seen by the hero as he traversed the ocean floor before meeting Glaucus. Everybody knows, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, Clarence’s dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the sea: —
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea.
Keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this passage, wrote, —
Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d,
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breastplates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox; — then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster.
Jeffrey in his review of the Lamia volume has a fine phrase about this passage. It ‘comes of no ignoble lineage,’ he says, ‘nor shames its high descent.’ How careful Shelley’s study of the passage had been, and how completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of the poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is not that of the sea, but that which the light flashing from the forehead of the infant Earth-spirit reveals at the earth’s centre.
The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown wingèd things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jaggèd alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts.
The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without name. Another possible debt of Shelley to Endymion has also been suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage of Epipsychidion, proposes to share with his spirit’s mate in their imagined island home in the Ægean. If Shelley indeed owes anything to Endymion here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been Shelley’s reading of Endymion that led him at this time to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own two lyrics, Arethusa and the Hymn to Pan (both of 1820); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within Keats’ compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of emulating and improving on Keats Shelley’s beautifully accomplished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the Epistle to Maria Gisborne (1819) and Epipsychidion (1820), but that he had already made a first experiment in the same kind with Julian and Maddalo, written before his copy of Endymion had reached him, so that we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.
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