are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.'
'They come not here, they have no thought to come, And thou art here for thou are less than they.'
It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood upon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain, pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' Yet the poet has his reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled Goddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality made visible.
'Then saw I a wan face Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had past The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away; They held me back with a benignant light Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed Of all external things; they saw me not, But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast....'
This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him; few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture, each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse' of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united contraries.