‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’—John Keats ENDYMION poem analysis—form, rhyme, & open couplets

Hello, and welcome to Close Reading Classic Literature with me, Dr. Octavia Cox. Why is a thing of beauty a joy forever, according to John Keats? That's the question I'm going to be unpicking and interrogating in more detail today. And to do that, I'm going to be analysing John Keats' beautiful opening passage to his poem Endymion. Endymion was composed between April and November 1817 and was then published the next year in 1818. I'm going to start with some background to the poem to help elucidate it in a bit more detail and then I'm going to read through the poem and unpick it and explain it, explain the first paragraph line by line in a bit more detail so that we can get more of a handle on what's actually going on, what the meaning actually is. And then I'm going to close in the final section by analysing how John Keats uses the form of the poem, so how John Keats uses rhyming couplets to add to the poem's sense of abundance, the idea of forever increasing, which we get at the opening of the poem. To start with the background of the poem then. Keats saw the poem as experimental and he saw himself almost as a poetic apprentice in writing this poem. So creating a poem would be like his poetic training and this would be the kind of task set to a young apprentice. So in a letter of the 8th of October 1817, Keats wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey, having earlier said the same thing to his brother George, that it, that is, Endymion, will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination and chiefly of my invention, which is a rare thing indeed, by which I must make four thousand lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with poetry. John Keats commences the poem that would become Endymion then, first thinking about form. He considers the length. Four thousand lines was by far the longest poem that Keats had attempted by 1817 and indeed it would remain the longest poem that Keats would compose. He was training himself up to write a long poem, which he thought necessary to prove himself to be a great poet. As he continues in the letter to Benjamin Bailey of the 8th of October 1817, A long poem is a test of invention. So we can see the repetition then of the use of the word test. He's testing himself, he's training himself up, he's experimenting with what he thinks he needs to do in order to become a better poet, to train himself up to be a better poet. A long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the polar star of poetry and those who have seen my video on Keats' poem Bright Star will know the importance of this image for Keats, the polar star, the north star. In other words, the guiding light of poetry. So invention, Keats takes to be the guiding light of poetry. Invention is the guiding light, the polar star, as fancy is the sails and imagination the rudder. So we have this kind of navigation imagery going on here where you're guided, the invention is guided by the polar star and fancy is the sail, so you're kind of blown along by fancy and imagination is the rudder. So the rudder is what steers the boat. That's what steers you, kind of fundamentally is the imagination, but you get blown along by the gusts of wind of fancy. And he continues, did our great poets ever write short pieces? So he's trying to find ways, trying to develop his skills to become a great poet. And he aligns himself already with great poets and training himself up to be a great poet and he sees Endymion as part of that process. So just going back to the idea of length then for comparison, William Shakespeare's longest play Hamlet is also about 4,000 lines and John Milton's Paradise Lost, the great English epic poem of the 17th century, is about 10,000 lines. And this idea of kind of building yourself up to be a great poet and in some sense looking to previous poets as a way to being an apprentice to kind of master poets by echoing them and imitating them and kind of training yourself up to be more like them. We can see in the way that John Keats moves on then after Endymion to try and compose Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, which were Miltonic in some ways, or at least Keats was using Milton as an example to try and write epic poetry. And he eventually gave it up because he said it was too Miltonic and that life to Milton would be death to me. But the point there is this idea of training yourself up and being a kind of apprentice poet. Given that Endymion started as a formal poetic challenge that Keats set himself, it's interesting to look at the poem then to consider how John Keats plays with poetic technique, how he undertakes this self-proclaimed test and trial of his skills. In particular, I want to outline how Keats uses form, how he uses rhymed couplets to add to the poem's contents sense of bountifulness and excess. Forever increasing, as I said, which we see in the opening couplet. First, I'm going to read through the poem and then I'm going to go through it line by line and pick it in a bit more detail. So here is the poem. A thing of beauty is a joy forever Its loveliness increases It will never pass into nothingness But still will keep a bower quiet for us And a sleep full of sweet dreams And health and quiet breathing Therefore, on every morrow We are wreathing a flowery band To bind us to the earth Spite of despondence Of the inhuman dearth of noble natures Of the gloomy days Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways Made for our searching Yes, in spite of all Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits Such the sun, the moon, trees old and young Sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep And such are daffodils with the green world they live in And clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make Against the hot season The mid-forest break Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined For the mighty dead All the lovely tales that we have heard or read An endless fountain of immortal drink Pouring unto us from the heavens' brink Beautiful, joyful, in many ways, opening to a poem, I think. One of the things I think it's crucial for us to ask ourselves in the opening of this poem is what does beauty mean here for Keats? A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Okay, but what is a thing of beauty? So in a letter to his brothers, to George and Tom Keats on the 21st of December 1817 so this is shortly after composing Endymion Keats wrote, The excellence of every art is its intensity Capable of making all disagreeables evaporate From their being in close relationship with beauty and truth So here we have this idea of intensity of beauty and truth So the excellence of every art is its intensity from those excellences of art being in close relationship with beauty and truth So this idea of art sort of filtering beauty and truth and intensifying it The more you intensify this beauty and these truths the more you are able to make all disagreeables evaporate So beauty and truth are aligned and we remember that in Ode on a Grecian Urn The urn says at the end, although that's up for debate but I would say that the urn says at the end beauty is truth, truth beauty Now I'm not sure that we should necessarily agree with the urn but they are at least aligned, this idea of beauty and truth and that the more those two are intensified the more you are kind of protected against the disagreeables of life that they form a kind of a bulwark or a defence against those And what is beauty then? It's a bit chicken and egg Essentially beauty is that which makes all the disagreeables of life evaporate Beauty then is not just or not merely an aesthetic quality It's not saying, oh that's beautiful, that's a beautiful woman or that's a beautiful garden or anything like that Beauty is far more profound and far more to do with elevating your soul and elevating your spirits So let's have a look at the poem in a bit more detail to see what beauty means for Keats and why a thing of beauty is a joy forever A thing of beauty is a joy forever Its loveliness increases As I've said, this creates a sense of excess and why does its loveliness increase? That suggests it's a kind of ongoing process that you see a thing of beauty that fills you with joy because it protects you against gloomy thoughts as we'll get on to And that beautiful concept or that beautiful remembrance the loveliness of that increases Well, why does it continue to sort of stay with you and even increase? It will never pass into nothingness And this is a fundamental kind of worry that Keats struggles with really throughout much of his poetry and you see him come back to it again later for example in The Great Odes which he wrote in 1819 which were published in 1820 It's fundamental to Keats' conception really of the point of life that you find something beautiful it strikes your soul with wonder and awe and it brings joy to your life And how do you cope with the fact that it doesn't last? How do you cope with the fact that it will die? This is beauty, beauty that must die from Odon Melancholy And how do you cope with that? And there are many strategies that Keats kind of posits throughout much of his poetry In fact you can sort of think of them in some ways as being a bit like thought experiments that he sort of says Well, I'll try this way of coping with it in this poem I'll try this other way of coping with it in that poem So there are some poems you could see Ode to a Nightingale for example him sort of saying Well, if I can't be with the nightingale then I might as well die Cease upon the midnight with no pain So there's that way of kind of coping with it It's like okay, well I'll just die then if this beauty isn't going to last Or as he posits kind of here earlier in Endymion written as I've said in 1817 How does he kind of cope with that here? Here he says it will never pass into nothingness So it will continue to remain So this is not beauty that must die as he says later This is beauty that is forever increasing somehow So what's his thought here? I think of beauty as a joy forever Its loveliness increases and it will never pass into nothingness It will never die But still will keep And we've got a repetition here of ideas of permanence that it continues both in still and keep And this is sort of furthered and echoed in the repetition here the kind of aural repetition So it will never repeated in still will So it's still will and then we have the kind of visual repetition in the double E of keep So we've had the two L's of still and will and then we have the double letter in keep Still will keep And it's really laying on the idea of this not dying, this not passing into nothingness this continuing this idea of permanence But still will keep a bower quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing So I think there's a lot that we can ascertain about what Keats thinks beauty is from these lines So what does beauty do to the mind? It keeps a bower quiet for us So it quietens mental restlessness It softens life's anguish life's mental anguish A bower is a sort of little enclave or a little nest kind of among foliage So it kind of keeps a little sacred space quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams So it kind of allows the imagination allows the imagination to play sweetly It keeps us in health And I think that's a really interesting word for Keats to have used particularly because later in this section he talks about unhealthiness And we remember that Keats was a trained apothecary at this point that he was training at Guy's Hospital in London and that he was a dresser and he was very trained in health medicine and so on and he brings the idea of health into his poems and this is another way of thinking about beauty that it's a kind of protection of one's health a protection of one's mental health but still will keep a bower quiet for us a sleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing again we've got the repetition of quiet so it keeps a kind of quiet space for us to retreat to and where we can breathe quietly again this idea of not being anxious of a kind of mental restlessness that beauty provides restfulness, sorry and it brings restfulness therefore on every morrow so for each tomorrow, so day after day after day we are breathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth so we are breathing, we are seeking we are looking for, we are making breathing is a kind of act you have to do, you have to breathe, you have to make forming beauty from the earth around us, we are breathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth to keep us living, to keep us wanting to be on the earth to keep us from wanting to die a flowery band to bind us to the earth this is in spite of, so this is a kind of retaliation against, we can use beauty as a defence against despondence again this idea of mental anguish the inhuman dearth of noble natures of the gloomy days this real sense of melancholy and hoping that beauty can be a way of protecting yourself against the gloomy days, that it's something to remember on those gloomy days to bring you joy of all the unhealthy going back to the idea of health, of all the unhealthy and o'er darkened ways made for our searching, and again we've got this idea of restlessness, mental restlessness unhealthy mental restlessness that perhaps beauty can be a way of curtailing that endless mental searching, the unhealthy and o'er darkened ways made for our searching, those dark passages of the mind that you go down those are the o'er darkened ways that Keats can't kind of help or there's a pull towards searching those dark unhealthy mental thoughts and Keats is saying maybe beauty can be a defence against that and how can it be a defence against that, well and why is it increasing, because you think about those things of beauty in those moments of those gloomy days or when you're down you're searching down an o'er darkened mental way that you remember that beauty and you remember the joy in thinking about that beauty and that that provides this defence against this mental anguish and because it provides a defence against that mental anguish it becomes more joyous, it was joyful once in the initial conceiving of the beauty and then it's joyful again because it's protected you from anguish and then the next time you think of it again it's even more joyful and even more beautiful because it is kind of building it's keeping away the what did he describe them as, the disagreeable the more it makes the disagreeables of life evaporate the more beautiful and joyous it becomes and it's a kind of snowball effect because it keeps protecting you and the more it protects you the more joyful it becomes, the more it protects you the more joyful it becomes and so on, so it provides the imagination with kind of joyful sucker and sustenance protects you, inoculates you against this mental restlessness yes, in spite of all, there's beautiful monosyllables there which I think each one is emphasised, yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty and we've got a kind of formal echo here, so we start with a thing of beauty and here we've got some shape of beauty so it's kind of indistinct, it's not entirely clear or easy to define what a thing of beauty is or some shape of beauty that it's kind of indistinct and then Keats in this section of the poem goes on to provide some examples of the kinds of things that might be a shape of beauty or a thing of beauty, these kind of abstract ways of thinking but he tries to provide examples here, so yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits and there are funeral connotations so funereal connotations in the word pall because pall is the cloth that is spread over a coffin so the shape of beauty can pull off the pall, can kind of pull off the imagery or the thoughts of death, can remove them from our dark spirits and here we've got a repetition of the word dark so we had our darkened ways which I was talking about earlier and now we've got moving away the pall from our dark spirits, repetition of dark and also of course the gloomy, the imagery of the gloom of the mind and here we move on to see that the gloom of the mind can be kind of illuminated by can have light shone on it by beauty because the first example that we have, such the sun, so the darkness of the mind, one of the things that we might first look to as a thing of beauty is the sun and then the moon which reflects the light of the sun trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon, so a boon is something that's beneficial, so sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep, we might think that there's almost a kind of paradox immediately here which is that the first thing that's mentioned as a thing of beauty which might get rid of the darkness of the mind is the sun and then the moon which reflects the sun but then we've got the sprouting of a shady boon, so the trees grow and they create shade for the sheep on the one hand we've got the sun being this thing of beauty and then we've got the shade from the sun being the thing of beauty, but I think the sort of contrast or the paradox in that image is part of the point in that it's not necessarily the thing that is the thing of beauty, the object that is the thing of beauty, it's the way that you kind of interpret or think about that object, that thing that kind of pleases you when you think about it, a pleasing thought which makes the disagreeables evaporate becomes beautiful because it makes the disagreeables evaporate, it's not so much about the thing itself, so in some moments the sun, in some moments the moon in some moments the shade, all those things can be beautiful at different times and going back to kind of formal considerations we've got such, sun, sprouting shady, simple, sheep, we've got a lot of alliteration here of the S sound or you can say sibilant, so repetition of the S sound and then we have another example and such, this is another example of some shape of beauty, such are daffodils with the green world they live in and kind of on its own, I don't think that this necessarily makes that much sense such are daffodils with the green world they live in, okay they're yellow against a green backdrop, fine, but why might they be a thing of beauty? Well, I think this is a reference to William Wordsworth's famous poem Daffodils, also known as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. William Wordsworth's poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud was originally published in 1807 but it had been republished in his volume of poems from 1815 and we know that Keats acquired a copy of these poems in late 1815 and indeed early in his career, Keats absolutely adored Wordsworth. Later on he would go on to become a bit more critical of Wordsworth the egotistical sublime he talks about but early in his career he really admired Wordsworth and wanted to meet Wordsworth and here I think we can see some of that influence so William Wordsworth's famous poem Daffodils which you may have heard of before but for example he says in that poem All at once I saw a crowd, a host of dancing daffodils. You can see to the poem that he's walking along and he's by a lake and he sees these daffodils on the other side of the lake moving in the breeze and it's like they're kind of dancing and laughing and it brings him a sense of joy to see these dancing daffodils and in the final stanza, the closing stanza it reads, For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash, the daffodils, flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils and I think this is a kind of fundamentally important text for understanding what's going on here in the opening of Endymion. So this sort of phenomenon that Wordsworth describes Keats renames I think as beauty. So the phenomenon is that you see this beautiful sight. Wordsworth doesn't call it beautiful Keats I think calls this translates the same kind of process into the term beauty but so Wordsworth you see this sight which strikes you and brings you joy. For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood. So when I have those gloomy days in the language of Keats' poems when I am anxious, when I'm in pensive mood you know when my mind is restless and painful those daffodils come back to me, they flash upon that inward eye, they flash upon my mind and that is the bliss of solitude and that brings him bliss. Remembering those dancing daffodils when he is in this pensive mood that brings him joy, that brings him bliss. Now Wordsworth focuses on solitude and I won't go into that because that's not really part of Endymion but this is a part of for Wordsworth why solitude is so valuable because you kind of process these two feelings best when you're alone. So you're there in your pensive mood and then you have these kind of flashes of what Keats would call beauty to cheer you up or to bring you out of these pensive moods, to bring you bliss even in a pensive mood. And then my heart with pleasure fills so that it makes you feel better, it makes you feel more healthy and dances with the daffodils. It's a sort of almost transcendental experience, you know that you have this pensive mood, you remember something which strikes you as wonderful or beautiful and it enervates you then in this current moment. Again, it makes your heart joyful again and it brings you joy in this present moment and you are back to a state of dancing with the daffodils again. And so the next time you remember those daffodils you will remember the original viewing of the daffodils but it will be sort of added to because you then have these later feelings of pleasure and dancing with those daffodils again. So the joy that those memories contain kind of builds up the more you remember them and the more bliss that they bring you. Back to Endymion, such are daffodils with the green world they live in and clear rills. So a rill is a stream, basically a small stream and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make against the hot season. I love that image there that these streams kind of cool themselves against the hot sun. So again, seemingly this idea of paradox because the streams here are cooling themselves against the heat of the sun but as I said, I don't think it's quite as paradoxical as it might originally seem. The mid-forest break, so the kind of clearing, rich with a sprinkling of fair musk rose blooms. And again there's a beautiful formal kind of technique that Keats is using here which is to slow the pace of the rich with a sprinkling of fair musk rose blooms to slow that line down almost as though we've come to the mid-forest break, we've come to this clearing and we've taken the time then to enjoy what is in that clearing. So these fair musk rose blooms are in that space between the trees and the poem slows down to allow us to enjoy those kind of beautiful smells, beautiful looking blooms. And we've got the kind of, even though they are across couplets which I'll get on to in a minute, we've got the alliteration of break and blooms. And I'll get on to why we slow down particularly at that line in a minute. Then we move on to another example. And again as in the previous line, although it's across couplets we've got the alliteration of dooms and dead. And in these two lines it's almost as if Keats is trying to kind of find a way to comfort himself when contemplating death. And this is perhaps one of the ways that Beauty does this. So the kind of anguished dark thought is a thought of death. But the beauty is that we imagine the grandeur of the doom. So the destinies, we imagine the grandeur of the destinies for the mighty dead. And that kind of beautiful thought is a way to protect yourself against the anguish of thinking about death. All lovely tales that we have heard or read, an endless fountain of immortal drink. And here we've got again going back to the opening idea of forever and increasing. That it's an endless fountain that we can kind of go back to and return to again and again. That it will keep on giving. If we keep using beauty as a way to stand up against anxiety, then it will keep giving to us. It's an endless fountain of immortal drink. It will never die. Pouring unto us from the heavens brink. I think it's worth noting though that Keats ends on a boundary. So the word brink means the kind of edge. So the edge of heaven. That these beautiful thoughts pour into us, onto us from the heavens brink. From the edge of heaven. So you can take that both ways I suppose. You can either see that then as beauty as being heavenly. Or you can see it as not actually quite getting you there. That it's just on the edge of the heavenly but it isn't quite. And in that sense then, does that undermine the idea that it is in fact immortal? Because as he said earlier in the poem when he was talking about a flowery band to bind us to the earth. If we're on the earth and we're only at heavens brink then we haven't actually got up into the immortal realm. It's just throwing in that perhaps little edge of darkness you might say. Suggesting perhaps that he hasn't quite convinced himself. Maybe. I'm now going to consider the form of this extract and I'm going to focus on Keats' use of couplets. So I just want to explain how I think the sense of excess. So this idea of loveliness increasing is created in the poem's opening through the use of form. So of course this sense of excess is achieved in other ways too. So the plethora for example of sensuous imagery. So I was talking about the musk rose and we have the kind of smell or the imagined smell of the musk rose. Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk rose blooms. And here we have the open vowels that Keats often uses actually. This technique he uses often. So fair musk rose blooms. Those are all open vowels. All long vowels. They're not kind of short contained vowels. They fill the mouth. You have to kind of enunciate them quite clearly. Fair musk rose blooms. So you have the open vowels but you also have the sibilance so the repetition of the S sound that kind of intensifies as the line goes along. It almost gets kind of denser. Rich. So you've got a sort of S sound there with a sprinkling S sound there. Fair musk rose blooms. As I was talking about you've got the mid-forest break and then you have this kind of sensuous imagery and it's formed in such a way which actually makes you slow down reading the line almost as if you are kind of pausing to enjoy that sensuousness. So we have that but also I think this idea of kind of increasing and revelling in the beauty and the joy from the form of the poem. So what is the form of John Keats's poem Endymion? Well to answer this we need to look at the definition of heroic couplets. Heroic couplets was the most popular poetic form in the 18th century. For example in the poetry of Alexander Pope and I have another video on Alexander Pope particularly his use of heroic couplets. So if you want a bit more detail you can go and look at that video. Very essentially a heroic couplet is a rhymed pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a line of verse with five metrical feet. So feet are the one two sounds like a foot walking along the ground. So essentially it has ten beats in it. Let's see if Endymion fits that definition. So it is in rhymed pairs of lines. So we can say that it's in rhymed couplets. So let's look at those rhymes then. Ever, never, keep, sleep, breathing, breathing, earth, dearth, days, ways, all, pool, moon, boon, daffodils, rills, make, break, blooms, dooms, dead, red, drink, brink. Those are very strong rhymes. There are no half rhymes there at all. And yet when we read the poem, I don't think we feel that it's kind of dominated by those rhymes. Actually, it seems that we have to kind of read across the rhymes to some extent. And yet those rhymes are there. So that's worth bearing in mind. What about the iambic pentameter, which, as I've said, was a very familiar rhythm to English readers at this period. So at the beginning of the 19th century, because iambic pentameter had been very dominant in English poetry for many centuries. So Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, in large part uses iambic pentameter, which is the text I mentioned earlier, as indeed does Milton's Paradise Lost. So again, let's look at the poem Endymion to see if it fits in. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Well, a thing of beauty is a joy for...er? Are we going to kind of try and condense it into filling only one beat? Let's look at the second line. Or are we going to pronounce ever and never as two beats? Well, it's for the kind of reader to decide. Are they going to try and fit this into 10 beats or are they going to go over into 11 beats? So we've got this already from the opening, then we've got this idea of pushing on the boundaries of fullness and what the reader might expect, because they might expect, as I've said, iambic pentameter. Now, in the first edition, neither ever or never is apostrophised. And this is a way that poets in the 18th and indeed 19th century often try to kind of suggest that you are supposed to shoehorn these words into one syllable by saying er and ner rather than ever and never. So in this poem, similar words are apostrophised in order to show that a syllable should be removed. So in this extract then in line 10, we have ur darkened ways. The apostrophe shows that it should be pronounced as one syllable ur rather than two syllables over with the V sound and taking out the V and putting an apostrophe was a very common practice at this time. But Keats does not do that. He doesn't do that for this ever and never. He retains the V sound. He does not apostrophise the V out suggesting that it should be read as two syllables. What we have then in the opening is giving the poem a sense that from the very beginning it's not going to be contained within expected boundaries, that it's going to be kind of pushing, pushing over the edge of what's expected and therefore giving a sense of fullness and increasing because it's going beyond. Just as Keats hopes is true of his own imagination, going back to the letters to Benjamin really. And then I was talking about at the beginning of the video and we see again this extra syllable. So in the middle two then. So we have the first two, 11 and then we have the kind of second couplet. So pass into nothingness that still will keep a bower quiet for us and sleep. So that does have 10 beats in it. It does kind of conform. So we have this 11, we have over the boundary and then it returns to what might be more expected rhythm and then in the fifth line again we kind of expand out to 11 beats again. Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. There's a real sense then of not rushing, of not kind of contailing yourself. And here particularly it's evident I think because we've got the repetition of and. So full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. If you wanted to make it fit into 10 syllables you could do that very easily by taking out the and health and just saying health. Full of sweet dreams health and quiet breathing. That would make it fit the 10 syllables and yet we've got this extra and to give a sense of fullness and not rushing. The form here is echoing the content in that it's, we're keeping kind of mentally quiet if you like. That we're not allowing ourselves to be kind of caught up in anguish. We're just taking our time. Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. This opening section then conforms very much to one sense of heroic couplets in that it is very strongly rhymed. These are very strong rhyming couplets and yet it doesn't fit in neatly to iambic pentameter which might be expected because it veers between 11 and 10 syllables. Going back to the opening couplet we might also notice that the sense is not contained within the couplet. The meaning goes over the line in order for the poem to make sense you have to read over the line as it's called and this is enjambment. So it will never doesn't make sense by itself. You have to read onto pass into nothingness. It will never pass into nothingness. The third line is required for the end of the second line to make sense. This is called an open couplet. And what is an open couplet? It's a couplet in which the syntax the structure and sense do not come to a conclusion or pause at the end of the second line. And as we see in Endymion often actually it's kind of opens beyond the first line of a couplet too if that makes sense. So that a couplet will appear here and you have to have read the beginning over in order for that couplet to make sense. The second line in an open couplet is not what we call end stopped. So there is kind of necessary use of enjambment. The sentence continues onto the next line without a pause and this continuous reading is necessary to clarify the meaning or grammar. I would argue that in fact Keats almost seems to play kind of provocatively on the open rhymed couplet form by having the ends of clauses at kind of deliberately unusual points throughout the passage. In the opening sentence for example it ends at the first half of a rhymed couplet. So it ends on breathing at the end of line five kind of dissecting the rhyming couplet of breathing and breathing. And throughout the rest of the passage significant clauses come to an end mid line. So in the sentence ending our dark spirits that very important sentence it ends on the fifth beat mid line and it opens on the sixth beat of line 11. So it opens at the midpoint and it closes at the midpoint. Yes in spite of all some shape of beauty moves away the pull from our dark spirits. So we have 20 beats but they are divided not in a couplet but kind of across a couplet. It's almost deliberately provocative there. We've got 20 beats of iambic pentameter but not within the boundary of the couplet. Throughout the extract the sense of meaning go on over several lines which adds to the sense of fullness and excess and this idea of lack of containment which is encouraged by the form of the open couplets. And I think that the very strong rhyme but the kind of insistence on breaking the couplet open is part of this kind of provocative playfulness and move away from the contained sense of the closed heroic couplet which really dominated in the neoclassical period the early 18th century period in which Alexander Pope was writing as I mentioned. But interestingly though the passage ends with a closed heroic couplet the only one in these 24 lines. So what is a closed heroic couplet? Well I'm sure you can work it out given the definition so far but a closed heroic couplet is a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter which is So the syntax, structure and sense begin at the opening of the first line and come to a conclusion at the end of the second line. The couplet then has the quality of a self-contained epigram. So the couplet becomes almost a kind of unit in and of itself. So what have we got here in this poem Endymion by Keats then? We've got an endless fountain of immortal drink pouring unto us from the heavens brink and you pause at the end of both lines here within this couplet. So immortal drink comma and then the full stop at the end of brink and this closing closed heroic couplet follows on from all lovely tales that we have heard or read that's line 22 as if the ensuing couplet encapsulates all those lovely tales. The pause at the end of line 22 makes the reader stop momentarily to separate this couplet off from the rest of the section and I would say that the pause at the end of red is the first kind of heavy pause that we have had at the end of a couplet so far in the poem. So never, we have to read that with enjambment, it will never pass into nothingness and asleep full of sweet dreams we are breathing a flowery band the inhuman dearth of noble natures over darkened ways made for our searching moves away the pall from our dark spirits sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep clear reels that for themselves are cool and covert we might say that there is a pause at the end of break rich with a sprinkling of fair musk rose blooms but I don't think it's a heavy pause there. I think it's as I was saying this idea of break in order for us to kind of experience the musk rose blooms more fully so I think we're supposed to pause so that we do appreciate the line that comes next but I wouldn't say that it's a heavy pause in the same way that read is a heavy pause. Continuing on then the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead and that also doesn't have a pause I would say necessarily at the end of the couplet. So of the final couplet both lines are end stopped emphasising the rhyme and that the section comes to a close at the end of heaven's brink now that's quite clear that we have this concluding closing heroic couplet to kind of get us to the pinnacle of heaven's brink we kind of come to a conclusion there at the end of this first paragraph it is as if you can kind of just get to heaven's brink but you cannot push any further you cannot kind of try to describe beauty and joy anymore than by saying well you get to the point where you're at heaven's brink and then then what then no more and you know beauty can pour unto us from heaven's brink but we cannot quite enter into it for ourselves and as I was talking about does this in fact then undermine this idea of an endless fountain or is it just endless among the earthly but then it can never continue to be increasing if it cannot increase beyond heaven's brink then it's not endless this endless fountain it's not an endless fountain forever increasing maybe it's just an endless fountain kind of making you go round and round on earth is this then the limit of beauty and if it is the limit of beauty then that's kind of echoed in the form because we have this closed heroic couplet at the end kind of saying there is no more after this point because a closed heroic couplet brings this kind of epigrammatic sense of closure of completeness the closed heroic couplet form at the end of a passage of very provocatively open heroic couplets despite the rhyme and as I've said it's almost there are kind of deliberate attempts to go across the couplet so I was talking about the alliteration of break blooms dooms dead and these are then picked up in drink and brink break blooms brink dooms dead drink it's kind of provocatively playing with the idea of the open couplet going across the couplet is this the kind of acknowledgement then that there is in fact a hard boundary at the edge of heaven that it's that it's not available to us actually there is a kind of definite limit that we can never get beyond that so in fact that challenges dismisses counters the idea that a thing of beauty is a joy forever whose which whose loveliness increases does this this form then having this closed heroic couplets at the end giving a sense of finality right at heavens brink mean that there is or suggest that there is this hard boundary in fact which however much you think about beauty can never actually be passed and does this undermine then the opening of this first paragraph because you've got this hard limit you've got heavens brink and does that mean then that it cannot forever increase because you've got this hard edge of heavens brink so a thing of beauty is a joy forever its loveliness increases forever well that's not the case then if you've got this hard boundary this hard edge so is it's this beautiful hopeful opening thoughts that a thing of beauty is a joy forever and it's loveliness increases because you can forever imagine it and it can forever become more wonderful and more joyful and more lovely is that then undermined you know only a few lines later by having this hard boundary at heavens brink thank you very much indeed for watching remember if you like what I do here on my channel where I analyze classic literature then do subscribe and if you have liked the video then do press the thumbs up button it does help me out in YouTube's algorithm and I'd love to know what your thoughts are on this beautiful wonderful poem by Keats do you think that he accepts that a thing of beauty is a joy forever this phrase that we you know that we ourselves kind of use as an aphorism or as passed down into English language as a kind of wonderful beautiful maybe even slightly trite saying but do you think maybe that Keats even undermines that thought within his own opening of the poem do let me know your thoughts in the comments below