‘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 analyzing john keats's 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 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 analyzing how john keats uses the form of the poem so how john 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 and having early 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh keats's 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 um find ways trying to develop his skills to become a great poet and he aligns himself already uh 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 um be 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 uh 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 uh miltonic in some ways or at least keats was using milton as uh 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 um 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 asleep 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 ur darkened ways made for our searching yes in spite of all some shape of beauty moves away the paul 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 are cooling covert make against the hot season the mid forest break rich with a sprinkling of fair muskrose 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 these beauty this beauty and these truths the more you are able to make all disagreeables evaporate so beauty then and truth are aligned and we remember that in o'donnell grecian urn the urn says at the end although that's alpha 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 uh against uh the disagreeables of life that they um form a kind of um yeah a bulwark or or a defense against those and what what is beauty then it's a bit chicken and egg but essentially beauty is that which makes all the um disagreeables of life evaporate beauty then is not it's not just or not merely an aesthetic uh quality it's it's not saying oh that's that's beautiful that's a beautiful woman or that's a beautiful garden or or anything like that beauty is far more kind of profound and far more to do with elevating your soul and elevating your spirits so let's have a look at the poem then in a bit more detail to see what what beauty means for keats and why a thing of beauty is a joy forever a thing of beauty is a joy forever it's 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 onto and that's beautiful concept or that beautiful remembrance the loveliness of that increases well why why does it continue to 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 oats which he wrote in 1819 which were published in 1820. it's fundamental to keats's conception really of the point of life that you you find something beautiful it's it strikes your soul with wonder and awe and you know it it 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 it will die you know this is beauty beauty that must die um from odom 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 and i'll try this other way of coping with it in that poem so there are some poems you could see ozone nightingale uh o2 and item girl for example um 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 uh 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 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 bg's enjoy forever is 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 instill and keep and this is sort of furthered and echoed in the repetition here the kind of um hourl repetition so it will never repeat it in still will so it's still will and then we have the kind of um visual repetition in the um double e of keep so we've had the two l's of still and will and then we have the the double uh letter in keep still will keep you know it's really laying on the idea of this not dying this not passing into nothingness this continuing idea of permanence but still will keep a power quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing so it's i think there's a lot that we can ascertain about what keats thinks beauty is from this these lines so what does beauty do to the mind it keeps a power quiet for us so it it quietens uh mental restlessness it's it softens life's anguish life's mental anguish a bower is a a sort of um little enclave or a little nest um kind of among foliage so it's 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 to play uh 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 unhealthyness and we remember that keats was a trained uh apothecary at this point that he was training at a guy's hospital in london and that he was a dresser which was essentially a kind of trainee to a surgeon so he was very trained in in health um medicine and so on and he brings the idea of of health into his poems and this is um another way of thinking about beauty that it's a kind of a protection of one's health a protection of one's one's mental health but still keep a bowel 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 so again this idea of not being anxious of a kind of mental restlessness that beauty provides restfulness sorry it's going to protect him from restlessness and it brings rest to fullness therefore on every morrow so for each tomorrow so day after day after day after day we are leaving a flowery band to bind us to the earth so we are reading we are seeking we are looking for we are making i mean reading is a kind of act you have to do you have to read you have to make um forming beauty from the earth around us we are wreathing 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 bound 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 defense against despondence again this idea of mental anguish uh the inhuman dearth of noble natures of the gloomy days this real sense of kind of melancholy and 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 robots idea of health of all the unhealthy and ur 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 ur darkened ways made for our searching those dark passages of the mind that you go down those are the oh darkened ways that keats can't kind of help or there's a pull towards searching those dark unhealthy mental thoughts and keith is saying maybe beauty can be a defense against that and how can it be a defense against that well you 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 a cert you're searching down in a dark and mental way that you remember that beauty and you remember the joy in thinking about that beauty and that that provides this defense against this mental anguish and because it provides a defense against that mental anguish it becomes more joyous it was joyful once in the initial like 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 is kind of building it's um [Music] keeping away the what did he describe them as the disagreeable so that it the more it makes the disagreeables of life evaporate the more beautiful and joyous it becomes and 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 protected 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 these beautiful monosyllables there which i think you know are each one is emphasized 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 he's kind of abstract uh abstract ways of thinking um but he tries to provide examples here so yes in spite of all some shape of beauty moves away the pool from our dark spirits and there are kind of funeral connotations here if you nereal connotations in the word paul because paul is the um the cloth that is spread over a coffin so the shape of beauty can pull off the pool can kind of pull off the um imagery or the thoughts of death it can remove them from our dark spirits and here we've got a repetition of the word dark so we had our uh darkened ways which i was talking about earlier and now we've got um moving away the pool 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 uh i 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 um beneficial so sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep we might think 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 the trees grow and they create shade for the sheep so 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 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 the way that you uh 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 um 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 sibilance 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 a daffodils with the green world they live in okay well ball okay they're yellow against 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 wondered 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 um before um but for example he says in that poem all at once i saw a crowd a host of dancing daffodils the conceit of the poem is that he's walking along and he's by a lake and he sees these daffodils on on kind of 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 fundamental fundamentally important text for understanding what's going on here in the opening of endymion so this 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 um calls this translates the same kind of process into uh the term beauty but so wordsworth you see the 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 um you know when my mind is um 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 um and i won't go into that um because that's not really part of endymion but this is a part of for wordsworth why solitude is so valuable because um you kind of uh process these two feelings best when you're alone so you're there in your pensive mood and then you have these um kind of flashes of what keats would call beauty to um kind of to cheer you up or to bring you out of these pensive moods to bring you bliss uh even in a pensive mood so and then my heart with pleasure phil so that it makes you feel better it makes you feel more healthy and dances with the daffodils it's a sort of um almost transcendental experience you know that you have this pensive mood you remember something which strikes you as wonderful or beautiful and it enables you then in this current moment it 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 you will it will be sort of added to because you then have these later feelings of pleasure and dancing with those daffodils again so the 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 real is a a stream basically a small stream and clear reals that for themselves a cooling covert make against the hot season i love that image there that um 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 and 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 um blooms and we've got the kind of even though they are across couplets which i'll get on to in a minute and 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 such two is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead and again as in the previous line although it's across couplets we've got the alliteration of uh dooms and dead and in these two lines it's almost as if keats is trying to kind of um find a way to comfort himself when contemplating death and this is perhaps one of the ways that we that beauty does this so the the kind of anguished dark thought is a thought of death but the beauty is that we imagine the grandeur of the doom so that 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 um 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 keat 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 unto us from the heavens brink from the edge of heaven so it's you can take that both ways i suppose you can either see that then as as the beauty as beauty as being heavenly or you can see it as not actually quite getting me 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 heaven's drink then we haven't actually got up into the immortal realm it's just throwing in that perhaps little edge of um darkness we might say there 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's 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 that the plethora for example of sensuous imagery so i was talking about um the muskraws and we have the kind of smell or the imagined smell of the muskrows rich with a sprinkling of fair musk rose blooms and here we have the open vowels that keats often use this actually this technique uses often so fair musk rose blooms those are all open vowels or long vowels they're not kind of short uh contained vowels they they um they 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 and 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 sander 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 um reveling 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 on uh alexander pope particularly his use of um heroic couplets um 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 like a foot walking along the ground um so essentially it has 10 beats in it let's see if enduring fits that definition so it is in rhymed pairs of lines so we can say that it's in rhymed couplet so let's look at those rhymes then ever never keep sleep breathing breathing earth dearth days ways all paul moon boon daffodils reals 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 uh ismith pentameter had been very dominant in english poetry for many centuries so shakespeare's hamlet for example in large part uses iambic pentameter which i'm 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 forever well a thing of beauty is a joy for air are we going to kind of try and condense it into filling only one beat uh let's look at the second line it's loveliness increases it will nail or are we going to uh 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 11b 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 apostrophized and this is a way that poets uh in the 18th vanity the 19th century often try to kind of suggest that you are supposed to shoot on these words into one syllable by saying air and ner rather than ever and never so in in this poem similar words are apostrophized in order to show that a syllable should be removed so in this extract then in line 10 we have or darkened ways the apostrophe shows that it should be pronounced as one syllable uh rather than two syllables over uh with the v sound and taking out the v and putting an apostrophe was a 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 apostrophize 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 justice keats hopes is true of his own imagination going back to the letters to benjamin bailey and then i was talking about at the beginning of the video and we see again this extra syllable so in in the middle two then so we have the first two eleven and then we have uh the kind of second couplet so pass into nothingness but still will keep a bower quiet for us and a 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 go we kind of expand out to uh 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 containing 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 ten syllables you could do that very easily by taking out and 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 we're not allowing ourselves to be kind of caught up in 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 fears 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 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 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 kind of opens beyond the first line of a couplet two if that makes sense um 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 on to 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 cupboard of breathing and reading 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 um line eleven 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 the 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 scents and meaning go on over several lines which adds to the sense of fullness and excess and this idea of a lack of containment which is carried encouraged by the form of the open couplets and i think that the very strong rhyme but the kind of insistence on breaking the coupler 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 the 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 cup 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 end stopped 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 coupler becomes almost a kind of unit in and of itself so what have we got here in this uh poem endemium 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 wreathing a flowery band the inhuman dearth of noble natures over darkened ways made for our searching moves away the paul from our dark spirits sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep clear reals that for themselves are cooling covert um so first we might say that there is a pause at the end of break so the mid forest 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 muscles 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 reed is a heavy pause continuing on then the grounder 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 stops emphasizing 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 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 any more 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 then it can never continue to be increasing if it cannot increase beyond heaven's brink then it's not um 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 cutlass 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 doom's dead drink um that's kind of provocatively playing with the idea of um the open couplet going across the couplet is this a 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 there we can never get beyond that so in fact that um challenges dismisses counters the idea that a thing of beauty is a joy forever who's which whose loveliness increases does this this form then having this uh closed heroic couplet at the end giving a sense of finality right at heaven's 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 heaven's brink and does that mean then that it cannot forever increase because you've got this hard edge of heaven's 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 it's this beautiful hopeful opening thought that you know a thing of beauty is a joy forever and it's 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 heaven's bring 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 to let me know your thoughts in the comments below