All tendrils green

Diana und Endymion, 1836 painting by Franz Schrotzberg.

[Image source: https://useum.org/artwork/Diana-und-Endymion-Franz-Schrotzberg-1836 . In the Belvedere, Vienna.]

                                and round him grew
All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue,
Together intertwin'd and trammel'd fresh:
The vine of glossy sprout; the ivy mesh,
Shading its Ethiop berries; and woodbine,
Of velvet leaves and bugle-blooms divine;
Convolvulus in streaked vases flush;
The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush;
And virgin's bower, trailing airily;
With others of the sisterhood.

(Endymion II, 409-418)

I'm reading Endymion, again. 

The passage I've just quoted is from Keats' description of the sleeping Adonis in Book II of Endymion. It  lists a number of species of climbing plants. As often, Keats' description suggests closely-observed London gardens of his own times. It is, in fact, just what Lockhart criticized as "laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots". But Lockhart didn't see (or did he?) that precisely this urban mundanity, its willingness to acknowledge what it really saw, marked out the path of Keats' intervention into a poetic culture that had become stultified and unreal. 

The vine of glossy sprout : That is, the grape vine, Vitis vinifera. The leaves are "glossy dark green on top, light green below, usually hairless". 

The ivy mesh, Shading its Ethiop berries: Ivy, Hedera helix. Mesh: woven. The winter berries are green turning blue-black.

Woodbine : Honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum. Each flaring flower does somewhat resemble a trumpet or "bugle", perhaps a visual fanfare as they point out in different directions from the common flower head. 

Convolvulus: Climbers of the bindweed family, their flowers could be described as vase shaped, and the garden varieties are often streaked.

The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush: Virginia creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, whose leaves turn red in autumn. Native to America, introduced into Britain in 1629. 

And virgin's bower, trailing airily: Clematis: "trailing airily" probably refers to the stems seeming to defy gravity by venturing out into mid-air (actually sustained by the clasp of other stems). 

The horticulture is Keats' own, but the general idea of Adonis sleeping among tendrilled plants came from Spenser:

And in the thickest couert of that shade,

  There was a pleasant arbour, not by art,

  But of the trees owne inclination made,

  Which knitting their rancke branches part to part,

  With wanton yuie twyne entrayled athwart,

  And Eglantine, and Caprifole emong,

  Fashiond aboue within their inmost part,

  That neither Phœbus beams could through the throng,

Nor Aeolus sharp blast could worke them any wrong.

(Faerie Queene, III.VI. 44). 

Keats kept Spenser's ivy and the honeysuckle ("Caprifole"). He had a different use for the rose. Let's put that initial quotation back into its context.  

And down some swart abysm he had gone,

Had not a heavenly guide benignant led

To where thick myrtle branches, 'gainst his head

Brushing, awakened: then the sounds again

Went noiseless as a passing noontide rain

Over a bower, where little space he stood;

For as the sunset peeps into a wood

So saw he panting light, and towards it went

Through winding alleys; and lo, wonderment!

Upon soft verdure saw, one here, one there,

Cupids a slumbering on their pinions fair.

After a thousand mazes overgone,

At last, with sudden step, he came upon

A chamber, myrtle wall'd, embowered high,

Full of light, incense, tender minstrelsy,

And more of beautiful and strange beside:

For on a silken couch of rosy pride,

In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth

Of fondest beauty; fonder, in fair sooth,

Than sighs could fathom, or contentment reach:

And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach,

Or ripe October's faded marigolds,

Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds–

Not hiding up an Apollonian curve

Of neck and shoulder, nor the tenting swerve

Of knee from knee, nor ankles pointing light;

But rather, giving them to the filled sight

Officiously. Sideway his face repos'd

On one white arm, and tenderly unclos'd,

By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth

To slumbery pout; just as the morning south

Disparts a dew-lipp'd rose. Above his head,

Four lily stalks did their white honours wed

To make a coronal; and round him grew

All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue,

Together intertwin'd and trammel'd fresh:

The vine of glossy sprout; the ivy mesh,

Shading its Ethiop berries; and woodbine,

Of velvet leaves and bugle-blooms divine;

Convolvulus in streaked vases flush;

The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush;

And virgin's bower, trailing airily;

With others of the sisterhood. Hard by,

Stood serene Cupids watching silently.

One, kneeling to a lyre, touch'd the strings,

Muffling to death the pathos with his wings;

And, ever and anon, uprose to look

At the youth's slumber; while another took

A willow-bough, distilling odorous dew,

And shook it on his hair; another flew

In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise

Rain'd violets upon his sleeping eyes.

In Spenser's poem the arbour on the mount of Venus is erotic anatomy, shaded by interlaced foliage. The eroticism in Keats' poem is more incessant and dispersed, a longing that hardly ever rests in satisfaction.

John Gibson Lockhart, on the unclassical nature of Keats' Endymion -- the famously vicious review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (August 1818) -- a thoroughly ugly performance, as all Keats' admirers observed, but, read in full, it is not quite so disrespectful as it's reputed to be.

https://lordbyron.org/doc.php?choose=JoLockh.1818.Cockney4.xml

[Lockhart was apparently assisted in his assaults on the "Cockney School" by John Wilson (Christopher North). William Michael Rossetti (in his excellent Life of John Keats, 1887) mentions a rumour that "Scott himself lent active aid in concocting the articles". But this rumour didn't even attract John Sutherland (The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography, 1995), who noted that Scott was nervous about Lockhart's enthusiasm for the Blackwood's style of "brutal personal satire", and warned him against it.]

Lockhart hints, nastily enough, at the lubricious side of Endymion. But more to the point were Keats' incautious statements, especially in the Poems of 1817, which showed his ambition to match himself, and his friends, with the greatest English poets. That created a vulnerability exploited by Lockhart, who pointed out that after all Leigh Hunt was very far from a great poet, and that someone who couldn't discriminate in value between Wordsworth and Hunt was self-condemned as completely out of his depth. Yet in a way Lockhart, by even mentioning Keats' vaulting ambitions, began to cede ground to him, as readers have done ever since. There has been a tendency to accept as a given Keats' presence among the greatest poets, because he so openly and seriously aimed at it; to assume that, though of course he did not triumph at first, he did triumph in the end. And while I love Keats very much, I think that's unfair to so many other poets and to so many other kinds of poetry. This talk of greatness was wrong, in the way that publicity is always wrong. (Lockhart's review is of course the kind of thing that makes people say there's no such thing as bad publicity.)

Keats had tweaked the tail and Lockhart replied in kind; they were both aggressive in their ways. (Keats' aggression would have been more open if his first version of the Preface had been allowed.) Lockhart's meanness was disgraceful. Keats was not mean, but it was he who provoked this kind of response. 

Keats was quite self-consciously unclassical, even though he saw Endymion as touching "the beautiful mythology of Greece" (Preface). Think of his curt dismissal of the matter of Troy, which he compared unfavourably with the medieval story of Troilus and Cressida; meaning Chaucer's version (Book II, 1-43). "Hence, pageant history! hence, gilded cheat!" Keats was both incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about Greek mythology and at the same time dedicated to a different way of accessing that mythology, different from the curriculum of a classical education; he saw that he could say things that people with a classical education would never say; they were too comfortably moulded to reflect on poetry or on life or on myth with the same freshness he brought to it. There was a boldness to his dedicating Endymion to Chatterton. Patently, Keats was intent on being a thorn in the side of orthodox literary culture. 

Endymion very evidently didn't have Spenser's music, but its own; an awkward heroic couplet that was completely unlike the Augustan measure, that revelled in being "nerveless" (Lockhart's word) i.e. in not being firmly Popeian or clinching but, as a direct consequence, capable of generating new surprises. Yet it also seems to me to be Spenserian in quite a deep way; a combination of tedium and excitement, for instance. But it isn't so much the Spenser of The Faerie Queene that I'm thinking of; which was a narrative poem through and through, in ways that Endymion isn't; it's more the Spenser of, say, The Shepheardes Calendar. 

*

In "I Stood Tiptoe", Keats had called the story of Endymion "That sweetest of all songs, that ever new, / That aye-refreshing, pure deliciousness". One might naturally assume that Keats was talking about a particular literary treatment of the story; but no such treatment survives from classical times. Keats certainly knew the accounts of Endymion in the much-reprinted classical dictionaries of his time. Very suggestive they might be, in a poet's eyes, but they are scarcely the "sweetest of all songs".  

ENDῨMION, a shepherd, son of Æthlius and Calyce. it is said that he required of Jupiter to grant to him to be always young, and to sleep as much as he would ; whence came the proverb of Endymionis somnum dormire, to express a long sleep. Diana saw him naked as he slept on Mount Latmos, and was so struck with his beauty that she came down from heaven every night to enjoy his company. Endymion married Chromis, daughter of Itonus, or according to some, Hyperipne, daughter of Arcas, by whom he had three sons, Pæon, Epeus, and Æolus, and a daughter called Eurydice ; and so little ambitious did he show himself of sovereignty, that he made his crown the prize of of the best racer among his sons, and honorable distinction which was gained by Epeus. The fable of Endymion's amours with Diana, or the moon, arises from his knowledge of astronomy, and as he passed the night on some high mountain, to observe the heavenly bodies, it has been reported that he was courted by the moon. Some suppose that there were two of that name, the son of a king of Elis, and the shepherd or astronomer of Caria. The people of Heraclea maintained that Endymion died on mount Latmos, and the Eleans pretended to shew his tomb at Olympia in Peloponnesus. Propert. 2, el. 25. -- Cic. Tusc. 1. -- Juv. 10. -- Theocrit. 3. -- Paus. 5, c. 1. l. 6, c. 20.

(Bibliotheca Classica by John Lemprière, Eleventh Edition (1820), pp. 275-276. Source .)

This Luna had a lover who was named Endymion, and he was courted by her, insomuch, that to kiss him, she descended out of heaven, and came to the mountain Latmus, or Lathynius, in Caria; he lay condemned to an eternal sleep by Jupiter; because, when he was taken into heaven, he attempted to make love to Juno. In reality, Endymion was a famous astronomer, who first described the course of the moon, and he is represented sleeping, because he contemplated nothing but the planetary motions.

(Tooke's Pantheon, Baltimore edition of 1838, p. 210 . Source .)

What Keats was really thinking of was Endymion as he figured in English poetry of the Elizabethan age, as Sidney Colvin made clear in his  Life of John Keats (1887). Keats would certainly have known some spell-binding Elizabethan lines on the Endymion story, e.g. in Spenser's Epithalamion, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess (like other readers of his time, Keats was a major fan of Beaumont and Fletcher). There were plenty of other treatments too, beginning with Lyly's Endimion (1588). 

And then there was Michael Drayton. Keats himself owned a 1636 edition of Drayton which included The Man in the Moone, one of his two poems about Endymion. 

In some ways the closest analogue to Keats is Drayton's earlier poem Endimion and Phoebe (1595); but this had never been republished and Keats must have been very diligent to track down a poem surviving in only two copies. 

If you want to check it out for yourself, then Endimion and Phoebe is on pp. 197-227 of J. Payne Collier's 1856 edition of Poems by Michael Drayton. The resemblances are quite striking: for instance  Drayton introduces Phoebe, in disguise, wooing her lover away from herself; a storyline that naturally suggests Keats' Indian Maid. But the differences are quite striking too. Drayton's Endimion is a shepherd with a flock of sheep, but Keats' shepherd-prince has no flock to watch over; he is conceived principally as a huntsman, a "mountaineer", a "forester" and, after I 486 never makes the slightest reference to sheep. Also, Endimion and Phoebe is an erotic epyllion on the model of Venus and Adonis : so Drayton's maid is "wanton", and Endimion is correspondingly reluctant (at first), being vowed to chastity as a follower of Diana. Keats' Endymion isn't reluctant in the least. 

Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey (8th October 1817) that Endymion was ‘a text, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention ... by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with poetry’. He was right about the "one bare circumstance". The Endymion myth had accreted some fabulous lines of poetry in the 1590s but it didn't really have much of a plot; it was just a situation. (Drayton and Keats came up with similar ways of elaborating a bald tale that was bereft of characters and drama: each produced the semblance of an intrigue by having Phoebe take a part against herself. I can believe they did so independently.)

[Maybe these Elizabethan sources of the Endymion story also account for the not obviously apposite invocation of the "muse of my native land" at the beginning of Bk IV; Keats was acknowledging that his Endymion was in some ways more English than Greek. (There was Endymion literature elsewhere in Renaissance Europe too, but Keats seemingly didn't know of it, though he might have been interested in Marino hailing Galileo as a "new Endymion".)]

Natalia Agapiou "Endymion at the Crossroads: The Fortune of the Myth of Endymion at the Dawn of the Modern Era", 2004, Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition

https://www.academia.edu/39020137/Endymion_at_the_Crossroads_The_Fortune_of_the_Myth_of_Endymion_at_the_Dawn_of_the_Modern_Era_2004_

Claude L. Finney, "Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe and Keats' Endymion", PMLA Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1924), pp. 805-813.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/457249

*

Bruce E. Miller, "On the meaning of Keats's 'Endymion'", Keats-Shelley Journal

Vol. 14 (Winter, 1965), pp. 33-54

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30212654

Discusses two lines of interpretation (is Endymion about spiritualized union with essence or about natural and physical love) and makes a detailed case for a coherent narrative that charts a progress from the sensual encounter with what he calls "the nympholeptic goddess" in Bk II 707-853 through the romantic relationship with the Indian Maid to, ultimately, the celestial union with Phoebe. 

The contrast between the sustained eroticism in Bk II and the much cooler temperature of the Indian Maid section in Book IV is undeniable and calls for explanation. But I think it is sufficiently explained by the entirely different situations. The "naked waist" of Book II, the "known Unknown", is only unknown as regards her name; Endymion knows her very well to be his declared lover, and their embraces are immediate and unrestrained. On the other hand, when Endymion sees the Indian Maid in Bk IV he believes she is a stranger to him; a lover in distress, like those Endymion had helped to save in Bk III. Endymion falls for her, but neither he nor she (playing the part of a stranger) can instantly give way to ecstatic transports of the kind seen in Bk II; nevertheless, they are moving pretty fast in a sexual direction (IV. 313-320) when interrupted by the cry of Woe! and the appearance of Mercury. Thereafter the expression of their love is muted by consciousness of the obstacles. 

*

Christian La Cassagnère, "Keats's Gleaming Melancholy: A Reading of Endymion" (2006)

https://journals.openedition.org/erea/365

An interesting and quite persuasive track through Endymion, seeing it as unified by the theme of melancholy; placing special emphasis on some of the most confusing elements of Bk IV, such as the Indian Maid's roundelay on sorrow and the passage about that "den" of "remotest glooms" the Cave of Quietude (and the excellent quality of sleep that may be obtained there). This proposal relates Endymion to the later Ode on Melancholy, and also to Lamia (based on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy).

*

Chris Townsend "Keats's Verse Sentences in 'Endymion'"

https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2019/07/24/keatss-verse-sentences-in-endymion/

Brief but suggestive, connecting the peculiar verse form of Endymion with its topography of paths and getting lost. 

*

I've already mentioned W.M. Rossetti's Life of John Keats. But it's worth adding that it contains an admirable review of both the merits and the faults of Endymion (pp. 168-180). His strictures on Book IV, in particular, gave me plenty of food for thought. 

He includes an attempt to summarize the action of the poem, something I've also tried my hand at: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/12/john-keats-endymion-1817.html

Neither he nor I were attentive enough, I feel, but that's very understandable. A summary must select, but while the story of  Endymion is from one point view rather static, the poem Endymion is ceaselessly active. It isn't easy, when reading it, to decide what to highlight and what to leave unreported, because Keats noticeably avoids the kind of signals that allow a reader to distinguish between, say, a principal narrative line and a digression. To offer just one example, Endymion is repeatedly shown as sleeping or on the verge of sleep. Are these sleeps just a handy device for switching from one scene or vision to the next, or is Endymion's sleepiness (as per Lemprière) a principal fact about him and his story? Is e.g. his immersion in the Cave of Quietude (from which nothing material seems to follow) to be regarded as an important part of his story or not? 

As we have seen, Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of incidents—partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet’s own—which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader’s mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we find little in Keats’s poem.

It's quite a powerful argument. In Rossetti's era of the dramatic monologue, or in our own era of Madeline Miller, it seems rather obvious that the way to turn "one bare circumstance" into a full-length work is to attempt an in-depth realization of the leading characters, to shape them into individuals, and to seek ways of portraying the love of a human and an immortal as something credible or at least conceivable. 

But it's an argument that can be answered, in part at least. For Keats and indeed for most poets up to his time, poetry had never been about realism. Keats in particular did not want to demythologize the Endymion story; it was the myth that he wanted. Keats' invention was indeed hyperactive, but it was deployed rather in creating the effect of "richly-shot silk" that Rossetti describes so well. What the reader was to share was not the plausibility of the story but its strangeness.