THE ODES OF JOHN KEATS:

A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

GHADAH BAKR MARIE

To

The Unforgettable Memory of my dear father

and Mother

Thanks to:

Many thanks to all the professors with whom I had correspondence through writing the book and I am pleased to mention some of them-Professor Kenneth Muir, Professor Stuart M. Sperry, Professor Ronald A. Sharp, and Professor David A. Kent. They have provided me with a number of books and articles, in addition to their own views on different aspects of Keats's odes.

Also, I like to thank my family for the continuous encouragement I received. An endless gratitude I owe to my dear sister, Dr. Hanan Bakr, for her kind help in providing me with up-to-date books on Keats, in addition to her dear advice. A great help was also received from my dear brother, Dr. Siddeeq Bakr. Contents

Chapter Page

Interlocution 1-7

Chapter One: The Irregular English Ode 8-27 and Keats: A Historical Survey

Chapter Two: The Early Odes 28-46

Chapter Three: The Major Odes: 47-68 A Unified Sequence!

Chapter Four: Sensation and Thought in 69-89 the Major Odes

Chapter Five: Imagery Structure of the 90-128 Major Odes

Chapter Six: Thematic Structure of the 129-141 Major Odes

Conclusion 142-144

Bibliography of Works Cited 145-159

Introduction

This book aims at a discussion of the major odes of John Keats – "Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode on Indolence" and "To Autumn". Points of view of many critics on these odes are surveyed. The thesis contains an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion.

The introduction contains a hypothesis of this book, its aim, the data and method used. Other works on the same field are also mentioned.

Chapter One is a historical introduction to the "Ode" as a genre. It presents two contradictory opinions concerning Keats's handling of the "Ode". The first opinion is that Keats's odes are but a developed stage of his experiments with the "sonnet" form. The second opinion presents the notion that Keats used the "Ode" as a literary genre as used by the English poets, principally by Thomas Gray, who influenced Keats at the beginning of his literary career.

1 Chapter Two tackles the controversy around some of Keats's poems – "Ode to Apollo", the four lyric interludes of Endymion: "To Pan", "To Neptune", "To Sorrow", and "To Diana"; "Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair"; and "Ode to May". These poems are regarded by some critics as early odes. They have features of the irregular English ode. Other critics, however, reject some or all of these poems as early odes.

Chapter Three discusses the debate on Keats's critics of whether the major odes form a unified sequence or not. Some critics believe they form a sequential pattern; others assert that they form a unity; a third group of critics read and assess the odes as individual poems.

Chapter Four discusses another critical issue, that of sensation and thought in John Keats, and their role in shaping the major odes. Many points of view on both sides are stated here. Essentially, sensation proved its predominance, in spite of the fact that there is development from sensation to thought in his poetry.

Chapter Five is about Keats's skillful use of imaging in the major odes-especially sensory imagery which established Keats's fame as a great Romantic poet of sensation.

2 Chapter Six explores the structure of each ode as complementary to theme. Each of the major odes has specific type of structure. In all these odes structure has a firm relation with theme.

The conclusion recalls the main issues in the book and shows Keats as a great poet of sensation whose fame is of permanent value. Also, it sums up my points of view on each issue.

Keats's Odes have attracted, and still attract, the attention of critics since their first publication. A large amount of critical analyses of the odes has accumulated, for they are regarded the peak of Keats's poetic life. Although written when Keats was barely twenty-five, they proved his poetic genius. His literary life span is only about five years and it is during the period from April to September 1819 that he wrote the odes. Their intrinsic literary value and their relation to Keats's poetic achievement are great. Hence, critics have investigated these odes extensively. Accordingly, each study of the odes tackles certain aspects, and thus many points of view are given. This book is another attempt to re-evaluate the odes.

This study aims at presenting the main aspects of the major odes. It, first of all, discusses the issue whether

3 Keats's odes are the result of his experiments in both the sonnet-sequence and the narrative pomes, or whether they fit in the traditional pattern of the irregular English ode. It, then, tackles the question whether these odes do or do not form a unified sequence.

The study also states the sensation – thought argument on Keats's odes. The functions of imagery and structure in these poems are salso discussed here.

The six major odes of Keats form the main data of this study. In one chapter reference is made to some of the poems which are regarded as "early odes". Allusions are made to Milton's "Nativity Ode", Collins' and Gray's Pindaric Odes, References to Keats's letters are also made in relation to his odes.

Some critics associate the odes with Keats's personal life; others study the odes in relation to other poems of the poet – especially the narrative ones and those written just before the odes. Another approach is to read the odes in relation to one another and to Keats's letters. Also, there are studies which emphasize the psychological state of the poet, that is, his mood when writing the odes. Other studies conduct a critical analysis of the odes as independent works of art. This study stands close to this last method.

4 Many books and articles are devoted to the study of Keats's odes. Among the books, Robert Giting's John Keats: The Living Year (London: Heincman, 1954) is a biographical study of the odes. Jack Stillinger's edition of Twentieth Century Interpolations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968) contains critical interpretations of the odes as personal view points of Keats's modern critics. In his The Odes of John Keats and their Earliest Known Manuscripts (London: Heincman, 1970) Robret Gittings gives an account of all the drafts of the odes Keats first wrote. G. S. Fraser's edition of John Keats, Odes: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1970) cantinas sound and significant articles on the odes. Helen Vendler's recent book, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1983) argues that Keats's odes can be read as a sequence. She tries to enforce her claim partly by using "image-transformation device in the odes.

In addition to these books there is a large number of articles an single odes. Here are some of the most significant ones: on the "Ode to Psyche", L. M. Jones's "The 'Ode to Psyche': An Allegorical Introduction to Keats's Great Odes" in the Keats-Shelley Memorial, No. 9 (1958) celebrates the ode as a starting-pint towards a better

5 way of writing the other odes. Another article is L. Waldoff's "The Theme of Mutability in the 'Ode to Psyche'" in PMLA, 92. No. 3 (May 1977) which tackles the "change" theme as the moving agent in the poem. On the Nightingale Ode, the most famous article is that of Rich arch Harter Fogle, "Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'" in PMLA, 68, No. 1 (March 1953) which gives a full account of the ode: another is that of Y. J. Lams, "Ruth, Milton, and Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'" in MLQ, 34. No. 4 (December 1973), which, shows Milton's influence on Keats in this ode. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" occupies, among the other ode, the major part of criticism.

Among the standard articles on the ode are those of J. D. Wigod, "Keats's Ideal in the Ode on a Grecian Urn'" in PMLA, 72, No. 1 (March 1957). This article discusses one of Keats' themes – that of the actual against the ideal, in relation to the ode. Another article as by J. O'Rourke, "Persona and Voice in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'" in Studies in Romanticism, 26, No. 1 (Spring 1987). O'Rourke handles "Silence" as developed in the ode. The last ode, "To Autumn", also has a large number of critical articles devoted to it. Among these are Michael Lillgate's "Keats: 'To Autumn'" in Notes on Literature, No. 5 (1960) in which he traces the development of the ode in terms of thematic

6 growth: Patrick Swinden in "John Keats: 'To Autumn'", Critical Quarterly, 20, No. 4 (Winter 1978) ascribes the poem's optimistic mood to the fact that Keats never mentions the dead leaves usually seen in autumn.

Other materials on the odes are found in books dealing with Keats's poetry in general. Such books are by famous critics on Keats – such as K. Muir, W. J. Bate H. W. Garrod, P. Gittings, I. Jack, E. Wasserman, B. Blackstone. J. Ricks, S. M. Spery, Sperry, M., R. Ridley, and E. Mayhead.

7 The ode is a classical genre, with its roots in English poetry that go back to the Renaissance. The ode has undergone many changes since that time. In the Ranaissance there were, in addition to the ode, many other literary genres-pastoral, elegy, tragedy, lyric, etc. by the passage of time, and by the end of the nine-teenth century, some of these genres disappeared. The ode, however, stayed.

Traditionally, the term "Ode" is reserved for any "Long poem, serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure")1(. It used to be of considerable length, and dedicated to celebrate a "solemn character" to announce the occasion)2(. Consequently, the ode becomes.

)1( M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Rinehart, 1957), P. 61. )2( Enid Hamer, The Meters of English Poetry (London: Methuen, 1966), P. 218.

8 The vehicle for public utterance on state occasions as, for example, a ruler's birthday, accession, funeral, the unveiling or dedication of some imposing memorial or public work)3(.

For John D. Jump, on ode is a lyrical poen which is complex in both structure and style, having a specific length and written in the form of an address)4( whose theme is general.

The ode is of two types: The Pindaric and the Horatian. The Pindaric ode is Greek in origin. It is of two types: the monodies which are sung by one person, and the choral odes which are sung y choirs. These choral odes are sung to celebrate festivals, religious occasions, and other important events, public and well-known. The prominent among the choral odes is the epinician. Finder (518 – C. 438 B. C.) was famous for the epincian ode. This torn means "the choral song in honour of a victory in the

)3( Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warcke and O. B. Hardison, eds., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (London: Maemillan, 1974), P. 585. )4( The Ode: The Critical Idiom (London: Hethoun, 1974), P. 4.

9 Olympic" or any other popular game)5(. Usually, the themes of the Pindaric ode are public and occasional.

According to Paul Pry, the Findaric ode can have either regular or irregular stanzaic form)6(.

However, it is famous for its three stanzaid triads: the strophe, the antistrophe and the epode. Strophes are "units of verso in a certain rhythmic, and chanted by one half of the chorus" while moving to the left)7(. Antistrophes are just the same but chanted by the other half of the chorus, moving to the right. The epodes are sung by the whole chorus at a "stand still". This triadic division is usually repeated several times. The Pindaric odes are also complex in stanza from, and are long. Each stanza contains twelve lines or even more.

The second type, the Horatian ode, is ascribed to Horace (65 – 8 B. V.) the great Roman poet of odes. The Horatian ode is regular in its satanic from, the themes of the Horatian ode are generally personal, reflective or

)5( Ibid. )6( The Poet's calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), P. 5. )7( Christopher Gillie, A Companion to British Literature (London; Logman, 1977), P. 681.

10 philosophic. Instead of the tradic stanzes of the Pindaric, the Horatian ode is homostraphic. This is why it is simpler than the Findaric. It is, considered simpler than the Findaric, usually brief and meditative.

Many points of corrarison can be drawn between these two classic types. Whereas the Findaric ode is characterised by passion and extravagance, the Horatian ode is moderate and economic. The themes of the Pindaric ode are about aristocracy, courage, and overflowing generosity, while those of the Haratian are about caution, moderstion and self-control. While the Pindaric ode celebrates festivals and choral songs, the Horatian prefers a quiet setting for quiet singing)8(.

The Pindaric ode attracted major English poets form the Renaissance up to the time of Keats. Regarding the structural and metrical difficulties of the Pindaric ode, the English poets tended to make some variations to suit their purposes. Michael Drayton, for example, mixed the native with the classic form in his odes "To the Virginan voyage" and "His Balled to Agunicourt". John Milton was a reader of Pinder, but he falt more free in using a simple from-four stanzas with variant rhyme.

)8( Jump, P. 9.

11 Ben Johnson introduced distinct changes in the ode pattern of his time. He "Englished" the "strophe", "antistrophe" and "epode" of Finder into "turn", "counter- turn", and "stand", following almost the same regulation. In a Jonson's ode,

The metrical form and rhyme-scheme of the turn are identical with these of the counter-turn, and with these of all the other turns and pounter turns in the poem)9(.

Similarly, the metrical. Form and rhyme-scheme of all the stand are the same, except for at the beginning of the second.

Abraham Cowley, in the 1650's, introduced the "irregular ode" for the first time. He ignored the Pindaric form and allowed each stanza to have its own pattern of line length, metrical form, rhyme-scheme, rhythm and number of lines. In other words, "long stanzas of irregular lenth and an assortment of lines with a varying number of metical feet")10(. Are the features of the new type of ode-the irregular English.

)9( Ibid, P. 13. )10( Ian Cordon, "Keats and the English Findaric" in A Review of English Literature, 8, No. 2 (April, 1967), P. 12.

12 This type was welcomed by many English poets because it was easier than both classic types.

During the Restoration add the eighteenth century, the irregular ode was "an outlet for enthusiasm, for irregular metres, for noisy rhetoric, even for the romantic imagination")11(. Hence it was a good opportunity for some poets to abandon the monotonous couplet form fashionable at that time. John Dryden followed Cowley in his famous odes "To the Fious Homory of the Accomplished young Lady Mrs. Anna Killigrow," "A song for St. Cecillia's Day", and "Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Musique".

Alexander Pope wrote an irroglaur English Pindaric, "Ode on St. Cecillia's Day". Deth Drycan and Pope found it worth while to write irregular English odes. By mid- eighteenth century, this now ode was a completely accumulated from which has established itself as part of the English literary tradition.

Cowley's misconception of Pindar was opposed by William Congreve. Asserting that there is nothing more regular than the Pindaric, he proposed to "expound the true

)11( Jump, P. 10.

13 principles of Pindar's odes")12(. In his "Pindaric ode to the queen", congrove approved the triadic stanzas.

Thomas Gray followed convolve in his imitation of the pure Pindaric ode. He gave it its genuine value as a gonre. His two great odes, "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard" are pure English regular Pindarics. Gray's attempt to restate the pure Pindaric in English was to release it from the irregular ode.

William Collins also contributed to the development of the English ode as a gonre. His "Odes" is a collection of odes to "Pity", "Toar", "Simplicity", and other abstract ideas. some of his odes are "overweighed with the cumbrous, craking machinary of the Pindaric")13(.

His "Ode to Evening, howover, is an excellent example of the stangaic Horatian pattern of the ode. Collins' odes bring us near to the threshold of the romantic odes-in theme, tone and mood.

)12( Beger Lonsdale ed., The Poems or Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (London: Longman, 1969), P. 159. )13( Edward Albert, History of English Literature (London: Harrap, 1979), P. 240.

14 The romantic poets, Coleridgo and Wordsorth accepted the irregular English ode as a model for writing odes. The true English romantic ode begins with Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality and Goleride's "Dejection: An Ode".

These two romantics added little to the irregular English ode, for they found the way already prepared for them. Hence we find in their odes:

The tone of… address, the meditation on an abstract theme, the serious and somewhat melancholy mood, the irregular verse…

The romantic imagery)14(.

From this we can extract five major characteristics for the irregular English ode. First, the from of address, or invocation. Second, meditation upon a natural scene or a human emotion. Third, the melancholy mood, which is serious in tone. Fourth, the irregular verse which differentiates this type from the two classic ones. Fifth, the romantic imagery. And we can add a sixth feature which is related to the form.

)14( Gowdon, P. 15.

15 Each stanza of the irregular English ode has its own pattern of line length, metrical form, rhyme scheme, rhythm and number of lines.

When John Keats (1795-1821) wrote his odes, all the three types-the Pindaric, the Horation, and the irregular English odes-were before him. At the some time, he was writing sonnets just a few months before writing the oden. Keats wrote sixty-three sonnets.

Thirty nine of them were in the Petrarchan form they include most of his early sonnets such as "On the Sea" and "The Grasshopper and the Cricket". The other sixteen are al Shakespearean. The rest are irregular sonnets.

Keats practically "disregarded the Petrarchan variety that he had employed exclusively before Endymion and substituted the Shakespearean form in its place")15(.

The first Shakespearean sonnets was "When I have fears" (written in January 18, 1818). After this almost all of Keats's sonnets were either Shakespearean or experimental- with the exeption of three sonnts written after the Peter

)15( J. Sendry and Richard Gimmone, Hohn Keats: A Thematic Reader (Longon Scott, Foresman, 1971), P. 24.

16 Chan model, "To the Nile", "To Alisa Rock", and "On Visiting the Tomb of Burns".

After experimenting with both the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean types, he wrote six sonnets of a rather odd form. The first three of them, "To My Brother George", "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Again", "On Hearing the Bag Pipe", all rhyme/abba abba oded /abba abba/, i.e., Petrarchan octave, Shakespearean Quatrain and a couplet. The other two, "The Poet" and "Sonnett written at the end of The Flower and the Jefe"also begin with a Peterchan octave, and Shakespearean quatrain and couplet/abba abba oded ee/. The sixth sonnet of this group, "On Peace" is quite odd. It begins as Shakespearean but ends irregularly,/ abab oded dde dee/.

These sonnets with mixed rhyme schemes reflect his state of mind at this period. He wrote three expert mental sonnets "What the Thrush Said" in blank verse, "To Sleep" rhyming/abab oded bcefef/ and "On the sonnet" rhyming/abca bdc abc dede/- which show Keats's rebellion against the major sonnet forms and his will to break away from them. His experimental sonnets "succeeded in

17 avoiding both the quatrains of the Shakeaspearean form and the couplets of the Peterchan")16(.

Keats was in search of a new compact verse form through which he could express his ideas freely and condensely. He was looking for a form longer than the sonnet and shorter than the long poem which would "give liberty and impose restraints")17(.

He has written both long and short poems. On the one hand, he had dedicated 4000 lines for Endymion in addition to many other long narrative poems, such as Isabella, Lamia The Eva of St. agnes and Hyperion. On the other hand, he found the sonnet form too confined to suit his own way of thinking. Both the long and short poems made him think of a form which lies between these two poles. Hence it is safe to say that Keats chose the irregular English ode form, because.

)16( Ibid, P. 25. )17( H. W. Garrod, Keats end ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), P. 90.

18 It required less sustained physical effort than a long poem, and because it did not demand a full development of though)18(.

The irregular English ode met Keats's search for the right form. However, this point is a controversial one. Critics are divided into two groups, the first argues that Keats's major odes developed out of the sonnet-sequence he was writing before the odes. The second group, however, affirms that these odes are lyrical poems in the traditional pattern of the English irregular Pindaric.

H. W. Garrod is the pioneer of the first opinion. He thinks that this new form (i. e., theode) is but an improved stage of the "sonnet". The milestone of this argument is Keats's letter of 3 May, 1818 to his friend J. H. Reynolds in which he introduced for the first time the fragment of the "Ode to May" (May, 1818). On this fragment Garrod made two observations: First, it is "the earliest poem of Keats which we can say certainly that he himself called it and ode". Here in the second observation is that

)18( Ian Jack, English Literature 1815-1832, Vol. X of Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobree (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), P. 116.

19 The most obvious circumstance in connexion with the form of it is that its fourteen lines less resemble an Ode than a sonnet)19(.

Having thus established this fragment as Keats's first ode and its structure as that of s sonnet, he suggests that this sonnet was the starting-point for the great odes)20(. He justified this conclusion by referring/Keats's letter to George and eorgins Keats (his brother and sister-in-law) on February-May 1819 in which he put the words "in cipit altera sonnta" just after finishing the "Ode to Psyche" (which appeared in the some letter). Then he declared:

I have been endeavoring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate (i. e., Petrarchan) does not suit the language over-well from the pouncing rhymes-the other kind (i. e., Shakespearean) appears too elegiac and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a passing effect)21(.

)19( Garrod, PP. 74-75. )20( Ibid., P. 80. )21( Hydar Edward Rolling ed., The Letters of John Keats. Vol. II (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard, 1958), P. 108. all quotations of Keats's letters are from this two-volume edition and hereafter

20 On the one hand, it is this "pouncing rhyme" of the Petrarchan sonnet which annoyed him, on the one hand. On the other, his trouble with the Shakespearean sonnet is two- fold: its alagiac feature and its unpleasant final couplet. With such limitations, Keats found himself too much restricted.

In the last three experimental sonnets, "On Fame", "To sleep", "If by Dull Ehymes" – which are written just a month before the major odes of 1819-Keats has two objects: First, to get rid of the end couplet; second, to break away from the three alternate rhyming quatrains which are "the source of the too 'elegiac' character which he minds in the 'Shakespearean' sonnet")22(.

J. Sendry and R. Giannone support Garrod's view point. They think that "Ode to Psyche" reflects Keats's mind. They claim that he

will be referred to as Ltters, followed by volume and page numbers. )22( Garrod, P. 83.

21 Overcame the limitations of the sonnet by stringing together several sonnet like blocks of verse, creating a structure fexible enough to develop a significant theme)23(.

Garrod, supported by other critics (mainly M. R. Ridley, W. J. Bate, Ian Jack) friends that the new form Keats tried in his odes consists of s Shakespearean quatrain followed by a Peterchan sestes, with some variations in the sestet. On this form, M. R. Ridley comments:

The creation of this stanza was a noteworthy technical achievement. It gave Keats just what he wanted as a vehicle of expression, avoiding the defects which he folt in the two sonnet form)24(.

Ridley's argument ochoes to a large extent that of Garrod. They both insist that the origion of the great odes was but a developed form out of the sonnets he was writing before the major odes.

W. J. Bateshares almost the same opinion. He describes this Keatsian ten-line stanza as a free form, a form "capable of extension of a poem many times the

)23( John Keasts: A Thematic Reader, P. 26. )24( Keats's Graftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development (London: Mothuen, 1963), P. 206.

22 length of s sonnet", yet one that was also "interwoven and complete")25(.

In opposition to Garrod and his supporters, Ian Gordon stated that the major odes of Keats are in the model of the irregular English Pindaric ode. He mentions that when Keats started writing odes

He began as a writer of an eighteenth century genre. When he went on, as he did in his work for the 1820 volume, to develop his ode-structure, it was on the basis of the Pindaric)26(.

Tackling the argument of Garrod (i.e., the letter of 3 May, 1818 to J. H. Reynolds), Gardon starts his opposition. He argues against Garrod's two comments on the fragment "Ode to May". Gordon states that it is not the first ode of Keats, for "Ode to Apoolo" is written earlier, in 1815. also, it is not in the form of s onnet, for the H. E. Rollins' edition of Keats's letters presents the ode with thirteen, not fourteen lines. Hence, a new consideration is demanded.

)25( John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard, 1964), P. 28. Ian Jack shares the same opinion, see his English Literature 1815-1832, P. 120. )26( "Keats and the English Pindaric", P. 19.

23 S. M. Sperry stands midway between Garrod and Gordon in arguing the source of Keats's ode. He says that it is possible to adopt the two points of view. In writing the major odes sperry argues that, he sees, Keats could have been aware of both the influences of the sonnet, and of the ode as practiced by earlier poets)27(.

Gordon's argument seems more convincing. In considering his opinion, quoted above, we can see that Keats's first ode "Ode to Apollo", was written after the eighteenth century Heratian pattern. It consists of eight, six- line stanzas. Here Keats followed the verse-structure fashionable in the eighteenth century. In a verse-letter to his schoolmate Charles Cowden Clarke in 1816, Keats wrote his famous couplet on the ode:

Who found for me the grandeur of the Ode

Growing like Atlas, stranger from its load)28(.

In this year "Ode" could have two possible meanings: it is either the romantic development of the Pindaric, or the eighteenth century Pindaric itself-in its regular or irregular

)27( In a correspondence with Professor Stuart M. Sperry (U. S. A. Indiana, Indiana University) on March 7, 1988. )28( Letters, I, 111.

24 form. We can trace in the work of Keats many quotations from Wordsworth's great irregular "Ode on Intimations of Immortality". He made direct references to Wordsworth's ode in his poems and letters)29(.

Gray's two great regular English Pindarics, "The Bard" and "The Progress of Poesy" attracted Keats's attention and influenced his "Ode to May" in which he, like Gray, expressed his wish to be among the great poets)30(.

Five months earlier, in January 1818, Keats wrote for the first time an irregular Pindaric ode "On seeing a look of Milton's Hair". It was to Keats, in 1818, an ode. Though Keats ever completed the "Ode to May", its opening lines give the impression of a Pindaric ode. Gordon thus

)29( See Beth Lau "Keats's Rcading of Wordsworth: An Essay and CHeeklist" in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 26 (Spring 1987), 147-150; See also Peter J. Manning, "Keats's and Wordsworth's Nightingales" in English Language Notes, 17, No. 3 (March 1980), 189-192; D. Bush, "Notes on Keats's Reading" in PMLA, 50, No. 1 (March 1935), 785-806: and Clive Sesom, "Keats's Accent" in The Keats-Shelley Memcrial Bulletin, 13 (1962), 43- 45. )30( Keats's Poetry in General contains references to many of Gray's poem. For details See Phyllis G. Mann, "Keats's Reading" in The Keats-Shelly Hemorial Bulletin, 13 (1962), 43.

25 invalidates Gerrad's comments on this ode and assorts that "to see it as a sonnet seems perversity")31(.

Indeed, the tone of address, the qualities of passion and overflowing generosity are all in the manner of an irregular English Pindaric ode.

Hence, the jump from an irregular sonnet to a fully developed ode is somewhat unwarranted, whereas the movement from early to fully developed odes is logical especially when this is supported by his successors like Gray and Wordsworth. These early odes, thus, are worthy of discussion, which will be done in the next chapter.

Subsequently, "Ode to Psyche", the first of Keats's major odes, is another irregular English Pindaric: long lines, uneven line-length (mostly short lines) and irregular rhyme-scheme, serious tone and romantic imagery.

In this ode Keats used irregular stanzas "to produce loosely the effect of a 'Pindaric' ode, and it seems…… that this effect is obtained")32(.

)31( Gorean, P. 22. )32( K. Allet, "Ode to Psyche" in John Keats. A Reassessment, ed.. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1958), P. 78.

26 It is the irregular English Pindaric ode, we can deduce, which Keats adopted in his odes.

It provided him with what he needed in theme and structure. His vacillation between the long and the short poems obliged him to think of a moderate form adequate to his expanding abilities and his poetic genius.

Hence was his choice, for he "found the right size of poem" in his adaptation of the irregular English ode)33(.

This rich form led him to the construction of long, rhymed stanzas flexible enough to express emotion, and disciplined enough to control the emotion in a suitable form.

)33( Gordon, P. 23.

27 There is much controversy about some of Keat's early poems, some critics regard them as precursors of the major odes, others do not. These poems are seven in member. They are, chronologically arranged, "Ode to Apollo" (February 1815); the four lyric interludes of Endymion "To Pan" (April 1817); "To Neptune" (September 1817). "To Sorrow" (October 1814) and "To Diana" (November 1817); "Lines on Seeing a Book of Milton's Hair" (21 January 1818) and "Ode to May" (1 May, 1818))34( .

)34( Some critics, as Robert Bridges and H. W. Garrod, list the ode "To Fanny" among the early odes in spite of the fact that it was writer towards the end of 1819, i. e. after finishing the major odes. This ode is problematic since it does not fall within the same time span of the early odes, nor does it fit within the consideration and assessment of the major odes. This poem is problematic even to those who accept it as an early ode, according to Garrod, it can be regarded as two odes since the first stanza differs in form and theme from the following six. (Keats, P. 79).

28 Robert Bridges regards these poems as early odes, describing "Ode to Apollo" and "Lines on Seeing a Look of Milton's Hair" as "chiefly or entirely of personal interest")35(.

Fred Inglish classifies the two interludes, "To Pan" and "To Sorrwo" and the fragmentary "Ode to May" under the list of odes)36(. H. W. Garrod accepts the lyric interludes as odes except "To Pan")37(.

Apart from the seven poems, these are four more pieces which, in varying degrees, claim attention as experiments with the ode form. These poems are "God of the Golden Bow" (and of 1816 or early 1817): "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern" (January 1818), "Fanny" (1818); and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" (1818). "Ode to Apollo" and "God of the Golden Bow" both celebrate the power and grandeur of poetry, and are decicated to Apollo. The former was written in February 1815 and the latter towards the end of 1816 or early in 1817.

)35( Quoted in G. S. Fruser, en., John Feats, Odes: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1971), P. 53. )36( Keats: Writers and Theic Works (London: Evans, 1966), P. 122. )37( Keats, P. 79.

29 Neither of them was published by Keats himself, and it was left to the discretion of editors to regard them as odes or as hymns.

"God of the Golden Bow", for instance, was considered a hymn because of its dedicatory tone)38(:

God of the golden bow,

And of the golden lyre,

And of the golden hair,

And of the golden fire.

…

O Delphic Apollo)39(?

Keats's biographer and publisher, Richard Woodhouse, however, called it a "fragment" of an "ode", and since was an extremely "accurate" editor, he must have known have known Keats's personal views on the poem)40(. As % Garrod observes, Keats would have been content to call either of these poems an ode, since both of them "at the

)38( For details see Garrod, P. 73. )39( Poem, P. 56. )40( Gordon, P. 19.

30 time when they were written, corresponded to his conception of what an ode was")41(.

Of the two poems, "Ode to Apollo" is a more elaborate ode. It is the only poem, among the early ones, written after the Horatian pattern eight, six-line stanzas a form current as an eighteenth century verse-structure. The theme of the ode is the progress of poetry, a theme a common in eighteenth century poems.

This ode takes much from Gray's and Collins' odes, its theme recalls many earlier imitations of the Odes of Gray, Colins and others on poetry, music, and kindred themes")42(.

As RobertGittings observes, this ode is so similar to Gray's two Pindaric odes that it looks like an imitation of them)43(.

Many references to Gray's "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard" are found in it. "Apollo". Also, Collins' ode

)41( Garrod, P. 73. )42( Douglas Bush, "Keats" in his Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry" (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1965), P. 82. )43( John Keats (London: Penguin, 1968), P. 75.

31 "To Evening" has an influence on it. For example, the first two lines of the poem.

In they western halls of gold

When thou sittest in the state)44(,

Recall two lines of Collins' ode "To Evening"

O Nymph reser'd, while now the bright-hair'd sun

Sits in yon western Tent…..')45(

Again, the last couplet of the sixth stanza of Keasts's poem

'This still! – wild warblings from the Aeolian lyre Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire)46(.

Is reminiscent of Gray's first two lines of "The Progress of Poesy".

Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake,

)44( Jack Stillinger ed., John Keats" Complete Poems (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard, 1978), P. 8. all references to Keats's poem are from this edition, cited here as Poem. )45( Austin Lane Poole, ed., Gray and Collins: Poetical Works, 3rd ed. (London: OUP, 1937), P. 273. )46( Poems, P. 9.

32 And give to rapture all thy trembling strings)47(.

These references show clearly that keats, at an early stage of his poetic career, was influenced by Gray's and Collins' Pindaric pattern of writing odes. However, when he wrote his major odes, Keats followed the irregular English Pindaric form. In the "Ode to Apollo", the form of address, and the apostrophe give an odic quality to the poem. Keats here addresses Apollo, using such words as "thy", "thou", many times in the poem. The meditative moon and the serious tone are obvious, and romantic imagery is presented in a condensed form. The theme, the progress of poetry, is important. All these features quality the "Ode to Apollo" to the status of ode. Also, Keats's vacillation between the Horatian verse-structure and the Pindaric theme reveals his search for a definite ode form for the poem.

"To Pan" is the first lyric interlude in the first book of Endymion "spoken by a priest who is making sacrifice on behalf of the shepherded to Pan, the rural god")48(.

)47( Gray and Collins: Poetical Works, P. 45.

33 Pan, in Greek mythology, is the god of flocks and hordes, "the personification of Nature or the Universe")49(.

The poem is Keats's favourite, it consists of five stanzas of moderately regular length. Garrod refuses to call it an ode, he calls it a hymn instead. The reason for his refusal is that almost all its lines are written in heroic couplets "save that six of its seventy. Five lines are reduced to three fet, and one line to two feet")50(.

In this ode, as in the previous one, Keats is still under the influence of his predecessors-especially Collins. In Keats's interlude, the lines

And through whole solemn hours doest sit and hearken

The dreary melody of bedded reeds)51(.

Recalls Collins' lines in "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson".

In you deep Bed of Whisp'ring Reads

)48( Robert Gittings, ed., Selected jeems and Letters of John Keats (London: Heinomann, 1966), P. 177. )49( John Warrington, Evorment's Classical Dictionary (London: The Aldine Press, 1961), P. 53. )50( Garrod, P. 77. )51( Poems, P. 70.

34 His airy Harp Shall now be laid)52(.

Pan, here, is the vital force that dominates natural objects on earth. He is discovered in variant froms: he is the power to give "heavy Peace-fullness", he shelters the "Bewildered Shepherd" the "leaved fig trees", "the squatted here". His function culminates in being

Dread opener of the mysterious doors

Leading to universal knowledge)53(.

Such descriptions give the impression of Pan as "full of the richness of the earth… touched with the mystery of the vital force binding all living things together")54(.

There is a characteristic feature in the ode (found clearly in "To Sorrow") concerning the form which is the reiteration of rhymed half lines at the and of each stanza

)52( Gray and Collins: Poetical Works, P. 291. )53( Poems, P. 71. )54( Aileen Ward, John Keats" The Making of a Poet (London: Mercury, 1963), P. 118.

35 which causes the "swaying movement of other variously chosen rhyme-schemes")55(.

This gives us the impression of a dancing verse moving to and fro throughout the poem.

The form of address, the apostrophe (the poem celebrates Pan himself), with Keats's quotations from Collins' ode, help us to see the Pan interlude as an ode in the irregular English Pindaric pattern.

"To Neptune", in the third book of Endymion, may also be regarded as an early irregular English ode, since the form of address is clear. The lines of each of the three stanzas are of irregular length and number.

The interlude is an address to the god of the sea, Neptune: "King of the stormy sea")56(.

Everything here is watery, the origin of the god himself is water, "O shell borne King sublime")57(.

)55( G. Wilson Knight, P. 268. )56( Poem, P. 136. )57( Ibid.

36 This line gives a touch of naturalism. The rhyme and half lines are found at the end of each stanza which cause movement in the ode.

On this interlude (and also on "To Dianna") Garrod comments: "I can discover no more then such morits as may be expected from bad work of good poets")58(.

It is true that such poems cannot e praised highly, yet we can, at the same time, find in them suggestive passages enriched with meditation and romantic imagery.

Because of its right rhythm and consistent reiteration of some lines, the lyric interlude "To Sorrow", in the fourth book of Endymion, is also called "Song". A wealth of romantic imagery both from poetry and mythology can be found in this poem. The "Sorrow" song "presents us with the theme of metamorphosis")59(.

)58( Keats, P. 78. )59( Bernard blackstone, "The Mind of John Keats in His Art" in British Romantic Poets, ed., Shiv, K. Kumer (London: Univ. of London Press, 1966), P. 268.

37 At this stage, a theme dominant in Keats appears. Here we find both sorrow and joy as "two inevitable states in our life")60(.

This alternation of joy and sorrow is conveyed successfully through the form of the poem; "a delicate humour is felt within the literary, yet also and, rhymes")61(.

What Keats suggests here is to fully actualize the soul, or potential identity with which each person is born, one must not merely passively tolerate suffering but actively confront it)62(.

And this is what the Indian Maid does in the song. She accepts sorrow as something inviolable, hence invites it resolutely:

Came then, sorrow!

Sweetest Sorrow~

)60( The source of this poem is a letter to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November, 1817 in which Keats questions the validity of truth and imagination: See Letters, I, 184-5. )61( G. Wilson Knight, "The Priest-like Task", P. 274. )62( Ronald Sharp, "A Recourse Somewhat Human": 'Keats's Religion of Beauty' in The Kenyon Review, I, No. 10 (Summer, 1979), 40.

38 Like an own-babe I nurse thee on my breasts)63(.

This early ode is really "better than everything, save the best of Keats")64(.

The form of address, the apostrophe end the romantic imagery characterizes it as an ode in the irregular English form.

As for the "Dianna" interlude, in the fourth book of Endymion, it celebrates Diana as "A fertility goddess")65(.

Many mythological terms are used in this ode, "Htesperus", "Caster", "Pollux",… etc. the use of these terms and of mythological imagery impede the easy movement of the lines in the poem. Still we can feel the gradual poetic development in Keats through it. The maturalism which characterizes the "Sorrow" ode is found in this poem also.

Again, the form of address and irregular verse qualify this poem to the rank of ode.

)63( Poems, P. 145. )64( Garrod, P. 79. )65( Everyman's Classical Dictionary, P. 193.

39 In these four lyric interludes of Endymion "To Pan", "To Neptune", "To Sorrow" and "To Diana", Keats attempted to write irregular English odes in the Pindaric pattern. The form of address, the apostrophe and invocation, the irregular verse, the meditative and melancholic mood, the serious tone and the romantic imagery are all found in these early odes of 1817. also, the movements caused by the reiteration of rhymed half line in "Pan", "Neptune" and "Sorrow" remind us of the triadic movement of the Pindaric odes.

"Lines on the Mermiad Tavera", "Fancy", and "Bards of passion and of Mirth" form a sort of trio, written I heptasyllabic verse, much in the vogue of eighteenth century poetry. The Mermaid Tavern was a favourite resort of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Reaument and Fletcher. "Written in the Spirit of outlawry")66(.

As Keats confided to Reynolds in a letter, deted 3 February 1818, the poet invokes the spirits of the poets to "sup and browse from horn and can""

Souls of poets dead and gone,

)66( See Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems, P. 438.

40 What Elysium have ye known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?)67(

" Roads of Passian and of Mirth" is, again, a tribute to Elizabethan poets, this time particularly to Beaument and Fletecher. The poem was first published (under the heading "Ode") in 1820, and celebrates, as Keas explained to his brother and sister-in-law, "the double immortality of the poets")68(:

Roads of Passion and of mirth,

Ye have left your souls on earth!

Have ye souls in heaven too,

Double-lived in regions now?)69(

"fancy", a companion poem, is much in a free vein:

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home)70(:

)67( Ibid, P. 166. )68( Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems, P. 452. )69( Ibid., P. 225. )70( Ibid., P. 223.

41 Keats calls this poem and "Bards of passion and of Mirth" "specimens of s sort of randeau")71(; i. e., a sec of lines returning upon themselves at the end with a repetition on the beginning. The poem has an obvious link with "Ode to Psyche" where the "gardener Fancy" is invoked to cultivate "some untrodden region" of the poet's mind.

All these poems are not odes proper, for they have several elements of the ode form which mature and crystallize in the major odes soon to follow.

All these poems are not odes proper, for they have several elements of the ode form which mature and crystallize in the major odes soon to follow.

Early in 1818, Keas had "found the Pindaric type… attempted by himself in the lyric interludes to Endymion far to diffuse for philosophic arguments")72(.

He tried to find a more tight form, unstamped before. In his "Line n Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair")73(, he tried to tighten the form of the irregular English ode. Almost the

)71( Ibid., P. 452. )72( Robert Gittings, John Keats, P. 454. )73( The occasion of writing the ode is told in a letter to Benjamin Bailey on 23 January, 1818, Se Letters, I, 209.

42 same theme of Gary's "The Progress of Poesy" can e seen in lines like these:

And Pleasure nobler pinion

O, where are thy dominions?)74(

The address form is already there in the poem since Keats is addressing Milton. The serous tone and romantic imagery mixed with passionate feeling are also found in this ode of Keats.

Few months later, on 3 May of 1818, Keats wrote to his friend, J. H. Reynolds, a letter in which occurred for the first time a fragment (which is never completed) of an "Ode to May")75(.

May in Greeck mythology, is the mother of Hermes, "identified by the Romans with an Italian divinity of Spring")76(.

The theme of the ode echoes, to a large extent, that of Gray's "The Bard" the praise for the poets and the

)74( Poems, P. 165. )75( See Letters, I, 278. )76( Everyman's Classical Dictionary, P. 333.

43 satisfaction obtained to be among those "bards who dies content in pleasant sward")77(.

Keats regards the pleasure of composing poetry as "entirely adequate to itself")78(.

Here he searches for no literary fame and this is why he is content with the "simple worship of a day". May, the Greek goddess, is compared to the poetry upon which Keats is mediating in the ode: "nurtured by many years of thought and experience, invested with wisdom, but also a source of beauty and pleasure")79(.

Keats, in this ode, reaches a state in which he shakes himself free from the styles of other poets and starts his own. Here he mixes Greek allusions and simple expressions with un-Greek pure romantic nostalgia. This new sense of balance, Douglas Bush sees, set him at peace and fixity. Bush ads:

)77( Poems, P. 199. )78( Walter H. Event, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), P. 214. )79( Both Lau. "Keats Mature Goddesses" in Philological Quarterly, 63 (1984), 326.

44 "Keats is not here writing like an Elizabethan or like his carlier self")80(.

Rather, it is an inexperienced new formula, both concise and rich in meaning, which he is trying to accomplish here.

Alileen Ward is unhappy with the compressed feeling in this ode. She protests: "the emotion is several controlled with great deliberation out of pure imaginary experience")81(. Ward is misled in her observation since the poem is rich with romantic imagery which conveys his own sensations, especially in the description of the old poets and their achievement.

These experimental early odes find their ways to "Ode to Psyche", the first major ode, as a step towards a more definite form. Ian Jack names "Ode to Apollo", "To Pan", "Neptune" and Diana" as the antecedents of the "Ode to Psyche")82(.

This is true since Keats has in mind a certain form when writing the odes. The experimental form of the early

)80( Mythology and the Romantic Tradition, P. 105. )81( John Keats: the Making of a Poet, P. 218. )82( Keats and the Mirror of Arts (London: OUP, 1967), P. 203.

45 odes justifies the easy movement and gradual development in the major odes)83(.

In both form and content, the early odes paved the way for the major odes. In form, the use of address, apostrophe and the irregular verse are found in a condensed formula in the major odes. In content, the themes of reconciliation between life and death (found clearly in the May fragmentary ode) and joy and sorrow (especially found in hymn" to Sorrow") as inevitable are clearly presented in the major odes. In fact this reconciliation in the major odes between life and death-especially in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"-and between joy and sorrow – especially in "Ode on Melancholy" – led Keats to accept death itself with a happy mood. This acceptance is particularly shown in the last of the major odes- "To Autumn".

)83( See Chapter One, P. 21.

46

It must be said at once that the exact order in which Keats's major odes were written is unknown. Critics seem to organize their chronology according to their own judgment. Walter Jackson Bate, Jack Stillinger, Eobrt Gittings, Helen Vendler, Ian Jack, H. W. Garrod, Kenneth Muir… each one of them has a different view on this matter.

All of them were written in 1819 and published in the 1820 volume. Conventional opinion places "Ode to Psyche" first (written towards the end of April). Then comes, chronologically, "Ode to a Nightingale" (written in May), "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melanchology", "Ode on Indolence" (written in the Spring), and finally, the ode "To Autumn" (written on 19 September). Keats's major critics – Stillinger, Bate, Gittings and Garrod agree on this chronology!

The order does not matter greatly. It is the thought and mood of the poet which is of more importance in

47 considering the unity of the odes. The traditional point of view is that though these odes were not written as a sequence but can be read as one. With regard to this point, many critics differ in their explanations)84(.

Tacking the theme of the odes, Jack Stillinger gives a basic Keatsian thematic structure for the odes.

In this structure he depends on a literary conception of two realms always in opposition, containing characters and actions interpolating them. He argues that "the Odes as a group may be read as an investigation of the imagination's ability to cope with time and change")85(.

This is represented by an up-down movement which can be illustrated by means of a simplified cosmography:

)84( For different opinions on the chronological sequence of the major odes see Robert F. Gleckner, "Keats's Odes: The Problem of the Limited canon" in Studies in English Literature, 5, No. 4 (Autumn 1965), 577-580. )85( "Imagination and reality in the Odes of Keasts" in his edition of Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prontice-Hall, 1968), P. 5.

48 B

A A'

The horizontal line represents a boundary between the ideal (above) and the actual world (below). the above and below realms can act for many concepts such as imagination and reality, permanence and transience, immortality and mortality, the superstitious and the believed the spiritual and the material)86(.

Basically, the speaker in the ode is in the actual world (A), takes off an imaginative trip to the ideal (B) and then-realizing, for different causes, the impossibility to cope with the ideal world-returns to the actual world (A'). This return however, is accompanied by knowledge and experience from the ideal world of which he is now an exemplar.

This up-down structure can be traced generally in only three of Keats's odes. In "Ode to Pysche", for example, the speaker's imagination is motivated by the

)86( Ibid, PP. 2-3.

49 sight of "two fair creatures", cupid and Psyche, lying on the grass (A). he begins to dream of the goddess psyche (B) and insists to regain for her the lost rights as a goddess. His dream goes too far

So let me bethy choir, and make a moan

Upon the midnight hours)87(;

Then, realizing the impossibility of such a dream, he prefers to go back to reality (A'). The "fane" of Psyche is therefore built "In some untrodden region of my mind")88(.

The ode is "concerned with the imagination itself")89(.

It is through imagination that he is transcended to the ideal world in which he gains knowledge.

This makes him aware of the difference between the ideal and the actual worlds. This awarencess brings him back to the actual world.

Stillinger's diagram can also be applied to "Ode to a Nightingale". The speaker here is motivated to travel to the ideal world of the nightingale. A song of this bird is the

)87( Poems, P. 276. )88( Ibid, P. 277. )89( Ward, P. 279.

50 motivation which makes him sad because "too happy" in the happiness of the bird (A).

Wine and imagination are his means of the trip. Being there, in the ideal world of the bird (B), the speaker is "embalmed" with darkness, he "cannot see" but only "guess" the beauties there. His inability to face the difficulties of the ideal world draws him back to his own world matured by knowledge and experience (A'). He realizes that imagination brings him out of his world of pain and suffering. Simultaneously, however, "it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast")90(.

This poem proves the idea that

Man is unable to draw heaven and earth

together into stable union-and it is part

of Keats's scheme of things that he must be

unable while he is mortal-then he is torn

between the two externs, grasping after both

)90( Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and Tradition (New York: OUP, 1965), P. 31.

51 but at home in neither)91(.

"Ode on a Gracian Urn" similarly follows the up- down diagram in contemplating the sconces inscribed on the walls of a Grecian urn. To start with, the speaker's imagination is provoked (A). It is by comparing the changeless, permanent world of the urn with his own that he realizes the difference. As a result, he is inclined to the urnly world in which life is more happy than his own: "Ah, happy, happy bought!... happy melodist… more happy love")92(.

This is why he is now in a trance (B). Hence transcience and permanence move together

Close to the knife-edge, but Keats's

question, although it brings them together

in the same context, expresses a hesitation

that prevents them from fusing)93(.

Through contemplating a scene of a desolate town

)91( Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats's Major Poems (London: The John Hopkins Press, 1953), P. 181. )92( Poems, P. 282. )93( E. Wasserman, P. 17.

52 What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?)94(

The emptiness of the town draws him lack his own world since he cannot manage the silence which dominates the urn and its figures.

The vanity of the dream, the vain paradox of

the completely satisfying human life in an

arrest of time is recognized in the shift of

the imagination to the little town)95(.

The urn is consequently regarded as a "Cold Pastoral". With his return to the actual world (A') he realizes the fact that the urn is merely "a form empty of meaning till imagination fills it; and the human imagination cannot rest even in a dream of endless bliss")96(.

)94( Poems, P. 283 )95( F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto and WIndus, 1962), P. 275. )96( Ward, P. 282.

53 His speculations lead him to know that the only beauty man can attain is found in the actual world. In spite of all the attempts of the imagination to verify the urn and its figures, "they remain but a semblance of life")97(.

The next Ode, the "Ode on Melancholy", however, invalidates Stillinger's structural diagram. In this poem no imaginative trip is undertaken from the very beginning, the speaker doesnot attempt to make the trip to the ideal world, but rather face reality however painful it is. A sad awareness is better than no awareness.

For shade to shade will come too drowsily

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul)98(.

Since sorrow is forever joined with pleasure ("in the very temple of Delight/Vali'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine")99(), it is better to be accustomed to it. Melancholy is

)97( Jecob D. Wigod, Keats's Ideal in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in PMLA, 72, No. 1 (March 1957), 116. )98( Poems, P. 283. )99( Ibid, P. 284.

54 "veil'd" because "only in th emystry of her ambivalence is true "joy' to be found")100(.

Beauty becomes vexing because it is mixed with sorrow. In the very moment of tasting "Joy's grape against his palate fine")101(. One senses the presence of sorrow in bursting the grape. This ode, thus, is not a part of a unified whole as Stillinger claims, since both joy and sorrow belong to the actual world; his diagram cannot be applied here.

Moreover, in applying his structural diagram to the major odes, Jack Stillinger excludes "Ode on Indolence" and ode "To Autumn". In fact, it is this exclusion which is a loophole taken against the idea of regarding the odes as a unified sequence. This point is detailed later.

Many critics approved of Stilinger's up-down structural diagram. Paul Fry thinks that each ode seeks to show how this see-saw movement between imagination and reality by keeping head in the ideal world while feet stick in the actual:

)100( William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Penguin, 1930), P. 216. )101( Poems, P. 284.

55 Until "Autumn", which poses-or at least poises

an answer to this question, each ode in turn

voices a frustration at the threshold, honestly

retreating from any tempting oxymoron of

imaginative sympathy)102(.

This "parabola-shape"- to quote S. M. Sperry's term – cannot be applied to all the six odes. Each ode has a different shape, Helen Vendler proclaims. Yet she does affirm the sequential pattern of the odes. She argues that Keats's odes, though not written sequentially, can be read as unfired sequence. For her, each ode is a progression towards the totality of the other odes, and that Keats uses every new ode asa commentary on its predecessor. Vendler adds that the odes

Make up a system of inexhaustible internal

relations. Each one, when taken as a vantage

point, casts light on Keats's authorial choices

in the others)103(.

)102( The Poet's Calling in the English Ode, P. 220. )103( The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard, 1933), P. 291.

56 Examining the odes from many different angles- philosophically, aesthetically, and linguistically she affirms that each ode gives a better solution than the previous one, to Keats's development as a man and a poet.

The sequence of the odes is mostly joined by means of imagination-which Stillinger already uses in his description of the trip to the ideal world)104(.

Such critical views tend to understand the odes "as a sequence with unity of theme and progression of though")105(.

Accordingly critics tend to tackle the odes from single frames of reference. Taking the theme of mortality, for example, "the full cycle from ideal to acceptance of mortality is completed in the odes")106(.

Basically, however, the element of suffering is taken as the main agent around which the odes are constructed. In

)104( See L. M. Jones, "The" Ode to Psyche': An Allegorical Introduction to Keats Great Odes" in The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, No. 9 (1958), PP. 23-26. )105( L Waldoff, "The Theme of Mutability in the 'Ode to Psyche'" in PMLA, 92, No. 3 (May 1977), 410. )106( J. P. Egger, "Memory in Mankind: Keats's Historical Imagination" in PMLA, 86, No. 5 (October 1971), 995.

57 his often quoted letter dated 21 April 1819, to his brother George, Keats proclaims "Do you not see how necessary a World of pains and troube is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?)107( "

Applying this philosophy, the odes (especially the least one) reach a state in which there is an "acceptance of life as it really is")108(.

Walter Jackson Bate one of Keat's well-know critics, argues for the sequential progression of the odes on the basis of Keats's comparison of human life to a "Mansion of Many Apartments". Three "chambers" are recognized,; the first is that of "thoughtless" life in which we do not feel the misery of the human life since we do not think of it. The second is the "Chamber of Maiden Thought" in which the "awakening of the thinking principle with us" makes us feel and try to experience it. Then comes the third chamber, of

)107( Letters, II, 102. )108( David Perkins, "Affirmation of Process in 'Ode on Melancholy' and 'To Autumn'" in Twentieth Century Interpractations of Keats's Odes, P. 85. in His English Literature 1815-1832, P. 118, Ian Jack regards "time" as associative element among the Nightinagle, Urn and Melancholy odes.

58 "the burden of the Mystery" in which all the "passages" are dark and lead but to a mist")109(.

Bate examines the odes as a sequence under the notion that "the growth of awareness will oaring now pain as well as pleasure or rather unforeseen combinations of both")110(.

It is this "growth of awareness which Keats calls "the burden of the Mystery", the third chamber of human life, for which compensations are supplied in the odes.

It is important to mention H. W. Garrod's point of view of the odes. He arecs with Stillinger, Vendler and Bate agree with him that "the odes, taken together, are a sequence")111(.

He, however, thinks that it is "mood" which holds the sequence of the odes. The prevailing mood of the odes (except "To Autumn") is "drowsiness".

Garrod, it is clear, depended in his explanation of the drossy mood of the odes on Keats's letter in which he

)109( Letters, I, 280-281. )110( John Keats, P. 493. )111( Keats, P. 94 ff.

59 declared: "the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode on Indolence")112(.

Garrod's discussion beings with "Ode on Indolence" in which Keats described the three-fold vision which haunts him-Love, Ambition, and "my demon Poesy")113(. Which used

To steal away, and leave without a task

My idle days…..)114(

this sense of idleness occupies the other odes. accordingly, Garrod claims that this ode "has close affinities with the five great odes of the 1820 volume")115(.

As an exception to the common trend, John Holloway defeats the ode-sequence pattern and proves its invalidity claiming that such a pattern which "has already been done" failed to combine all the major odes together.

This is due to the fact that critics always tend to neglect both "Ode on Indolence", and Ode "To Autumn".

)112( Letters, II, 116. )113( Keats speacks of these figures in a letter to eorge Keats on 19 March 1819. See Letters, II, 79. )114( Poems, P. 284. )115( Keats, P. 79.

60 On the assumption that the former is too bad to be included among the major odes, and the latter is composed months after the others, the critics use these reasons as a justification for this omission)116(.

Unity rather than progression is the other trend of examining the relationship among the great odes of Keats. It is the idea that "the odes form a unity" among themselves)117(.

This view is adopted mainly by Robert Gittings who claims that the odes are composed as a unity. The milestone of his argument is Keats's "vale of soul-making" letter. This critique, briefly, is that no one can gain his "identity" and become a "soul" unless he undergoes pain, troubles, and suffering)118(. Gittings' argument is that :

There is no progress of thought from one ode to the other. Rather, each is

)116( "The Odes of Keats" in Critties on Keats ed., Judith O'Neill (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), P. 59. )117( Bernaard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London: Longmans, 1959), P. 309. )118( See Letters, II, 102.

61 an attempt at the same theme from a different view point)119(.

This argument brings us to a now threshold in examining this debatable subject. Here it is not progression which determines the interpretation of the odes. The odes are regarded here as one unit, different shapes for one idea.

Stuard Sperry, however, has quite a different opinion on this issue. He is clear straightforward in his opinion that:

recent attempts to establish a basis for reading the odes as group, for understanding The ways in which they interrelate with and Qualify each other, have never been as successful As individual readings)120(.

So it is "individual readings" of the odes that Sperry favours. He then recommends to read the odes as Keats's embodiment of a sense of irony and negative capability)121(.

)119( John Keats, P. 455. )120( Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), P. 242. )121( Ibid, PP. 242-291.

62 I think it is better to adept Sperry's arguments: to treat the odes individually withink the context each one creates. To study the odes as a group of related poems is apparently problematic, though metrically they have some affinity. In spite of the fact that there are certain common images and structural forms among the odes, each one has its own independent theme, mood and attitude which differ radically from those of the other odes. Each ode has, if it is proper to say, its own Keats.

"Ode to Psyche" deals with the theme of suffering: a suffering goddess who wins her place among the "Olympus hierarchy" as a result of her long patience.

Keats was occupied in reading Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche in an Elizabethan translation of "The Golden Asse" just before writing this ode. He chose this story to be the subject of his ode because it suited his "vale of soul-making" doctrine. At the time of writing the ode, he was living near his beloved Fanny Brawne. They used to meet in the garden of the house)122(.

)122( Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year (London: Heinemann, 1954), P. 128.

63 The window of her house is refered to in A case ope at night To let the warm Love in!)123(

The theme of "Ode to a Nightingale" is traveling to the ideal world of a nightingale. The song of this bird created this wish in the speaker of the poem.

Keats wrote this poem in a difficult and crucial time. Through the poem, he tried to transcend the sad life he was leading. The general setting of the poem is inspired by Keats's hearing of a nightingale when he was in the garden of his house. In this period, his brother Tom had died just a few months ago. Keats referred to him in the lines

Where youth grows pale, and spectre- thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow)124(

Isolation was the subsequent result and he is "forlorn". The ode, hence, is spontaneously written, as a

)123( Poems, P. 277. )124( Poems, P. 280.

64 result of Keats's inspirited genius. It is written in one morning, as his friend Charles Brown certified)125(.

The theme of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is aesthetic. It shows the superiority of art. This was a current theme at that time-"the debate about the relations between poetry and the Visual Arts")126(.

This theme is conveyed through two scenes on the urn, the first is that of "wild ecstasy" in which the melodist, the lovers and the trees are "forever panting, and forever young")127(.

The other scene is that of a religious sacrifice in a "desolate' town. The ode describes "thee creative ecstasy which the artist perpetuates in a masterpiece")128(.

Keats's reading of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy", a favourite book of his, helped shape his "Ode on Melancholy")129(.

)125( This is related in all of Keats's biographies. See, for example, Gittings, John Keat, P. 462. )126( Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Arts, P. 214. )127( Poems, P. 282. )128( C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (London: OUP, 1976), P. 142. )129( See Janice C. Sinson, "John Keats and The Anatomy of Melancholy" in The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin (1971), 21-30.

65 In this ode, melancholy is a state of being which appears as a mood. The speaker in the ode advises us to stand against melancholy and accept it as an inevitable thing, since sadness and sorrow accompany pleasure and joy all the time.

"Ode on Indolence" presents the theme of indolence and numbness, a mood which characterized Keats for a period of time, when writing the ode. The ode is a good example "of the way Keats's mind worked" at that time)130(.

By change, as he was one day collecting his sheets, his eyes were attracted by a "description of the day dream he had one lazy morning in March")131(.

The ode is about three figures on an urn – "Love", "Ambition" and "poesy" – pursuing the speaker to draw him out of an indolent mood while he insists on staying in this idle state.

The theme of the ode "To Autumn" is the passage of time and, consequently, acknowledging death as a natural result. This ode has a close connection with the latter of 21

)130( Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year, P. 146. )131( Ward, P. 280.

66 September, 1819 in which he described the weather at autumn.

How beautiful the season is now-How fine the

air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really,

without joking, chaste weather)132(.

The passage of time is shown through the progressive movement of the seasons – late summer, autumn and a premonition of early winter. Also, fruitfulness and plentiful ness are obvious themes in this ode, as ripeness can be traced through the movement of time.

Fundamentally, the themes of the major odes- suffering, living in the ideal world, contemplating a work of art, confronting melancholy, dreamy relaxation after sleep, and accepting death (and also fractioning) – are obviously various. The odes cannot, thus, be considered neither as a sequence nor ass a unity. They have their own separate themes. It is unacceptable to think that Keats ever thought of linking any theme with the other, in writing these odes. And it is unsuitable to try to read them together as a sequential progression or as a unity. Since each ode

)132( Letters, II, 167.

67 carries-in spite of the few similar sub themes among them, which is ordinary in all poets – a different message from the other, it is safer to treat them as single poems.

68 Traditionally, the name of John Keats is linked with sensuous poetry. This sensory feature is also found in other poets, but richness and spontaneity of sense impressions form this feature in Keats. This statement, however, needs qualification. For Keats is a poet of sensation, but his later poems, of the '1820' volume, especially the major odes, mark a unification of intellect and sense experience.

In examining this crucial subject in Keats it is important to make a distinction between Keats's letters and his poetry. Some of the letters, show his conflicting position between sensation and thought.

In a verse epistle to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, on March 25, 1818, John Keats tries to explain a strange mood by declaring that he feels the obligation to philosophize in poetry. But he cannot do that, because

69 Things cannot to the will

Be settled, but they tease us out of thought)133( .

This is why any philosophizing in poetry "spoils the singing of the nightingale")134(, i. e. it is impossible to have a good philosophy in poetry without changing its literary quality. It is difficult to combine two different poles such as philosophy and poetry. Philosophy for Keats needs deep thinking, whereas poetry needs but a sensuous poet. This conflict between sensation and thought registers the force of both desire and knowledge in Keats. "Sensation and thought" take various idioms in the course of their interpretations such as "heart and mind", "sense and intellect", "romance and anti-romance")135(, "sensibility and maturing mind")136(.

)133( Poems, P. 181. )134( Ibid, P. 182. )135( See Robert Kern, "Keats and the Problem of Romance" in Philological Quarterly, 58, No. 2 (Spring 1979), 171-189. )136( See William Walah, Introduction to Keats (London: in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 5, (London: Penguin, 1957), 225-232.

70 Ronald sharp presents "sensation and thought" as, successively, "skepticism" and "aestheticism", referring to them as "two essential impulses" in Keats's work)137(.

M. H. Abrams speaks of an "aesthetic" philosophy in Keats and how he tried to relate poetry to reality)138(.

Sensation has for Keats many equivalent meanings as understood by different critics. This is clear especially in his letters. "Feeling", "Emotion", "sexual desire", "creative experience" and "impression" are among the possible implications of the word)139(.

Commonly, "Sensation" in Keats's poetry is related to the five senses of sight, bearing, taste, small and (frequently used) of touch. He has been succeed of being a secularist. This term needs clarification:

)137( See Keats Skepticism and the Religion of Beauty (Athens: the Jniv, of Georgia Press, 1979), PP> 9, 128; See also his article "'A Recourse Somewhat Human': Keats's Religion of Beauty" PP. 22-49. )138( See The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: OUP, 1953), PP. 314-316. )139( For the variant meanings of "sensation", see R. T. Davies, "Some Ideas and Uses as in John Keats: A Reassessment, PP. 134-136.

71 If it is meant those aspects of Landscape and

Sky, of colour and of form, it is true enough.

If it is meant to imply abandonment of morals

it is untrue)140(.

Also, references to "feeling" and "sense experience" are associated with "summation". This is comprehended in Keats's exclamation "O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts")141(.

As for "thought", the word is understood in its ordinary meaning – as "intellect", "analytic mind", "extensive knowledge". On one occasion, Keats used "thought" to moan "law" and "precept")142(.

The early poetry of Keats is characterized by a tendency towards sensation. His while imaginative and emotional life was marked by acute sensation. Also, his senses were determined by both imagination and emotion.

)140( F. N. Doubleday, "John Keats and the Borough Hospital" in The Keats-Thelley Memorial Bulletin, 13 (1962), 17. )141( Letters, I, 185. )142( See Letters, I, 374.

72 Yet, he still felt the ability to think and analyze. He finds within him "feeling for light and shade" throbbing in his mind as "all that information… necessary for a poem")143(.

This "light and shade" feeling makes him examine his poetic achievement with a skeptical eye. The unfavorable comments of the contemporary reviews – the Blackwood's and the Quarterly Review on Keats's Endymion: A Poetic Romance)144( made him re-examine his poetry more carefully.

As a result, he felt that the free flow of feeling has to be directed, tasted and announced for", otherwise it will never grow up into good poetry but remains only entertaining)145(.

)143( Letters, II, 360. )144( At his time Keats has been criticized severely, See, for example, John Gilsons's sharp criticizing two articles, "On the Cockney School of Poetry" in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2, No. 7 (1817), 38-41; 3, No. 17 (August 1818), 512- 525; See also the unsigned review "Literary Pocket-Book in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 6, No. 33 (December 1819), 235-247. )145( Walah, Introduction to Keats, P. 62.

73 Sheer sensational poetry began to seem for Keats "suddenly narrow and inadequate")146(.

A change, hence, was required. Keats's mind, according to Walsh, especially during 1817-1818, was in conflict, for he could not identify clearly what was happening within himself.

He declares: "I think a little change has taken place in my intellect lately")147(.

To his poems he hopes to add "a more thoughtful and quiet power")148(.

The epistle referred to above is considered the beginning of his new attitude. Keats's "intuitive lines to Reynolds even for shadow the shifting conforms of his dramatic odes")149(.

Another evidence, the sonnet "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once again", also marks the change. Keats

)146( Robert Kern, P. 177. )147( Letters, I, 214. )148( Ibid, II, 209. )149( David Luke, Keats's Motes from the Underground: 'To J. H. Reynolads' "in Studies in English Literature, 19, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), 612.

74 had to decide on which way he will direct his poetic abilities; and it seems that the choice crucial and obligatory: "(IF) I must choose between despair and Energy (i. e., whether or not to acquire knowledge) – I choose the latter")150(.

It is obligatory because Keats was feeling a constant remorse for "not yet having written great verse")151(. He never quite got rid of this feeling)152(.

His decision to acquire knowledge, however, did not prevent his from having sensuous language along with the intellectual thought in the poem. This is clear in the "King Lear" sonnet which is said to be "Keats's most serious attempt, thus far in his career, to shake himself free from the seductions of romance")153(.

Accordingly, Keats finds that it is experience to which he has to submit himself in order to gain knowledge

)150( Letters, II, 113. )151( Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development (Chicago; The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), P. 27. )152( Hoxie N. Fairchild, "The Romantic Movement in England" in PMLA, 55, No. 1 (March, 1940), 26. )153( Robert Korn, P. 177.

75 and information. Following "experience", he goes on to construct his intellectual formation. Experience brings him suffering which he appreciates as indispensable for "soulf- making".

Keats's conscious aim was to follow "Solomon's directions" to "get Wisdom-get understanding")154(.

He taught himself how to be passive and receptive, to make up his mind about nothing, to be in state of "Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason")155(.

Though he was not enthusiastic about combining knowledge and experience, he was happy with such disinterestedness, since he could "have no enjoyment in the world but through continual drinking of knowledge")156(.

In the great odes, sensation and thought are reconciled. This reconciliation, in this late stage of his poetic life, is a point of controversy. Sensation is regarded, by some critics, as predominant in Keats's odes, since for

)154( Letters, I, 271. )155( Ibid, 193. )156( Ibid, 271.

76 his poetry originates through meditation of the natural world and its endowing of sensational impressions)157(.

Such a view-point can be found in Nathan Cervo:

For Keats, the physical world was a place

primarily to be enjoyed. It's appeal was

directly to the senses)158(.

This opinion is rather specific, after all, since it assorts the aesthetic quality of Keats's poetry. We a similar view is expressed, that with Keats,

A poem is not the protected expression of a Predetermined thought but is itself the process of its thinking but is itself the process of its thinking moving from perception to perception, sense to sense)159(.

)157( See Stuart N. Sperry "Keats and the Chemistry of Poetic Creation" in MLA, 85, No. 2 (March 1970), 268: See also his Kets the Poet, Chapter One, PP. 3-29. )158( "Hazlitt, Wordswroth, Keats: A Pre-Raphaelite View" in Pre- Raphaelite Review, 3 (1979), 70. )159( Archibald Macleish, Poetry and Experience (London: Penguin, 1960), P. 160.

77 Douglas Bush confirms the quality of sense. He accepts this sense apprehension in Keats, by saying that truth cannot be perceived but through the senses)160(.

In this respect, the odes express the truth of the poet's desire to escape from the sadness of this world, which comes to him through the senses. The song of the bird in the Nightingale ode carries the speaker away from the miseries of this world, where "but to think is to be full of sorrow")161(.

It is this realization, however, which brings him back to his world after recognizing the impossibility of attaining the world of the nightingale.

The case of the Grecian Urn ode is similar. The urn symbolizes the untroubled, immortal beauty in this transient world; this fact, however, reminds him of real nature of the urn: "Cold Pastoral".

Lionel Trilling affirms in his famous article

)160( See Mythology and the Romantic Tradition, PP. 107-108; and his "Keats" in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed., W. J. Bate (Englewood Cliffs. Prentice-Hall, 1964), P. 25. )161( Poems, P. 280.

78 "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters",

It is his i. e., Keats's characteristic mood

of thought all through his life to begin

with sense and to move thence to what he

calls "abstraction", but never to leave sense

behind. Sense cannot be left behind, for

of itself it generates the idea and remains continuous with it)162(.

Trilling, like Douglas Bush, stands family beside the sensational element in Keats. To deal with sensation as predominant over thought implies that is "the shorthand for thought")163(.

Sensation grenades thought but never leaves it and the two remain combined in the creative process of Keats's poetry)164(.

Although many critics favour the side of sensation, yet they do not deny the existence of thought in Keats's

)162( Critics on Keats, ed., Judith O'Neill, PP. 18-19. )163( Bernard Blackstone, "The Mind of Keats in His Art" in British Romantic Poets, P. 269. )164( C. F. Hoxie N. Fairchild, "Keats and the Struggle for Existence Tradition" in PMLA, 64, No. 1 (March 1949), 102.

79 Odes. It is his eagerness to think intensely which gives way to J Keats's genuine mind to move away from sensation (though never totally) to a tougher element which he believes necessary for his poetical character. In fact, Keats looked for intensity in poetry as a means of achieving serious results. He was eager for "a search for au intensity of intellect that would rival the intensity of sense)165(.

In the great odes, thought "amounts to an integration" of intellect and emotion)166(.

Keats, as mentioned earlier, had reached a state in which he became aware that it is inconvenient to stay within the constraints of sensation. Sensation is better to be, William Walsh claims, "filtered through a judging mind and be informed by deliberate thought")167(.

Accordingly, it is thought, springing out of sensations which becomes the governing principle in Keats's odes.

)165( Helen Vendler, P. 46. )166( Cleanth Brooks, "The Artistry of Keats: A modern Tribute" in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes, P. 99. )167( "John Keats", P. 226.

80 In opposition to Bush, and the other supporters of sensation in Keats, Matthew Arnold favours the side of thought. He takes Keats's Beauty – Truth principle as a milestone for his discussion. He sees Keats as a "character passing into intellectual production")168(, one who regards something beautiful because it is true:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" – that is al

Ye know on earth, and al ye need to know)169(.

Arnold also joins "Joy" with beauty-truth. He finds in the "relation of beauty with truth and of both with joy a necessity for the understanding of Keats's intellectual mind)170(.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever)171(.

This restless perplexity and the troubled hesitation of wavering between sensation and thought are revealed when the major odes are considered. Their central themes reflect this over conflicting mood. In "Ode to Psyche", Psyche

)168( G. K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (London: Dent, 1960), P. 289. )169( Poems, P. 283. )170( G. K. Chasteron, P. 289. )171( Poems, P. 65.

81 symbolizes ideal beauty for whom the sensations so far to "build a fame".

Thought and experience interfere to stand against indulgence in the imagination, since dreams cannot be realized in the sexual world. At the and of the poem, "the union of Cupid and Psyche signifies a reconciliation of heart and understanding, or of sensations and knowledge")172(. More inclined to the thoughtful side in this ode, Helen Vendler states that the ode aims at "a complete, exclusive, and lasting annihilation of the senses in favour of the brain")173(.

In the Nightingale and the Gracian Urn odes, the speakers cannot fully enjoy the immortality of the ideal world, reached by means of sensation and imagination, because experience and knowledge remind them of mutability. This mutability threatens the transient sensation all the time. In "Ode to a Nightingale" the sensuous enjoyment of the song of the bird is so intense that the senses soon drugged: "as though of hemlock I had drunk")174(.

)172( Beth Lau, "Keats's Nature Goddesses", P. 325. )173( The Odes of John Keats, P. 47. )174( Poems, P. 279.

82 Yet imagination cannot escape from oppressive reality. The ultimate think imagination can offer is death, which is perceived here as the highest sensation: "How more than ever seems it rich to die")175(.

Death is remembered whom darkness prevails over the ideal world of the nightingale . Darkness prevents the speaker from sight – "I cannot see". As a reaction to darkness, other senses "more vividly as such synaesthetic phrases as 'soft imeance' make alert")176(, begin to compensate for the lack of visual sensation.

The reality of death results from understanding the difference between the ideal and the actual worlds. This brings the listener the wide can between life and death. Knowledge and understanding oblige the speaker to retreat to his own world, and resume his mortal condition in actuality.

Summation is transacted into thought and becomes a means of judgment. Yet we can still see sensation

)175( Poems, P. 281. )176( Morris Dickstein, P. 210.

83 flickering oven at the end of the poem- "Do I wake or sleep?")177( .

In "Ode on a Grecian Urn", sensations are related to young love. Here, spring, youth and love are secured against the sorrows of mutability (stanzas two and three). however, Keats's thoughtful judgment distinguishes the reality of the figures on the urn-the melodist, the young over and the maiden-an only marbles wrought on an urn which is itself a "Cold Pastoral". The urn raises questions to which no answer is given. Here Keats applies the "Negative Capability" doctrine of gaining knowledge)178(.

It is art which at the end takes the speaker away from his intoxicated senses to a realization of the spiritual eternity represented in the beauty-truth identification)179(.

)177( Poems, P. 281. )178( See Letters, I, 193; See also Arthur Clayborough "Negative Capability " and "The Charelion Poet" in Keats's Letters: The Case for differentiation" in English Studies, 54, No. 6 (December 1973), 569-575. )179( This catchy phrase has been the subject of endless debate. For different opinions on this issue, see the "Appendix" in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes, P 113; See also II. Polgar, "Keats's Beauty-Truth Identification in the light of Philosophy" in The Keats-Shelly Memorial Bulletin, 16 (1965),

84 Art, here, "unexpectedly", gives voice to this proposition")180(. It states both beauty and truth (which can be represented here as sensation and thought) as in disposable to all mankind or to a special person)181(. Here is a similar idea:

Whenever a fiction of the poetic mind wins us

because of its beauty, we way be pretty sure

that it embodies an idea which, if we could

get it, would win our reasonable approval also)182(.

In "Ode on Melancholy" sensation and thought are shown as two inevitable elements. From the very beginning this inevitability is accepted. There is always the awareness of the intermingling of beauty with melancholy, joy with

55-56: an J. O. Mourice, "Present and Voice in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'" in Studies in Romantic Ian, 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 27-30. )180( N. H. Abrams, " Belief and the suspension of disbelief " in Literary Criticism: Idea and Act, ed., W. K. Wimsatt, Lee Angeles, London: Univ. Of California Press, 1974), P. 158. )181( D. Simpson Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1979), P. 10. )182( F. C. Presentt, The Poetic Mind (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959), P. 34.

85 sorrow. Here both sensation of beauty and joy and experience of melancholy and narrow combine to give us the following image:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her Sovran shrine)183(.

In this ode, however, "truth can be pursued in Sensation rather than in Thought")184(. Hence sensation dominates the scene.

The "Ode on Indolence" celebrates a sensuous experience – a state of indolence and numbness so intense that the speaker is overwhelmed with drowsiness.

The three figures on the vase – "Love", "Ambition" and "Poesy" – represent the side of thought in this ode.

They threaten the stillness of the speaker and try to awake him from numbness. The ode shows the conflict between the desire to banish the figures, on the one hand, and to follow them, on the other. first, he wants them to melt away:

)183( Poems, P. 284. )184( Helen Vendler, P. 183.

86 O why did ye not melt and leave my sense

Undaunted quite of all but – nothingness?)185(

Then there is the temptation to follow them:

To follow them I Burn'd

And ached for wings)186(

Ultimately he resists them:

Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle sprite,

Into the clouds, and never more return!)187(

It is probably, true to state that Keats frees himself from indolence through resisting the figures. Yet, to banish the figures away from the indolent speaker declares the victory of sensation – here indolence – over intellectual power.

In the ode "To Autumn", the conflict between sensation and thought is overcame by a decision from the speaker to accept the process of fruition and decay as

)185( Poems, P. 285. )186( Poems, P. 285. )187( Ibid, P. 286.

87 inevitable. This reflects Keats's idea of the world as "both precious and frightening")188(.

There is a full satisfaction of all the senses. Everything in fulfilled and ripe to its utmost. On the one hand, the ode reveals surrender to the joys of lie, and an invocation to taste the beauties of this season which are subject to death and decay. On the other hand, the ode gives us the impression of "maturity (which) is transformed into wisdom")189(.

This is clear when the speaker accepts death calmly as something natural.

It becomes clear that here "the imaginative fusion of sensory particulars with though and feeling" brings out the actuality of the situation)190(.

The ode is a perfect application of Keats's "Negative Capability" doctrine. For he "channels his awareness into union with the multiple forms of the season")191( from the

)188( James Kissane, "Light and Shade: An English Life of Keats" in The Sewanee Review, 78, No. 1 (Winter 1970), 209. )189( William Walsh, "John Keats", P. 239. )190( W. P. Albrecht, "Keats's 'Truth' and 'A Truth'" in Philological Quarterly 57, No. 2 (Spring 1987), 226. )191( Sendry and Giannone, P. 7.

88 landscape scene, at the beginning death: "gathering wallows twitter n the skies")192(.

The argument advanced so far shows Keats's complex mind swinging between sensation and thought; between sensuous feeling and the intellectual power of under standing. On the one hand, it is possible state that eats's odes are, linguistically speaking, expressions of sensation, the language and the images are sensuous.

On the other hand, the existence of thought in the odes shows the development of Keats's mind and his experience in writing poetry. Hence the combination of sensation and thought as sensation generates thought. It seems that Keats, the sensuous poet, tried to apply his thought and experience in the odes, as he could not produce poetry of sensation alone. In fact, sense and thought are interfused in the rich texture of his poetry.

)192( Poems, P. 361.

89

Keats's odes are full of rich images which are both sensory and concrete. They give the impression of spontaneity and compactness. It is clear that each image performs its duty to the full in suggesting meaning and emotions.

Synaesthetic imagery constitutes a large proportion of different types of imagery. This type is conceived as a fusion of two or more sensations in one image or a presentation of one sense in terms of another, in order to give more effective meaning, or to strengthen the weak sensation. Here Keats uses images form the sensory system – sensations of sight, bearing, taste, smell and touch. The use of such images gives the impression of a complex sensuous treatment of physical experiences.

It is, in fact, the correctness of images which attracts the attention in Keats's poetry. In using visual images, for example, we are not concerned with sight only. Rather, we tend quite often to hear, smell, touch, and taste, through this

90 one image. What attracts us more in such images is that they create more than one appeal. In addition to these sense impressions, we often feel the weight, coldness, warmth, darkness etc., of them. Moreover, we feel the physical impact of eating, drinking, sleeping, running and many other bodily activities.

Moreover, various types of Keats's images include these of sleep – wakefulness, light dark, bittersweet, bower (forest, fane… etc.), food and many other images. The major odes contain almost all of these types. In his early verse, Keats has experienced these images, though to a lesser degree. In the major odes, however, a mature expression of these images appears so that they become the medium for presenting the theme of each ode.

The "Ode to Psyche", to begin with, presents a remarkable instance of fusion and transference of multiple sensations")193(.

It opens with an invocation to the goddess of the soul, Psyche who is deprived of her rights as a goddess to hear the speaker's "tuneless number", that is, his verse which is

)193( Richard Harter Fogle, "Synaesthetic Imagery in Keats" in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, P. 48.

91 unaccompanied by music. The speaker's verse is charged with both pain and pleasure, sweet enforcement". Pain is caused by the effort of composition;)194( and pleasure is caused by the "remembrance dear". The sleep – imagery, which often recurs in Keats, is clear in

Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes)195(?

Sleepness and wakefulness are here interrelated. He is not sure whether he is awake or just dreaming)196(.

Sense impressions are aroused by the sight of Psyche, embraced by "the winged boy", Cupid, in a "forest". The image "fainting with surprise")197(. Which describe the speaker's state of mind and indicates that this scene is spiritual rather than physical. Both the vision of Psyche and the fame, which he will build in her honour, exist only in the speaker's mind. The lovers are "ready still past kisses to

)194( Letters, II, 105. )195( Poems, P. 275. )196( On dream imagery in Keats's verse see John E. Holsbery, "Hawthorne's 'The Haunted Lind', the Psychology of dreams, Coleridge and Keats" in Texas Studies I Literature and Language, 31, No. 3 (Fall 1979), 324-328. )197( Poems, P. 275.

92 outnumber" although they "lay calm-breathing on the bodded grass")198(. This reveals that the lovers are paradoxically both sensual and pure.

Many sensory images convey the ecstasy of the speaker's vision. The image "whisp'ring roof" is auditory, the forest is heard. A tactile image is given in "trembled blossoms" as we sense the movement of the flowers. The most effective images are in the lines

'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flower, fragrant-loved,

Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian)199(,

Images like "hush'd", "cool-rooted flowers", and colours as "Blue, silver-white" give the impression of coolness which suggests the satisfaction of the two lovers.

We feel the coolness of the flowers with then, and smell the plessing scent. In these two lines, "auditory, tactual, olfactory, and visual suggestions join together… in perfect unity")200(.

)198( Ibid, P. 276. )199( Ibid. )200( R. N. Fogle, "Synaesthic Imagery in Keats", p. 44.

93 For we hear the "hush's", feel the coolness, smell the fragrance and see the colours of the flowers.

The speaker now praises Psychie, in the first part of the second stanza.

Fairor than Pheebe's samphire-region'd star,

Or Vesper, amorous flow-worm of the sky)201(

By referring the heavenly goddesses, "Phoobe" (goddess of chastity) and Vesper (goddess of love), the speaker compares Psyche with them and finds her even "fairer".

Psyche misses the privileges endowed to gods and goddesses in "'Olympus' faded hierarchy")202(. Personal presence is clear in the line "I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired")203(.

According to the story of the ode Psyche is deprived of her rights, listed in the second part of the stanza, these rights are going to be restored by the speaker himself.

)201( Poems, P. 276. )202( Ibid. )203( Ibid.

94 This list of lost privileges in reduplicated in the third stanza but to give the counterpart meaning. Now the speaker provides all the requirements of Psyche through his imagination. Here we have images of hearing in "So let me be the choir, and make a moan")204(.

"choir" and "moan". Also, an image of time recurs here: "Upon the midnight hours")205(.

The speaker substitutes for Psyche all the lost rights, in the final stanza:

Yes, I will be thy pries, and build a fame

In some intrude region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind)206(:

The restoration takes place in the speakers'' mind".

This part of the stanza presents a central metaphor in the ode – the "fame" of Psyche.. at the beginning, the fame was an ordinary forest, now a special bower is presented by

)204( Ibid. )205( Ibid. )206( Ibid, P. 277.

95 the speaker as a reward for the suffering goddess. G. Wilson Knight says that the fane copes, in this stanza, with both

The psychosocial and natural order. The

fame is, we may suggest, the Home of man's

consciousness, and yet more too. Certainly

Keats is both celebrating the sacramental in

Nature… and airing to form creatively, as

It were, a new structure of the mind)207(.

The fame is built with pain, but it is a pain of growth and development, hence it is "pleasant pain" – bittersweet image (it is also an oxymoron) which affirms "Keats's conviction that he must assure full responsibility for his own growth")208(.

This final stanza can be soon as an extended metaphor for the creator of a poem. The fame, it becomes clear "in

)207( "The Priest-like Task An Essay on Keats" in his The Starlit Dome, P. 303. )208( L. Waldoff, "The theme of Mutability in the 'Ode to Psyche;", P. 416.

96 indeed poetry itself")209(. This because more conceivable in examining the whole ode closely)210(.

The creative process is carried out with the help of the "working brain" which creates the "fane", this "strange mental landscape")211(. Peace and quietness which can be felt in images such as "lull'd to sleep" characterize this now place. Flowers in this fane are "feigned" by "The Gardner Fancy". "Fancy" here means imagination. In this imaginative habitation, "casements" are "one at night" – an image of time – to let "The Warm Love (i. e., Cupid) in" – here we have images of both movement and feeling.

In the conclusion, "shadowy thought" expects its guests, "The Wars Love" in darkness. To compensate for darkness, "torch" is an image of light. . "Wonderfully", Harold bloom comments on the last line,

The poet ends the stanza by opening

The hard-won consciousness of his own creative

)209( G. Wilson Knight, P. 304. )210( Robin Mayhead, John Keats (London: CUP, 1967), P. 87. )211( L. Dickatein, P. 202.

97 Powers to a visitation of Love)212(. A succession of images, thus, contribute to the formation of the theme of the ode. Images of the first stanza present Psyche and Cupid meeting in a forest. This initiates the speaker's imagination of Psyche, the deprived goddess of the soul. Images of the next two stanzas give both the problem and solution of Psyche's issue. The second stanza presents the less rights, whereas the third states the restoration process, step by step. In the final stanza, the long neglected Psyche becomes a true goddess of the soul and a fane is built in her honour, in the speaker's own mind.

In "Ode to a Nightingale', Keats finds an outlet for his own poetic thought about joy and pain, light and darkness, nature and spiritual experience. Here, what the ideal world of the nightingale means to the speaker is principally conveyed through imagery. In the first stanza the effect or both aching happiness and frustration is produced through a set of images.

The speaker's heat "aches", not out of sadness but, paradoxically, from being "tee happy" in the bird's

)212( "Keats and the Embarrassment of Poetic Tradition" in From Sensibility to Romanticism ed., F. Hilles and H. Bloon (London: CUP, 1965), PP. 515-516.

98 happiness as he hears it sing of "summer in full threaded ease". The image of "drowsy numbness" suggests the sleepy mood of the speaker.

The mind is in "some melodies plot/of beacon green")213(. Here both the aural and the visual appeal to us. We can hear the melodies (music), and see the colour of the plot. This synaesthetic fufion is to show that here drowsiness leads to a new awareness, for modes of sensation have more than one implication.

It is this impact of the song on the poet which provokes his mind into a trance whose subject is

The poet's desire to attain the ideal

State of ecstasy and effortless imaginative

outpouring that the nightingale seems to enjoy)214(.

This trance is achieved by wine imagery "as though of hemlock I had drunk")215(. Time here is "a symbol of the

)213( Poems, P. 279. )214( Bath Lau, "Keats, Associations and 'Ode to a Nightingale'" in Keats-Shelley Journal, 32 (1983), 59. )215( Poems, P. 279.

99 misguided effort to engage in the sensory essense of nature without pain")216(.

Wine brings oblivion – represented by the image "Letho-ward", the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. In fact wine draws a porderline borderline between the two realms of mortality and immortality. It differentiates between what is and what aught to be)217(.

Wine imagery extends further:

O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been

Cool'd a long age in the been-deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!)218(

Here, Keats is at the peak of his poetic achievement.

In this second stanza he is "packing into a few lines what prose could not have expressed in many times the number of words he has employed")219(.

)216( E. Wasserman, P. 191. )217( B. Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn, P. 325. )218( Poems, P. 280. )219( R. H. Fogle, "Synaesthetic Imagery in Keats", P. 49.

100 The image "Testing" combines more than one sensation. It is not tactile image, it is associated with the emotion of the poet.

The feeling of tasting "flora" leads to the successive images of "country green", "Dance", and "sunburn mirth". One image leads to another. Sensuously, sight, colour, motion, sound and heat are all embodied in only two lines.

The "Hypocrene", a sacred spring to the muses, is "blushful". Christopher Richs suggest that "the fundamental point, clearly, is to intuitive a relation between the delight of wins and the delights of poetry")220(. The surprising lines

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth)221(;

With the /b/ alliteration and the onomatopoeic "winking"-causing the sound of wine when poured into a glass to the full – bring audual, visual and tactile senses all together. He hear the sound of pouring the wine, see it's colour and taste its flavor. Wine imagery dominates the first two stanzas. The image of the "forest" also recurs in

)220( Keats and Embarrassment (London: CUP, 1974), P. 202. )221( Poems, P. 280.

101 these stanzas, being in the first a " melodious plot" and becoming "forest dim' in the second.

The third stanza brings about the "far away" image, motivated by wine, in the previous one (and by imagination in the next). The happy thoughts provided him to think of his state in this mortal life. (It is the intensity Keats always claims in his letters)222(). The world of the speaker is full of "weariness", "fever" and "fret", while that of the bird has nothing of these depressing features. The bird is happy because "it is not human")223(. Because it is out of the mortal world

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre – thin and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow)224(.

Wine is then rejected in favour of imagination, "the viewless wings of poesy")225(. The statement "dull brain

)222( See, for example, Letters¸ I, 192. )223( Robin Nayhead, P. 72. )224( Poems, P. 280. )225( Ibid.

102 perplexes and retards")226(. Gives the songs of retreat and gradual withdrawal. With his fact evermore solidly – on the ground, the speaker meditates on the celestial world of the nightingale.

Now the light-dark imagery prevails. Darkness is blended with the light of the "queen moon". Here, the moonlight, which symbolizes imagination, is blended with darkness. This "evokes the enchantment of mystry, the wondrous secret just out of reach")227(.

This carries both physical and mental importance. In spite of the moon shine, the speaker complains: "there is no light", he cannot see but only "guess" the beauties of the ideal world. It is, hence, a mental darkness, blindness of brain, not of eyes. Light is so little, it comes "from heaven" only when "the breezes" blow. This line excellently conveys the sense of light "blown" within the breezes in a way that when reading it one feels the little light reaching us through the blowing breezes.

Darkness overcomes light. Since he exists in "embalmed" darkness, he is obliged to depend on the

)226( Ibid. )227( Richard Harter Fogle, "Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale", In PMLA, 68, No. 1 (March, 1953), 215.

103 senses rather than sight, he smells the scent of the flowers; tastes the nectar of the "musk- rose"; hears the sound the "murmurous haunt" of the flies. In the middle of this darkness the speaker hears the song of the nightingale: "Darkling I listen")228(, he can listen and hear. His other senses laid asleep, he is nearly dead. Here death is associated with sleep, it is one of the features of the ode)229(.

Death is presented as "easeful", the speaker is "half in love" with death. While the bird sings, he feels it is "rich to die". Death is conceived not in terms of extinction, but as release from pain. It is the song of the bird which would serve as a means by which he could "cease upon the midnight with no pain")230(.

The imagery of death is used here to convey two contradictory moods one realistic and the other romantic, in

)228( Poems, P. 281. )229( See E. Grennan, "Keats's Gentempus Mundi: A Shakespearean Influence on the 'Ode to A Nightingale'" in Modern Language Quarterly, 36, No. 3 (Semptember 1975), 275. )230( Poems, P. 281.

104 the speaker. Death is a "horrible dissolution and falling away, but it is also the climax of ecstasy")231(.

Yet he rejects death soon, since it leaves him with "ears in vain" to the bird's "high requiem" for which he wishes to become a "sod". Hence, "the desire for happiness is obviously the controlling element" in this stanza, since death is "envisaged as a cessation conterminous with a powerful feeling of sublimity")232(.

Accordingly, the subject – to death speaker is alienated from the never – to – die bird. They represent two "opposite poles – heaven and earth")233(. The death imagery continues in the seventh stanza where the speaker affirms.

Thou waste not born for death, immortal Bird!)234(

)231( Cleanth Brooks, "The Artistry of Keats: A Modern Tribute" in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes, P. 100. )232( Victor J. Lams, "Ruth, Milton, and Keats's 'Ode to A Nightingale'" in Modern Language Quarterly, 34, No. 4. (December 1973), 430. )233( E. Wasserman P. 203. )234( Poems, P. 231.

105 The speaker "preserves song, though not himself, from death")235(. The bird is immortal because its voice can be heard forever by all generations. Keats brings images from history: "emperor and clown"; religion: "Ruth" the image of Ruth "combines qualities of the earthily and remote, transient and eternal, painful and consoling")236(; and "feary lands forlorn" to prove that in no time or place was the song of the bird ever trod" down. Enchantment, suggested by such words as "charm'd, magic", and "feary", are contrasted with the baffling associations of "perilous" and "forlonn". We feel the "casement" opening out on the foam of perilous seas in "feary lands forlorn".

The feeling of forlornness, attributed to "feary lands" is ironically applied to the speaker himself:

Forlorn! The very word is like a bell

To tell me back from thee to my sole self!)237(

)235( Eleaner Cook, "Birds in Paradise: Uses of Allusion in Milton, Keats, Whitman Stevens and Ammons:, in Studies in Romanticism, 26 (Fall, 1987), 432. )236( Beth Iau "Keats's Mature Goddesses", P. 331. )237( Poems, P. 281.

106 That is, "forlorn" tolls the death of the imagination" in the speaker)238( since its very source turns to be "plaintive anthem" after being a "high requiem",

"fancy", it becomes clear, "cannot cheat so well". It is described as "deceiving elf". The speaker is in a state of "reflective soltitude")239(.

The image "deceiving lef" shows the speaker's reaction towards the new experience, he describes imagination as "deceiving", he no more believes in the ideal world as better than his own. Hence, the song "fades". Here we feel "the song fading on the ear when the poet, whether in imagination or reality, went his however way")240(.

The images of the last stanza provide "the necessary anticlimax to the poem" when the speaker

)238( R. H. Fogle,"Synaesthetic Imagery in Keats", P. 217. )239( J. G. Lawler: Celectial Pantomime (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), P. 119. )240( Katherine N. R. Konyen, "Keats and the Countrysied" in The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 13 (1962), 27.

107 Returns to his solo self, poetry cannot keep him in perpetual ecstasy, that music of the nightingale is fled)241(.

In this ode imagery serves to set imagination as a relief form the mortal world of pain, yet "it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast")242(.

This is thus a celebration of the richness of mortality and an invocation to taste it in spite of its "deathly nature")243(.

The first stanza of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is full of images which stress the character of the urn arrested beyond time. Through imagery Keats presents an aesthetic aspect of a visual art. The images are used as ironic device. From the very beginning, the physical image "unravish'd bride" strikes us with its unfamiliarity. The marriage between the urn and "quietness" is metaphorical, but is ironically unfulfilled – and never to be fulfilled. Hence

)241( K. N. Wilson, The Nightingale and the Hawk (London George Allen, 1964), P. 138. )242( C. Brooks, Modern Poetry and Tradition, P. 21. )243( H. Bloom, P. 520.

108 their child is a "foster child". "It is not their actual child, because they have not created it")244(.

The line "Thou foster-child of silence and slow time")245( gives the impression of slow moving time. The first stanza contains imagery of physical passion – "unravish'd bride", "foster-child", "haunts about thy shape", "wild ecstasy". The urn is purer than humanity.

Ironically, although it is silent, it can tell a story sweeter than the speaker can. This story teller produces "unheard melodies" "sweeter" than the handiness.

This is acceptable if we know that these "unheard melodies" play

Not to the sensual car, but, more andear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone;)246(

It is "the spirit" to whom the pipes play. This "mystic oxymoron")247( prepares us to accept the notion that one

)244( C. N. Bowra, P. 138. )245( Poems, P. 282. )246( Ibid. )247( This term is used by K. Durks in his "Symbolic Action in a Poem by John Keats" in John Keats, Odes Casebook, P. 105.

109 can, even if only imaginatively, attain such moments in which silence has a sound much more beautiful than any other sound, since it is directed to "the sprit".

In the second stanza images present a scene of melodist, maiden and lover. The musican's song is perpetual, the beauty of the maiden never fades, the lover will forever love. Images of sound are connected with the musician, images of maturation are represented by the green tree that will never "be bare". Besides, there are images of love consummation. The lover is always about to reach his "goal" but "never, never" can he kiss his beloved. Having created the young man with intense desire and eager anticipation for fulfillment, "the speaker philosophizes on the permanence of art amidst the mutability of temporal existence")248(. In this poem

Immortal women do not make good lovers…

for though they remain eternally young and

desirable, one can never experience with them

the full cycle of enjoyment that depends upon

)248( Albert C. Labriola, "Sculptural Poetry: The Visual Imagination of Michelangelo, Keats, and Shelley" in Comparative Literature Studies, 24, No. 4 (1987) 330.

110 time and process)249(.

Still, the speaker consoles the lover

Do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)250(

The three images of sound, maturation and love consummation are repeated in the third stanza. This stanza is regarded as a "recapitulation of earlier motifs")251(.

In the third stanza, the emphasis is on the third image- that of love consummation. Here Keats draws a comparison between unruly and earthily love. The unruly love, though never fulfilled, is

More happy love! More happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be emjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young)252(;

)249( Both Lau, "Keats's Nature Goddesses", P. 331. )250( Poems, P. 282. )251( Cloanth Brooks, "Keats's Sylvan Historians: History Without Footnotes" in his The Well-Wrought Urn (London: Dennis Debson, 1968), P. 129. )252( Poems, P. 282.

111

The "still" in "Still to be enjoy'd" has special auditory stress that "emphasizes the endless and static wait for fulfillment in which the figures on the urn are trapp'd")253(.

Earthly love, on the other hand, though consummated and full of "human passion", it

Leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue)254(.

The figures on the urn are but stones, yet, in a sense, are more alive than their flesh – and – blood counterparts.

The fourth stanza presents another set of images describing a religious rite. It is of a sacrificial folk coming from a "little" unknown town. This sudden shift of the score is result of "the vanity of the dream, the vain paradox of the completely satisfying human life in an arrest of time" of the previous stanza)255(.

)253( David A. Kent, "On the third Stanza of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn" in Keats-Shelley Journal, 36 (1987), 23. )254( Poems, P. 282. )255( F. R. Leavis, P. 275.

112 The dominating image is that of the "mysterious". The speaker's feeling about this situation is also mysterious.

He starts asking never answered questions. The image of silence, which is clear enough in the first stanza, reappears here. The key-word "emptid" in "What little town… is emptied of this folk")256( gives the implication of silence and makes us feel the slow movement of the sacrificial folk. Since the town is "desolate", its streets

Will silent be; and not for evermore a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return)257(.

After being a sweet story teller, the urn new cannot tell or even answer the questions of the poet. Thus the first four stanzas an be soon as one long image describing the urn and its scenes.

In the last stanza, the poet dissociates himself from the urn and describes it as "Attic Shape", "fair attitude", "silent form". These images also indicate that the urn deserves form the observer more than more interpretation of its

)256( Poems, P. 283. )257( Poems, P. 283.

113 scenes. It can be contemplated, aesthetically, as a marvelous piece of art)258(.

The urn is described as a "Cold Pastoral" "cold" conveys both physical and mental sensations. The urn is cold because it is made of "marble" which is known to be a cold material. It is "cold" also because it is an inanimate thing, "over-wrought" with "marble men and maidens" devoid of feeling or passion. The speaker tries to get himself out of the subjectivity in which he is entrapped, by saying that the urnly life remains "forever warm and still to be enjoyed")259( only because it has been reduced to "cold" marble. This is why it "teases us out of thought")260(.

"Tease" is chosen to portray "mischievous mockery on the part of the urn")261(.

Paradox faces us again when this urn is modified as a "friend to man" in spite of being coldly remote from him. The urn, because it is an inanimate object, can only be a "friend to man" in the comfort and instruction it provides.

)258( Lee T. Lomen, Approaches to Literature (London: OUP, 1969), P. 55. )259( Poems, P. 282. )260( Ibid, P. 283. )261( Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and Tradition, P. 16.

114 The images of this ode carry the principle theme that the figures on the urn "remain but a semblance of life" however, great is out imagination in blowing life into their noses to let them breathe and feel the sensuous life of human beings)262(.

The speaker persuades us to take advantage of his experience with the urn and to accept out transitory happiness by showing us that it would be heaven to have it forever.

In "Ode on Melancholy" images of taste and religion combine together to convey the joy-sorrow reconciliation as inevitable in life. Images of taste are "sustained and depend in their vitality, through associations with tactile and muscular response")263(.

The first stanza presents the images "Lethe", "Wolf's bane", "night shadow" – poisons which destroy the conscious mind of the person if he attempts to deal with

)262( J. D. Eigod, Keats's Ideal in the 'Ode on A Grecian Urn'", P. 116. )263( N. J. Bate, "Keats's Style: Evolution Towner Qualities of Permanent Value" in Gitties on Keats, P. 35.

115 them. Such tings would kill the "wakeful anguish of the soul")264(.

Which is something important to experience; for it is better to feel the agony than to feel nothing. "Yew-berries", "beetle", "death-moth", "downy owl" are images of death, which threaten those who think of death as an outlet for their miserable life. In this stanza, rough and muscular images are accompanied by religious images – such as "rosary", "Psyche" and "mysterious".

The second stanza is pregnant with sensuous imagery. Keats tells us how to behave whom a "melancholy fit" comes.

Images like "weeping cloud" make us feel the agony of its weeping. This "weeping", however, "fosters the droop headed flowers all")265(. Hence "weeping the flowers of joy which are themselves sorrowful")266(.

"sudden", posited at the beginning of the second line of the stanza, gives the feeling of rain falling suddenly. "April" image has its significant implications in that it is

)264( Poems, P. 263. )265( Ibid. )266( William Empson, P. 215.

116 both a month of rain, and the beginning of spring, the season of joy and fruitfulness. Its critical meaning are due to the accompanying image "shroud" which gives depressing meaning. It presents the theme of death in the ode. Hence we can see the blending of sadness with pleasure the ode "courts tragedy and… makes death the mother of beauty")267(.

We can taste the sensation of pleasure and sadness from the beginning till the end of the poem. The joy sorrow imagery is fundamental in the poem. Sorrow can be found in a "morning rose". Images like "glut", "morning rose", "globed peonies" carry shinning and light colours with them. As the speaker tries to harmonize joy and sorrow in nature, suggests that the same can apply to on human life – to enjoy both natural and feminine beauties.

The last three lines of the second stanza carry abundance of sesory imagery:

Or if they mistress some rich anger shows,

Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes)268(.

)267( H. Bloom, P. 522. )268( Poems, P. 284.

117

Here we have sensations of touch, in "Imprison her soft hand,", of hearing, in "let her rave"; of taste, in "feed deep, deep"; and of sight, in "her peerless eyes". The mistress is a source of both joy, however transient, and sorrow caused by her anger. She night be the personification of Melancholy, in the line "She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die")269(.

Realizing the transience of love and beauty, Keats "intensifies his joy in them")270(. In the often quoted lines.

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her Sovran shrine)271(,

Melancholy is personified because "in the mystery of her ambivalence is true "joy to be found")272(. Here "the desire for pleasure denies itself")273(. It is inevitable to acknowledge the presence of sorrow on any delightful occasion:

)269( Poems, P. 284. )270( K. Muir ed., Hohn Keats: A Reassessment, P. 73. )271( Poems, P. 284. )272( W. Empson, P. 216. )273( Leinel Trilling, Beyond Culture (London: Penguin, 1963, P. 69.

118 Joy, whose hand is over at his lips

Bidding adieu )274(;

At the moment of reading this line, we tend to visualize the man (the personification of joy) turning around and bidding us goodbye. This is handled by putting "Bidding" at the beginning of the line to give it this "impressive seriousness")275(. The most effective imagery is found in

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate tongue fine:

His should shall taste the sadness of her night)276(.

Here, the two contradictory joy and sadness are presented on one occasion. When tasting the grape of joy, sadness assompanies the happiness experienced in pressing the grape. We can imagine here a person pressing the grape

)274( Poems, P. 284. )275( E. C. Pettet, A Selection From John Keats (London: Longman, 1974), P. 20. )276( Poems, P. 284.

119 into his mouth – it is an image of pressure. Images of taste and hearing are also found in these lines.

It is as if we are tasting the grape and hearing its sound when pressed into the mouth. Melancholy, however, raids this joy with her "night" and hangs joy on her shrine as a sign of her victory over him. In this stanza, the final, religious imagery is clear, especially in "shrine". Melancholy has her own shrine; this asserts the inevitability of her presence on all occasions.

In "Ode on Indolence" imagery modifies an indolent mood which, at the same time, carries a spiritual growth- through the recurrent appearance of the three figures. Half- formed images incarnate the indolent mood of the speaker in the first stanza. The first four lines of the poem are slow in rhythm, which suits the deep reverie of the speaker in the ode. Time is described as positively "frowsy". The image "blissful cloud" contains oxymoronic implication. Indolence characterizes everything in the ode. The lulling words "lose and les" hypnotize us and draw us to a state of complete inertia.

The three figures on the urn are not yet recognized, they are more apparitions. They are accused of stealing the "idle day" of the poet and leaving him "without a teak".

120 Then he accuses them of talking away his joy of "nothingness". He bids them to

Leave my sense

Undaunted quite of all but-thingness)277(

The figures are later recognized as "Love" through the image "a fair maid",, "Ambition" which is described by the image "pale of cheek" why watches with her "fatigued eyes"; and "Poesy" which takes three lines to modify:

The last, whom I have more, the more of blame

Is heap'd upon her, maiden, most unmeek,

I knew to be my demon Poesy)278(.

These figures come to the scene four times. At each time the speakers excited, till at their third turn he becomes enthusiastic to follow them.

Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd

And ached for wings)279(,

)277( Poems, P. 285. )278( Poems, P. 285. )279( Ibid.

121

Yet this seems only temporary, because at their last turn, the speaker again rejects them. This rejection is conveyed through the images "stirring shades" and "baffled beaus" which modify the figures' quality. He describes them as objects of transitory effect. He has easily resisted them. Keats here seems to "repudiate love altogether. But he was able to reject love, ambition, and poetry only by saterising them")280(.

The ironic images are revealed clearly in the likes

For I would not be dieted with praise,

A pet-lamb I a sentimental fare!)281(

At the end he decides to dismiss these figures forever: "Fade softly from my eyes")282(, and returns to his state of indolence. He rejects their lure in favour of his joy of sense – indolence. Hence, the images of passion ("Love"), action ("Ambition") and creation ("my demon Poesy") and their attempts unsuccessfully; they are dismissed from the sight

)280( Kenneth Muir, P. 65. )281( Poems, P. 286. )282( Poems, P. 286.

122 of the speaker. This is because these images are counterbalanced by these of indolence and drowsiness)283(.

The Ode "To Autumn" is rich with different kinds of imagery. Cunningly enough, the images produce the theme of both fulfillment and decay. The speaker uses with autumn all the delights of spring. The poem is a celebration of fractioning. Fulfillment takes its ripest shape. The first stanza is full of tactile images "mellow fruitfulness", "maturing sun", "conspiring".

Also "to load and bless", "round thach-eves run")284(, "to bend", to "fill… the core", "to swell the gourd", "to plump the hazel shells", "to set budding" – all combine to perform the growth process. Each image has a relation to the other. the sun is "maturing". "Maturing" here is pun. On the one hand it means that the sum is making fruit grow; on the other hand, it means that the sun itself is in the process of growing.

Sun and autumn "conspire" to "lead and bless". Conspiracy has, unusually, an optimistic meaning here.

)283( See G. Wilson Knight, "The Priest-Like Teak", P. 296. )284( Poems, P. 360.

123 Keats convinces us to comprehend the relation between the sun and autumn as one of fruitful marriage.

The offspring of this implied marriage is the growing fruit. Hence we are given verbs of growth – "load", "bless", "bend", "fill", "swell", "plump" and "set budding". They suggest the heaviness and ripeness of the fruit.

The image "moss'd-cottiage trees")285( implies the slow movement of the creative process. The image "sweet kernel" makes us think of the luxury of pressing an apple into the mouth, tasting its flavour. The image of the "bees" gives the sound of the bees hissing around flower, taking nectar from them.

There are, however, counter-images which suggest the presence of autumn, such as "slammy cells" which gives us the sense of coldness. chance is implied through time movement. Here, summer has already gone and it is early autumn – in the maturing process.

The second stanza has images of, another type. The images of the first stanza are tactile and synaesthic, here we have autumn personified and becoming the central metaphor. All the images describing it are visual and in

)285( Poems, P. 360.

124 plastic poses – as if the movement is being frozen in the very moment of achievement.

There are images of man's harvesting activities. In the first four lines we are in a granary:

Who hath not seen thee amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks bread may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind)286(;

There is a quiet satisfaction, "careless", which implies the passage of time, indirectly. It is now the time when harvesting has already finished, and the store is filled with corn; and it is time now to have a break from work. The last line is an image of a girl sitting with her hair lifted up. The sound of the wind is conceived through the onomatopoeia "winnowing". We luxuriously enjoy the soft breeze of the wind.

the images of "half-reap'd furrow sound asleep")287(

)286( Poems, P. 360. )287( Poems, P. 360.

125

give the sense of drowsiness which is achieved in the next line "Drows'd with fume of poppies". Here we smell the fume and feel the slow motion of one who is about to fall asleep. Autumn now appears as a gleaner who picks up the corn left behind after being cut. The "steady they laden head across a break")288(.

Image is suggestive. When reading or hearing the line road, we immediately see a cautious girl balancing the lead she carries before crossing the river)289(. This stanza also contains counter-images. Beside this pleasant scene, autumn is presented also as dying. This is clear in the image of "patient look". Autumn is patiently watching "the last oozing hours by hours")290(, as if waiting for death; "oozing" implies the passing of time. The fruit is put to the "cider-press" for pressing it into juice.

In the first two stanzas of the poem, there are images of pressure which contribute to give vitality to the ode. Pressure is represented by the act of loading and bending the trees towards the earth. Another kind of pressure is

)288( Ibid. )289( See F. R. Leavis, PP. 263-264. )290( Poems, P. 360.

126 inner, giving ripeness to the core of the fruit; another is that of balancing the load and the movement of the gleaner, and the pressure of the poppies causing drowsiness. Also we accept the presence of pressure in lifting the hair against the wind.

In the final stanza, images are of autumnal sound (hence auditory images). They imply both growing and ending. Now the time is late autumn and early winter. The question "where are the songs of spring?)291(" is not to create regret that autumn has no songs. In fact autumn has its own songs, and its own beauty. The sound imagery is clear in "wailful choir", "mourn", "bleat", "sing", "whistle" and "twitter'. This stanza offers the richness of the season by means of images of peace and serenity accompanying these of fulfillment. The sound here are all faint and slight which appeal to both peace and fulfilled growth.

Other images, however, indicate the end of autumn the "choir" is "wailful; it is sunset time, the day is ending, but softly. This combination of happy and sad images reveals the fact of human life itself – where joy and sorrow counterbalance each other. hence ,the image of the last line

)291( Poems, P. 360.

127 "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies")292( makes us lift our eyes towards the sky "from which is ultimately derived this natural plentitude and human peace")293(.

We can, at the same time, perceive it the other way around. Birds are migrating, which indicates the coming of winter – the day and the season are "softly" dying)294(.

Death here is accepted and welcomed too. "To accept death", John Middleton Murry comments,

Is to accept life, it is to accept the

whole of one's mortal destiny, to see it as necessary and inevitable and beautiful)295(.

Yet, what makes us optimistic in the poem is the fact that Keats never allows melancholy to overshadow the happy mood of the ode. What proves this is the absence of the dead leaves usually present in autumn)296(.

Autumn becomes, thus a condition of rest from the pressure of time, and a harbinger for a new year a new life.

)292( Ibid, P. 361. )293( W. H. Evert, P. 298. )294( L. Unger, "Keats and the Music of Autumn" in John Keats, Odes: A Casebook, p. 187. )295( Keats and Shakespeare (London: OUP, 1964), P. 126. )296( See Patrick Swinden, "John Keats: 'To Autumn'" in Critical Quarterly, 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), 57-58.

128

In the major odes of Keats, structure has an intimate relation with theme. The movement from one stanza to another coincides with thematic development. Each ode has a certain shape through which an idea is conveyed. Although the up-down structural design :

B

A A '

can be applied to "Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn")297(, each of the major odes has its own thematic structure. This is due to the fact that Keats's odes lend themselves to various interpretations.

The structural design parallels a thematic movement in "Ode to Psyche". Obviously, the structure is that of reduplication. Due to the developing theme, the poem pairs

)297( See Chapter Three on this structure.

129 the opening stanza of the mythological story of Cupid and Psyche found in a natural forest with the closing stanza in which Psyche awaits her lover in a bower "In some untrodden region")298(, of the speaker's mind. The natural bower in the first stanza is replaced by an imaginative one in the last.

Similarly, the second and third stanzas form a paralleled pair. The second stanza lists the missing privileges of the late goddess, Psyche. The third, in reaction, juxtaposes this lack by providing an imaginative list instead. It is in fact by imagination that Psych's rights are restored, one by one.

It is clear now that it is the structure which presents both the problem and the solution of the poem. The deprivation lacking of Psyche's rights in having a bower and supplications of her own, as stated in the first two stanza, is manipulated in the last two. It is this theme of restoring the lost rights which "necessitates its mirror shape")299(.

)298( Poems, P. 277. )299( H. Vendler, P. 49.

130 The last stanza mirrors the first, the third mirrors the second. This mirroring the first, the third mirrors the second. This mirroring does not project the same features of the two mirrored objects. It is the solution of the problem. The problem (the lost bower and rights) is stated in the first two stanzas. The solution for this problem (the restoration of the lost bower and rights) is given in the last two stanzas. The last stanza mirrors the bower scene of the first, and the third mirrors the lost-rights scene of the second.

Many structural designs could be found in the "Ode to a Nightingale". The most convincing structure is that of entrance and exit. The movement of the ode is determined by this structural shape. The first stanza provides us with the motivating reason for the speaker's entrance into the ideal world of the nightingale. This motive is the song of a nightingale. The speaker's hearing of this song stimulates him to join that unfamiliar world.

The next three stanzas explain the different means through which the speaker wishes to take his way out of his world to enter that of the nightingale. The second stanza

131 deals with the first means which is wine, "a draught of vintage", "the blushful Hippocrene")300(.

The effect of wine on the speaker is shown in the third stanza. The speaker is intoxicated and wishes to join the world of ecstasy and joy, away from his world in which the sensations of pain and suffering are predominant. The first means is not powerful enough to help him transcend to the nightingale's world. Another means is, therefore, demanded.

The second means of entrance into the nightingale's world is approached in the first part of the fourth stanza. It is by means of imagination that the speaker decides to enter the world of the nightingale – the ideal world. If wine does not allow him to be in this ideal world, imagination does. In the second part of this stanza, the speaker has entered that world and is able to address the bird directly – "Already with thee")301(.

In the fifth stanza the speaker is now facing difficulties in that world of the immortals. In spite of this he tries to manage the situation. Darkness prevails over that

)300( Poems, P. 280. )301( Ibid.

132 world. Here he remembers his past wishes to die, but soon rejects this idea since it would take him out of that world. The sixth stanza elaborates the idea of death.

The very idea of death makes him aware of the difference between the two worlds, his world of mortals and the immortal world of the nightingale. Such awareness motivates him, in the seventh stanza, to travel back to his own world. In the final stanza, the speaker, recognizing the futility of joining the immortal world, abandons the realm of the ideal and re-enters that of his. He chooses a realistic attitude in coming back to face pain and suffering courageously.

Thus we can see that in the first stanza, the speaker is in is world. In the second, third, and the first part of the fourth stanza he prepares himself to enter the ideal world of the bird, but fails. In the later part of the fourth stanza and the next three he is in that world. In the final stanza he is back again to the actual world.

The five-stanza "Ode on a Grecian Urn" can be divided, according to a thematic structure, into two parts. The first part contains the first four stanzas constituting the subjective attitude of the speaker toward the urn. The

133 second part lies in the last stanza, which projects an objective attitude.

The poem begins with an address to the urn; the speaker is speculating about the urn and asking it to tell him the story of the legends of its scenes wrought on its wall. Here, in the first stanza, the questions directed to the urn are serious, for which the speaker awaits answers.

In the second stanza no answer is given. This "Sylvan historian" is supposed to tell a "flowery tale", but it does not. This is why the speaker turns his attention to a different thing. He is scrutinizing the figures themselves and wandering at their characters, and thinking of their relation to him.

This subjective attitude (of being in close touch with the urn and its figures) continues in the third stanza)302(.

The speaker becomes so subjective that he compares the ideal unruly life of permanent love and joy with the

)302( In his The Well-Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks sees the third stanza a "blemish on the ode", P. 129. other critics, however, evaluate it as control to the ode. See, for example, K. Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats", P. 110; N. Dikstein, Keats and His Poetry, P. 224; E. Wasserman, The Finer Tone, P. 36.

134 transient human joy of the actual world. In fact, he is here full of empathy towards the urnly life.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker turns again to ask questions, now on another scene – a town and its inhabitants. In this stanza, unlike the first, the speaker is conscious that no answers are given to his questions. He is now aware of the urn's silence and mysterious quality.

In the last stanza, however, the speaker is objective in his attitude toward the urn. In the previous four stanzas, he was attached to the urn and therefore his judgment was subjective. His views, as a result of this subjectivity, became empathetic; he preferred the qualities of the urnly life to those of the earth. In the final stanza he is detached. He realizes that the urn is a mere work of art, "Cold Pastoral", a "silent form" that can only be a "friend to man", not part of him.

This detachment makes him think of the urn objectively, away from the influences of his feeling and emotions. Here he is separating his thought from his feeling. As a result the urn is seen as an "Attic shape", a "Fair attitude" as beautiful as any masterpiece. He likes the urn, not as a moving incarnation of permanent life, but as a lovely piece of art.

135 Thus, structure here "extends to explain theoretical points on the nature of art and the role of artists")303(.

In "Ode on Melancholy", structure corresponds to the dialectical movement of the ode. Each of its three stanzas stands for a stage in the dialectical process.

The first stanza is the thesis of the poem – the rejection of oblivion or of death in case of melancholy.

The reason of this rejection is given in the last two lines:

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul)304(.

The second stanza is the antithesis which asserts the value of life. The first part describes the way a melancholy fit comes: "Sudden from heaven")305(.

The second part presents a way to react against the fit, by lingering at the natural or feminine beauty.

)303( George Woodcock "Romanticism: Studies and Speculations", in The Sewanee Review, 88, No. 2 (Spring 1980), 299. )304( Poems, P. 283. )305( Ibid.

136 The final stanza forms the synthesis – the speaker reaches a conclusion which is both unexpected and convincing. The solution is in admitting both joy and sorrow as indispensable to everyone. The whole poem is, in fact, based on sets of contrast: life and death, oblivion and consciousness, pleasure and pain.

These contradictions are reconciled in this stanza. The structure of this ode, then, forms a complete dialectical process. The thesis of the poem is given in the first stanza, the antithesis in the second, and the synthesis in the third.

In the "Ode on Indolence" the structural design goes side by side with the developing theme. The theme of recurrent stages of numbness and wakefulness is clarified by the rhythmic appearance and disappearance of three figures on an urn. Throughout the whole poem, the urnly figures have three turns.

The first part of the first stanza describes the not yet recognized figure. The second part presents the first of their turns. Their appearance acquaints the speaker, in the second stanza, with their "deep-designated plot)306(" to bring him out of his indolence and numbness. Consciously, he

)306( Poems, P. 284.

137 confronts the figures with resistance. Thus they fail to bring him to wakefulness.

The third stanza presents the second turn. In their second turn, the figures, in the first part, succeeded in awaking the speaker who was for a long time benumbed, for he is now examining their identities and recognizing their names too- "Love", "Ambition" and "Poesy". Their effect on him continues in the first part of the fourth stanza. Thus, instead of confrontation, it is now a yielding to the figure's influence for wakefulness. In the latter part of this stanza, however, yearning to indolence invades him again.

The third turm of the figres, in the fifth stanza, has consequently no effect on the speaker. His yearning for numbness is now dominant. Resistance against the figures' influence comes to the scene again and replaces the past yielding which the second turn had brought. Triumphantly, the speaker is back again to his indolence. In the final stanza, the figures retreat, they have failed in their attempts to steal his indolence. They are bidden "Farewell" and are banished for good.

138 In this ode Keats "tries the suprposition of one structural shape over another")307(, the vibrating movements of the figures, their repeated turns, coincide with the speaker's mood between sticking to numbness and yielding to wakefulness.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast they music too)308(.

The second part describes nature in late autumn. In this stanza, autumn is in its last stage. Winter is implied in the last line of the ode: "And gathering swallows twitter en in the skies")309(. Here, we can sense a stoic reference to death since autumn is drawn to us as :

an objective fact that is being recorded by the poet, rather than a metaphorical substitute for a cry of sadness at the pain of living and the mortality of man)310(.

Hence, death is conceived as an absolute fact of life - something which is inevitable for the poet, ripeness is

)307( H. Vendler, P. 23. )308( Poems, P. 360. )309( Ibid, P. 361. )310( Patrick Swinden, "John Keats: 'To Autumn'", P. 58.

139 all)311(. Keats's successful choice of autumn suits the fatal mutability which happens by time, since it is a "space between summer and winter that can never be abstracted from the large cycle of birth and death")312(.

This development in the process of time – from late summer (in the first stanza) to autumn (in the second), to early winter (in the third) – can also be applied to a single day. The first stanza can suggest the beginning of the day with its "maturing sun" and the bees gathering nectar from the flowers.

In the second stanza, autumn is "sitting careless on a granary floor")313(, tired of working under the sun at noon. In the final stanza the day is waning, it is sunset time, "soft- dying day". Hence the development of the seasons appears also in the passage of a single day.

It is important to say, therefore, that this ode has a firm overall unity, represented by its thematic structure. What adds to its firmness is the structural device of using

)311( By the time of writing this ode, Keats was seriously consumptive and he knew he was dying – a fact which he accepted with a calm mind. )312( S. M. Sperry, Keats the Poet, P. 338. )313( Poems, P. 360.

140 eleven lines in each stanza. The two lines before the last form a couplet. This device reinforces the vital quality of the season and its mood of stoic acceptance of the mutability of life.

141 John Keats is famous for his poetic genius. It is the major six odes, indeed, which qualify him to the rank of great poets. He attracts readers to his odes because the richness of their content and compactness of their form make them amenable to various critical interpretations. In addition to a large number of earlier studies of Keats's poetry, a host of twentieth century critics have dedicated their essays to his major odes.

Keats has attempted many types of poetry - mainly, the sonnet, the narrative poem, and the ode. His poetic genius, however, appeared in the ode, specifically, the six major odes of the 1820 volume – "Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode on Indolence", and "To Autumn". Chapter one treated the odes as a literary genre as attempted by Pindar and Horace and practiced, with changes, by English poets like William Collins and Thomas Gray.

Keats tried this literary genre- the irregular English ode earlier, before writing the major odes. There is a group of poems – "Ode to Apollo"; the four lyric interludes of

142 Endymion: "To Pan", "To Neptune", "TO Sorrow", and "To Diana"; "Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair"; and "Ode to May" – which are treated as early odes in Chapter Two. They are considered as forerunners of the major odes.

Tackling the major odes, in Chapter Three, many different points of view confront us as we examine them. One debatable issue in the odes is whether they form a sequential pattern, a unity, or individual poems.

I favor the last opinion since the odes were written in different moods, though at almost the same time span. They treat different themes inspite of some ideas that are common to all of them.

Another area of criticism in the odes, presented in Chapter Four, is that of sensation and thought. Keats was intensely attracted to the physical world which often form the subject matter of his poetry. Hence, the sensuous element figures conspicuously in his odes. This element of sense is the starting point in his poetic creation, and sense generates ideas but remains continuous with it.

In Chapter Five, the study of Keats's imagery in the major odes is the most rewarding literary investigation. Keats's fame is based on his use of sensory imagery. Many

143 of the images are synaethetic by nature. Because of this, the major odes look much alive, concrete, and tangible. And it is here where the secret of his attractiveness lies.

In the major odes, the structure is related to the development of the theme. Each ode, as discussed in the final chapter, has a specific thematic structure which is necessary for a fuller understanding of these odes.

144 1- Keat's Works:

- John Keats: Complete Peoms ed., Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. press, 1978.

- The letters of John Keats 2 Vols., ed., H. E. Rollins. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958.

2- Criticism:

- Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: CUP, 1953.

- Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957.

- Albert, Edward. History of English Literature. London: Harrap, 1979.

- Albre'cht, W. P. "Keats's 'Truth' and 'A Truth'". Philological Quarterly, 57, No. (Spring 1978) 225-240.

- Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Pres, 1964.

145 - Bate, Walter Jackson ed. Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1964.

- Blackstone, Bernard. The Concecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form. London: Longman, 1959.

- Blackstone, Bernard. "The Mind of John Keats in His Art". In British Romantic Poets. Ed. Shiv K. Kumar. London: Univ. of London Press, 1966.

- Bowra, C. H. The Romantic Imagination. London: CUP, 1976.

- Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and Tradition. New York: CUP, 1965.

- Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. London: Dennis Dobson, 1968.

- Bush, Douglas. "Notes on Keats's Reading". PMLA, 50, No. 1 (March, 1935), 785-806.

- Bush, Douglas. "Keats". In his Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry.

146 Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965.

- Cervo, Nathan. "Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Keats: A Pre-Raphaelite View". Pre-Raphaelite Review, 3 (1979), 63-74.

- Chesteron, G. K. Mathew Arnold's Essays in Criticism. London: Dent, 1964.

- Clayborough, Arther. "'Negative Capability' and 'The Camelion Poet' in Keats's Letters: The Case of Differentiation". English Studies, 54, No. 6 (December, 1973), 569-575.

- Cock, Fleanor, "Birds in Paradise; Uses of Allusion in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens and Ammons". Studies in Romanticism, 26 (Fall 1987), 421-413.

- Dickstein, Morris. Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971.

- Doubleday, F. N. "John Keats and the Borough Hospitals". The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin. 13 (1962) 12-17.

147 - Eggers, J. P. "Memory in Mankind: Keats's Historical Imagination". PMLA, 86, No. 5 (October, 1971) 990-997.

- Emson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Penguin, 1930.

- Evert, Walter H. Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats. Princeton: Princeton Univ. press, 1965.

- Fairchild, Hoxic N. "The Romantic Movement in England". PMLA, 55, No.1 (March, 1940), 20-26.

- Fairchild, Hoxic N. "Keats and the Struggle for Existence Tradition". PMLA, 64, No.1 (March 1949), 98-114.

- Fogle, Richard Harter. "Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'". PMLA, 68, No.1 (March 1953), 211-222.

- Fraser, G. S., ed. John Keats Odes: A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1971.

- Fry, Paul. The Poet's Calling in the Enlgish Ode. New Haven: Yale Univ. P., 1980.

148 - Garrod, H. W. Keats. 2nd ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939.

- Gibson, John. "On the Cockney School of Poetry". Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2, No. 7 (1917), 38-41.

- Gibson, John. "On the Cockney School of Poetry". Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 3, No. 17 (August, 1818), 519-525.

- Gillie, Christopher. A Companion to British Literature. London: Longman, 1977.

- Gittings. Robert, John Keats: The Living Year. London: Heinemann 1954.

- Gitings, Robert. Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1966.

- Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Penguin, 1986.

- Gleckner, Robert F. "Keats's Odes: The Problem of the Limited Canon". Studies in English Literature, 5, No. 4 (Autumn 1965), 577- 585.

149 - Gorden, Ian. "Keats and the English Pindaric". In A Review of English Literature, 8, No. 2 (April, 1967), 9-23.

- Grennan, E. "Keats's Contemptus Mundi: A Shakespearian Influence on the 'Ode to a Nightingale'". Modern Language Quarterly, 36, No. 3 (September 1975), 272-292.

- Hamer, Enid. The Meters of English Poetry. London: Methuen, 1966.

- Hilles, F. and Harold Bloom, eds. From Sensibility to Romanticism. London: CUP, 1965.

- Holsberry, John E. "Hawthorn's 'The Haunted Mind', The Psychology of Dreams, Coleridge, and Keats". Texas Studies in literature and Language, 21, No. 3 (Fall 1979), 307-328.

- Inglis, Fred. Keats. Writers and Their Works. London: Evans, 1966.

- Jack, Ian. English Literature 1815-1832. vol. X of Oxford History of English Literature. Ed.

150 Wilson, F. P. an B. Dobrec. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963.

- Jack, Ian. Keats and the Miror of Arts. London: OUP, 1967.

- Jones, L. M. "The 'Ode to Psyche': An Allegorical Introduction to Keats's Great Odes". The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, No. 9 (1958), 22-26.

- Jump, John D. The Ode: The Critical Idiom. London: Methuen, 1974.

- Kent, David A. "On the Third Stanza of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'". Keats-Shelley Journal, 36 (1984), 20-25.

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