The Trials of Creation in "On Seeing Elgin Marbles"

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ records Keats’ wonder at the Greek statues displayed in the British Museum in 1817. Within this wonder there is a deep solemnity within the artist, which seems to come from the experience itself and not from the speaker’s life outside this moment. This solemnity begins with physical pain born from metaphysical entities, as Keats says, “My spirit is too weak” (1) and “mortality/ Weighs heavily,” (1-2). There is an internal struggle which deals directly with Keats’ inescapable death, something that even at this early age hangs over him, creeping subtly closer. This feeling of death comes to the speaker “like unwilling sleep,” a characterization that suggests a fear not of death itself, but of the inability to control one’s existence. Keats as a poet seeks to create and the statues he faces represent  “each imagined pinnacle and steep/ Of godlike hardship,” (3-4) that the process of creation brings with it. Keats sees his own fate in the statues, a life of slavery to creation. And his death as “a sick eagle looking at the sky,” (5) leaves him as the old king observing his former kingdom; the expanse of creation unfolds before him and he can do nothing but perish.

Later in the poem Keats find some relief, “‘tis a gentle luxury” (6), in his not having to create nature himself. In this way, Keats is elevating the status of the statues in front of him to the same as the creations of some Creator and raising himself to this comparison. Keats is witnessing the breadth of creation in his mind at the moment of the poem and equating it all, finding no difference in the creations of man and nature. And all creation forces the same pain to well inside him (9-10 11). But this pain is not inflicted, rather it is fostered by this experience. The pain is uniquely that of Keats and the artist, not one that is present in the sculptures themselves.

And what is most interesting, is the contents of this pain which “mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude/ Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—/ A sun—a shadow of magnitude.” (12-13). Inside, Keats experiences the physicalities of the sculptures “Grecian grandeur” alongside his own “[w]asting of old time” (13) which widens the disparity between his idealized creator-self and his currently perceived self. Mixed within this churning self-critique are more abstract entities like “a billowy main” (13), “A sun” (14), and the “shadow of a magnitude” (14). These first two aspects refer to the raw power of nature both in motion and stillness, the ocean “billowing” in its endlessly repetitive tides and the sun staring motionless at the earth day after day. So activity is removed as a cause of Keats’ pain, his feeling having to do with the inexorable power of creation both forces have. And the final “shadow of magnitude” (14) hints in some way to Keats’ vision of his own legacy, both foreboding and intangible. This shadow could even be that of the once-healthy eagle Keats compares himself to in line 5, his still-healthy wings creating majestic shadows on the countryside.

Thus Keats is left in internal turmoil pitting his need to create against his creations’ legacies. His future is a shadow, not a roadway or a river running, something definite in shape but unknowable in consequence.

The Absent Self Across Keats

What fascinates me about Keats always comes back to his “awkward bow” with which he ends several letters, notably his last ever written (980). During his life, and his “posthumous existence” Keats is “vassal” to not only Fanny Brawne but also, and most importantly, to “the burden of the Mystery” (978, 971). His uncertainty solely pledges allegiance to “the truth of Imagination” (965), yet he knows he must exist in the world and of the world, a servant of “mammon” (979). There is that awkward bow: it exists, but it is uncertain and lacking a completeness. Who can really be totally certain about uncertainty? Keats believes the true artist and/or those with a “complete disinterestedness of mind” – the Shakespeare, the “seldom appearing Socrates” (974, 976) – dwell in “negative capability,” which is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (968). How does one begin performing this Kirkegaardian leap of faith into the abyss? Isn’t one scared of the abyss “staring back,” to paraphrase Nietzsche?

To be truly uncertain, to perform the awkward bow, one must almost be so self-conscious as to totally sublimate the self – to let the self move among other selves, other forms. “If a Sparrow come before my Window,” Keats writes in another letter. “I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel” (967). The dangerous zone of “no-self” is desired by Keats – to annihilate the thinking “I” and flit, with sensation and feeling, from person to person, object to object, animal to animal. This is Keats’ Poet, who is the most “unpoetical thing” (973).

I object to Keats’ notion, which, in some ways, reminds me of thinkers from Gandhi (his desire to be “zero”) to Roland Barthes (Death of the Author). There is always the pen, but for it to exert force upon the page there must be the pen-handler. “There now I think what with Poetry and Theology you may thank your Stars that my pen is not very long winded,” Keats concludes a letter to his brother and sister (977). The vassal, the filter, the being-changer, the no-self self is still in some way a self, a person, an identity. When one claims “no identity,” one makes a liar out of the self – its an assertion of absence that is really a presence. One advances a type of selfhood that sees the whole world teeming and the eye through which the mass is understand as unimportant, awkward, an organ that needs to bow out. Imagination, sleep – to Keats, these exist in the mind but also on some higher plane, in the grand mystery that is both burdensome and celebratory. The subject of self becomes absent, or at least un-speaking, quiet, silent: “the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness” (966).

Here I’m unfairly conflating and combining Keats’ letters across years and to various subjects. It would be better to consult the poems, perhaps, for a “truer” sense of his vision and philosophy, if only because those works were intended for a kind of public consumption and separation from individual addressees. Two more notes from the Letters (for the Letters are really quite striking and tremendous): “I am however young writing at random – straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness – without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion” (975) and finally: “Do you not think I strive – to know myself?” (975). Randomness is still a kind of direction; and the knowledge of oneself may be a kind of throwing up of hands, a surrender, an awkward bow: but it is a bow made by a person, not a shadow nor a ghost, nevertheless.

In the early poem “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats writes, concerning sleep: “What is it? And to what shall I compare it?” (24). The subject: the writer: the poet must compare “sleep” to something or he awkwardly bows out and compares it to nothing (or, paradoxically, to everything). The poet desires complete loss of poetical “self,” instead wanting to merely be the vessel or the continuously copying Monk of the imagination’s Monastery (979). Keats notes that the flowers do not trot out their identities; so should the poet also not? (969). Yet the poet must: for the poet controls the pen. “O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen / That am not yet a glorious denizen / Of thy wide heaven” (48-50) – this is a complaint of the poet, not a description of “Poesy” nor sleep. The lack of metaphor, the complaint of “no comparison” above in terms of “Sleep” is also a celebration of the self: it is the poet who is described, his awkwardness and fumbling, not sleep itself. This poet-subject, even in absence, desires “an eternal book / Whence I may copy many a lovely saying / About the leaves, and flowers” (74-76). He wants to be the Monk and surrender to the darkness and its small particles of light. Keats, admittedly, for all his gestures toward surrendering the self and identifying with that “Other I” claims: “I am continually running away from the subject” (966). And running toward what? Perhaps a stable person: a body: a mouth that will eventually heave blood.

For what is really about the Elgin Marbles in that poem? “My spirit is weak – mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep” (1-2) – the poet’s weakness (thus the poet) is the subject, and that becomes a way of describing the “dizzy pain” of “these wonders” (11). Nor do we really understand what about Chapman’s Homer in that poem is so exciting to Keats, merely what the sensation of reading the translation does for him. He doesn’t even read the poem – Keats “looks into” it, he has “seen” and “been,” he “breathes its pure serene,” he “hears,” he becomes like “some watcher of the skies.” Every other sense seems to shine except that of understanding. For Keats, this is perhaps not a problem. After all, “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration” (968). The beautiful Vision is important; the understanding is not, for it can never come, at least not in a way that will stay fixed.

Then we run back into the arms of “Sleep and Poetry,” where, with a bit more lines and wiggle room than the sonnets, we arrive at the point where: “The visions are all fled …  and in their stead / A sense of real things comes doubly strong” (155-157). What is the “real” to Keats? Is it that which gives only pain and not passion, nor a mixture of the two? Does the real destroy “negative capability”? Is there no great mystery that burdens in the “real things”? Is it different from that “dizzy pain”? Is this, finally, what one makes an awkward bow to – not the vision, the uncertainty, but the sense of waking to discover reality, like with Adam, the real Eve beside? (966).

The Simplicity of Keats' Similes

Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is fairly straightforward and self-explanatory: it is a poem about poetry. It is a simplistic approach to the appreciation of poetry that is reminiscent of previous poets “change the world” mentality that we have seen before. The speaker begins the poem by stating that he has traveled the world and seen the “realms of gold” (1). He sets the precedence that few things can surprise or amaze him. While these lines may be beautiful, the intrigue of the poem begins on line 9 and is condensed in two similes.

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken” (9-10). The first simile compares the speaker of the poem to an astronomer – hearing Chapman’s understanding of Homer is essentially an exploration or discovery.

“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/ He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men/ Look’d at each other in wild surmise -- / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” (11-14). Again, this second simile compares the hearing of Chapman’s translation to a discovery of something unknown.

The emphasis on words such as “new” (10) and the description of first sightings is an interesting comparison to the speaker’s situation because he makes it clear that he actually has heard Homer before yet has never “breathe[d] its pure serene” until Chapman spoke of it out loud. This indicates the power that poetry has to change – or the power for the familiar to become novel again. This act of appreciation then becomes an act of passivity. In both similes the speaker is a “watcher,” (9) “star’d,” (12) “look’d,” (13) and finally is “silent” (14). This stands in stark contrast to Chapman’s “speak[ing] out loud and bold” (8). Keats seems to be playing with the idea of poetry as passive versus active – as if both experiences exist in the reading of poetry: the active interpretation of the poem, the translation and analysis, as well as the passive enjoyment and discovery that the speaker is experiencing in the poem. If this is the case, it presents a fun and ironic presentation of the poem in which the speaker is both enjoying the poetry of Homer, yet simultaneously actively presenting the reader with his own poem. In addition, the poem presents the idea that those on the passive side are literally left speechless and perhaps are not capable of doing anything besides existing in isolation and appreciating in silence.

Keats on Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

In John Keats' letter to John Hamilton Reynolds on May 3, 1818, Keats has brings up an idea that made me think of Tintern Abbey in a different way. (970 - 972).

In Keats's letter, he makes a metaphor which compares the Chambers of a mansion to the different steps of life. He describes the first part of our life, or our childhood, as one without any of our opinions or thoughts until we reach another part of our childhood, "The Chamber of Maiden Thought". This chamber starts out as being filled with light and wonder but as we get older and time passes, the doors within the chamber are all opened and we are surrounded by dark passages and mystery. Keats felts that Tintern Abbey was Wordworth's exploration of these dark passages.

Upon reading this, I decided to take another look at Tintern Abbey. The poem describes Wordsworth's return to a landscape he knew as a child. While describing it, he thinks of instances in his life when he was feeling alone or low and how the thought of the nature scene lifted him up. To Keats, Wordsworth was using the idealist views of the natural world that he felt as a child, though naive, to get him through the loss of wonder that comes with adulthood.

"But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet" (25 - 27).

"how oft - / In darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, / Have hung upon the beating of my heart / How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, / O sylvan Wye!" (50 - 55).

When first visiting Tintern Abbey as a child, he idealized the scene unknowingly. Then as he grew up and started to come to face the evils of the world or the dark passages that Keats mentions, he thinks fondly of the idealism of his childhood, or the way of thinking that comes with the first Chamber in Keats's metaphor.

The Cultural Implications of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

            The “Elgin Marbles” in the title of Keats’s poem refer to a series of Parthenon objects that were relocated from their original place atop the ancient temple to the British Museum by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s (Ward).  In the two centuries since Elgin removed the figures from the Parthenon, controversy has erupted over whether the museum should return these cultural artifacts to Greece.  Some Greeks believe that the marbles should be restored to the Parthenon, being an invaluable part of Greece’s cultural identity.  By demonstrating his existential experience in the presence of the Elgin Marbles, Keats makes an implicit argument for their placement in the British Museum.  For example, Keats suggests that the Marbles caused his recognition of his own mortality, which most likely would not have been achieved otherwise.  Therefore, Keats implies that the Marbles are important to Britain’s understanding of the impermanence of humanity, and can hold a place of significance in the British Museum.

            Keats denotes the Marbles as appealing to human as opposed to a cultural sensibility, suggesting that they can have a universal impact rather than one strictly related to Greek culture.  The poem relates to the common experience of all humans – that of the knowledge of one’s impending death.  Keats describes how, “each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship tells me I must die” (3-4).  The fact that the each “pinnacle and steep” is defined as representing an “imagined” vision of the might of Gods rather than one that is “real” suggests that the Elgin Marbles are extraordinary as a stimulus for the poet’s imagination rather than as objects themselves.  Keats feels small and fragile in comparison to the Marbles, referring to himself as a, “sick eagle looking at the sky” (5).  The fact that he refers to himself as an “eagle” suggests that he was once strong, but is now “sick” – aware of looming death but not able to prevent it.  In expressing this sentiment, Keats successfully encapsulates the curse of humanity – the idea one’s death is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In the first lines of “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” Keats demonstrates the disarming effect of the Elgin Marbles, for the objects cause the poet to realize his stead in the world.

            The poem does suggest the “Grecian grandeur” (12) of the Marbles, specifically connecting the objects to their culture of origin.  However, Keats specifies that the, “rude / Wasting of time” (13) has spoiled the Marbles rather than their removal from the Parthenon.  It is the effect of time that has caused a “dizzy pain” (11).  This juxtaposition of pleasure and pain is fitting with the contradictory nature of Keats’s poem.  Despite the fact that Keats’s poem begins as a lament, defining mortality as like an “unwilling sleep” (2), he soon views mortality as a benefit.  For example, he states, “’tis a luxury to weep” (6).  Keats may evoke the specifically “Grecian grandeur” of the Elgin Marbles, but the fact that he refers to the Marbles as being affected by time (and by elements of nature – “A sun,” “A shadow of magnitude” (14)) emphasizes that the objects have the universal quality of being transient.  Therefore, Keats once again demonstrates how the Marbles have a significance that transcends any cultural identity.

            Keats does not directly confront the issue of the cultural theft of the Elgin Marbles.  However, in writing the poem demonstrating the effect of the objects on visitors to the British Museum, he is participating in it.   Keats stresses that the impact of the Elgin Marbles is not muted by their separation from the Parthenon or from Greece.  Therefore, Keats’ poem can be viewed as an argument that the Elgin Marbles belong not to any country, but to the world.

Works Cited

Ward, Victoria. "Why Are the Elgin Marbles so Controversial – and Everything Else You Need to Know." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.

Ode to the Elements

While Shelley's poem, "Ode to the West Wind," undeniably has profound philosophical meaning in that Shelley appeals to the wind for help as he copes with the onset of time and fading intellectual influence, the poem is profound in a Wordworthian sense, too, because it is an ode to the classical elements. In the poem, Shelley depicts earth, water, air, and fire and describes the effect they have on him and on each other.
For example, air is quite apparent in the poem (considering the fact that the word itself is in the title). In canto I, Shelley references the "West Wind," "breath," "ghosts," "azure sister of the spring," and "wild spirit." These are all different portrayals of the ephemeral. Earth also appears in canto I as "leaves," "grave," and "sweet buds." These references are to earthly substances, such as foliage or the actual ground.
In canto II, Shelley begins to more intricately intertwine the elements and introduces water and fire to the mix. Water appears with "ocean," "rain," "black rain," and "hail." Shelley begins to stoke the fire in the poem with reference to "lightning" and "fire" itself. He sets the elements up in interaction with and opposition to each other when he splices together different elements into the same image, for example in line 17, he says that the wind "Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean." Here, he is essentially describing wind, an air force, tangling with earthly tree boughs that are figuratively in the air ("Heaven") and the water ("Ocean"). Further, the wind comes into this scene in a "stream" in line 15, which hearkens to streams of water, effectively mixing the two elements.
Shelley sets up more of these fusions of classical elements throughout the poem. The fusions perhaps help Shelley to express the cycle of interaction and reaction in nature, which has larger implications for his philosophical message: how do people and ideas change over time and interact with each other? How do they effect change?

Ode to the West Wind

In class on Tuesday, we briefly discussed how the readings for Thursday were Shelley's political poems. Upon my initial reading, I didn't quite understand how this poem represented Shelley's involvement in politics. The footnotes gave some suggestions, but I think ultimately this poem is about the helplessness that Shelley was feeling. Because he was in Italy when he wrote this poem, he most likely felt disconnected from the political happenings in his native Britain. The footnotes mention that "the spirit of liberty was said to have deserted Europe." It goes on to talk about how the West Wind would bring this spirit back to Europe, but I think this West Wind is actually pushing him further away from his native country. In the first stanza, Shelley is feeling extremely disconnected. The West Wind drives up dead leaves "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing" (3). This is Shelley claiming that the political figures who may have once been activists and causing some upheaval, have now given up on the cause, and are also being moved out of England. As one of the political figures, Shelley felt helpless in his position. The wind, another invisible force, is something he cannot fight.

Another thing I found interesting about this poem is Shelley's use of comparisons over metaphors. As in "To a Sky-Lark," Shelley again uses similes which I think makes the poem stronger. As we discussed, Coleridge and Wordsworth had a tendency to create really grand images that could be difficult to grasp. Although Shelley still manages to make the unseen forces seem out of reach, he still allows for more footholds for his audience because he uses several similes that create images that are relatively easy to conceptualize.