visionary representations, we appear to have entered worlds of dream rather than the dreaming experiences of particular persons.
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The uncanny effect of Byron's poem is most disorienting not because the apocalypse we enter is a negative one, but because the otherworld of the text appears an independently authorized existence. As in the texts of the evangelists, the mediator of such an existence is not the focus of attention. (Because Byron was so famous, perhaps especially at the moment of this poem1816the subjection of dreamer to dream is all the more arresting.)
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Keats's dream poetry is quite different, as one can see by looking at his great sonnet "A Dream, after Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca" (1820):
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 | | As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon'd and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
So play'd, so charm'd, so conquer'd, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And, seeing it asleep, so fled away
Not unto Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe, where Jove griev'd a day,
But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where 'mid the gust, the world-wind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss'd, and fair the form
I floated with about that melancholy storm.
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As in "The Fall of Hyperion," this poem gives not the dream as such but Keats's experience of entering the uncanny world of dream. The event is typically Keatsian, as one sees in early poems like "Sleep and Poetry" and "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." Although not literally a dream poem, the latter is, like "The Fall of Hyperion," the record of the discovery of the power of imaginative vision. The difference separating Keats's work, in this respect, from Blake's and Coleridge's and Byron's measures the close affinity of Keats to Wordsworth. Keats's dream poetry follows the form of, for example, the Arab-Quixote dream sequence detailed in the
Prelude
Book Vin this kind of work we behold the dreamer first; the dream itself is mediated as an experience of discovery.
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