...'
This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
contraries.
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