Overlapping Odes

When reading the Odes by Keats for class on Tuesday I was stuck by how much overlapping diction imagery and ideas there were across the odes. Perhaps the strongest and most central thing shared across the odes is reference to Greek and Roman Mythology. This is hardly surprising, given the roots of the Ode trace back to the ancient Greeks as John discussed on Tuesday, but what I found noteworthy was how the same aspects appeared in the odes to differing effects. In “Ode to Psyche” the speaker says “No altar heap’d with flowers…No voice, no lute, no pipe” (29-32) and “Yes, I will be thy priest” (50). The first of these lines contrasts sharply with “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which deals a great deal with the imagined sounds of “pipes and timbrels” (10). At first I was confused by this, thinking Keats was putting sound and music to totally different purposes. Then I remembered that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” also says that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” and speaks of “spirit ditties of no tone” (11-14). In a similar fashion as to how the music Keats imagines as he stares upon the urn is sweeter to him than actual music; he argues in “Ode to Psyche” that his poem, his dedication is a sweeter song for its silent nature, preserved on the page. The ideas of altars and priests from the previous lines also support this idea, as Keats assumes the role of priest in “Ode to Psyche.” While in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the speaker only guesses at “to what green altar, O mysterious priest” (32), in “Ode to Psyche” Keats becomes the priest, and his poem the altar on which he makes a sacrifice of his efforts to Psyche. The context of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” helped me make sense of “Ode to Psyche” and the interplay between the odes in general.

The First Stanza of "To Autumn"

The first stanza of Keat's "To Autumn" draws me in the most. I rather love the whole poem, but the first stanza is "tattoo-worthy" in its beauty, as we discussed in class. Firstly, the stanza draws me in because it literally looks chalk-full on the page. It's lines are of relatively even length and the lines themselves appear rather dense. This immediately evokes the image that the "swell" and "ripeness" put forth in the beginning of the poem (7, 6). Autumn is here, and the world is bursting. Secondly, even the very first line is perfectly poetic--both for the image it depicts, and the sounds it makes when one reads it aloud. The alliteration of the words "mists" and "mellow" contains a very languid breeze in and of itself. Because "mists" ends with a hissing "s" sound and so does "fruitfulness," the line also loops back in on itself. The line is plump: contained, but filled to the brim with loveliness.

Moving further into the stanza, I like that much of the description of autumn is in noun-verb form. Yes, there are plenty of adjectives, but Keats chose strikingly apt verbs and nouns. As someone who tends to prefer a more Hemingway-esque read, I always appreciate when prose or poetry makes good use of the English language. I had a high-school teacher who subscribed to this philosophy so thoroughly that she once said that "there will never be an adjective or adverb that you could not omit for use of a superior noun or verb." While I don't think she was correct in such a firm philosophy, she had a point. She would make my classmates and I go through our work (personal essays, poems, and fiction) and physically cross out every adjective and adverb we had. Keats' diction might not be that spartan, but his words all have a certain weight to them. Take, for example, his use of the word "clammy" in line 12. While this is ironically an adjective, I like it because I would never think to describe the insides of flowers as clammy prison cells. But, once I read the line, it struck me as though nothing could be more fitting. I think that is perhaps the magic of Keats: you truly wish you had said it first, but you didn't (and if so, only in some deja vu, dreamy echo of a way).

Life and Death in To Autumn

I think it's really interesting how in Keats' To Autumn, he is able to create a sense of both life and death. At first, Keats praises the beauty that exists in the fall and all of the wonderful things that come from it. He acknowledges the life that exists in the fruit that is "filled with ripeness to the core" (6), and he uses words like "swell" and "plump"(7). Used as verbs, these words bring the nouns to life, proving that he sees the growth that exists in the season. He, like the bees that he describes in line nine, appreciates the warmth that exists in autumn that extends over from summer. His first stanza emphasizes activity that exists in the fall without the mention of any endings. Keats makes the fall an individual when oftentimes it can be seen as the beginning to an end.
Continuing on in his second stanza, he addresses the beauty that comes in the fall just existing. Keats still finds the portion of the fall after the harvest beautiful. He appreciates the smell of the flowers, the appearance of the bare stalks of whatever grain it was in the blowing in the wind, and the overall calm and serenity that exists in this part of the fall. Although he clearly appreciates it, Keats begins to show us that even though enjoyment in the long days can exist, it does mean that there is an end coming. By ending this stanza with "Thou watches the last oozings hours by hours" (22), Keats makes his audience feel the slow, lethargic feelings of colder weather set in. Oozing isn't necessarily a word that one would use to describe a beautiful summer day, instead this word sets the reader up to be slightly more suspicious of where Keats will go to next.
Ending on this slightly discomforting note, Keats moves into the final stanza of the poem. He starts by stating that although there is beauty in the spring, and it exists in autumn as well, the autumn has more melancholic undertones to it. This stanza still appreciates the beauty in the nature of the fall, but by describing the "full-grown lambs" (30), we see an end to life. The spring would mean new beginnings, and the acknowledgment of their lifespan shows the audience that Keats is beginning to think about the end of his own life as well as the end of the warm weather, and the introduction to a colder, more lifeless season.

Youth is Fleeting

To Autumn is very beautiful poem where again, Keats addresses an apostrophe. In this poem, the speaker addresses the season Autumn. I thought it was really interesting that Keats described a season as a female figure who would sit on the floor and sleep in the fields. The third stanza struck me the most because Keats starts to tell Autumn not to question where the songs of spring went but instead to listen to her own songs. To me, it sounds like Keats was giving an admired friend advice which made me think, why would she need advice?
After going back through the poem one more time I realized that Keats was emphasizing that Autumn would soon be swept away by the next season, Winter. Keats lets the reader know this by offering natural images that will soon be gone. For example, the "full grown" lambs of spring, the "later flowers" that the bees enjoy, and the swallows leaving for winter migration in the last line. In a subtle way, Keats discusses loss and the cycle of life and death. It is really interesting to think of this poem knowing that Keats died at 25.

"Ode on Indolence"

The figures of Love, Ambition and Poesy grow less distinct throughout the poem—first they are “figures” (1), then “shadows” (11), later they becomes “ghosts” (51), and by the end they are “phantoms” (59). In this way they do “Fade softly” (55) throughout the poem---by the end it is believable that the speaker can tell them to “Vanish” (59); now that they are only phantoms, they might (the imagery of the clouds helps with this, as well). The slow fading seems to align with the “drowsy” (36), “dim” (42), “dreamy” (56) feel of the poem. It also has a kind of cyclical/repetitive feel with the motion of the turning urn the central event. For the first three sections the turning is almost aligned with the stanza shifts, as well---in the third stanza it is the “third time” (21) they pass.

There’s also just a ton of repetition in the poem that kind of makes it feel more circular or like it’s closing in on itself—dreams are mentioned a lot, and other images repeat—the flowers, the clouds---words are repeated, too—“shifted” (6, 8) and “pass’d” (5, 21) to “passing” (21) and then “faded” (23, 31) to “fade” (55). The repeated words definitely add to the dreamlike sense and give the poem a kind of quiet pulsing that might put one to sleep. In a sense sleep is a kind of forgetting--- it seems this is what the speaker is trying to do in the poem with the gradual fading of the figures. The overall arc of the poem pulses in a way too: the speaker starts out “benumb’d” (17) to the figures, and “Unhaunted” (20), then he sees and recognizes the figures and then they fade again (maybe as if sleeping, then waking up, and falling back asleep). It is interesting that he laments that they “did…not melt” (19) before they could haunt him when the poem then goes on to demonstrate the way that they do, in a sense, “melt” or “fade,” at least.

Perhaps this suggests that it is the writing of the poem itself that gives the speaker the power to banish the figures. He is forced out of his idleness by the need to write the poem and then it is only at the end that he can embrace again his “idle spright” (59). The final footnote has a quote from Keats: “the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence” ----This introduces a kind of paradox--- it is about idleness, but the indolence is the inspiration for the poem. The experience of it is the reason the poem exists, and thus a part of the work that went into the poem—which means that it isn’t really indolence anymore, though it is.

The way the speaker describes the figures throughout the poem is interesting, too---they  have “bowed necks,” are “serence” and “placid”---as though mocking the peacefulness that the speaker wants to have, or even did have before he noticed them. 

And another note on the central image of the turning urn: it is interesting that the speaker only mentions that the urn is turning—that someone is turning it---but doesn’t give any real identity to this actor by describing the action passively. Even the first line about what the speaker himself sees--“One morn before me were three figures seen”—is passive, which sets up the inaction of the poem. That someone needs to turn the urn—that Love, Ambition, and Poesy need an urn, even—suggests the speaker realizes that they need a vessel to work through, that they cannot exist independent of a person who loves/has ambition/writes poetry. Still, that he has someone else directly interacting with the urn (or just doesn’t explicitly interact with it) shows the disconnect he feels---“they were strange to me” (9). At the same time, he later realizes the he does know them, so perhaps this disconnect is something he is trying to force. He does appear to take more agency/demonstrate his power over them closer to the end of the poem as he tells them to vanish. At the same time  this control he takes to reclaim his idleness in a sense means that he isn't idle anymore.

The Individualistic Melancholy of Keats

Keats’s melancholy, as subject for “Ode on Melancholy,” is one that seems constant. From first stanza to third, even when not explicitly addressed, melancholy lurks in the background of the poem sparking (illuminating) paradoxes that the reader must struggle with. The poem’s movement, as well as its content, thus creates a vision of melancholy which grows stronger as the speaker continues to contemplate it.

The first stanza (not including the additional one added in The Norton) begins with a hint of anxiety and rolls into Keats’s warnings against succumbing to melancholy. The poem begins with “No, no, go not to Lethe,” the opening repetition reading like an anxious stutter or desperate plea to begin the contemplation on death. And the deaths that Keats enumerates are not only concerned with the body, but with faith, “make not your rosary of yew-berries” (5), and with the soul, “Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be/ Your mournful Psyche,” (6-7), so as to show how melancholy affects the ailed mind wholly. Yet the consequence that Keats postulates coming from these poisons seems to disregard their lethality. Instead of death coming, Keats says, “For shade to shade will come to drowsily,/ And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” (9-10), which hints not at an ultimate demise, but a loss of vigor in the “anguish of the soul.” This is the first paradox of the poem, and possibly the most difficult to understand. The Norton’s footnote regarding these last two lines states that they show “sorrow needs contrast to sustain its intensity,” which makes sense, but then how are the poisons related? Why must Keats lessen sorrow with death and not just further sorrow? I suppose I’m confused as to why he doesn't address the literal ends to the means he has described.

Following this vague end to the stanza, Keats introduces melancholy outright and as something unavoidably, saying, “But when the melancholy fit shall fall/ Sudden from heaven” (11-12). What’s interesting about these opening lines is how Keats characterizes melancholy’s coming into being, it being portrayed as something coming from the exterior rather than the interior where emotion is usually thought to come from. Not only that, but the melancholy comes from heaven, which suggests Keats finds something redeeming about it, possibly even something holy. After introducing melancholy, Keats describes it through the simile of a “weeping cloud” (12), which obscures spring (14) and also brings about life (13), thus at once spotlighting and hiding beauty and creating another paradox. This one, though, feels easier to grapple with because melancholy creates a new perspective and can force a subject to observe things differently via its veil. We've all seen works of art both depressing and beautiful and felt worthwhile activities dimmed by an unattributable sadness.

The final paradox comes in the last stanza and is almost a rehash of that in the last stanza. Here Keats moves melancholy from hypothetically existing within the addressee and characterized by the natural, to the realm of the metaphysical where “She dwells with Beauty” (21), “And Joy” (22), “and aching Pleasure nigh” (23). Thus melancholy becomes the bedfellow of its opposites and seems to contaminate them in some way, forcing them to die (21), leave (22), or become their host’s demise (24). Keats even goes so far as to write, “Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (25-6), suggesting that melancholy not only exists with delight but is worshipped alongside it. And thus the paradox of melancholy finding hold “in the very temple of Delight,” through mutual strength. Just as delight can inspire good will, melancholy can inspire a person to be insular and brooding. Delight can also lead to melancholy through disappointment of expectations, such as that of Wordsworth crossing the alps in “The Prelude.” Yet if The Norton is true in surmising this poem as describing “the tragic human destiny that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they are transitory and turn into their opposites,” shouldn't there be some attention to the lifting of melancholy? Just as joy and beauty can be transitory, so can melancholy and depression, but this idea seems to be missing from the piece.

Not only that, but melancholy grows stronger throughout the poem, progressing from not being mentioned in the first, to “melancholy” (11) in the second, and finally “She” (21) or “Melancholy” (26) in the third. And in the sensation’s final, personified form there remains a permanence that seems irreconcilable; its “sovran shrine” denoting authority and stability. And so in Keats melancholy seems inexorable, which could give reason to the recurrence of death in his works. Still though, this melancholy becomes something deeply personal and ingrained in the speaker, leaving the universal tone of the piece less than desired.

Fantasy’s Reality and Paradox in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”

What does one do with a sad sleepy boy such as Keats? Although I pushed back a bit on the idea from last class that Keats is merely morose, and instead proposed that he was very well aware of his “romantic” persona as dealt “on down through chivalry” in the Western poetic canon (from Chaucer to Shakespeare to even Milton), I do believe that this mask and this person can be, and maybe should be, read together. After all, is Keats really concerned with what is “real” – a real sadness vs. a performative poetic melancholy. His poems are filled with so many dreams and imaginings, so many fairies and fantasies, “the Queen-Moon on her throne / Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays,” (36-37), the pleasurable kinds that are still somehow wrapped up in Death’s cloak – and so we are led to the question: what is real in Keats? Fantasy seems to make one more aware of reality.

I’m leading class discussion tomorrow on “Ode to a Nightingale” and am tempted, therefore, to discuss the other Odes in this post not to give myself too much away; but this Ode is so wonderful and rich and I’ve never actually written anything on it so I’ll use this space (here, now) to pose some thoughts and questions before going “unto the breach.”

Paradoxically again, we’ll start at the end: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?” – the final lines of the poem. This question seems to be the final and eternally-there query for Keats in his poetry and letters. Even in his more “objective” narrative romances like “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” both of which we read for last class, the tension of sleep plays such a pivotal role that without it Keats might have no verse of which we could speak. “ ‘This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline…My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!’ ” muses Porphyro, in “St. Agnes,” hoping to rouse his lover to wakeful reality but taking joy in her identity as “sweet dreamer” (326 and 334). Keats makes a similar move in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” where the femme fatale is adored by the “knight at arms” for being a “fairy’s child” (14) but he is then hoodwinked and perhaps cuckolded after the sleep event brought on by her: “And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dream’d” (33-34). Even the “Ode to a Nightingale” features a “deceiving elf” (74). Whether one is waking or sleeping has immense repercussions in Keats, on both the identities of the dreamer and the other (presumably) non-sleeping wakeful one, and the reality that is built by both of them together.

In the “Ode” we have a more direct happening: Keats himself, perhaps, as speaker, musing on a “real” bird and its (his? her?) song. The “Odes” tempt us to read them more literally – or more rooted in reality – than the narrative poems, perhaps because we have to suspend less disbelief to “understand” them, but also because the things that are being written about are “real” and physically present in some sense: the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, even the Psyche and Melancholy. Yet the tone of the poem is practically poisonously psychedelic: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as thought of hemlock I had drunk” (1-2). The poet cannot even notice or note what is around him: “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs” (41-42) – although he is somehow able to describe them in absence. His imagination gives him more than what the nightingale has – joy, yes, but too much happiness – and it also takes as much away. “I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,” the poet claims, vs. the bird who is immortal and “was not born for death” (61). The bird represents a kind of life and “happy lot,” but it cannot imagine: it represents a fading away into the unreal forest, a loss of life that is not death, but not living either (20).