From Cloudy Trophies to Quiet Power: Keats’s Hyperions, the 1819 Odes, and Michael O’Neill’s Late Poetry

Abstract

This essay reads Keats’s 1819 poetry alongside Michael O’Neill’s poems about his terminal illness. It focuses on Keats’s abandonment of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion in favour of ‘To Autumn’ through a juxtaposed reading of ‘cloudy trophies’ and ‘quiet power’. The Hyperion poems explore the collapse of the Poetical Character in the face of incurable, immortal suffering. While the spring odes, exemplified in a reading of ‘Ode on Melancholy’, attempt to balance the dynamic between a speaker and its poetic subject through apostrophe, the conclusions of the odes are self-cancelling. ‘To Autumn’ signals a breakthrough from curative to palliative poetics through the simultaneous celebration of life insisting on itself and the process of dying. The contrast between Guy’s Hospital and the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester underlines the shift in vision from incurable suffering to palliative, quiet power.