Great Regulars: Every epoch must end, every vision

of perfection replaced by another. (The Olympians will, of course, be themselves deposed by the God of the Christian era.) Take the idea of the zeitgeist. Changes in culture dictate what people believe and what they don't believe, but where such changes spring from is remarkably tricky to pin down. They just happen to be blowing in the wind.

In a brilliant phrase, Keats compares the old gods to a "dismal cirque/Of Druid stones," linking the image of a stone circle with a dreary circus out of a nightmare, maybe because it goes nowhere, endlessly.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading from Hyperion by John Keats

~~~~~~~~~~~