion. The Preface, written a few months later, presents the poem as a stage passed through. Many readers have taken Keats at his word; others find in the final book's tensions the beginnings of the drama of 'Joy and Sorrow' that Keats told Taylor was his chief aim (Rollins 1958) (Stillinger 1978).
"O Sorrow, Why dost borrow The natural hue of health, from vermeil lips?--
The opening of the Indian Maid's roundelay. The short refrain-lines break the couplet movement of the poem, and the question personifies Sorrow as a thief of beauty.
Happy gloom! Dark Paradise! where pale becomes the bloom Of health by due; where silence dreariest Is most articulate;
The Cave of Quietude. The oxymorons (happy gloom, dark paradise, articulate silence) describe a state of exhausted calm that is both a refuge and a kind of death.
There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died.
Endymion's renunciation of the ideal for the mortal Indian Maid. The lines voice the poem's strongest doubt about its own quest, a doubt the final revelation answers but does not erase.
Characters
Endymion and the gods
- Endymion
- A shepherd prince of Mount Latmos in Caria (hence 'the Latmian' and 'the Carian'). Visited in a dream by a goddess, he loses interest in his people's life and wanders through earth, sea and air in search of her. He is passionate, self-absorbed and given to long speeches about love, but he learns compassion in raising the drowned lovers and humility in loving the Indian Maid. Keats's Endymion is less a hero of action than a figure of the questing imagination.
- Cynthia (Phoebe, Diana)
- The moon goddess, called by all three names. She appears to Endymion in dreams, in a well, as a voice, and in darkness, but never openly until the last scene, when she is revealed as the Indian Maid. Torn between her love and her fear of the other gods' disapproval, she waits until Endymion has been 'spiritualiz'd'. She embodies ideal beauty, but also an erotic desire she is ashamed to confess.
- The Indian Maid
- A dark-haired girl, lost in the forest after following Bacchus from the East, whom Endymion meets in Book IV and loves against his will. She sings the song to Sorrow and refuses Endymion's love as forbidden. Her revelation as Cynthia in disguise makes her the poem's most debated figure: real woman, test, or symbol of the ideal found in the real.
- Pan
- The god of shepherds and wild nature, worshipped at the festival of Book I. In the Hymn to Pan he becomes a symbol of immensity and of the unknown, a pagan deity of the imagination.
- Venus and Cupid
- The goddess of love and her son. Venus wakes Adonis in Book II and encourages Endymion in Books II and III; Cupid, with his attendant Cupids, presides over the bower of Adonis. They stand for love's power to overcome death.
- Neptune
- God of the sea, in whose palace the revived lovers celebrate at the end of Book III with a hymn in his honour.
Lovers in the poem
- Venus and Adonis
- The goddess and the mortal youth killed by a boar. In Keats's version, adapted from Ovid and Spenser's Garden of Adonis, Venus's grief wins from Jove the decree that Adonis shall sleep through winter and wake each summer. Their reunion in Book II prefigures Endymion's own union with an immortal.
- Glaucus
- A fisherman turned sea-god who loved the nymph Scylla, fell into the power of Circe, and was condemned to a thousand years of withered age. He has spent centuries gathering the bodies of drowned lovers. Freed and made young by Endymion, he is a mirror of the hero and a warning against false enchantment.
- Scylla
- The nymph loved by Glaucus and killed by the jealous Circe. Keats spares her the monstrous transformation of Ovid's version; she lies preserved in a crystal niche until Endymion revives her.
- Alpheus and Arethusa
- A river-god and the nymph of Diana's train who flees him, both turned to streams. Endymion overhears them at the end of Book II and prays for their happiness, his first act of compassion for other lovers.
Others
- Peona
- Endymion's sister, Keats's own invention. Practical and affectionate, she cares for her brother, questions his devotion to a dream, and represents the claims of family and ordinary life. She is present at the final revelation, and the goddess promises her the freedom of the forests.
- Circe
- The enchantress of Aeaea who seduces Glaucus with a false love, keeps a court of men turned into beasts, and destroys Scylla. She represents a degraded, sensual counterfeit of the love Endymion seeks.
- The priest of Pan
- The aged priest who leads the shepherds' sacrifice in Book I. His presence gives the opening festival its dignity and its sense of a whole community at worship.
- The Naiad
- The fountain-nymph who, in Book II, pities Endymion and tells him he must wander beyond mortal bounds before he can be happy.
- Bacchus and his rout
- The god of wine and his procession of satyrs, bacchantes and beasts, described in the Indian Maid's song in Book IV. Their noisy triumph from India offers a joy that cannot cure sorrow.
Themes
Ideal beauty and the real world
The poem begins by claiming that beauty binds us 'to the earth', and ends with a goddess who can be won only through a mortal woman. Between these points Endymion is pulled between a dream of heavenly beauty and the loves, griefs and duties of the world. The question of whether the ideal is to be sought beyond the real, or within it, is the poem's central concern, and its answer, through the double identity of the Indian Maid, has been read both ways.
Keats was thinking about the same question in his letters of late 1817, where he wrote of the imagination as 'Adam's dream', which 'he awoke and found it truth'. Endymion dramatises the hope behind that phrase and the fear that the dream might prove empty (Rollins 1958) (Bate 1963).
Love as the way to the divine
In the 'pleasure thermometer' love sits at the top of the scale of happiness, above the delights of nature and art and the 'steady splendour' of friendship. Love is presented as self-destroying and self-fulfilling at once: we 'blend' and 'mingle' with its radiance. Yet the love in the poem is also physical, and its encounters in the dark bower or the Indian forest give the abstract scale a body.
The many inset love stories (Venus and Adonis, Glaucus and Scylla, Alpheus and Arethusa, the drowned lovers) make love a universal force, and Endymion's own fulfilment depends on his helping other lovers.
Sorrow and the education of the soul
Sorrow is present from the first book, in Endymion's melancholy, and becomes a subject in its own right in the Indian Maid's song. The goddess's final explanation, that Endymion had to be 'spiritualiz'd' through mortal suffering, makes sorrow a necessary stage in the soul's growth. This anticipates Keats's famous letter of April 1819 on the world as 'a vale of Soul-making' and the odes' sense that joy and melancholy are inseparable (Sperry 1973).
Dream, vision and waking
The goddess first appears in a dream, and the poem is full of trances, sleeps and awakenings. Each vision leaves Endymion more desolate on waking, and he repeatedly asks whether his dreams are true. The structure of ecstasy followed by a return to 'habitual self' recurs throughout Keats's later poetry, most famously in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'.
Poetry and the poet's vocation
Endymion is also a poem about writing poetry. Its prologues reflect on the poet's choice of love over history, the rulers of the world against the 'patient wing' of the poet, and the English Muse's long wait for glory. The quest of the hero shadows Keats's own attempt to prove himself in a long poem, and the narrator's interventions, especially in Book IV, show the poet impatient to finish his 'first-born song' (Motion 1997) (Roe 2012).
Motifs
Descent and ascent
Endymion goes down into the earth in Book II, down to the ocean floor in Book III, and up into the sky in Book IV. These vertical journeys map the poem's search for the divine onto the cosmos, and each brings him to a new kind of vision and a new loneliness.
Bowers
From the 'bower quiet for us' of the first lines to Peona's island, the bower of Adonis and the jasmine bower of Book II, enclosed green places recur as spaces of rest, love and dream. They owe much to Spenser and Hunt and were among the things hostile reviewers mocked.
Inset songs and hymns
The Hymn to Pan, the hymn to Neptune and the Indian Maid's song to Sorrow break the couplets into lyric measures. They show Keats's range and allow the community, the gods and the grieving individual to speak in their own voices.
Waking from dreams
Again and again Endymion wakes to find his vision gone, and the poem returns to the bleak moment after ecstasy. The motif links the romance to Keats's lifelong concern with the truth of imagination.
Symbols
The moon
The moon is both the goddess and the beauty of the natural world, which Endymion has loved since childhood. In Book III he discovers that he prizes his unknown goddess even above the moon, only to learn at the end that they are one. The moon thus stands for an ideal that is also present in nature.
The 'orbed drop / Of light'
At the top of the pleasure thermometer love is pictured as a drop of light hanging by an unseen film. The image suggests intensity, fragility and the culmination of a gradual ascent, and has become a shorthand for Keats's conception of love as the highest form of 'fellowship with essence' (Wasserman 1953).
The Cave of Quietude
A den of the soul 'beyond the seeming confines' of ordinary experience, where anguish and pleasure cease. It symbolises the numbness that follows extreme suffering, a paradoxical paradise of emptiness.
Glaucus' cloak and scroll
The old man's cloak, embroidered with symbols of the sea, and the scroll that tells him his fate stand for the knowledge of the world's hidden meanings, and for the idea that such knowledge must be completed by an act of love.
Critical debates
Allegory of the poet's quest or erotic romance?
An influential tradition of criticism reads Endymion as an allegory of the soul's, or the poet's, quest for ideal beauty. Claude Lee Finney traced a Neoplatonic scheme through the four books; Walter Jackson Bate, more cautiously, saw the poem as Keats's exploration of the relation between imagination and human experience, with the Indian Maid's transformation as its resolution. On such readings Cynthia is the ideal, the Indian Maid the real, and the poem teaches that the ideal is reached through the real (Finney 1936) (Bate 1963).
Other critics resist allegory. Jack Stillinger and others have stressed the poem's sceptical and erotic elements, arguing that it is a sensuous romance whose love-scenes are physical and whose final revelation is more a fairy-tale device than a philosophical conclusion. Marjorie Levinson reads the poem's luxury and its 'bad taste' as marks of Keats's anxious social position (Stillinger 1971) (Levinson 1988).
The 'pleasure thermometer' and Keats's poetics
Keats's letter to Taylor of 30 January 1818, asking for a change to the passage in Book I, called it 'a kind of Pleasure Thermometer' and 'my first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama—the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow'. Critics have used the passage to reconstruct Keats's early aesthetics: a progressive self-annihilation in which the self loses itself in nature, art, friendship and love (Rollins 1958).
Earl Wasserman built a model of Keats's thought around such ladders of intensity, culminating in a 'fellowship with essence'. Others note that the scale is less spiritual than it sounds, ending in 'the mere commingling of passionate breath', and that its value lies in love's effects on the world. The passage connects with Keats's later idea of the 'chameleon poet', who has no self (Wasserman 1953) (Sperry 1973).
The poem's faults and Keats's own judgement
Keats was the first critic of Endymion. His Preface admits 'great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt', and he later wrote that he had 'leaped headlong into the Sea' to learn its soundings. Many readers have agreed, finding the narrative diffuse, the rhymes forced and the love-scenes cloying.
Others defend the poem's faults as inseparable from its virtues. Christopher Ricks argued that Keats's openness to embarrassment, his willingness to write of blushes, kisses and swooning, is a moral strength, a refusal of the defensive irony that protects other poets. Susan Wolfson has examined how the poem questions its own romance conventions (Ricks 1974) (Wolfson 1986).
The Cockney School attacks and class
The reviews of 1818 were partly literary, objecting to Keats's coinages, rhymes and loose couplets, and partly social and political. Lockhart's Blackwood's article mocked Keats as an apothecary's apprentice who should go 'back to the shop', and linked him with Hunt's radicalism; Croker, a Tory politician, confessed he had not been able to read past the first book.
Nicholas Roe has shown how deeply Keats's education and friendships were rooted in Dissenting and liberal culture, so that the reviewers' political reading had some basis. Jeffrey Cox reconstructs the 'Cockney School' as a real group around Hunt, with a shared programme of mythological, erotic and anti-establishment poetry (Roe 1997) (Cox 1998) (Matthews 1971).
Did the reviews kill Keats?
After Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821, Shelley's Adonais and its preface blamed the Quarterly reviewer, and Byron joked in Don Juan (XI) about a mind 'snuffed out by an article'. The image of a sensitive poet slain by criticism shaped Victorian views of Keats.
Biographers have shown that Keats took the reviews with considerable resilience: his letters of late 1818 are calm, even proud, and his best poetry followed. The legend now interests scholars mainly as an episode in the making of Keats's posthumous reputation (Gittings 1968) (Motion 1997) (Roe 2012).
Endymion and the later poetry
Many of Keats's mature preoccupations appear first in Endymion: the conflict between vision and reality, the place of sorrow in joy, the poet's responsibility to humanity. Hyperion, begun as Endymion was being printed, rejects its luxury for an epic austerity, and The Fall of Hyperion explicitly criticises the dreamer who withdraws from the world.
Critics such as Stuart Sperry and Leon Waldoff trace a continuous development from Endymion to the odes, seeing the earlier poem as a laboratory in which Keats discovered his themes; others see a sharp break, with the odes' compression a deliberate correction of Endymion's sprawl (Sperry 1973) (Waldoff 1985).
Spenser, Shakespeare and Leigh Hunt
Keats's first poem was an imitation of Spenser, and Endymion's bowers and allegorical episodes owe much to The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare's influence is felt in the diction, in the epigraph from Sonnet 17 ('The stretched metre of an antique song'), and in Keats's habit of annotating his own copies of the plays (Spurgeon 1928).
Leigh Hunt's influence is the most controversial. Hunt's loose couplets, his diction and his cult of 'luxury' shaped the style of Endymion, and both hostile reviewers and later critics have seen Keats's development as a liberation from Hunt. Ayumi Mizukoshi and Jeffrey Cox offer more sympathetic accounts of Hunt's aesthetics of pleasure and of Keats's debt to it (Mizukoshi 2001) (Cox 1998) (Bush 1937).
Key passages
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness;
The poem's first line has become proverbial. In context it begins an argument: beauty endures and grows in the mind, and so binds us to the earth in spite of despondency. The whole romance tests this claim against Endymion's longing for a beauty that is not of this world.
Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; An element filling the space between;
The hymn ends by turning Pan from a woodland god into a symbol of the unknown. The images of reflection and of filling the space between earth and heaven express a religion of imagination rather than of doctrine.
but at the tip-top, There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop Of light, and that is love:
The top of the 'pleasure thermometer'. Love is the culmination of a series of intensities, pictured as a luminous drop suspended at the peak. Keats's letter to Taylor of 30 January 1818 shows how much he valued this passage.
"Endymion! the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos.
The third of Endymion's visions. Delos was the birthplace of Diana and Apollo; the goddess promises a hiding-place more secret than her own birthplace, hinting at both her identity and her fear of discovery.
He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead:
The summons into the underworld. The promise of immortality to the one who dares sums up the visionary spirit of the poem, though Book IV will make Endymion doubt whether such voices can be trusted.
Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house.
The resurrection of the drowned lovers. The personified Death weeping at a scene of joy is characteristic of Keats's daring, half-comic tenderness, and the episode places compassion at the centre of Endymion's quest.
Muse of my native land! loftiest Muse! O first-born on the mountains! by the hues Of heaven on the spiritual air begot:
Book IV's invocation turns from the Greek Muses to the English Muse, who waited while Greece and Italy had their glory. It expresses Keats's ambition to take his place among the English poets.
"There is not one, No, no, not one But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; Thou art her mother,
The close of the song to Sorrow. Sorrow is accepted as the maid's only companion, almost her family; the song gives grief a place in a poem that began with 'a joy for ever'.
There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died.
Endymion's renunciation of his dream. These lines voice the strongest objection to the visionary quest: that it is a form of presumption that starves the soul. The revelation that follows tests whether that objection has been answered.
Aye, he beheld Phoebe, his passion!
The moment of revelation, when the Indian Maid's black hair turns golden and she is seen to be the moon goddess. The ideal and the real, separated through four books, prove to be one.
Questions for study
What does the opening paragraph claim about beauty, and how does the rest of the poem test that claim?
Look at the phrase 'a flowery band to bind us to the earth'. Ask whether Endymion's quest binds him to the earth or draws him away from it, and how the ending answers.
Explain the 'pleasure thermometer' (End. 1.777–842). What are its stages, and why did Keats value it so highly?
Trace the ascent from nature and music to friendship and love. Use the letter to Taylor of 30 January 1818, and consider whether the scale is spiritual or bodily.
Is Endymion an allegory? If so, of what?
Consider the Neoplatonic reading of Finney and Bate, then the objections of critics who stress the poem's erotic and sceptical side. Use the Indian Maid as a test case.
What is the role of the inset love stories (Adonis, Glaucus and Scylla, Alpheus and Arethusa)?
Compare each story with Endymion's. Notice that his reward follows his help to other lovers in Book III.
How does the poem treat sorrow? Consider the Indian Maid's song and the Cave of Quietude.
Think about the goddess's claim that Endymion had to be 'spiritualiz'd', and compare Keats's later letter on the 'vale of Soul-making' and the 'Ode on Melancholy'.
What is the function of Peona?
She is Keats's invention. Consider her as a voice of common sense and family affection, and her place in the last scene.
Read the Preface. How fair is Keats's judgement of his own poem?
Weigh the charge of 'mawkishness' and immaturity against the passages that critics have most admired. Consider Ricks's defence of Keats's embarrassing moments.
Why did the Quarterly and Blackwood's attack Endymion so violently?
Separate the literary objections (couplets, rhymes, coinages) from the social and political ones. Use Cox and Roe on the Cockney School.
How do the prologues to Books II, III and IV comment on poetry and politics?
Look at the rejection of 'pageant history', the satire on rulers, and the invocation to the English Muse. What do they suggest about Keats's sense of his vocation?
In what ways does Endymion anticipate the odes of 1819?
Consider the motif of waking from vision, the nightingale in the pleasure thermometer passage, and the pairing of joy and sorrow. Also consider what the odes reject in Endymion's style.
Further reading
- Allott, Miriam, ed. The Poems of John Keats. London: Longman, 1970.
- Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
- Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937.
- Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Finney, Claude Lee. The Evolution of Keats's Poetry. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1968.
- Jack, Ian. Keats and the Mirror of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
- Levinson, Marjorie. Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
- Matthews, G. M., ed. Keats: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
- Mizukoshi, Ayumi. Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
- Motion, Andrew. Keats. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
- Ricks, Christopher. Keats and Embarrassment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
- Roe, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
- Roe, Nicholas. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
- Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
- Sperry, Stuart M. Keats the Poet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
- Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Keats's Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928.
- Stillinger, Jack. The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
- Stillinger, Jack, ed. The Poems of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
- Waldoff, Leon. Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
- Wasserman, Earl R. The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953.
- Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- Wolfson, Susan J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.