There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen Their baaing vanities, to browse away The comfortable green and juicy hay From human pastures; or, O torturing fact! Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight Able to face an owl's, they still are dight By the blear-ey'd nations in empurpled vests, And crowns, and turbans.
Here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows, while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical corn-sheaves (they come from the story of Samson in the Book of Judges). Milder cases abound, as this of Circe tormenting her victims:--
appealing groans From their poor breasts went sueing to her ear In vain; _remorseless as an infant's bier_ She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil.
Does yonder thrush, Schooling its half-fledg'd little ones to brush About the dewy forest, whisper tales. Speak not of grief, young stranger, or _cold snails Will slime the rose to-night_.
He rose: he grasp'd his stole, With convuls'd clenches waving it abroad, And in a voice of solemn joy, _that aw'd Echo into oblivion_, he said:--
Yet hourly had he striven To hide the cankering venom, that had _riven_ His fainting recollections.
The wanderer Holding his forehead to keep off the _burr_ Of smothering fancies.
Endymion! the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall _stir_ No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling _cloys_ And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.
In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats's style in _Endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an 'exclaim,' a 'shine,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to 'throe,' to 'passion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,' etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,' 'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,' 'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,' 'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such like technical liberties with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike and utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style of 'the slipshod Endymion.' Nevertheless the consequence of his experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the happier liberties in _Endymion_ has done much towards enriching the vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.