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In May (1818) Keats’ poem Endymion: A Poetic Romance was published. It bore on the title page the motto “The stretched metre of an antique song”, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17 and reportedly one of Keats' favourite lines from the bard. Stretched metre suggests that the metre of the line in old poems was irregular, or perhaps too long, whilst antique as well as meaning old, could have a secondary meaning of bizarre, odd, slightly insane. Taking this as a lead the work takes an “ancient” song (Dowland’s “My thoughts are winged”) and uses it as source material for the piece. The choice of song is deliberate as the opening lines “My thoughts are wing’d with hopes, my hopes with love, Mount love unto the Moone” link perfectly with the legend of Endymion and Selene, the goddess of the moon.
