In Keats's Endymion, a lonely maiden tries to escape sorrow and ends up embracing it
A girl weeps alone beneath palm trees until a roaring procession sweeps her up: Bacchus, god of wine, with satyrs, tigers, elephants and alligators ferrying laughing infants. She follows him from Egypt to India. Yet when the revel fades, she returns to the companion she had tried to shake off, and calls her Sweetest Sorrow.
The song opens with a string of questions to Sorrow, asking why it steals colour from lips, fire from a falcon's eye and lightness from May. Then comes a twist. The singer greets Sorrow and hopes to leave her behind, only to find her impossible to desert because she is so faithful and kind. Grief here is not an enemy but a clinging friend.
The middle section explodes into spectacle. Purple streams announce the god's approach, trumpets and cymbals clash, and young Bacchus rides in his chariot twirling an ivy wand while the drunken Silenus lurches along on a donkey, pelted with flowers. Damsels and satyrs explain they have abandoned lutes, bowers and even their stores of nuts to follow him. Kings of India lower their jewelled sceptres, and Egypt kneels. The maiden joins, but the chase brings no pleasure; worn out, she drifts into lonely forests. In the closing stanzas she turns tender toward her grief, singing, "Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast," and naming Sorrow as mother, brother, playmate and suitor all at once.
Keats was trained for medicine before poetry claimed him. After attending John Clarke's small, progressive school in Enfield, where the headmaster's son Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to Spenser and Tasso, he was apprenticed at fourteen to a surgeon-apothecary, Thomas Hammond, and lodged above the surgery. In October 1815 he enrolled at Guy's Hospital and within a month became a dresser, assisting surgeons in operations, a notable promotion. His family assumed he would practise as a doctor.
Money haunted him. His grandfather had left him £800 in trust, yet he seems never to have learned of it and never claimed it, although the family solicitor knew. Later Victorian poets such as Swinburne, Rossetti and William Morris drew heavily on his medieval-flavoured work.
Source: PoetryDB — Song of the Indian Maid, from 'Endymion' · Public domain (GB: author died 1821, life+70 expired; US: author died 1821, so every lifetime publication is from 1930 or earlier)
