Directing verse 1: Hyperion
TASK
Read this opening to Keats’ poem Hyperion closely, and then imagine you are a film director planning to interpret this poem onscreen. Use the questions in the text boxes to record your ideas for presenting this poem within a scene. To move a text box click and drag it using the cross-arrow on the right-hand side:
49. Hyperion
A Fragment, Book I
DEEP in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair; 5
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. 10
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.
