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Home  »  The English Poets  »  Extracts from Hyperion: Saturn

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

John Keats (1795–1821)

Extracts from Hyperion: Saturn

(From Book I.)

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 grey-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung about 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 feathered grass,

But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more

By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds

Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,

No further than to where his feet had strayed,

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 bowed head seem’d listening to the Earth,

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seem’d no force could wake him from his place;

But there came one, who with a kindred hand

Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low

With reverence, though to one who knew it not.

She was a Goddess of the infant world;

By her in stature the tall Amazon

Had stood a pigmy’s height: she would have ta’en

Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;

Or with a finger stayed Ixion’s wheel.

Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,

Pedestal’d haply in a palace-court,

When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore.

But oh! how unlike marble was that face:

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.

There was a listening fear in her regard,

As if calamity had but begun;

As if the vanward clouds of evil days

Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear

Was with its stored thunder labouring up.

One hand she pressed upon that aching spot

Where beats the human heart, as if just there,

Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:

The other upon Saturn’s bended neck

She laid, and to the level of his ear

Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake

In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:

Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue

Would come in these like accents; O how frail

To that large utterance of the early Gods!