poetry_study_guides - keats’s odes.doc
TRANSCRIPT
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Context
In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring
poems in the English language. Among his greatest achievements is hissequence of six lyric odes, written between March and September 1819—
astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keats’s poetic
achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which it ended:
He died barely a year after finishing the ode “To Autumn,” in February 1821.
Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he
was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to
tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he was
fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually he went
to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty, he abandoned his
medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book
of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential
magazine, and his second book attracted comparatively little notice when it
appeared the next year. Keats’s brother Tom died of tuberculosis in
December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in Hampstead.
In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During
this time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that
enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he
died. His health and his finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in
the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer climate might restore his health. He
never returned home. His death brought to an untimely end one of the most
extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century—indeed, one of the
most extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved
widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his
tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”), but he was
sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his
death, he remarked that he believed he would be among “the English poets”when he had died.
Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century
Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and
imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas
and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic
concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and
creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the
transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which
the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their
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expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations—
though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats’s.
Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story—there is no unifying “plot”and no recurring characters—and there is little evidence that Keats intended
them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary
number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The
odes explore and develop the same themes, partake of many of the same
approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way, exhibit an
unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do
not stand on their own—they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of
the sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed wholly or partially
from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to read. There has
been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat the voices that speak the
poems—are they meant to be read as though a single person speaks them
all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode?
There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question
itself is wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is unmistakably
Keats’s own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it is
unlikely that all the events really happened to Keats), but given their sincerityand their shared frame of thematic reference, there is no reason to think that
they do not come from the same part of Keats’s mind—that is to say, that they
are not all told by the same part of Keats’s reflected self. In that sense, there
is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same
voice. The psychological progress from “Ode on Indolence” to “To Autumn” is
intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to
imagine that the odes are spoken by a sequence of fictional characters. When
you think of “the speaker” of these poems, think of Keats as he would have
imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speaker’s trajectory
from the numb drowsiness of “Indolence” to the quiet wisdom of “Autumn,” try
to hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of Keats’s
extraordinary language.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
The Inevitability of Death
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Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death
and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred
every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a
lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of
great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing
the Elgin Marbles” (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long
enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great as Shakespeare or
John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic
achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to
understand—and surpass—the work of his predecessors. Hovering near this
dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and
terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the
mournful1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”
The Contemplation of Beauty
In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of
delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can
choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects
and landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian
Urn”), books (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting
Down to Read King Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a
Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”
[1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep
demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first
book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” envies
the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel
because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed
their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they
shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful.The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having
experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker
changes, grows old, and eventually dies.
Motifs
Departures and Reveries
In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a
transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the
speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a
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new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful
object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to
depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility
or rationality, is part of Keats’s concept of negative capability. In “Bright star,would I were stedfast as thou art,” the speaker imagines a state of “sweet
unrest” (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his lover’s breast
forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have
experiences and insights that they can then impart into poetry once they’ve
returned to conscious life. Keats explored the relationship between visions
and poetry in “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”
The Five Senses and Art
Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connectedwith various types of art. The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes
the pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another,
musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the
figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the
sides of the urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can
touch them by holding the vessel. Although the poem associates sight and
sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear the music.
Similarly, the speaker in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” compares
hearing Homer’s words to “pure serene” (7) air so that reading, or seeing,
becomes associating with breathing, or smelling. In “Ode to a Nightingale,”
the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that he might
adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five
senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the
production of worthwhile art.
The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker
In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the work—
that is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader
recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention
or explanation of the poet. Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an
object that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of
that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and
indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas
until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in
quotation marks. Since the poem’s publication in1820
, critics have theorized
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about who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one
or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the poet is so
complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and troubling.
Symbols
Music and Musicians
Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry
and poets. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes
musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by
using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of
“To Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to
sing. Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as
spring, the season of flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses
the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art.
Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of
using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music
represents the ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings
who will eventually die, we can delay death through the timelessness of
music, poetry, and other types of art.
Nature
Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of
poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care.
Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley, among others, to create extended meditations and thoughtful odes
about aspects of the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,”
hearing the bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of
art and the mortality of humans. The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy”
compares a bout of depression to a “weeping cloud” (12), then goes on to list
specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In “Ode to Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky
to find ways to worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star
becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and the moon rests amid a
background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from
which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes, symbols,
and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe.
The Ancient World
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Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer
poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a
mythical world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from
ancient mythology to populate poems, such as “Ode to Psyche” and “ToHomer” (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the
Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting,
temporary nature of life. In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of
permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several
centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from
Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death
of Keats or another writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keats’s
great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats quietly
prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”
Ode on Indolence
Summary
In the first stanza, Keats’s speaker describes a vision he had one morning of
three strange figures wearing white robes and “placid sandals.” The figures
passed by in profile, and the speaker describes their passing by comparing
them to figures carved into the side of a marble urn, or vase. When the last
figure passed by, the first figure reappeared, just as would happen if one
turned a vase carved with figures before one’s eyes.
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the figures directly, asking them
how it was that he did not recognize them and how they managed to sneak up
on him. He suspects them of trying to “steal away, and leave without a task”
his “idle days,” and goes on to describe how he passed the morning before
their arrival: by lazily enjoying the summer day in a sort of sublime numbness.
He asks the figures why they did not disappear and leave him to this indolent
nothingness.
In the third stanza, the figures pass by for a third time. The speaker feels a
powerful urge to rise up and follow them, because he now recognizes them:
the first is a “fair maid,” Love; the second is pale-cheeked Ambition; and the
third, whom the speaker seems to love despite himself, is the unmeek
maiden, the demon Poesy, or poetry. When the figures disappear in the fourth
stanza, the speaker again aches to follow them, but he says that the urge is
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folly: Love is fleeting, Ambition is mortal, and Poesy has nothing to offer that
compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by “busy common-sense.”
In the fifth stanza, the speaker laments again the figures’ third passing,describing his morning before their arrival, when his soul seemed a green
lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows, and sunbeams. There were clouds in
the sky but no rain fell, and the open window let in the warmth of the day and
the music of birdsong. The speaker tells the figures they were right to leave,
for they had failed to rouse him. In the sixth stanza, he bids them adieu and
asserts again that Love, Ambition, and Poesy are not enough to make him
raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He bids them farewell and tells
them he has an ample supply of visions; then he orders them to vanish and
never return.
Form
Like all the other odes but “To Autumn” and “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on
Indolence” is written in ten-line stanzas, in a relatively precise iambic
pentameter. Like the others (again, with the exception of “Ode to Psyche”), its
stanzas are composed of two parts: an opening four-line sequence of
alternating rhymed lines (ABAB), and a six-line sequence with a variable
rhyme scheme (in stanzas one through four, CDECDE; in stanza five,
CDEDCE; in stanza six, CDECED).
Themes
Chronologically, the “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode. It was
composed in the spring of 1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few
months before “To Autumn.” However, when the odes are grouped together
as a sequence, “Indolence” is often placed first in the group—an arrangement
that makes sense, considering that “Indolence” raises the glimmerings of
themes explored more fully in the other five poems, and seems to portray the
speaker’s first struggle with the problems and ideas of the other odes. The
story of “Indolence” is extraordinarily simple—a young man spends a drowsy
summer morning lazing about, until he is startled by a vision of Love,
Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow
the figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning
outweigh the temptations of love, ambition, and poetry.
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So the principal theme of “Ode on Indolence” holds that the pleasant
numbness of the speaker’s indolence is a preferable state to the more
excitable states of love, ambition, and poetry. One of the great themes of
Keats’s odes is that of the anguish of mortality—the pain and frustrationcaused by the changes and endings inevitable in human life, which are
contrasted throughout the poems with the permanence of art. In this ode, the
speaker’s indolence seems in many ways an attempt to blur forgetfully the
lines of the world, so that the “short fever-fit” of life no longer seems so
agonizing. The speaker rejects love and ambition simply because they require
him to experience his own life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of
ending (of love, the speaker wonders what and where it is; of ambition, he
notes the pale cheek and “fatigued eye,” and observes that it “springs” directly
from human mortality). He longs never to know “how change the moons” and
to be “sheltered from annoy.” This is why Poesy offers the most seductive,
and also most hateful, challenge to indolence. Poetry is not mortal and
changeable (Poesy, in fact, is a “demon”), but it is anathema to indolence and
would require the speaker to feel his life too acutely—thus it has “not a joy” for
him as sweet as the drowsy nothingness of indolence.
Though the poem ends on a note of rejection, the persistence of the figures
and the speaker’s impassioned response to them indicate that he willeventually have to raise his head from the grass and confront Love, Ambition,
and Poesy more directly—a confrontation embodied in the other five odes,
where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality,
imagination, and art. Many of the ideas and images in “Ode on Indolence”
anticipate more developed ideas and images in the later odes. Each ode finds
Keats confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in
“Indolence,” he confronts three. The lushly described summer landscape, with
its “stirring shades / and baffled beams,” anticipates the imaginary landscape
the speaker creates in “Ode to Psyche”; the experience of numbness
anticipates the aesthetic numbness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the
anguished numbness of “Ode on Melancholy”; the birdsong of the “throstle’s
lay” anticipates the nightingale and the swallows of “To Autumn.” The Grecian
dress of the figures and their urn-like procession anticipate the “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” and also cast back to an earlier poem, “On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles,” in which the speaker’s confrontation with some ancient Greek
sculptures makes him feel overwhelmed by his own mortality. (The “Phidian
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lore” the speaker refers to at the end of the first stanza is a direct reference to
the earlier poem: Phidias was the sculptor who made the Elgin marbles.)
In this way, the “Ode on Indolence” makes a sort of preface to the other odes.It does not enter into a dramatic exploration of love, ambition, or art, but rather
raises the possibility of such a confrontation in a way that casts light on the
speaker’s behavior in the other odes. Its lush, sensuous language, and its
speaker’s oscillation between temptation and rejection in the face of the
figures’ persistent processional, indicate a fuller, deeper, and more acutely felt
poetic exploration to come. But for now, the speaker is content to let the
figures fade and to give himself wholly to the numb dreaminess of his
indolence.
Ode to Psyche
Summary
Keats’s speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess Psyche,
urging her to hear his words, and asking that she forgive him for singing to her
her own secrets. He says that while wandering through the forest that very
day, he stumbled upon “two fair creatures” lying side by side in the grass,
beneath a “whisp’ring roof” of leaves, surrounded by flowers. They embraced
one another with both their arms and wings, and though their lips did not
touch, they were close to one another and ready “past kisses to outnumber.”
The speaker says he knew the winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He
answers his own question: She was Psyche.
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses Psyche again, describing her as
the youngest and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods and goddesses. He
believes this, he says, despite the fact that, unlike other divinities, Psyche has
none of the trappings of worship: She has no temples, no altars, no choir to
sing for her, and so on. In the third stanza, the speaker attributes this lack to
Psyche’s youth; she has come into the world too late for “antique vows” and
the “fond believing lyre.” But the speaker says that even in the fallen days of
his own time, he would like to pay homage to Psyche and become her choir,
her music, and her oracle. In the fourth stanza, he continues with these
declarations, saying he will become Psyche’s priest and build her a temple in
an “untrodden region” of his own mind, a region surrounded by thought that
resemble the beauty of nature and tended by “the gardener Fancy,” or
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imagination. He promises Psyche “all soft delight” and says that the window of
her new abode will be left open at night, so that her winged boy—”the warm
Love”—can come in.
Form
The four stanzas of “Ode to Psyche” are written in the loosest form of any of
Keats’s odes. The stanzas vary in number of lines, rhyme scheme, and
metrical scheme, and convey the effect of spontaneous rhapsody rather than
considered form. Lines are iambic, but vary from dimeter to pentameter; the
most common rhymes are in alternating lines (ABAB), but there are abundant
exceptions, and there are even unrhymed lines. (“Hours,” at the end of line
ten in the third stanza, is an example.) The number of lines in a stanza issimply organic and irregular; stanza one has 23 lines, stanza two has 12,
stanza three has 14, and stanza four has 18.
In the first stanza, every line is written in iambic pentameter except
lines 12, 21, and 23 (the first two are trimeter, the last dimeter). The full
rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFGEEGH IIJJ KIKI. It can essentially be
broken into five parts: two pairs of four-line, alternating rhymes (ABAB
CDCD), a looser seven-line sequence that includes rhythmic irregularity and
two unrhymed words (EFGEEGH, with the trimeter in line 12 and the
unrhymed words “roof” at the end of line 10 and “grass” at the end of
line 15), two couplets (IIJJ), and a final four-line section with alternating
rhymes (KIKI), differing from the first in that the “I” rhyme-lines (which match
the rhymes of the first couplet above) are shorter than the “K” lines, with the
trimeter of line 21 and the dimeter of line 23. (This sounds far more
complicated than it is; penciling in the letters at the end of each line will make
the scheme much easier to follow.)
The second stanza is shorter and much simpler. It follows a strictly alternating
rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF, and the only irregularities are metrical,with two trimeters, lines 6and 8. The result is that the CDCD section of this
stanza differs slightly from the others; the D-lines are shorter. The third stanza
has trimeters in lines 10, 12, and 14; other than that, the stanza is written in
iambic pentameter. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB CDDCEF GHGH. This is
relatively self-explanatory, except that “moan” and “hours,” the E- and F-lines
(lines 9and 10) do not have precise matches; “moan” rhymes roughly with
“fans” and “Olympians,” and “hours” rhymes roughly with “vows” and
“boughs,” but neither of these matches is as precise as the other rhymes in
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the stanza. If those rhymes “count,” the rhyme scheme of the stanza should
be written as ABAB CDDCDA EFEF.
The final stanza has trimeters in lines 16 and 18, and follows a relatively
simple and natural rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EE FGFG HIHI. In other words, each section is four lines long and alternates rhyming lines, except for
the EE couplet in lines 9and 10.
It is very important to note that the large number of irregularities and long
algebraic rhyme schemes in this ode should not be taken as signs of great
formal complexity. “Ode to Psyche” is much more freely and loosely written
than any of Keats’s other odes, and the fact that it is difficult to schematize
testifies to this spontaneity and freedom rather than to an elaborate
preconceived formal scheme. The other odes, though their stanzas and
rhyme schemes are easier to describe in terms of form, are much more strictly
ordered and make much deeper use of strict form than does the “Ode to
Psyche.” In fact, there is little to gain from long formal analysis of the Psyche
ode; its form is better understood in the loose and general terms in which it
seems to have been planned.
Themes
With its loose, rhapsodic formal structure and its extremely lush sensual
imagery, the “Ode to Psyche” finds the speaker turning from the delights of
numbness (in “Ode on Indolence”) to the delights of the creative imagination
—even if that imagination is not yet projected outward into art.
The basis for the story of “Ode to Psyche” is a famous myth. Psyche was the
youngest and most beautiful daughter of a king. She was so beautiful that
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was jealous of her; she
dispatched her son, Eros, the god of love (the Cupid of Roman mythology and
the “winged boy” of Keats’s poem) to punish Psyche for being so beautiful.But Eros was so startled by Psyche’s beauty that he pricked himself with his
own arrow and fell in love with her. Eros summoned Psyche to his palace, but
he remained invisible to her, coming to her only and night and ordering her
never to try to see his face. One night, Psyche lit a lamp in order to catch a
glimpse of her lover; but Eros was so angry with her for breaking his trust that
he left her. Psyche was forced to perform a number of difficult tasks to placate
Venus and win back Eros as her husband. The word “psyche” is Greek for
“soul,” and it is not difficult to imagine why Keats would have found the story
attractive—the story of the woman so beautiful that Love fell in love with her.
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Additionally, as Keats observed, the myth of Psyche was first recorded by
Apuleius in the second century A.D., and is thus much more recent than most
myths (this is why Keats refers to Psyche as the “latest born” of “Olympus’s
faded hierarchy”). It is so recent, in fact, that Psyche was never worshippedas a real goddess. That slight is what compels Keats’s speaker to dedicate
himself to becoming her temple, her priest, and her prophet, all in one. So he
has found a way to move beyond the numbness of indolence and has
discovered a goddess to worship. To worship Psyche, Keats summons all the
resources of his imagination. He will give to Psyche a region of his mind,
where his thoughts will transform into the sumptuous natural beauties Keats
imagines will attract Psyche to her bower in his mind. Taken by itself, “Ode to
Psyche” is simply a song to love and the creative imagination; in the full
context of the odes, it represents a crucial step between “Ode on Indolence”
and “Ode to a Nightingale”: the speaker has become preoccupied with
creativity, but his imagination is still directed toward wholly internal ends. He
wants to partake of divine permanence by taking his goddess into himself; he
has not yet become interested in the outward imaginative expression of art.
Ode to a Nightingale
Summary
The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb,
as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a
nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his
“drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather
from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the
music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing
his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and
like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into
the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire
to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has
never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its
consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale,
and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”
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In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will
follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but
through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already
with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlightis hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes
blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the
flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white
hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of
flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to
the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of
dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the
nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than
ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the
nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale
would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no
longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that
it was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has
always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he
even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the
word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with
the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away
from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can
no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking
dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he
himself is awake or asleep.
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 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
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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 meditationcauses 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
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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. Asbefits 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
Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and
addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It
is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow
time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He
wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they
depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a
group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could
be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels?
What wild ecstasy?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this
time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of
trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than
mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that,
though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not
grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the
trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their
leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,”
and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal
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love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes,
leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, thisone of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where
they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where
they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and
tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it,
frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again
addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of
thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain,
telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it
needs to know.
Form
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on
Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of
each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long,
metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part
rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines
of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second
occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one,
lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas
three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in
other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the two-part rhyme
scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes)
creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines
of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last sixroughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule,
true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not
connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)
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,
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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 theurn: 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
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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 simplybecause 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 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.
Ode on Melancholy
Summary
The three stanzas of the “Ode on Melancholy” address the subject of how to
cope with sadness. The first stanza tells what not to do: The sufferer should
not “go to Lethe,” or forget their sadness (Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in
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Greek mythology); should not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of
Prosperpine,” is a poison; Prosperpine is the mythological queen of the
underworld); and should not become obsessed with objects of death and
misery (the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl). For, the speaker says, thatwill make the anguish of the soul drowsy, and the sufferer should do
everything he can to remain aware of and alert to the depths of his suffering.
In the second stanza, the speaker tells the sufferer what to do in place of the
things he forbade in the first stanza. When afflicted with “the melancholy fit,”
the sufferer should instead overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty, glutting
it on the morning rose, “on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,” or in the eyes
of his beloved. In the third stanza, the speaker explains these injunctions,
saying that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked: Beauty must die, joy is
fleeting, and the flower of pleasure is forever “turning to poison while the bee-
mouth sips.” The speaker says that the shrine of melancholy is inside the
“temple of Delight,” but that it is only visible if one can overwhelm oneself with
joy until it reveals its center of sadness, by “burst[ing] Joy’s grape against his
palate fine.” The man who can do this shall “taste the sadness” of
melancholy’s might and “be among her cloudy trophies hung.”
Form
“Ode on Melancholy,” the shortest of Keats’s odes, is written in a very regular
form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza is
ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. The first
two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme,
ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending
slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the
eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas. As
in some other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Grecian Urn”), the two-partrhyme scheme of each stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes)
creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well, in which the first
four lines of each stanza define the stanza’s subject, and the latter six develop
it. (This is true especially of the second two stanzas.)
Themes
If the “Ode to Psyche” is different from the other odes primarily because of its
form, the “Ode on Melancholy” is different primarily because of its style. The
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only ode not to be written in the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker
admonishing or advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode;
presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In many
ways, “Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the beautiful descriptions of
nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of “Nightingale,” and the
philosophy of “Urn,” all find expression in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy”
is more than simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at
last explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain
in a way that lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of
“Urn” and achieve the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”
For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy” urges action rather
than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the eagerly embraced drowsiness
of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy numbness” of “Nightingale,” the
speaker declares that he must remain alert and open to “wakeful anguish,”
and rather than flee from sadness, he will instead glut it on the pleasures of
beauty. Instead of numbing himself to the knowledge that his mistress will
grow old and die (that “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,” as he said in
“Nightingale”), he uses that knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely.
Because she dwells with “beauty that must die,” he will “feed deep, deep uponher peerless eyes.”
In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing synthesis of
melancholy and joy, in a way that takes in the tragic mortality of life but lets
him remain connected to his own experience. It is precisely the fact that joy
will come to an end that makes the experience of joy such a ravishing one;
the fact that beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more
thrilling. The key, he writes, is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at the
heart of all pleasure—to “burst joy’s grape” and gain admission to the inner
temple of melancholy. Though the “Ode on Melancholy” is not explicitly about
art, it is clear that this synthetic understanding of joy and suffering is what has
been missing from the speaker’s earlier attempts to experience art.
“Ode on Melancholy” originally began with a stanza Keats later crossed out,
which described a questing hero in a grotesque mythological ship sailing into
the underworld in search of the goddess Melancholy. Though Keats removed
this stanza from his poem (the resulting work is subtler and less overwrought),
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the story’s questing hero still provides perhaps the best framework in which to
read this poem. The speaker has fully rejected his earlier indolence and set
out to engage actively with the ideas and themes that preoccupy him, but his
action in this poem is still fantastical, imaginative, and strenuous. He can onlyfind what he seeks in mythical regions and imaginary temples in the sky; he
has not yet learned how to find it in his own immediate surroundings. That
understanding and the final presentation of the odes’ deepest themes will
occur in “To Autumn.”
To Autumn
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 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.
Form
Like the “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza
structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as
opposed to ten in “Melancholy”, and each is metered in a relatively precise
iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and rhyme scheme,
each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is
made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of
the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme
scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and the second line rhyming with
the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme
scheme: The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third
stanzas are arranged CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza
serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second part offers room for
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musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic
division is only very general.)
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 andappreciation. 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 inthe 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
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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 be
Before 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 sostrongly 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.
Study Questions
1. What are some of the recurring motifs that appear throughout the six odes?
Given the chronological problems with the usual ordering of the odes
(“Indolence,” often placed first in the sequence, was one of the last odes to be
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written), to what extent do you think the odes should be grouped as a unified
sequence?
2. Taken together, do the odes tell a “story,” or do they simply develop a
theme? Do you think the speaker is the same in each ode?3. How does the “Ode on Indolence” anticipate the themes and images of the
other five poems? Given the speaker’s later confrontations with Love,
Ambition, and Beauty—as well as with such themes as mortality and the
creative imagination—does the conclusion of the Indolence ode seem ironic?
4. In what ways is “Ode to Psyche” different from the other odes? How do
these differences affect the poem’s attempt to describe the creative
imagination? Why might the speaker want to use his imagination for Psyche’s
worship?
5. From Psyche’s bower to the nightingale’s glade to the warm luxury of
Autumn, the odes contain some of the most beautiful sensory language in
English poetry. But many of the odes intentionally limit the senses they
inhabit. With particular reference to “Nightingale” (which suppresses sight)
and “Grecian Urn” (which suppresses every sense but sight), how do the
odes create an abundance of believable sensation even as they limit it?
6. The odes are full of paradoxical and self-contradictory ideas—the
attribution of human experience to the frozen figures on the urn, for instance.
But the “Ode on Melancholy” builds its entire theme on an apparent paradox—that pleasure and pain are intimately connected and that sadness rests at
the core of joy. How does the language of “Melancholy” strengthen that sense
of paradox? What does it mean for trophies to be cloudy, pleasure to be
aching, a lover’s anger to be soothing, and “wakeful anguish” a thing to be
desired?
7. On its surface, the ode “To Autumn” seems to be little more than
description, an illustration of a season. But underneath its descriptive surface,
“To Autumn” is one of the most thematically rich of all the odes. How does
Keats manage to embody complex themes in such an apparently simple
poem?
Bibliography
The best single work on Keats’s odes is Helen Vendler’s study The Odes of
John Keats. Many of the ideas in this summary were first and best expressed
in that book, and anyone wishing to learn more about the odes will want to
read it.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1983.
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“Their conversation is awkward, especially when she mentions Wickham, asubject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors).
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subject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors, 2002).
Footnote
The Chicago Manual of Style
Chicago requires the use of footnotes, rather than parenthetical citations, in
conjunction with a list of works cited when dealing with literature.
1 SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Keats’s Odes.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002.
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/ (accessed May 6, 2013).
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