Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti

John Keats (1795–1821)

Extracts from Hyperion: Hyperion’s Arrival

(From Book II.)

ALL eyes were on Enceladus’s face,

And they beheld, while still Hyperion’s name

Flew from his lips up to the vaulted rocks,

A pallid gleam across his features stern:

Not savage, for he saw full many a God

Wroth as himself. He looked upon them all,

And in each face he saw a gleam of light,

But splendider in Saturn’s, whose hoar locks

Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel

When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove.

In pale and silver silence they remained,

Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn,

Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps,

All the sad spaces of oblivion,

And every gulf, and every chasm old,

And every height, and every sullen depth,

Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams:

And all the everlasting cataracts,

And all the headlong torrents far and near,

Mantled before in darkness and huge shade,

Now saw the light and made it terrible.

It was Hyperion:—a granite peak

His bright feet touched, and there he stayed to view

The misery his brilliance had betrayed

To the most hateful seeing of itself.

Golden his hair of short Numidian curl,

Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade

In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk

Of Memnon’s image at the set of sun

To one who travels from the dusking East:

Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon’s harp,

He uttered, while his hands, contemplative,

He pressed together, and in silence stood.