![]() More fully implicated in the imaginative workings of his later romances, Endymion's uncertain ending anticipates Keats's mature poetic preoccupation with a process of disclosure and deceit. The reader, like Peona is torn between a fiction of transcendence and a negative awareness of reality's darkness. Ultimately, Endymion's encounter with Cynthia discloses her fictive nature as an idealised woman and is a reminder that even idealising fictions conceal as much as they reveal. The youthful Endymion's 'spiritualiz'd' apotheosis is not a transcendental escape from the mutability of his 'mortal state' (IV, 991-3), as the world he abandons is left much darker for his absence. Though Keats's poetic sleight of hand asserts a metaphysical fiction, his poetry points to Peona's very real desertion. Having achieved communion with the transcendental, Endymion abandons the web of human relations and the 'gloomy wood' to which Peona returns (IV, 1003). ![]() ![]() Keats ensures his narrative's close witnesses the revealed Cynthia united with Endymion, her lover, and his sister, Peona. His early romance depicts a conflict between fictions of the ideal and the harsh circumstances of the ordinary and real, between the heightened sense of self-knowledge attained through visionary modes of consciousness and the self-deception of the illusory. From the outset of Endymion, Keats is alert to the possibility that the 'bower' of romance can all too readily surrender its idyll back to the 'o'er-darkened ways' (I, 4 10-11) of the world of human existence. ![]()
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