Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings,

conquerors, and worldly 'regalities' in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet 'On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt' written the previous March in the copy of his _Poems_ which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as 'baaing vanities,' and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities all gilded masks?' The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe--cosmic powers, as we should now say--most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-mightiest.' Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey. Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon's praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer's attention is suddenly diverted,--

For as he lifted up his eyes to swear How his own goddess was past all things fair, He saw far in the green concave of the sea An old man sitting calm and peacefully. Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, And his white hair was awful, and a mat Of weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats's reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:[9] but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the _Arabian Nights_.

Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him. But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man's welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.

Had he then wrong'd a heart where sorrow kept?

* * * * *

He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears. The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt Before that careworn sage.

They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures, even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of Neptune's kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe, who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla was forgotten. How the witch, the 'arbitrary queen of sense,' one day revealed her true character, and 'specious heaven was changed to real hell.' (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare's great sonnet against lust--

This all the world well knows; but none know well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell?)

He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and dead, killed by Circe's arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a sea-monster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,--a doom which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in the _Arabian Nights_, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.

Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature--if moreover he would piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea--there would one day come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognizes the predestined youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old--or rather 'the young soul in age's mask'--go together to the submarine hall of burial where Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers lie enshrined. As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the poet's own words:--

'Let us commence,' Whisper'd the guide, stuttering with joy, 'even now.' He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough, Began to tear his scroll in pieces small, Uttering the while some mumblings funeral. He tore it into pieces small as snow That drifts unfeather'd when bleak northerns blow; And having done it, took his dark blue cloak And bound it round Endymion: then struck His wand against the empty air times nine.-- 'What more there is to do, young man, is thine: But first a little patience; first undo This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue. Ah, gentle! 'tis as weak as spider's skein; And shouldst thou break it--What, is it done so clean A power overshadows thee! O, brave! The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave. Here is a shell; 'tis pearly blank to me, Nor mark'd with any sign or charactery-- Canst thou read aught? O read for pity's sake! Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.'

'Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall Sweet music breath'd her soul away, and sigh'd A lullaby to silence.--'Youth! now strew These minced leaves on me, and passing through Those files of dead, scatter the same around, And thou wilt see the issue.'--'Mid the sound Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart, Endymion from Glaucus stood apart, And scatter'd in his face some fragments light. How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight Smiling beneath a coral diadem Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn'd gem, Appear'd, and, stepping to a beauteous corse, Kneel'd down beside it, and with tenderest force Press'd its cold hand, and wept,--and Scylla sigh'd! Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply'd-- The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And as he passed, each lifted up his head, As doth a flower at Apollo's touch. Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air--while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly; and the rest Felt a high certainty of being blest. They gaz'd upon Endymion. Enchantment Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent. Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers, Budded, and swell'd, and, full-blown, shed full showers Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine. The two deliverers tasted a pure wine Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz'd out. Speechless they ey'd each other, and about The fair assembly wander'd to and fro, Distracted with the richest overflow Of joy that ever pour'd from heaven.

The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it, like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But bearing in mind what we have recognized as the general scope and symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit touched with the divine beam of Cynthia--that is aspiring to and chosen for communion with essential Beauty--in other words the spirit of the Poet--must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away the selfishness of its private passion in sympathy with human loves and sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of the gods with the poetic gift and passion, has only begun to awaken to sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid for this plunge into sensual debasement; the painful acquisition of the gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognizes in him the predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.

As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was mixing up with his classic myth ideas taken from the _Thousand and One Nights_. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments, and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart of Circe,--let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man. First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering 'some mumblings funeral' as he does so (compare the 'backward mutters of dissevering power' in Milton's _Comus_). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he waves his magic wand nine times in the air,--as a preliminary to the last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted? Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate suggestion comes from the couplet in Sandys's Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-gods admitted him to their fellowship,--

Whom now they hallow, and with charms nine times Repeated, purge me from my human crimes.

The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of runes on the shell[10] which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher's wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of the drowned multitude to life and happiness.

The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the pageant's sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser's festival of the sea-gods at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book of the _Faerie Queene_. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful multitude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand, and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of Neptune--another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent architectural splendours--and find the god presiding on an emerald throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a speech of arch encouragement, where the poet's style (as almost always in moments of his hero's prosperous love) turns common and tasteless. Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid. This is interrupted by the entrance of Oceanus and a train of Nereids. The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion's human senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away; he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his goddess, written in starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is restored to earth, lying on the grass beside a forest pool in his native Caria.