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).
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