Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also..."'
The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
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