Poet’s Corner: Keats–Hyperion 1

10 September 2026

(8 January 2016) As we continue to trace the influences of major poets upon my own poetry, we look today on a piece of John Keats’ poetry, from an unfinished work, “Hyperion,” first begun and abandoned in 1818, and again in 1819 as “The Fall of Hyperion,” both exploring creativity by focusing on the fall of the second generation of Greek gods, in this case Saturn, Hyperion, and Mnemosyne. It was the mood of these two longer fragments that caught my attention, as also the idea of ‘memory’ as a fallen priestess lamenting the loss of power and position. Here is the first stanza from the first book:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ‘mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.

All here points to a place far from our familiar world, a place where memories go to fade into oblivion; everything about this place speaks of decay and ruin, hidden from any light, choked by silence, plagued by a complete lack of motion, so that the leaf the falls never moves from where it landed. Further, the stream is “voiceless,” and the only motion we see is the Naiad hiding in her reeds, pressing her finger harder into her lips, a long standing symbol of silence. Why? Because here lies the fallen god, Saturn, still living–gods are immortal–having nothing to do but sit and brood in silence. This mood is reinforced in the next stanza:

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray’d,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

We see the traces of his passage in his footsteps on the sand, leading us straight to where he sleeps, “listless, dead”–a powerful image–without power, his whole mind focused on his mother earth, for some kind of comfort that never comes. Later, the poet sees the priestess, Mnemosyne, or memory, and her lament at the great that has fallen. These images first entered my thoughts when I was planning a collection of poems, my ‘Senior poetry project’, and something in the discussion of this poem led me to see memories as fragmented, like shards of a broken mirror strewn across the floor of a room, deep within our minds, where the memories get mixed up with each other. I used this image to write the title poem for this collection, now published as “Ode to a Stump Farm.” Next time, we will look at this poem of mine and show Keats’ obvious influence on its creation. Until then, good reading!