Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia]

One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion. A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.

That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How do you believe in a benevolent Supreme Being who cares for his creation in a world where evil is predominant?

If Keats cared to establish a religion, its deity would have been Beauty. Didn’t he tell us that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”? He even went to the extent of saying that we don’t need to know anything more than that. For Keats, beauty is divine. Beauty is the ultimate answer to all the mysteries and riddles of life.

The extract given in class 12 by CBSE is a paean to beauty. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” it begins. The first few lines describe the blessings of beauty. Beauty is a special place (bower) prepared for us by nature. It brings us peace and relaxation, good sleep and sweet dreams, good health and blissful happiness. Beauty brings us endless joy. Nothing else can do that. Not religion, not gods, let alone other ephemeral things.

In order to enjoy the blessings of beauty, we bind ourselves to the earth with a band of flowers which we “wreath” every day. There is much sadness on earth, however. All that sadness is a creation of human beings. Despondence, lack of noble people, gloom, evils that we perpetrate… We create all that sadness. And that sadness puts us on a quest for happiness!

Then the poet goes on to give us a list of things that bring happiness. All those things belong to nature. Sun, moon, daffodils, streams, trees… And finally some human-made beauty too: literature – “All lovely tales that we have heard or read”. It is here that “the grandeur of the dooms” appears.

Look at the lines:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead…

The ‘mighty dead’ are our past heroes about whom we weave beautiful stories in our poems and epics and other works of literature. These works of literature, along with the numerous beautiful things in nature, become “An endless fountain of immortal drink,” the fountain of joy for the questing human soul. This beauty is immortal, divine - coming from "heaven's brink". It will go on without end, without death. Nature will keep giving us beauty and generations of humans will keep writing good literature.

So what does the phrase ‘grandeur of the dooms’ mean? It means the glory of the deaths that we have imagined for our bygone heroes. That is, ‘doom’ translates as ‘death’. Our literatures have imagined the glory in the deaths of those heroes and made those deaths beautiful.

Death cannot be glorious or beautiful. But art has the power to render them majestic. “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.” How beautiful that death is! Who but Shakespeare could have made it so beautiful? Look at Othello’s final moments with Desdemona: “Put out the light, then put out the light.” The final cry of Conrad’s Kurtz – “The horror! The horror!” – has the same sublime touch though that character was not exactly heroic.

Keats died at the beautiful age of 25. Too early for any human being to die. He had achieved remarkable success in that very short lifespan. Not as a surgeon that he had educated himself to be but as the High Priest of Beauty. Though ‘success’ came to him posthumously. In his lifetime very few people appreciated his poems. Better known poets like Byron ridiculed Keats’ poetry as onanism, intellectual masturbation.

Keats died a sad death. Can death be anything but sad? But in Keats’ case, it was the tragic premature death of a questing genius who had so much to contribute to literature. Some Shakespeare may yet be born to convert that tragedy into the “grandeur of a doom…”