Hyperion: A Fragment

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale," the poem begins, and there sits Saturn, the dethroned king of heaven, grey-haired and quiet as a stone, so still that a dead leaf falls beside him and does not stir again. Keats set out to write an epic of the Titans overthrown by the young Olympians, and made instead a war poem with no battle in it: vast grieving gods crouched in a lightless den, arguing over what they have lost, while Hyperion, the sun, the one Titan not yet fallen, paces his blazing palace sick with omens. The verse moves with Miltonic weight, long sentences rolling in like weather. In the third book, the young Apollo stands before Mnemosyne and feels the whole of history pour into him, crying that "Knowledge enormous makes a God of me," as if godhood were a kind of agony. Mid-line, Keats stopped. What he left turns on the terrible, generous law that "first in beauty should be first in might," and asks the old giants, magnificent in their ruin, to bow to something lovelier.