John Keats

John Keats (1795 –1821) was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one

of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in

publication for only four years before his death.[1]

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death to the

extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a

significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with

Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2]

The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters

are some of the most popular and analyzed in English literature.

When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years; from 1814 until the summer of 1820,

and publishing for four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry probably amounted to just 200 copies.[60] His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The

Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before his last visit to Rome. The compression of his poetic

apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats's work.[1]

By the time of his death, Keats had therefore been associated with the taints of both old and new schools: the obscurity of

the first wave Romantics and the uneducated affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School". Keats's reputation after death mixed

the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling,

which Shelley later portrayed.[67]

The Eve of St. Agnes

The setting is a medieval castle, the time is January 20, the eve of the Feast of St. Agnes. Madeline, the daughter of the lord of the castle, is looking forward to midnight, for she has been assured by "old dames" that, if she performs certain rites, she will have a magical vision of her lover at midnight in her dreams. Madeline believes in this old superstition and prepares to do all that is required, such as going supperless to bed.

On this same evening, Porphyro, who is in love with Madeline and whom she loves, manages to get

into the castle unobserved. Madeline's family regards Porphyro as an enemy whom they are ready to

kill on sight. The presence of many guests in the castle helps make it possible for Porphyro to escape

notice. By chance he meets Madeline's old nurse, Angela, who is his friend; she tells him of

Madeline's quaint superstition. At once the idea of making Madeline's belief become reality by his

presence in her bedroom at midnight flashes into his mind. He assures Angela that he means no

harm and she reluctantly agrees to help him. She leads him to Madeline's chamber where he hides in

a closet.

Madeline soon enters and, her mind filled with the thought of the wonderful vision she will soon have,

goes to bed and falls asleep. The ritual she has performed produces the expected result; her sleep

becomes the sleep of enchantment and Porphyro, looking as if immortalized, fills her dreams.

After Madeline falls asleep, Porphyro leaves the closet and approaches her bed in order to awaken

her. His whispering does not stir her; her sleep is "a midnight charm / Impossible to melt as iced

stream." He picks up her lute and plays it close to her ear. Suddenly her eyes open wide but she

remains in the grip of the magic spell. Then "there was a painful change, that nigh expell'd / The

blisses of her dream so pure and deep." She now sees Porphyro, not immortal as in her dream, but in

his ordinary mortality. The contrast is so great that Madeline even thinks that the human Porphyro is 1 | P a g e

on the point of death. She wants her visionary Porphyro back again. Her wish is granted; the

operations of magic are powerful enough to enable Porphyro, "beyond a mortal man impassion'd far,"

to enter her dream vision and there they are united in a mystic marriage.

When the magic visionary state comes to an end, Madeline expresses her fear that Porphyro will

abandon her, "a deceived thing; — / A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing." Porphyro, who

now addresses her as his bride, urges her to leave the castle with him. "Awake! arise! my love, and

fearless be, / For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."

The two leave the castle undetected and go out into the storm. That night the baron and all his

guests have bad dreams, and Angela and the old Beadsman both die.

Analysis

In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats uses the metrical romance or narrative verse form cultivated

extensively by medieval poets and revived by the romantic poets. Scott and Byron became the most

popular writers of verse narrative. Keats' metrical pattern is the iambic nine-line Spenserian stanza

that earlier poets had found suitable for descriptive and meditative poetry. Because of its length and

slow movement, the Spenserian stanza is not well adapted to the demands of narrative verse. It

inhibits rapidity of pace, and the concluding iambic hexameter line, as one critic has remarked,

creates the effect of throwing out an anchor at the end of every stanza.

Keats clearly was not very interested in writing lively narrative in The Eve of St. Agnes. The story is

trifling and the characters are of no great interest. Porphyro is an idealized knight who will face any

danger whatsoever to see his lady love, and Madeline is reduced to an exquisitely lovely and loving

young lady. Keats is interested in celebrating romantic love; romantic love is literally a heavenly

experience, and for its culmination Keats puts his lovers temporarily in a heaven that is realized

through magic. The Eve of St. Agnes is, in part, a poem of the supernatural which the romantic poets

were so fond of employing.

The Eve of St. Agnes is a heavily descriptive poem; it is like a painting that is filled with carefully

observed and minute detail. In this respect, it was a labor of love for Keats and provided him with an

opportunity to exploit his innate sensuousness. Imagery such as "he follow'd through a lowly arched

way, / Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume," all of stanzas XXIV and XXV describing the stained

glass window in Madeline's room and Madeline's appearance transformed by moonlight passing

through the stained glass, stanza XXX cataloguing the foods placed on the table in Madeline's room,

the lines "the arras, rich with horseman, haw, and hound, / Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar; /

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor," show Keats' picture-making mind at work. The poem

has to be read with scrupulous attention; every detail makes a distinctive contribution and even

though much of what is in the poem is there for its own sake, everything at the same time makes its

contribution to the exaltation of romantic love. Some critics view the poem as Keats' celebration of

his first and only experience of romance. It was written not long after Keats and Fanny Brawne had

fallen in love.

Readers have been struck by Keats' use of contrast in The Eve of St.Agnes; it is one of the chief

aesthetic devices employed in the poem. The special effect of contrast is that it draws attention to all

the details so that none are missed. Keats deliberately emphasizes the bitterly cold weather of St.

Agnes' Eve so that ultimately the delightful warmth of happy love is emphasized. The owl, the hare,

and the sheep are all affected by the cold although all three are particularly well protected by nature

against it: "The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold." The hatred of Madeline's relatives for Porphyro,

for whatever reason, highlights the love of Madeline and Porphyro for each other. Age is contrasted

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with youth; the poverty and self-denial of the Beadsman are contrasted with the richness of the feast

that Porphyro prepares for Madeline.

All the senses are appealed to at one time or another throughout the course of the poem, but, as in

most poems, it is the sense of sight that is chiefly appealed to. The most striking example of Keats'

appeal to the sense of sight is to be found in his description of the stained glass window in Madeline's

room. This window was "diamonded with panes of quaint device, / Innumerable of stains and splendid

dyes." Madeline is transformed into a "splendid angel" by the stained glass as the moonlight shines

through it:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven: — Porphyro grew faint:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Keats put a stained glass window in Madeline's room in order to glorify her and put her firmly at the

center of his story.

The concluding stanza of the poem raises a problem. Why does Keats have Angela, who had helped

Porphyro and Madeline achieve a happy issue to their love, and the Beadsman, who had nothing to

do with it, die at the end of the story? Their death does not come as a total surprise, for earlier in the

poem Keats implied that both might die soon. Possibly Keats, looking beyond the end of his story,

saw that Angela would be punished for not reporting the presence of Porphyro in the castle and for

helping him. Death removes her from the reach of punishment. Keats may have used the death of

the Beadsman, to whom he had devoted two and a half stanzas at the beginning of the poem, to

close off his story. And so the Beadsman "For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold." Keats

needed a good concluding stanza to his poem, whose main characters disappear from the scene in

the next to last stanza, and so the lives of his two minor characters end with the end of the poem.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,     Alone and palely loitering;The sedge is wither'd from the lake,    And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,    So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel's granary is full,    And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,    With anguish moist and fever dew;And on thy cheek a fading rose    Fast withereth too.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

I met a lady in the meads    Full beautiful, a faery's child;Her hair was long, her foot was light,    And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,    And nothing else saw all day long;For sideways would she lean, and sing    A faery's song.

I made a garland for her head,    And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;She look'd at me as she did love,    And made sweet moan

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

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    And honey wild, and manna dew;And sure in language strange she said,    I love thee true.

She took me to her elfin grot,    And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,And there I shut her wild sad eyes--    So kiss'd to sleep.

And there we slumber'd on the moss,    And there I dream'd, ah woe betide,The latest dream I ever dream'd    On the cold hill side.

    Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;Who cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merci    Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam    With horrid warning gaped wide,And I awoke, and found me here    On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here    Alone and palely loitering,Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,    And no birds sing.

An unidentified speaker asks a knight what afflicts him. The knight is pale, haggard, and obviously dying. "And on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast withereth too — ." The knight answers that he met a beautiful lady, "a faery's child" who had looked at him as if she loved him. When he set her on his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had sung him to sleep. In his sleep he had nightmarish dreams. Pale kings, princes, and warriors told him that he had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady. When he awoke, the lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.

Analysis

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. Keats uses

the so-called ballad stanza, a quatrain in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. The

shortening of the fourth line in each stanza of Keats' poem makes the stanza seem a self-contained

unit, gives the ballad a deliberate and slow movement, and is pleasing to the ear. Keats uses a

number of the stylistic characteristics of the ballad, such as simplicity of language, repetition, and

absence of details; like some of the old ballads, it deals with the supernatural. Keats' economical

manner of telling a story in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is the direct opposite of his lavish manner

in The Eve of St. Agnes. Part of the fascination exerted by the poem comes from Keats' use of

understatement.

Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is appropriate to it:

"The sedge has wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing!" The repetition of these two lines, with

minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate knight

and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning.

In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or the knight, or the

destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in his poem contributes as much to it in

arousing the reader's imagination as what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful

lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a Circelike figure who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her

supernatural powers. She destroys because it is her nature to destroy. Keats could have found

patterns for his "faery's child" in folk mythology, classical literature, Renaissance poetry, or the

medieval ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a woman who is at once beautiful, erotically

attractive, fascinating, and deadly.

Some readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains of love. In his letters and in

some of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and

that he resented the pains, particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love. However,

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the ballad is a very objective form, and it may be best to read "La Belle Dame sans Merci" as pure

story and no more. How Keats felt about his love for Fanny Brawne we can discover in the several

poems he addressed to her, as well as in his letters.

."La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a literary ballad, a poem that imitates a folk ballad. A folk ballad tells a story on a theme popular with the common people of a particular culture or place. Generally of unknown authorship, a folk ballad passes by word of mouth from one generation to the next. One of its key characteristics is a cadence that makes it easy to set to

music and sing. .......A literary ballad has a known author who composes the poem with careful deliberation according to sophisticated conventions. Like the folk ballad, it tells a story with a popular theme. However, accomplished nineteenth-century romantic poets such as Keats couched literary ballads in more elegant language than that of typical folk ballads. “La Belle

Dame Sans Merci” is intended to be read, not sung. .......Keats completed the poem in April 1819. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), a critic and poet, published a revised version of the poem in his literary periodical, The Indicator, in 1820. The original version is generally regarded as superior to the altered version.

The Title

.......John Keats based the title of his literary ballad on the title of a long French poem with a different story. The title of the latter poem, written in 1424 by Alain Chartier (1392-1433), is “La Belle Dame sans mercy.” (Notice the different spelling of the last word.) As a feminine noun, the French word merci means pity or mercy. As a masculine noun, it means thanks. The translation of the title is “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy.”

Setting

.......The time is late autumn. The place is England during the Age of Chivalry. A lovesick knight tells an unidentified person about a beautiful “faery's child” he met in a meadow.

Themes

Interpretation 1: Unrequited Love

.......After telling the knight she loves him, the beautiful lady lulls him to sleep and abandons him. As he sits alone on a cold hillside, his unrequited love makes him physically ill. He lacks the energy and will to move on. All he can do is brood. 

Interpretation 2: Impossible Love

.......Line 30 of the poem says, "And there she wept and sighed full sore." The suggestion here is that the lady does care for the knight but realizes she must leave him because she is a fairy and he is a human. Two such beings cannot have a life together. This theme can apply to any man and woman who love each other but cannot marry because of cultural,

religious, or social barriers or any other impediment.  .......Be aware that lines 37-44 bring into question the validity of this interpretation. However, it may well be that the fairy lady, depressed and lonely in her elfin grot (line 29) became enamored of kings, princes, and other knights in previous

decades or centuries. . Interpretation 3: Terminal Illness

.......In the summer of 1818, Keats began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis, a disease that had already infected his younger brother, Tom, who died in December of that year. Exactly when Keats became aware that he was suffering from a killer disease is uncertain. But, as an observer of his brother's symptoms and as a trained apothecary who had worked in hospitals, Keats must have suspected that his own symptoms were an ominous sign. Consequently, when he wrote “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in the spring of 1819, he might have intended the beautiful woman as a symbol for the life, which was slowly slipping away from him. During this time, he must have felt like the knight sitting on the cold hill—pale, feverish, and alone. He lasted less than two more years, dying in February 1821.

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Ode to a Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains     My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,    But being too happy in thine happiness,--        That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees            In some melodious plot    Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,        Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been    Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,Tasting of Flora and the country green,    Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!O for a beaker full of the warm South,    Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,        With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,            And purple-stained mouth;    That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,        And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget    What thou among the leaves hast never known,The weariness, the fever, and the fret    Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,    Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;        Where but to think is to be full of sorrow            And leaden-eyed despairs,    Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,        Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,    Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,But on the viewless wings of Poesy,    Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:Already with thee! tender is the night,    And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,        Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;            But here there is no light,    Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown        Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet    Wherewith the seasonable month endowsThe grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;    White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;        Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;            And mid-May's eldest child,    The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,        The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time    I have been half in love with easeful Death,

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Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,    To take into the air my quiet breath;        Now more than ever seems it rich to die,    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad            In such an ecstasy!    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--          To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!    No hungry generations tread thee down;The voice I hear this passing night was heard    In ancient days by emperor and clown:Perhaps the self-same song that found a path    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;            The same that oft-times hath    Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell    To toll me back from thee to my sole self!Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well    As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades    Past the near meadows, over the still stream,        Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep            In the next valley-glades:    Was it a vision, or a waking dream?        Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?

Keats is in a state of uncomfortable drowsiness. Envy of the imagined happiness of the nightingale is not responsible for his condition; rather, it is a reaction to the happiness he has experienced through sharing in the happiness of the nightingale. The bird's happiness is conveyed in its singing.

Keats longs for a draught of wine which would take him out of himself and allow him to join his existence with that of the bird. The wine would put him in a state in which he would no longer be himself, aware that life is full of pain, that the young die, the old suffer, and that just to think about life brings sorrow and despair. But wine is not needed to enable him to escape. His imagination will serve just as well. As soon as he realizes this, he is, in spirit, lifted up above the trees and can see the moon and the stars even though where he is physically there is only a glimmering of light. He cannot see what flowers are growing around him, but from their odor and from his knowledge of what flowers should be in bloom at the time he can guess.

In the darkness he listens to the nightingale. Now, he feels, it would be a rich experience to die, "to cease upon the midnight with no pain" while the bird would continue to sing ecstatically. Many a time, he confesses, he has been "half in love with easeful Death." The nightingale is free from the human fate of having to die. The song of the nightingale that he is listening to was heard in ancient times by emperor and peasant. Perhaps even Ruth (whose story is told in the Old Testament) heard it.

"Forlorn," the last word of the preceding stanza, brings Keats in the concluding stanza back to consciousness of what he is and where he is. He cannot escape even with the help of the imagination. The singing of the bird grows fainter and dies away. The experience he has had seems so strange and confusing that he is not sure whether it was a vision or a daydream. He is even uncertain whether he is asleep or awake.

Analysis

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The "Ode to a Nightingale" is a regular ode. All eight stanzas have ten pentameter lines and a uniform rhyme scheme. Although the poem is regular in form, it leaves the impression of being a kind of rhapsody; Keats is allowing his thoughts and emotions free expression. One thought suggests another and, in this way, the poem proceeds to a somewhat arbitrary conclusion. The poem impresses the reader as being the result of free inspiration uncontrolled by a preconceived plan. The poem is Keats in the act of sharing with the reader an experience he is having rather than recalling an experience. The experience is not entirely coherent. It is what happens in his mind while he is listening to the song of a nightingale.

Three main thoughts stand out in the ode. One is Keats' evaluation of life; life is a vale of tears and frustration. The happiness which Keats hears in the song of the nightingale has made him happy momentarily but has been succeeded by a feeling of torpor which in turn is succeeded by the conviction that life is not only painful but also intolerable. His taste of happiness in hearing the nightingale has made him all the more aware of the unhappiness of life. Keats wants to escape from life, not by means of wine, but by a much more powerful agent, the imagination.

The second main thought and the main theme of the poem is Keats' wish that he might die and be rid of life altogether, providing he could die as easily and painlessly as he could fall asleep. The preoccupation with death does not seem to have been caused by any turn for the worse in Keats' fortunes at the time he wrote the ode (May 1819). In many respects Keats' life had been unsatisfactory for some time before he wrote the poem. His family life was shattered by the departure of one brother to America and the death from tuberculosis of the other. His second volume of poetry had been harshly reviewed. He had no gainful occupation and no prospects, since he had abandoned his medical studies. His financial condition was insecure. He had not been well in the fall and winter of 1818-19 and possibly he was already suffering from tuberculosis. He could not marry Fanny Brawne because he was not in a position to support her. Thus the death-wish in the ode may be a reaction to a multitude of troubles and frustrations, all of which were still with him. The heavy weight of life pressing down on him forced "Ode to a Nightingale" out of him. Keats more than once expressed a desire for "easeful Death," yet when he was in the final stages of tuberculosis he fought against death by going to Italy where he hoped the climate would cure him. The death-wish in the ode is a passing but recurrent attitude toward a life that was unsatisfactory in so many ways.

The third main thought in the ode is the power of imagination or fancy. (Keats does not make any clear-cut distinction between the two.) In the ode Keats rejects wine for poetry, the product of imagination, as a means of identifying his existence with that of the happy nightingale. But poetry does not work the way it is supposed to. He soon finds himself back with his everyday, trouble-filled self. That "fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do," he admits in the concluding stanza. The imagination is not the all-powerful function Keats, at times, thought it was. It cannot give more than a temporary escape from the cares of life.

Keats' assignment of immortality to the nightingale in stanza VII has caused readers much trouble. Keats perhaps was thinking of a literal nightingale; more likely, however, he was thinking of the nightingale as a symbol of poetry, which has a permanence.

Keats' evocative power is shown especially in stanza II where he associates a beaker of wine "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim," with sunny France and the "sunburnt mirth" of the harvesters, and in his picture in stanza VII of Ruth suffering from homesickness "amid the alien corn." The whole ode is a triumph of tonal richness of that adagio verbal music that is Keats' special contribution to the many voices of poetry.

Form

Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with

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only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.

Themes

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression—the nightingale’s song—is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,     Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,Sylvan historian, who canst thus express    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape    Of deities or mortals, or of both,        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?        What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

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Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;And, happy melodist, unwearied,    For ever piping songs for ever new;More happy love! more happy, happy love!    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,        For ever panting, and for ever young;All breathing human passion far above,    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?What little town by river or sea shore,    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?And, little town, thy streets for evermore    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,With forest branches and the trodden weed;    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!    When old age shall this generation waste,        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Keats' imagined urn is addressed as if he were contemplating a real urn. It has survived intact from antiquity. It is a "sylvan historian" telling us a story, which the poet suggests by a series of questions. Who are these gods or men carved or painted on the urn? Who are these reluctant maidens? What is this mad pursuit? Why the struggle to escape? What is the explanation for the presence of musical instruments? Why this mad ecstasy?

Imagined melodies are lovelier than those heard by human ears. Therefore the poet urges the musician pictured on the urn to play on. His song can never end nor the trees ever shed their leaves. The lover on the urn can never win a kiss from his beloved, but his beloved can never lose her beauty. Happy are the trees on the urn, for they can never lose their leaves. Happy is the musician forever playing songs forever new. The lovers on the urn enjoy a love forever warm, forever panting, and forever young, far better than actual love, which eventually brings frustration and dissatisfaction.

Who are the people coming to perform a sacrifice? To what altar does the priest lead a garlanded heifer? What town do they come from? That town will forever remain silent and deserted.

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Fair urn, Keats says, adorned with figures of men and maidens, trees and grass, you bring our speculations to a point at which thought leads nowhere, like meditation on eternity. After our generation is gone, you will still be here, a friend to man, telling him that beauty is truth and truth is beauty — that is all he knows on earth and all he needs to know.

Analysis

Keats has created a Greek urn in his mind and has decorated it with three scenes. The first is full of frenzied action and the actors are men, or gods, and maidens. Other figures, or possibly the male figures, are playing musical instruments. The maidens are probably the nymphs of classical mythology. The men or gods are smitten with love and are pursuing them. Keats, who loved classical mythology, had probably read stories of such love games. In Book II of his Endymion, he recounts Alpheus' pursuit of Arethusa, and in Book III he tells of Glaucus' pursuit of Scylla.

The second scene is developed in stanzas II and III. Under the trees a lover is serenading his beloved. In stanza I, Keats confined himself to suggesting a scene by questions. The second scene is not presented by means of questions but by means of description. We see a youth in a grove playing a musical instrument and hoping, it seems, for a kiss from his beloved. The scene elicits some thoughts on the function of art from Keats. Art gives a kind of permanence to reality. The youth, the maiden, and the musical instrument are, as it were, caught and held permanently by being pictured on the urn. And so Keats can take pleasure in the thought that the music will play on forever, and although the lover can never receive the desired kiss, the maiden can never grow older nor lose any of her beauty. The love that they enjoy is superior to human love which leaves behind "a heart highsorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue." The aftermath of human love is satiety and dissatisfaction. In these two stanzas Keats imagines a state of perfect existence which is represented by the lovers pictured on the urn. Art arrests desirable experience at a point before it can become undesirable. This, Keats seems to be telling us, is one of the pleasurable contributions of art to man.

The third scene on Keats' urn is a group of people on their way to perform a sacrifice to some god. The sacrificial victim, a lowing heifer, is held by a priest. Instead of limiting himself to the sacrificial procession as another scene on his urn, Keats goes on to mention the town emptied of its inhabitants by the procession. The town is desolate and will forever be silent.

The final stanza contains the beauty-truth equation, the most controversial line in all the criticism of Keats' poetry. No critic's interpretation of the line satisfies any other critic, however, and no doubt they will continue to wrestle with the equation as long as the poem is read. In the stanza, Keats also makes two main comments on his urn. The urn teases him out of thought, as does eternity; that is, the problem of the effect of a work of art on time and life, or simply of what art does, is a perplexing one, as is the effort to grapple with the concept of eternity. Art's (imagined) arrest of time is a form of eternity and, probably, is what brought the word eternity into the poem.

The second thought is the truth-beauty equation. Through the poet's imagination, the urn has been able to preserve a temporary and happy condition in permanence, but it cannot do the same for Keats or his generation; old age will waste them and bring them woe. Yet the pictured urn can do something for them and for succeeding generations as long as it will last. It will bring them through its pictured beauty a vision of happiness (truth) of a kind available in eternity, in the hereafter, just as it has brought Keats a vision of happiness by means of sharing its existence empathically and bringing its scenes to emotional life through his imagination. All you know on earth and all you need to know in regard to beautiful works of art, whether urns or poems about urns, is that they give an inkling of the unchanging happiness to be realized in the hereafter. When Keats says "that is all ye know on earth," he is postulating an existence beyond earth.

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Although Keats was not a particularly religious man, his meditation on the problem of happiness and its brief duration in the course of writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" brought him a glimpse of heaven, a state of existence which his letters show he did think about. In his letter of November 22, 1817, to Benjamin Bailey, he mentioned "another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated."

Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity—when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the

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urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and bless   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;       To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,       For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook       Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep   Steady thy laden head across a brook;   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,       Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn   Among the river sallows, borne aloft       Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;       And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Summary

Keats’s speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the “small gnats” hum among the "the river sallows," or willow trees, lifted

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and dropped by the wind, and “full-grown lambs” bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

Themes

In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy” presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.

“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in “Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).

In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the swallows recall the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection directly:

When I have fears that I may cease to beBefore my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,Before high-piled books, in charactry,Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting “grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in “Melancholy,” abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To Autumn” beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The development the speaker so strongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.

Analysis

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"To Autumn" is one of the last poems written by Keats. His method of developing the poem is to heap up imagery typical of autumn. His autumn is early autumn, when all the products of nature have reached a state of perfect maturity. Autumn is personified and is perceived in a state of activity. In the first stanza, autumn is a friendly conspirator working with the sun to bring fruits to a state of perfect fullness and ripeness. In the second stanza, autumn is a thresher sitting on a granary floor, a reaper asleep in a grain field, a gleaner crossing a brook, and, lastly, a cider maker. In the final stanza, autumn is seen as a musician, and the music which autumn produces is as pleasant as the music of spring — the sounds of gnats, lambs, crickets, robins and swallows.

In the first stanza, Keats concentrates on the sights of autumn, ripening grapes and apples, swelling gourds and hazel nuts, and blooming flowers. In the second stanza, the emphasis is on the characteristic activities of autumn, threshing, reaping, gleaning, and cider making. In the concluding stanza, the poet puts the emphasis on the sounds of autumn, produced by insects, animals, and birds. To his ears, this music is just as sweet as the music of spring.

The ending of the poem is artistically made to correspond with the ending of a day: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." In the evening, swallows gather in flocks preparatory to returning to their nests for the night.

"To Autumn" is sometimes called an ode, but Keats does not call it one. However, its structure and rhyme scheme are similar to those of his odes of the spring of 1819, and, like those odes, it is remarkable for its richness of imagery. It is a feast of sights and sounds.

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