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John Keats
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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” by John Keats
A Poetic Romance
(excerpt)
BOOK I
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,
They always must be with us, or we die.
Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I
Will trace the story of Endymion.
The very music of the name has gone
Into my being, and each pleasant scene
Is growing fresh before me as the green
Of our own vallies: so I will begin
Now while I cannot hear the city's din;
Now while the early budders are just new,
And run in mazes of the youngest hue
About old forests; while the willow trails
Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails
Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year
Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer
My little boat, for many quiet hours,
With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.
And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.
from https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/john-keats/a-thing-of-beauty-is-a-joy-for-ever-from-endymion
This guide explores the first stanzas of the English Romantic poet John Keats's book-length poem Endymion (1818). Beginning with words so famous that they've become proverbial—"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"—Keats lays out his poetic philosophy. He declares that the beauties of nature and art offer humanity not just a brief holiday from the world's troubles, but lasting consolation, even reason to go on living. That, he explains, is why he's going to tell the lovely story of Endymion, the mythological Greek shepherd who fell in love with the goddess of the moon: to drink from "endless fountain" of beauty that sustains the world, and to try to add a drop to that fountain himself.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” Summary
A beautiful thing gives endless joy. Its beauty only grows; it will never die; it will always make a safe place for us, where we can enjoy peaceful, healthy, quiet sleep. Thus, every morning, we make wreaths of flowers that keep us tied to this world—in spite of misery, in spite of the sad lack of great souls, in spite of bad days, in spite of all the dark, muddy paths we have to walk down in our lives. Yes, in spite of all that, some vision of beauty lifts the dark cloud away from our sad spirits. We see this beauty in the sun and the moon; in old trees and young saplings growing leaves to shade innocent sheep; in daffodils and their grassy world; in clear streams that make a cool, secret path for themselves through the hot summer; in clearings in the woods full of blooming musk-roses. We find beauty, too, in the great tales we tell of long-gone heroes, and in all the wonderful stories we've heard or read: they offer us an immortal spring of refreshing water, pouring down to us from the heavens.
And we don't just enjoy such beauties for a little while. No: just as we come to love the trees around a temple as much as we love the temple itself, we feel that the moon, the love of poetry, all these endless glories stay with us, shining a heartening light on our souls. They're so close to us that, whether we're in a time of sunshine or rain, we feel them always—or else, we die.
I'm thus full of happiness as I prepare to tell the story of Endymion. The lovely sound of his name is in my soul, and I can see the beautiful scenes of his story opening up before me, plain as the English valleys. I'll start writing now that I'm far away from all the city's noise and fuss; now that the first flowers are budding, making patterns of fresh color that wander through the old trees; now that the willow tree hangs delicate amber leaves down; now that the dairy pails overflow with more and more milk. As the year turns to lush, grassy summer, I'll quietly guide the little boat of my poem hour after hour down streams that pass through tunnels of green leaves. I hope to write many verses before the fresh daisies, with their red-rimmed white petals, are hidden in the grass—and before the bees are murmuring among the clover and sweetpeas, I should be about halfway through. I pray that my poem won't be half-finished when the frosty, stark winter comes: rather, may Autumn, with its grand gold colors, be around me when I finish writing. With that, like an adventurer, I send my first thought out into the wilderness as if it were a messenger. Let it blow its trumpet and make the unknown path ahead of me sprout with grasses so that I can go swiftly on, making my way through the greenery.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” Themes
Theme The Redemptive Power of Beauty
The Redemptive Power of Beauty
In its famous first line, Keats's Endymion makes a fervent statement of belief: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." The opening stanzas of this long poem declare that, whether beauty appears in the face of the moon or in a poem, it offers humanity indestructible consolation, healing, and courage. In fact, the poem suggests, beauty might be the only thing that can give people the will to go on living in a disappointing, depressing, and imperfect world. To Keats, beauty isn't merely decorative or distracting, but life-sustaining.
Beauty, the poem’s speaker says, offers consolation and redemption when nothing else can. Those who experience beauty in the natural world ("the sun, the moon," "daffodils / With the green world they live in") or in art ("all lovely tales that we have heard or read") are forever changed by it. Beauty helps people to endure all the world's sufferings and disappointments; "spite of despondence" (that is, in spite of deep unhappiness), they can always return to the metaphorical leafy "bower" that beauty builds within them, a place that offers "sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing" when nothing else can.
Beauty, therefore, isn't a fleeting, flimsy pleasure that occupies “one short hour,” briefly entertaining people or distracting them from their troubles. Rather, a beautiful thing is an immortal "joy for ever," a permanent refuge whose "loveliness increases" in memory rather than fading away. Having once experienced a great beauty, in other words, people carry the feeling it gave them always. The experience of beauty thus "bind[s] us to the earth," keeping people dedicated to existence even as they walk down the "unhealthy and o'er-darkened" paths that make up so much of life's journey. There's nothing frivolous about loveliness: without beauty, the speaker soberly observes, "we die."
Theme Nature, Creativity, and Poetry
Nature, Creativity, and Poetry
The prologue to Keats's Endymion connects artistry to the natural world. Both art and nature, the speaker suggests, come alive in an organic, seasonal way, growing at their own speed and to their own innate rhythms. These first stanzas hint that poetry in particular should come (as Keats once put it) "as naturally as the leaves to a tree." Writing poetry, in other words, means tuning into deep-rooted instinct and letting one's art grow, not imposing some rigid idea on one's material.
As he begins his long poem, Keats imagines how his verses will progress through the seasons. He'll start in the spring "while the early budders are just new," write all through the summer as the grass "grows lush in juicy stalks," and (with any luck) finish up in autumn when a "tinge of sober gold" colors the landscape. These images suggest that the poem (and perhaps the poet) will grow and mature just as the natural world does, moving from bright, energetic, youthful freshness to a solemn but lovely maturity.
Poetry, then, is ideally something that grows according to its own innate pattern, as plants do. Keats pictures beginning his poem by sending out a "herald thought" (a messenger-idea), a figure whose "trumpet" makes greenery sprout underfoot, creating a gentle poetic path for Keats to follow. This image suggests that the poet's job is to nourish a poem's natural growth, not to bend the verses to their own will. The poem's lines, in Keats's vision, might be summoned by the poet, but they'll spring up with their own life, as organically as grass.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)”
Before Line 1
Endymion was the Romantic poet John Keats’s first big, ambitious project, a book-length telling of the Greek myth in which the goddess of the moon falls in love with a sleeping shepherd. As the 21-year-old Keats saw it, writing a long narrative poem on a classical subject was a test of his artistic mettle, a way to aim for the greatness of Milton or Chaucer. The poem’s very form suggests the scope of Keats's ambition here:
Endymion is written (for the most part) in heroic couplets—paired rhyming lines of iambic pentameter.
That means that each line uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "A thing | of beau- | ty is | a joy | for ever." (The extra unstressed syllable on the end there is known as a feminine ending, a softening effect that Keats often reaches for in Endymion.)
This is the same form that Chaucer used in The Canterbury Tales and the form in which Keats would have encountered English translations of the Greek epics the Aeneid and the Odyssey. Grand company!
Endymion was thus both Keats's creative challenge to himself and his declaration to the world—a way of saying, "Hello, I'm John Keats, and I'm on the road to glory." This "Poetic Romance' (not a love story, but a fantastical quest tale, though a love story forms part of that tale) was made to be his making.
However, Keats's ambition to be, as he once wrote, "among the English poets after my death" was far from his only motive in writing this poem. Keats truly adored Greek myth, and he loved poetry with joy, awe, and fervor. Though Keats would look back on Endymion as an adolescent embarrassment, the poem nonetheless captured a lot of the qualities that would make Keats, Keats: sensuous delight, a longing for enchantment, an awed curiosity about the workings of art, and a deep faith in beauty.
The lines this guide examines form Keats's introduction to the poem proper, a preface that explains why and how the author is going to write the rest of the thing. A young man's work the poem may be, but the first lines ring with conviction—and have become some of the most famous verses in the English language.
Keats uses conventional light/dark symbolism here: light represents joy, beauty, and understanding, and darkness the opposite.
Life, the poem suggests, is often a pretty "gloomy" business. Everyone must sometimes travel down "o'er-darkened ways," through times of confusion, misery, and suffering.
Fortunately, the "cheering light" of beauty—whether it comes from "the sun, the moon," or from some more ethereal source—can "move[] away the pall / From our dark spirits."
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
Metaphor
The metaphors in these introductory stanzas draw a web of connections between the natural world, poetry, and the abstract idea of beauty itself.
A "thing of beauty," the speaker says in the opening lines:
[...] will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Beauty, in other words, builds a leafy refuge in the soul—a restful place where you can recover your strength when the tough world has tired you out. But beauty isn't just escapism; it also, the poem asserts, allows people to weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." That is, the bower that beauty builds helps people to stay in the world, not to get away from it. The "sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing" that beauty offers make people want to go on living, in spite of all the suffering they inevitably face.
The speaker presents this suffering, too, as a place. The metaphorical journey through life takes people through "unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways," or perilous paths. Notice the speaker's return to the idea of health (or the lack thereof): Keats, who trained as a doctor and who lost more than one family member to tuberculosis, had a particularly acute sense of how much it matters to be well.
Luckily, beauty offers not only a respite from such gloomy wanderings but also a guiding light and refreshment along the way. Experiences of beauty "become a cheering light / Unto our souls," the speaker says, and form "an endless fountain of immortal drink." That metaphorical cascade might even suggest the nectar of the gods, a beverage that flows eternally while offering those who taste it their own immortality. Perhaps that's where writing poetry comes into the picture. Creating a deathless "thing of beauty," after all, is one way to achieve immortality.
The poem goes on to describe the process of writing as being like a journey—a more pleasant one than the dark and rocky stumbling of the first stanza. The scenes of the story the speaker is about to tell rise up before him like "our own vallies," as green as an English hillside in spring. He'll steer the "little boat" of his words through this imagined landscape, eventually.
But first, he'll send an advance party: a "herald thought," a personified inciting idea, which he pictures preparing a path for him. By playing its "trumpet," this herald will make a green path spring up, a path that Keats can follow.
These metaphors suggest that, for Keats, writing means collaborating with a vision. The poem itself, ready to be written, appears in the imagination as a landscape; to capture its beauty, the writer must go exploring.
Form
Endymion introduces itself as a "Poetic Romance"—a term that doesn't mean what the modern reader might guess at first. Though this poem does tell a love story, a "romance" in the sense Keats means it is a story of adventure, often with a quest at its heart. Endymion will retell the old Greek myth of a mortal shepherd's quest to find the goddess of the moon, whom he meets in a dream and falls passionately in love with.
This first 62-line section of the poem, however, focuses on Keats's statement of poetic intent, not on the tale he'll tell. It also introduces the form the poem will use: heroic couplets, paired lines of rhymed iambic pentameter.
There's no standard stanza length in this form, so Keats's stanzas go on just as long as he wants them to. In this instance, he makes a passionate case for the importance of beauty in his first 24-line stanza, describes beauty's lasting power in a 9-line stanza, and sets out his hopes for his project and his intended writing schedule in a 29-line stanza. Notice that this division splits one pair of rhymes: "die" in line 33 and "I" in line 34. The second stanza thus launches energetically into the third, just as the young Keats launches energetically into his new project.
Meter
Endymion is written (for the most part) in iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in the poem's famous first line:
A thing | of beau- | ty is | a joy | for ever:
That extra unstressed syllable on the end there ("for ever") is what's known as a feminine ending, a softening effect that Keats often uses along the way.
Iambic pentameter is one of the more common meters in English-language poetry: spoken English often naturally falls into an iambic rhythm. It's a flexible meter, too, allowing for lots of variations that let the verse flow easily as water. Listen to the rhythm of line 49, for instance:
Many and | many | a verse | I hope | to write,
Kicking the line off with a dactyl (a three-syllable foot with a DUM-da-da rhythm) and following it up with a trochee (the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm), Keats stresses just how very many verses he's hoping to get through. The extra syllable and up-front stresses here create a tumbling, quick-paced rhythm that evokes verses spilling out onto the page like marbles from a jar.
Rhyme Scheme
The poem is written in heroic couplets. That means that its lines of iambic pentameter rhyme in this pattern:
AABBCCDD
...and so on.
In choosing this rhyme scheme, Keats lays claim to a noble poetic heritage. Heroic couplets, as their name suggests, were traditionally used to tell grand stories in narrative verse. The great Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer used them in The Canterbury Tales, and 17th-century writers like John Dryden and Alexander Pope used them in their English translations of classical epics like The Aeneid and The Odyssey.
Heroic couplets would thus have felt like a natural fit for a long poem telling a tale from Greek mythology. Keats is making an ambitious claim for his verse with this rhyme scheme, making it clear that this, his first long poem, aims for the grandeur and glory of great epics.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” Speaker
It's fair to take the speaker in this prologue as being none other than John Keats himself. Keats was only 21 years old when he began writing Endymion, and the poem was his first long, ambitious project—a task he saw as a testing ground for his poetic vocation. Before he gets started on his quest, he lays out his motivation for writing: a wholehearted faith in the spiritual value of beauty that would, in one way and another, stay with him all his short life.
As he sets out to write, he also draws attention to the fact that he's writing. Rather than launching straight into the tale of the shepherd Endymion and his love for the moon goddess, Keats first explains why he wants to tell this story, then lays out his intended composition schedule: if all goes according to plan, he'll get started in the spring, write all summer, and finish up in autumn. Right from the start, then, this poet keeps the idea of poetry and art-making in front of the reader's eyes, inviting them to consider what the tale of Endymion might have to do with art itself.
This earnest, eager poem would embarrass Keats later. When he published Endymion, he wrote a preface explaining that this was a young man's work and he knew it wasn't everything he'd wanted it to be—a preface that itself has a young man's blushing defensiveness. But the calm, ringing assurance of the first lines has survived both Keats's embarrassment and two centuries of wear.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)” Setting
As is often the case in Keats's poetry, the setting here wavers between the English countryside and a mythologized ancient Greece.
The speaker makes it clear he's writing this poem in his native England. He's left the "city's din" for the countryside, where "early budders" (or early blooming flowers) can inspire his own poetic budding. There, he can rejoice in a very English vision of natural beauty, lying among the daffodils in "the green world they live in."
Flashes of old magic interweave with these visions of the English spring. When the speaker describes the trees "that whisper round a temple," he seems to see something straight out of ancient Greece springing up in his native woodlands. He even says that he can see episodes from Endymion's story:
[...] growing fresh before me as the green
Of our own vallies [...]
The story of Endymion itself will be set entirely in the world of ancient Greek mythology. But that world will look very much like an idealized, enchanted English countryside: nymph-haunted, green-leaved, springing with wildflowers.
Literary Context
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius: in an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Keats was also among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime: he met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. However, he never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the granddaddy of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.
Endymion, which appeared in 1818, was Keats's second published work and his first book-length poem, a test of his poetic mettle. While it didn't make the splash he'd hoped (it attracted mostly vicious pans in the newspapers), its immortal first words have become some of the most famous and widely quoted lines of poetry in the English language.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Historical Context
When Endymion was published in 1818, a glorious literary afterlife must have felt painfully far away to Keats. After working on the poem for over a year, he was a better poet when he was done than he had been when he started, and he winced as he looked back on some of his earlier work. Accordingly, he wrote a defensive preface to the poem apologizing in advance for its immaturity.
This, perhaps, was not the best idea. Even if Keats hadn't introduced his work this way, the critics who believed a "Cockney poet" like Keats shouldn't be writing about a subject so lofty as Greek mythology would still have ripped the poem apart.
The England of Keats's time (and the England before and since, for that matter) was intensely classist, marked by sharp divides between an educated, wealthy upper class and everybody else. In the eyes of the conservative literati, Keats—the son of a London innkeeper, trained as a doctor—was laughably pretentious, a middle-class nobody daring to call himself a poet. One such critic, John Lockhart, wrote a review of Endymion that called Keats "the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters," and told him:
It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” &c.
Such snobbish criticisms would dog Keats all his life. Though he had important champions—journalist and poet Leigh Hunt, notable Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley—his genius would go mostly unrecognized in his lifetime, in great part because of a literary world that had conveniently forgotten that Shakespeare himself was a glovemaker's son.
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