Endymion A Thing Of Beauty

The Sleep of Endymion: A thing of Beauty is a joy forever ...

The myth of Endymion is hardly complicated. A beautiful young shepherd is visited by the moon, Diana, in his sleep. She kisses him and he wakes from his dream. However, this simple tale has inspired artists for centuries. Each time the story is retold, it is done in a new and personal manner that emulates the ideals of the creator. Two such artists are Anne-Louis Girodet and John Keats. The two men are hardly similar, the first being an artist and the second a poet. However, their interpretations of the Endymion myth are similar as seen through Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion  “Introducing mystery, irrationality, and sensuality into the hard, clear, and civic-minded art of David. Interpreting his subjects in an evocative and dreamlike manner (and adding a strange, erotic charge), The Sleep of Endymion shows Girodet’s passion for two artistic forms that he hoped to fuse: painting and poetry,” (“Romantic Rebel”). begins, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” setting the tone for a poem that proclaims beauty and joy over reason and rationality. In this style, Keats broke from the traditional heroic couplets that marked his era. Instead, he uses open couplets, which is conducive to the romantic ideals that mark his poetry. In essence, Keats’ aim is to “move beyond the divide between imaginative ideal and sensuous reality,” (Cox 144). While these romantic similarities are simply part of the emerging romantic notions of the time, both artists went so far as to places these virtues above existing political and artistic pinnacles. In The Sleep of Endymion, “ poetry displaces the didactic, the mythical displaces the political, and reason gives way to the irrational,” (“Romantic Rebel”). Keats’ ideologies aligned with Girodet. His poem worked to contradict the “Wordwsworthian ‘despondency [that] besets/Our pillows’ as we find ourselves confined within ‘dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives,’” (Cox 145) For both artists, the emerging sense of romanticism was not only an alternative to the existing norms, but surpasses it in potential. Only romanticisms “set forth the poem’s central themes that love and poetry represent our best home to displace oppressive regimes and the despondency that follows upon the collapse of revolutionary ideals,” (Cox 145). , both artistic forms become lascivious. The level of sexuality in Keats’ poem has been debated.