Great Muse, thou know'st what prison Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets Our spirit's wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspir'd, snail-paced lives. Long have I said, how happy he who shrives To thee! But then I thought on poets gone, And could not pray:--nor could I now--so on I move to the end in lowliness of heart.--
Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the gods, is interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet's mind's eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his attempted scrap of an Alexander romance in a fellow student's notebook). Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the coming struggle between his hero's celestial love and this earthly beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself, laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing him a song of India to ease his passing. Her song, telling of her desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to the new earthly love, not blindly, but realizing fully what he forfeits. He bids the damsel--
Do gently murder half my soul, and I Shall feel the other half so utterly.
A cry of 'Woe to Endymion!' echoing through the forest has no sooner alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury descending. The gods intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he has touched,--the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of the same breed as those 'steeds with streamy manes' that paw up against the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in _Sleep and Poetry_. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other: they are borne aloft together,