Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

120The Poetry of John KeatsHowever, within the “verisimilitude” that Keats calls beautiful we maydistinguish the structures of both “sublimity” and “beauty” as definedby both Coleridge and Hazlitt. Keats has Endymion tell us thathappiness lies in “a sort of oneness” with nature through poetry or,more intensely and fully, in the melting “radiance” of love (I, 777–816).In such intensity visual and aural configuration is unshaped.. . . who, of men, can tellThat flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swellTo melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,If human souls did never kiss and greet?(I, 835–42)The temporal and spatial contiguity of these images as well asthe rhythm and syntax provide (to use Hazlitt’s terms) “affinities”which make the passage “beautiful.” But, jumping from “affinities” to“connexions,” Endymion wonders whether these natural objects couldexist without the power of love. To a lover the radiance of his lovegives all things a new and less fragile life in essential beauty. Nowreflecting their oneness with the lover, these things claim the immortalitythat Endymion assigns to love (I, 843–49). Endymion’s “love”may lack the powerful auspices of Coleridge’s love through faith in the“one Life,” but it unshapes particulars in the same way. In the closinglines, Endymion’s description rises from “beauty” to “sublimity.” Here Iam using these two words not as Keats did but as Hazlitt—and as faras structure is concerned—Coleridge distinguished between them.Obviously the content of Keats’s “essence,” even when sensoryforms are unshaped, is not always “dramatic,” as Hazlitt defines thatquality. But in Keats’s greatest poetry the unshaping emotion is not onlydramatic but tragic. In the passage just quoted, of course, the contentof essence is “happiness.” Endymion acknowledges the destructivenessof process (the “green fruit” swelling to “melting pulp”) but doesn’tworry about it. For the moment, the fruit is safe in the aura of love.A few lines earlier Endymion had been testy on this score, defendingthe “ardent listlessness” that tolerates the “slime” of “human serpentry”