Creative Mutability in John Keats’s Odes

By

Afroditi Domasi

A dissertation submitted to the School of English, at the Aristotle University of

Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master

of Arts.

MA in English and American Studies

Dissertation Supervisor: Dr Maria Schoina

Thessaloniki February 2020

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..1

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………2

I. Pursuing Inspiration: “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode to Psyche”…………………..14

II. Mutability and the Artifact: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”…………………………….30

III. Pain into Creativity: “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy”………...40

IV. The Limits of the Cycle: “To Autumn”………………………………………….53

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………61

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..63

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Abstract

The notion of mutability according to the pre-Socratic philosophers, subjects everything in the world to constant change, regardless of ethical categories. It also relates to the concepts of fluidity and necessity. For the Romantics, it manifests chiefly in poetry. One can trace its influence in the odes of John Keats, especially when read in a specific sequence. In the “Ode on Indolence,” the poet fluctuates between inactivity and mental stimulation chiefly inspired by thoughts of poetry, while in the “Ode to Psyche” he resolves to restore a forgotten ideal through his poetry. Next in my analysis is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he temporarily steps back from his role as a poet and becomes a recipient of art, contemplating mutability in the artifact. “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Melancholy” constitute poems of inner contemplation; in the former Keats contemplates the end of mutability in human mortality while being in a trance-like state; in the latter, this same feeling translates to melancholy in the conscious everyday experience. In the ode “To

Autumn” we see a culmination of the tendencies exhibited in the other odes, as the poet assumes a stance of acceptance and reconciliation with the forces of mutability.

Through the odes, and especially through “To Autumn,” we see the poet personally affected but also creatively motivated by the certainty of mutability.

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Introduction

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free; Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability. Percy Bysshe Shelley

“When I consider everything that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment,” Shakespeare is contemplating in sonnet 15, and he proceeds to describe a view of the world “[w]here wasteful Time debateth with Decay / To change your day of youth to sullied night”; the antidote to the corrosive time is, simply, “[a]s he takes from you, I engraft you new” (lines 1-2, 11-12, 14). The clear-cut poetic solution suggested here to the final problem – decay, old age and death – is that art and the artist can mend the corrosion of time, turn it back, in a sense. This idea puts art on a pedestal and misconstrues its role in relation to human mortality and mutability.

Artistic creation seems to compensate for the frailty of our nature, and art is often professed as a stable antipode, a constant to the ever-changing reality of human experience. I find that this notion of contraries is not only far from Shakespeare’s own but an oversimplified and inaccurate conception of the role of the artifact – the product of artistic creation – as well as the creative process itself. The juxtaposition of art and life to such an extent leads at best to a deification of art akin to idolatry, with the artist assuming a “priestlike task”, to use Keats’s phrase from “Bright Star” (line

5), at worst to a demonisation of art as a scapegoat for an individual’s choices or humanity’s mistakes. The inherent dualism of such notions does injustice to the complicated relations of art and life. Exploring the Romantic poetry of John Keats in the Great Odes, I argue that the answer to a constantly changing world is a more complicated view on art, one that admits change and imperfection and reflects both

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evolution and its opposite, assimilating the human element rather than existing in isolation and adoration. As I will discuss, it is a distinctly worldly, rather than divinely inspired artistic composition that arises from Keats’s attitudes in his poems.

The presiding human concern, the anxiety or fear of mutability, finds appeasement in art conditioned by the same mutability – art that is weakened or enhanced by the effects of mutability. Inescapable change, a concept with distinctly Romantic undertones, becomes a prerequisite of artistic creation.

Before examining it within the context of Romantic thought and Keats’s poetic inspirations, the notion of mutability needs to be more clearly delineated. The very attempt to “delineate” though is ironic, since mutability is not in essence dependent or even co-dependent on human logic and conception. Its manifestations are not constrained by time as we experience it, and therefore often cannot be observed firsthand, since they exceed the human lifespan. A being’s existence is a testament to mutability, although a being’s birth and death do not constitute mutability’s beginning and end, only of that being. In this respect it can be linked to

P.B. Shelley’s doctrine of necessity, which is conceived to rule over the actions and decisions of all beings (Gingerich 447-448).1 Shelley upholds that “everything is animation”, and necessity itself adheres to the laws of “continual change” (446).2

Shelley admits that even powerful Necessity has its limitations; as S.F. Gingerich

1 Paraphrasing here from Shelley’s notes in the poem “Queen Mab”. I quote Shelley’s prose and letters relevant to Necessity from S.F. Gingerich’s article. Despite the central part the doctrine of Necessity plays in Shelley’s poetry, little has been written since Gingerich’s 1918 essay on how Necessity fits with the poet’s other philosophical beliefs.

2 Shelley. “Letter to Miss Hitchener,” Jan. 2, 1812. Shelley discusses his view on religion he expressed in a conversation with Robert Southey. Quoted again from Gingerich.

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explains, the poet recognises the agency of “a living and animating Spirit pervading the frame of things” (449). Given that Shelley ardently argued against deism and organised religious institutions, he cannot but mean mutability or some condition in the world with similar effect. As for the concept of necessity, it originates in the ancient world, known as destiny, in the poetic works of Greek tragedians as much as in philosophy. And unfortunately for the purposes of this thesis, the idea of mutability, that is, the conception of it as a condition of existence and its systematisation into a coherent set of philosophic principles, is, like necessity, not a

Romantic one in itself. We need to give humanity credit for an earlier discovery.

While one cannot profess to have placed the beginning of it, the conceptualisation of mutability makes a prominent and lasting appearance in the pre-

Socratic philosophers, especially in the fragments we have of Heraclitus. It is most memorably, and poetically, expressed in the famous river (mis)quotation, originally

“[π]οταμοῖσι δὶς τοῖσι αὐτοῖσι οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης· ἕτερα γὰρ <καὶ ἕτερα> ἐπιρρέει

ὕδατα” (Heraclitus 26), that is, you could not step twice into the same rivers; for other

[and other] waters are ever flowing on. This single aphorism which both puzzles and resonates with us today represents the ancient thinker’s outlook on a Gordian issue which can be neither untangled nor cut. As Apostolos L. Pierris explains, the pre-

Socratic philosophers, despite their differences, circumnavigate the idea that “the

World presents itself as change”; whatever philosophical observations we make about the world arise within the conditions set by “cosmic diversity, variability and mutability” (“First Principles and the Beginning of Philosophy” 6). Constant change rules the world and determines our philosophical principles, while it sets the focus on motion rather than existence. Instead of stably defining what mutability “is”, we focus

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on what “is being”, what is in the process of becoming, “γίγνεσθαι” for the ancient

Greeks (Pierris, “The Beginning of Being” 16).

Mutability can indeed be understood to function the way a liquid does. Pierris connects the physical and the abstract aspect of mutability by expanding on the

Heraclitean water metaphor; he associates mutability to the flow of liquids, a property which by analogy makes them more resistant to pressure than solid matter (“The

Beginning of Being” 9). Elsewhere, he states that the world functions in a series of flows, “everything is a series of flows […] the world presents the abominable image of chaotic mutability”3 (“The Heraclitean World” 13). For our purposes, I argue that such a unifying approach towards the physical and the conceptual world, an overarching principle that does not undervalue differences but underlines the connections between the two, is one very much utilised by Romantic poets. M.H.

Abrams explores the concepts and problematisations the Romantics inherited from pagan philosophers in Natural Supernaturalism (141-154). He argues that the cultural traditions of these very different ages share the fundamental idea that fragmentation, the separation of nature and mind, is at the heart of the world’s malaise (Abrams 145).

The idea that “[t]he [philosophical] system is an organic one”4 (Pierris, “The

Beginning of Being” 13), one in which mind and nature cooperate organically – an idea preceding and in radical contrast to the Platonic priority of the mind over the

3 My translation. Originally, “Τα πάντα είναι ροές. Συνεχές, παντοειδές γίγνεσθαι αποτελεί τον Κόσμο.

[…] Ο Κόσμος φαίνεται να παύει να είναι «Κόσμος» και να παρουσιάζει την ειδεχθή εικόνα της

χαοτικής μεταβλητικότητας”.

4 My translation. Originally, “Το μοντέλο είναι οργανικό”.

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physicality of the senses – is the central idea which the pre-Socratic thinkers were eager to pass through, and which the Romantic poets adapted and reenacted.

Before I explore the relation of organicity and mutability in Romantic terms, however, there is one significant parameter in the world of constant, unstoppable change surmised by Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. The concept of “injustice”, one of the core concerns of ethical philosophy, does not come up at first sight in the approach we take towards mutability. Indeed, mutability is not to be constrained by a human-imposed conception. The roots of ethical philosophy and injustice are in logos

– reason – while mutability has been ascribed with chaotic energies. Most importantly, ethics are not resistant to time, in fact they are infused by it and themselves are being modified constantly. The factor of mutability makes it difficult to draw ethical conclusions, since at some point change is bound to happen, whatever one decides to follow as a guiding principle. The question arises, therefore, if it is useful to ignore this widening gulf in our reasoning. Leaving this perspectival compromise aside, that is, ignoring that mutability seemingly functions independently and irrespectively of ethics, the ancient philosophical thought boldly admits injustice as the norm in a world conditioned by change. In the Heraclitean fragments, “πόλεμος

πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι” (Heraclitus 28), war is the father of all, or as Pierris reiterates, “every interaction is a violation”5 (“The Beginning of Being” 17). The idea of injustice in the universe due to mutability is inferable from Shelley’s doctrine of necessity as well, since “governed by the law of Necessity,” as Gingerich observes,

“the animating spirit” – mutability – “of this supersensuous world is devoid of will

5 My translation. Originally, “Στην άγια καθαρότητα του Είναι κάθε αλληλεπίδραση είναι βιασμός. Για

να φτιαχτεί «κόσμος» τα όντα αλληλοβιάζονται.”

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and personality and as such is unethical” (Gingerich 453). Far from conveniently excluding mutability from ethics due to the powerlessness of mortal nature, I argue that one can accept it and adapt to it. Human beings cannot escape mortality and mutability, but this does not imply that the human consciousness is bereft of choice. It is quite the contrary – and the Romantic poets maintained this belief, albeit in different degrees, offering different personal variations on the same theme – the choices are amplified because conditioned by change. Mutability must be understood as part of the world and part of the human world, rather than as a limitation to creativity.

The idea of mutability has been a recurring theme in Romantic poetry, and it has strong links with the spirit of the role of organic change as well as organically motivated creativity. The latter notion is best expressed by Keats himself; he axiomatically believes that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all” (“51 To John Taylor” 107) 6 and indeed it must have felt so for himself. His statement holds true for the type of poetry he produced, not in honour of some patron but chiefly inspired by his own experiences and contemplative mind.

It does not mean that the poetry is as spontaneous as to be fit to be published unedited, or that writing verse constitutes an easy task in any way; besides, that would outright exclude the effects of mutability from the creative process; if a manuscript was perfect in the first attempt, modification would have no place. Keats attributes merely the main motivation for writing poetry to an inherent urge. The other way in which mutability inheres within organicity for the Romantics has been described by Abrams.

6 The in-text citation of The Letters of John Keats follows the edition by H. Buxton Forman and is arrayed as follows: (“number of letter and recipient as included in the edition” and page number).

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His argument systematises a Romantic tendency into a pattern “in which development consists of a gradual curve back to an earlier stage, but on a higher level incorporating what has intervened” (Abrams 114). This motion of cumulative experience resembles the shape of a spiral – “the Romantic spiral” (Abrams 183) and accommodates the necessity of fluidity of the Heraclitean tenets. I believe the Romantic spiral describes, in so many words, mutability itself. The changes a person experiences, good or bad, fundamentally lead to growth; change itself is neither good nor evil in the grand scheme of things, and any resistance to it is unproductive. Keats attests to this idea conceiving his own “system of salvation”; the man, he writes, is “destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other” and “[i]f he improves by degrees

[…] at each stage, at each a[s]cent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances” (“123 To George and Georgiana Keats” 334). He ardently declares, however, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” (335), in a way which reflects the religious antecedents of his secular age, implicitly ascribing causality not to an original creator, but to a force akin to necessity.

John Keats seemed to understand this principle very well; his world of necessary suffering is, however, “a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways7” (335). The reflections of organic change and the human attitude towards it are clear in his poetry, which incorporates the strengths and weaknesses of the mind, the graces and burdens of the physical world, the world of the senses. Keats’s poetry is a prominent example in the depiction of the struggle of thought and sensation; it is one of the poet’s main philosophical concerns, which he

7 My italics.

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relates to poetry, art and beauty. This struggle for the poet is all-inclusive, incorporating the trials posed by both the body and the mind; a person – or a poet – needs to overcome them in all aspects to reach a balance. Separating sensation and thought would be inorganic and would fail to lead to progress. In his letters we find little differentiation between natural beauty and artistic one, between the beauty of a flower and a poem; the reasoning behind his musings spontaneously connects the two.

He often interprets the one in terms of the other, as when he compares “great things with small”, the “imaginative Mind” with a melody (“31 To Benjamin Bailey” 67).

To a poet like Keats, who admits he “cannot exist without poetry” (“13 To John

Hamilton Reynolds” 21), the philosophical boundaries between poetry and nature are purposefully blurred, and the human / poet exists and creates in full awareness of the conditions of constant natural change around them. Older critics have established a tradition of attributing ethereal, “intuitive” qualities to Keats’s poetry – starting with

Matthew Arnold.8 I agree more with Newell F. Ford who was one of the first scholars to give primacy to the senses as creative motivation – and inspiration – for Keats, while he renders the abstract world of thought useful chiefly when in contrast to the senses (Ford 234). My argument, however, is not woven around the contrast between thought and the senses; rather, I explore how thought is necessarily infused by them, presented undifferentiated in Keats’s poetry. Keats is far from an ethereal poet, and his poetry is firmly connected to his surroundings; he often gets inspired by the grandeur of the landscape and declares, “I shall write poetry here and shall henceforth

8 Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism, Second Series, London, 1898, pp. 100-101.

Hancock, A. E. John Keats: A Literary Biography. Boston, 1908, p.62.

Thorpe, C.D. The Mind of John Keats. New York, 1926, p. 12.

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write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials” (“71 To Thomas

Keats” 156). These are the words of a poet who not only sees little difference between nature and poetry in their effect of beauty upon us but believes in the potential of their organic fusion. Keats is not a nature-poet like Wordsworth, though he proves himself to be a natural poet, in the way he experiences the creative process.

It is worth pointing out at this stage that, in relation to the other Romantic poets and thinkers, there are two popular concepts, to which one would be tempted to associate the condition of mutability. One involves the idea of the Romantic genius and the primacy given to the role of the poet/creator as a child-prodigy of his era.

Often seen as a revolutionary figure, the poet understood thus, reveals some biblical and some satanic antecedents. It is a notion potentially hubristic in its conception, and therefore fitting to the rebellious spirit we associate with Romanticism, especially with English Romantic poets such as Byron, Shelley and Blake. On a competitive, and equally competent strain, we find the notion of the Romantic poet in tune with nature, seemingly arising as an organic interpreter of it, a mediator for the natural world, gifted with words. In this variety William Wordsworth is the most prominent example. In either case, however, there is an underlying element of egocentrism in the way the figure of the poet is conceived.

Keats seems to be disinclined to follow either. He coins the term “egotistical sublime” (“93 To Richard Woodhouse” 226) for Wordsworth, and expresses his discontent with his poetic style, the fact that “for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, [we are] to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist” (“44. To John Hamilton Reynolds” 95). Correspondingly, in a letter to Shelley, he cautions that poetry must be the poet’s concern; despite the

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opinions of those who propose a serious purpose to be the God, “an artist must serve

Mammon” (“227. To Percy Bysshe Shelley” 507). In both cases Keats renders his fellow-poets misguided in some way. I do not imply here that the poetry of either poet is characterised in its sum by the above-mentioned opinions – Keats himself does not make such a grandiose judgement. Through his comments, however, he renders the categories of the sage poet of divine nature and the politically hued rebel figure, devoid of meaning. Neither seems to belong with poetry. Both conceptions reveal the same premise applied to different generations or temperaments; the premise is that the poet is an exception to the rule, a figure alone and at war either with the natural order of things, as in the case of the Romantic satanic genius, or at war with humanity and its achievements, as in the case of the nature poet who muses over the lost connection with nature. Roughly described, the former reveals an obsession with moving forward in order to differentiate oneself from the past, the latter looks longingly to the past, not necessarily the human historical past, but to a reinstatement of our ties with the earth, ties severed through the development of human socio-technological progress.

While these attempts at describing the thinkers of an era are not unfounded, they are noteworthy perhaps as reflecting the way those personalities chose to see themselves, their self-myth, rather than the things their writings reveal about them and their age.

Neither the rebel nor the sage metaphor is, I think, adequate to encompass the kind of poetry Keats – and Shakespeare – painstakingly explore.

Despite the differentiated branch of Romanticism Keats advocates, the way he incorporates mutability in his thought and creative urges is in accordance with a commonly shared tendency amidst his fellow Romantics. My personal understanding of the notion of mutability is Romantic as well; my argument poses change and instability as the norm, mutation and transformation as the only certain outcome,

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while it does not exclude in its rubrics the human contribution and the potential growth of the human character. Rather than being a force, which could be countered, if not stopped, mutability is a condition, an encompassing rule for all beings that one can only manipulate but not escape all together. It is not foreign to humanity and nature; it constitutes them. Negative outcomes cannot be attributed to mutability any more than beneficence; it exists outside perspective, human or otherwise. Once we add the human point of view, as Keats’s poetry emphatically does, the tragic as well as the creative aspect of mutability is revealed; the two are not mutually exclusive, and the very interaction of these elements constitute, more than anything, a Romantic attitude towards change. In the following chapters I discuss the odes not in chronological but in a contextually relevant order. Due to limited evidence on the exact temporal order of their composition, there is not a definitive way to approach them in a logical biographical way. Different critics adopt different sequences.9 I am visiting first the “Ode on Indolence”, to explore the effect of conflicting tendencies on creativity; the poet fluctuates between unwillingness and the simultaneous urge to create. Next is “Ode to Psyche”, in which the suppressed creative urge returns with palpable force, as the poet finds inspiration in the mythological goddess Psyche, but only after he accepts the impossibility of her initial form in his contemporary world and willingly transforms her into an ideal internalised in his own psyche – his mind and soul. In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the highly energetic attitude subsides, and the poet attempts to distantly observe an equally distant marble artifact, yielding thoughtful remarks on the relation of art with eternity, in contrast to his own mortal reality. In the “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Melancholy” Keats abandons

9 For an overview of how some important critical stances have been organised based on an individual or varied sequential approaches of the odes, see Helen Vendler, pp. 3-14.

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objectivity and gives in to his “Morbidity of Temperament” (“15 To Benjamin

Haydon” 30). He delves into the idea of mortality by writing poetry about its opposite, overabundant richness of the senses. In the “Nightingale” he utilises natural imagery, while in “Melancholy” the ideas are more internalised. “To Autumn” presents us not only with an abundance of the senses and nature, but also with an attitude of willful acceptance and assent with the changing of the times and the seasons, exemplifying the creative benefits of nature’s cyclic motion. I am discussing the odes in this sequence as I observe a gradual movement; from listlessness and uncertainty we move on to the jubilant energy in “Psyche”; then the more objectively inclined “Urn” intervenes as neutral ground in the progression, preceding the two more sombre odes.

The concluding poem is in a sense the culmination of them all; it invites us to trace elements of the other odes in its richly variegated palette. Along with his progressing thoughts about poetry, we will observe the way Keats’s attitude towards mutability evolves from poem to poem, itself mutating to encompass a wild diversity of experiences which need to coexist, each one valued for contributing to the growth of

Keats as a poet.

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I. Pursuing Inspiration: “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode to Psyche”

Considering that the “Ode on Indolence” is one of the least critically explored odes of Keats, one is free to hypothesise on its being the least important of the odes in terms of impact and content. This poem is reminiscent of early Keats, whose poetry is comparatively of less skill and more passionate writing than his later endeavours. For the purposes of this thesis, however, I am not focused on proving that the “Ode on

Indolence” is the least accomplished among the odes. I argue instead that the poem depicts a deeply human admittance of weakness, of the luring power ennui can have on an artist. I place the poem at the beginning of a meaningful sequence, as I analyse the effects of mutability on artistic inspiration and creation. “Indolence” is certainly a simpler poem in its conception, and less inventive in its execution. It does not fail however to communicate that creation is not a mythical process but a human experience; in it, the artist is not unburdened by the flaws of human nature and the effects of constant change. In this context, indolence can potentially impede a poet’s motivation; its role and effects as Keats perceives them, however, can be more complex.

Indolence is another word for inactivity, the attraction to slow rhythm of life and to living unproductively, and it applies to artistic creation too. The mind of a poet can be full of ideas and impressions generated by the poet’s engagement with the world around them; yet, Keats seems to say, the poetic mind cannot as readily communicate and create art out of those ideas. Indolence as a term denotes both laziness and boredom, both a feeling of unwillingness to act, and a disenchantment with the idea of acting itself. As such, its causes can be attributed equally to the person experiencing it and to the circumstances beyond one’s control. It is a feeling which seems to occupy one fully, self-nourished and hypnotic almost, and we see

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Keats admitting that “[r]ipe was the drowsy hour; / [t]he blissful cloud of summer- indolence” (“Indolence” lines 15-16). It is a sensation which “[b]enumb’d [his] eyes;

[his] pulse grew less and less” (17). As one passively keeps welcoming it to their life, indolence feels all the more like a natural state.

Not enough of indolence seems to have penetrated Keats’s mind, however, to prevent him from composing an ode to indolence. The irony is that, although the poem communicates artistically to us the atmosphere and conditions of indolence, the existence of the poem itself is a testament of breaking free from it. With mutability in mind, however, it would seem less like “breaking free” rather than being on equal measure obstructed and assisted – inspired even – by indolence. In order to understand this, one needs to consider the neutrality of the forces of mutability. They are, by definition, forces of injustice, as we understand Heraclitus’s original approach, in the sense that they are amoral. They exist regardless of the humanly constructed ethical categories of good and evil, disrespectful of human perspective. Seen itself as a condition defined by mutability, indolence is not to be hastily criticised as a conductor of inactivity, a harbinger of worthlessness. The space indolent behaviour occupies is liminal, between the extremes of inactivity and creation, leading to potential numbing as well as creative outcomes. The feeling of laziness this poem describes can be interpreted as the neutral restfulness between the fluid movement in two poles, and for this reason it can be manipulated by a mind inclined to do so, an artistic mind.

The poem’s focus is internal; Keats exposes the mental landscape of a person, a poet, who is at the beginning of the poem passive, yet thoughtful. Although he gives the impression of an entranced, enfeebled even figure, we see forces which tamper with his equilibrium in the poem. In the very first line, Keats introduces three

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“figures” visiting the idle poet’s conscience. Their names coincide with their essence,

Love, Ambition and Poesy, and they come in “placid sandals, and in white robes graced; […] like figures on a marble urn,” (4-5). The poet admits the figures are

“strange” to him (9), which corresponds to the vagueness throughout the poem about their nature. Keats seems indecisive on whether the three conscience-rousing figures are mythological – descending from one lesser known world of antiquity – or supernatural, and in either case “strange”, unfamiliar. Or indeed they might be figures of speech, communicating parabolically the poet’s philosophical wonderings. In fact, their initial conception is very obviously mythologically or supernaturally inspired, but I argue that it is so only superficially rather than in essence. Reading each figure’s description in the verses, I find that Keats created human-like figures, as if inspired by memories, sufficiently tangible to make an impact on an idle poet. He calls them

“Shadows” (11) but they are not actually phantoms, in the way of Shelley, nor like the unsettling omens of Coleridge.10 They are imagined as entities, to whom he attributes human traits. For example, the figures have gender; Love and Poesy are young females, while Ambition is inferred to be male. The inclusion of sensational detail –

Love is “a fair Maid” (5), Ambition is “pale of cheek” (6) and “with fatiguèd eye” (7)

– communicates an earthy quality, and a feeling of personal familiarity, rather than awe towards the figures. Keats’s poetry thus indicates that love, ambition and poetry are not exo-cosmic in a god-like way. Most importantly, since Poesy is humanised, I hold that it is not perceived here as the symptom of divine possession, although it

10 Shelley uses phantasmal figures as a reflection of his characters’ unattainable desires or hubristic actions; his poem “Alastor” is an indicative example. Coleridge has created “The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner”, a cautionary tale in which the main character is cursed with recurring spiritual visitations, including that of an albatross.

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obstinately possesses the mind of the poet, as I interpret the phrase “my demon

Poesy” (30). Far from placing it on a pedestal, Keats renders it approachable, and even amicable, “my demon”11 he calls her. Poesy, Ambition and Love are generated in the human mind, and whatever their inspiration originates from, they function as the personifications of vivid thoughts.

As the poem proceeds, the figures return twice, making three appearances in all. This poetic balance – three figures manifesting three times – along with the association of the figures’ names with their properties, are two elements reminiscent of the parabolic themes of the English folklore tradition. The link with those tales preconditions us to expect a moral message by the end of the poem, but we receive it in a convoluted way. The recurring figures imply a struggle in the poetic mind, and the message is to be inferred from a dialectic between the will for restfulness and intense thought. Even so, it is precarious, as if the poet himself might change his mind at any point. He does not resent indolence, and wishes at times the thoughts of love, ambition and poetry to “melt” (19), “vanish (56)” and leave him “unhaunted” (20). I would say that this indecisiveness in the poem, and the complexity of the general message shift the focus from the expected moral to the poetry itself, to the “how” instead of “what” we receive at the end.

To perceive the poetry as the main motivation of the poem, rather than philosophising around ideas of morality, is in tune with the priorities Keats himself sets. Those are, above all, aesthetic – the aim is the “Mammon” – poetry itself (“227.

To Percy Bysshe Shelley” 507). It makes sense that Poesy is the most tantalising of the figures, upon which “the more of blame / [i]s heap’d” (29). This “maiden” is

11 My italics.

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“most unmeek” (29), the most potent of the figures to disturb the idle poet. Despite some exorcising attempts, we see that the thought of poetry is the only one which can arouse him, albeit without joy (35), to create. The poet is inclined to pursue neither love nor fame, but poetry, albeit reluctantly, and it becomes the only result of indolence that he seems to aspire to. Poetry could paradoxically be the potential outcome of indolence and to signify the disruption of indolence.

This struggle of forces forms the fictional poet’s character and motivation. The poet does not attempt to pass a message but is the message; his reactions carry it. He is not a preacher but rather a sufferer – occasionally a willful sufferer – one experiencing reality intensely through his mind. After the visitation of the figures, he ends up worried and unbalanced. It is important, however, that his indolence provided the mental environment for his thoughts to fly free and generate a potential state of creative activity. The thoughts come disguised, “muffled in so hush a mask” (12), in

“a silent deep-disguisèd plot” (13), almost unrecognisable from other idle musings of no consequence. If indolence is partly responsible for the appearance of these thoughts, then it cannot be the opposite of activity or creation. In fact, Keats composes poignant poetry around the theme of indolence, as when he dreams in vain of “an age so shelter’d from annoy,” that he “may never know how change the moons,

[o]r hear the voice of busy common-sense” (48-50). As the concept of mutability dictates, inactivity engenders the potentiality of activity, the one is born out of the other in a continuous flux and therefore they are both natural and without fault, or equally at fault. Human choices are affected by this rule of constant motion, but the very same choices can also shape the motion according to one’s will. Relevant to that,

Keats makes his fictional poet a particularly vocal one; he both converses with and obstinately curses the figures. His character is not as passive as to lack an opinion; he

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is both enslaved by and master to his whims – a paradox better understood if we take into consideration the ceaseless activity of the mind even in times of indolence.

Relevant to that is the idea of “suspended animation,” a concept originating in science and becoming popular in other fields as well in the Romantic era, as Robert Mitchell discusses (107-108). The inherent contradiction of the concept verily explains what I call creative idleness in the ode. Mitchell argues that Keats, far from fearing a narcosis of the will, actually “aimed at a poetics of trance” akin to suspended animation (109). And eventually, despite the poet’s fleeting motivation, it is through poetry that he can possess as much as he is possessed by the forces of mutability, especially when they manifest in the form of idle days which leave time for lively thought.

At first glance, the indolence Keats describes is indeed a vacuum, a state akin to death. The poet is self-paralysed and unwilling to participate in any rousing activity, to produce anything “but – nothingness” (line 20). Because the feeling of indolence feeds off itself, it is not only difficult for the subject to overcome it, but it gives the illusion that it is inescapable and permanent, like death. It feels as if indolence, in other words could defeat not only will power, but also the forces of mutability. Helen Vendler asserts that the indolence the poet insists on “refuses any subjection to time;” and she compares indolence to a dream state (Vendler 23). Will power could indeed disrupt the lethargic cycle of passivity, and yet the human conscience presented in the poem is not an instance of will opposed to mental stagnation. There is not much evidence that Keats wants to depict a poet awakening by means of an abrupt or poignant hit of inspiration either. On the contrary, the poet is shown here in a struggling moment in the battle with himself, unsure which side to take, as “the claims of indolence”, Vendler observes, “are indisputable, and

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stubbornly reassert themselves” (22). The focus is on this process rather than the expected result, the creative awakening. As it is, we cannot dissect two distinct sides, one the better, one the worse for the poet. Keats’s affinity for indolent luxuriousness is a new take on Romantic ideals and creates serious complications to our analysis of the morality – and moral message – in this poem.

We cannot forget, in all its inherent irony, the fact that this is an ode on indolence, not against it, but on; it hints at a person with experience on the matter, a view from the inside, from living it rather than merely criticising it. Keats is not afraid of it; he and his fictional alter ego almost crave it. I assert in this context that the experience of indolence becomes a part of intellectual experience, rather than obstructing it. Indolence gives joy, while the thought of poetry tantalises, an idea that cannot come to terms with Romanticism’s affiliation with action, unless we accept indolence and idleness as part of the creative process, at least potentially. Keats in a letter composed around the same period with the ode, refers to a time when he was “in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless”, and I think it would be enlightening to quote the passage to some extent:

This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I long

after a stanza or two of Thompson's Castle of indolence. My passions are all

asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal

fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of

faintness – if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it

langour – but as I am – especially as I have a black eye – I must call it

Laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in

common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure

has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither Poetry, nor

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Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me:

they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase - a Man and two women

whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the

only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering

the Mind. (“123 To George and Georgiana Keats” 314)

In the end the mind overpowered the body and the poet wrote the ode on Indolence including eloquently those idle musings both in his letter and the ode. Judging from

Keats’s temper, the indolent morning was far from numbing for his mind, only restful for his body.

Having explored the ode thematically, the epigraph of the poem starts making more sense. Keats’s decontextualises a biblical quote by Matthew for the purposes of thematic relevance to the ode. The passage goes, “why take ye thought for raiment?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin”

(21st Century King James Version, Matthew 6.28,) and we see that human anxiety about daily tasks and material benefits is laconically contrasted with the serene motion of nature. It is curious that the aesthetically inclined Keats of this poem did not include the image of the lilies in the epigraph, when otherwise he arrays sensational natural imagery, as in his “pleasure’s wreath” which has “no flower” (18), his soul “besprinkl’d o’er [w]ith flowers” (23-24), and “the sweet tears of May” (26).

The inclusion of the epigraph is, for Paul Sheats, part of Keats’s attempt “to reconcile indolence and idleness, to present luxurious passivity as intrinsically creative” (Sheats

95). While Sheats finds the attempt unsuccessful compared to other odes (95), I would say that the poet has just started exploring this theme, and therefore it is given here less resolutely. He revisits it in the “Nightingale” with more poetic conviction. Here though, like the lilies of the field, the poet is inclined neither to toil nor to spin, before

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the three figures, the anthropomorphised thoughts, invaded his conscience; even after, he does not fully give in to their claims. Only reluctantly he makes an exception for

Poetry, giving it aesthetic priority in the ode, but he does not identify with a lover or a famous poet – he eventually rejects the figures of Love and Ambition although at first he “burn’d” to follow them “[a]nd ached for wings” (23-24). The need for creativity is the only yearning which is deemed worthy of his time, because it is poetry which he loves the most (28). The urge for creativity proves, in the following odes, as potent as indolence.

The problem with this aspect of artistic creation, the reliance on inspiration which may come at any moment, substantiated through idleness as much as through activity, is that it is fundamentally inconsistent and unreliable. Also, judging from subsequent odes, I cannot deny Michael Cooke’s argument that the poet’s “sense of

‘Indolence,’ of the integrity and efficacy of the ‘passive and receptive’ state was at best inconstant” (Cooke 161). This type of inspiration also comes with potential pain or guilt. Keats himself states that poetry has “not a joy” (“Indolence” 35). The poet must make sacrifices in order to invite inspiration, and to attribute time and effort to substantiate it into an artifact. The forces of mutability are interfering at all times, be it in the form of death or simple change, disenchantment with one’s craft even; poetic composition can feel impossible, or a faraway and inconsequential goal akin to the altar to a forgotten goddess. Thinking can easily turn itself to overthinking instead of creativity, and thus indolence may not transform to artistic activity but merely self- perpetuate.

As it is, indolence is not a villain per se, but it is also not a hero either, since the Romantic will, the will to conquer or creatively utilise even indolence, is very feeble in the poem’s narrative, making it lack resolution. Even having poetry itself as

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motivation does not come unchallenged by the same poet which first implied it. For that reason I believe that the “Ode on Indolence” is better examined in a dialectic with the other odes. Being itself so conflicted and conflicting, it is a starting point for the themes that are to be fully enlivened in the subsequent poems created in that same period. If we place this poem at the beginning of a narrative which starts from almost catatonic energy to end up in rich artistic contentment in “To Autumn”, then the poem is fittingly lethargic and noncommittal, like a person newly awakened. It is too early in Keats’s progression of thought for grand statements about beauty and truth, or for baring himself out to communicate his fears and obsessions through the voice of a nightingale. Not to say that the poem is inconclusive, but it is a beginning which does not leave the recipient comfortable but wanting more. The “more” that follows in the other odes will not guarantee clear-cut philosophical answers but poetic ones; it is not a “more” of resolution to our “irritable reaching after fact and reason” (“32 To George and Thomas Keats” 71), but of irresolution, struggling and fluctuation, as they are composed through the experience of a restless poetic mind.

After the “Indolence” ode, the “Ode to Psyche” presents us with a different mood of the poet, exhibiting how even the passive state of indolence can be overcome, can be affected by change. Perceived thus, mutability is the underlying reason why the dormant urge for creativity appears invigorated in “Psyche”. The poet’s motivation becomes more concrete, energetic. “Psyche” also starts from a state of idle thought and inactivity, this time not characterising the poet individually but referring to a broader tendency, an unpoetic attitude spread in the world. In this poem

Keats actually shows us that this initial stagnation can be amended and be turned into creative energies, through poetry and the will for poetic composition.

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This is an ode to Psyche, and therefore predisposes us for an exalting attitude towards it. Psyche is addressed similarly as a figure, albeit different in character from

Love, Ambition and Poesy of the “Ode on Indolence”. The poet calls Psyche a

“Goddess” without hesitation; the mythological themes are more than mere decorative imagery in this poem, clearly delineated rather than serving as allusions. Keats significantly chooses not to write an ode to an abstract idea, like conscience, or talk about the soul in general. He evades the religious and disguises the philosophical connotations by choosing particularly the mythologically invested “psyche”, a word which encompasses the meaning of soul while creating a path for poetic imagination to enter the equation.

The ode begins with the poet praising Psyche and lamenting her neglected position through the centuries, not worshipped as the other gods of Olympus and not remembered enough in secular times either. She is a late-blooming goddess, “too late for antique vows” (line 36) and therefore one of the forgotten ones. Keats makes an allusion to his contemporary reality, a reality which seems to have no choir, no flowers, no altar, no place for Psyche, a soulless, heartless world deprived of intensity of feeling (28-35). I would also add that the world Keats has in mind is a deeply unpoetic world, because it has forgotten the songs of the lyre (37), has isolated them from everyday expression of emotion and seemingly sublimated them into a separate realm, that of art (36-39). The sublimation is in truth derogatory for art. The effects of mutability are here aesthetic ones, and the gradual separation of art from life, practical everyday life, is hardly beneficial to a poetically disposed mind. The separation becomes in effect a comparison on unequal terms, upon which the artistic aspect of a personality is laid open to criticism and deemed less important in favour of other traits. Art’s role becomes questionable when art is marginalised from everyday

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experience and the artist becomes less creative. This would be an anathema to Keats who declared prior to the composition of the odes, in 1817, “I find I cannot live without poetry” (“13 To John Hamilton Reynolds” 21). The poet rebels and, “even in these days” (“Psyche” line 40,) decides to assume the responsibility to make amends for the neglected status of Psyche, because it goes along with an affront to poetry. He glorifies Psyche in his own way – not in altars and in the song of the lyre, not in a religious way per se but in a poetic one, fit for a secular age.

Despite the very different tone, I find that “Psyche” echoes “Indolence” in certain respects. Aside from the central figure of Psyche, comparable to the three figures in the other ode, and even Indolence itself as a fourth imposing figure, the poems have a connection that reaches deeper. As “Psyche” progresses, we witness a movement from silence and inactivity to poetry, from a slumbering and uncreative state to one of song, the silent, “tuneless” (1) song of poetic verse. The poet encounters Psyche as he wanders “thoughtlessly” (7) and then he is determined, “with awaken’d eyes” (6), conscious and prepared to dedicate his life and art to her. His motivation is certainly stronger than in “Indolence”, yet not without little hints at doubts, even from the opening lines of the poem. The way he places the phrase

“tuneless numbers” feels self-deprecating, and he modestly asks for pardon for composing a poem out of Psyche’s “secrets” (1-4). It is as if he admits, very covertly, that poetry itself is hardly enough to fully capture such a subject. Some verses later we see that the poet, this self-appointed acolyte of the goddess, is “pale mouth’d”, willing but weak and not of inexhaustible energy. Moreover, his services and gifts to

Psyche will come out of “shadowy thought” (65), which again attests to his imperfection and engenders various possible results, not necessarily pleasant and celebratory. In fact, he admits earlier in the poem that those creative thoughts have

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grown along with “pleasant pain” (52), emotional pain transformed to poetry through the pleasure of engaging in poetic composition. This theme is central to Keats’s poetry, explored indulgently in the “Ode to a Nightingale” and “On Melancholy”. But pain in its raw state cannot be used; it has to be filtered through the poetic mind in order to mutate into poignant verses. The poetic artifact composed contains them both, pain and pleasure, indissolubly. It is not an idea dissimilar to the one I explored in the “Ode on Indolence”. Pain and unpleasantness are not useless in a poetic composition, nor do they obstruct creativity. From an artistic perspective, they are as good as any feeling, and they can be as numbing as they are engaging for the inspiration of the poet.

The attitude of the poet towards Psyche is indeed exalting, but the mythological narrative he utilises enriches his relationship to it. Keats has lines of high praise for Psyche, but also of great compassion; she is the “brightest”, but also

“too, too late” (36-37). Most importantly, she is described like a woman sitting on the grass in an idyllic scene (9-15), next to a Cupid-like figure (21) whom the poet – and we – know to be Love. Keats does not include an account of the myth of Cupid and

Psyche; he withstands the tragedy of it and prioritises instead the serene aspects by describing a scene of bliss between them. It is not a larger-than-life image he presents, fit for a goddess, but a deeply human scene, a picture of a couple sitting in idleness, with hints of passion – “[t]heir lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu” (17) – set in nature, in a nameless forest but not in Olympus. Mythology entails anthropomorphism of the gods, presenting them flawed and relatable, but Keats here takes it further than that, communicating emotions rather than mythological facts. Despite his desire to be a votary of the Psyche, he treats his goddess as a part of nature, placing her and Cupid amid the flowers (13). Their inhuman feature, the wings, are not described with awe

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but as bird-like “pinions” (16), and Psyche is later called a dove (22-23). Taking all this in, we need to reevaluate the concept of godliness for Keats in this poem. His goddess is not a distant figure, unapproachable and imposing, but one to be pitied, one victimised by circumstances. Psyche is, at the end of the day, in need of the poet, as much as the poet needs her as inspiration and guide. Even as such, she does not guarantee divine inspiration to her votaries, but stands at best as an ideal, a goal to strive towards and achieve through poetry. Psyche is not, ultimately, a goddess, but the embodiment of intensity of feeling, which is holy for Keats, being the main motivation for his poetry.

The poem focuses on the internal landscape of the poet’s mind; the religious undertones it includes are there not to make a religious statement per se, but as metaphors to help redefine the significance of Psyche for a poet and for poetry.

Harold Bloom contends that the poet “participates in a humanistic and naturalistic communion, an act of imagination which is a kind of natural supernaturalism” (401).

The worship of Psyche is therefore the intense connection with our emotions. Keats’s poet is willing to assume the responsibilities of a priest, but only as a mediator, rather than a respected sage. Martin Aske suggests on this point that Keats imagines “an exclusive intimacy between poet and goddess” (Aske 103), and while I recognise the intimacy in the effort to humanise Psyche, in no part of the poem is it implied that this poet is exclusively favoured or chosen by the goddess, nor do I think Keats maintained such a delusion. To this fact attests, among other instances, his disregard for the figure of Ambition in “Indolence”. What stands out instead is the poet’s wish to volunteer his services and establish the glory of Psyche with whatever art he possesses – art not of divine but of human proportions. The poet acts within the confines of mutability and not despite them. He does not seek to reestablish an extinct

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ancient worship but respects the passing of time and reinvents Psyche in his own way.

He is willing to create for her and inspired by her, to produce soulful art, passionate poetry, and this can be achieved only through his “working brain” (61), through the human effort of a mind eternally striving to meet an ideal. What he proposes to give her, albeit in metaphors, is an assemblage of earthly offerings, a poetry akin to building a sanctuary for her close to nature, “by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees”

(57), to being her voice and her music (47), but also her heat (49); he is ready to pass on through his poetry the richness of intensity that communion with Psyche engenders. As Morris Dickstein proposes, the internalised landscape “dramatizes a shift from nature to inwardness, in which nature nevertheless preserves an important place”, even as metaphor (201). He imagines an environment where all the human senses will be delighted, and Love will be admitted (lines 66-67) along with Psyche by the means of poetry. Examining the “Ode to Psyche” after “Indolence”, we see a progression from one attitude to another, from self-abandonment to the forces of mutability which may or may not lead to creativity, to a conscious effort of adapting to nature and time, in order to create something new and effective.

In “Psyche” the poet is dreaming of achieving as much, but he remains a figure “pale-mouth’d”, exhibiting little of the prowess he envisions. This ode feels like a preamble, a more focused one than “Indolence”, for the poetry that follows. In

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats muses more soberly on the potential and limits of art and the relation between art and its ideals, while in the “Nightingale” and

“Melancholy” odes he focuses on the pain of the working brain that creates the art. It is only in “To Autumn” that we find him liberally engaging in the vertiginous variety of experience that poetry can communicate. This richness, lyrical almost, is certainly

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hinted here in “Psyche”, but it leaves us “pale-mouth’d” too, dreaming of it without yet experiencing it first-hand.

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II. Mutability and the Artifact: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In “Ode on Indolence” the poet debates with himself on whether art is worth his time, while in “Psyche” he finds inspiration in a forgotten ideal and resolves to ardently create poetry. Before we delve into another aspect of the artistic process in the “Nightingale”, in which the previous celebratory mood is abandoned in favour of exposing the painful aspect of creativity, Keats in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” focuses on the artifact itself. As a result, the tone in this poem is neither mournful nor hopeful, but rather distanced and inquisitive, with only hints of emotionality. As I have pointed out in the beginning, I am choosing to discuss the odes in this sequence as I observe a gradual movement from the jubilant energy we saw in “Psyche” to the more sombre

“Nightingale” and “Melancholy” odes. The “Urn” is in comparison a less personal poem, in which the voice of the poet as creator is seemingly silenced, while the artwork itself, in this case a marble urn, is placed at the forefront. In this scheme,

Keats reveals his philosophical attitude towards art and implicitly poetry, his favoured artform. The poet’s choice of a marble urn to communicate his own views is a statement in itself; it arguably reveals Keats’s idea of a poet as a creature who is versatile enough to empathise with the voice of an artifact. At the same time, the urn as a tangible object, conditioned by time and space, brings forth mutability’s effects in the artistic product itself.

In this ode, a Grecian urn is the stimulus for a philosophical argument in the poet’s mind. Keats’s problematisation on the eternal aspect of art and the impermanency of human nature is a deep-rooted human concern. However, this notion of contraries is challenged when we recognise that the urn as a work of art is subjected to limitations. Objectively, it is a material artifact, affected by the anarchic forces of mutability; philosophically, Keats finds it impenetrable, as the temporal

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distance obfuscates the ancient artifact’s original aspect, value and function. I argue here that eternity in art cannot be found in the objective reality, but only in the sense of the artwork’s quietness towards us, the only aspect which remains “unravished”

(“Urn” line 1) by time. As we will see, Keats’s poetry on the urn is not dissimilar in its complications to the perceived ontological nature of the urn itself, affected and afflicted by constant change but aspiring to eternity.

The material artifact is up to a point resistant to the distortions of the passing time and circumstance, especially if it is made of marble, like the urn. But it is not the material’s endurance which Keats chooses to juxtapose to mortality and the finiteness of creativity. The urn, according to Jeffrey Baker,

is clearly the union of a temporal thing (the potter who turned the clay, or the

craftsman who shaped the marble) with a timeless, immaterial thing

(inspiration, imaginative vision, ideal form). But it is also a material thing

…shaped by an ideal conception (the form of the artist’s mind). It is thus both

a child of the union of time and timeless and, at the same time, a partner in

such a union. (Baker 168)

When a work assumes the form which the artist intended for it, it ceases to be a sum of its parts – material and inspiration – and becomes in a way independent; it exists outside the time and place of its creation. The urn is bound by time and circumstance, due to its material properties, but also inhabits the mind of the audience who has experienced it. Therefore, the creative process, bound tightly with materiality and mutability, cannot exist simultaneously with the finished product, which transcends them in an ideological sense; the former is terminated once the artifact is completed.

When it comes specifically to the art of sculpture, it is true that hard marble cannot be

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as easily affected by time and natural forces as an oral composition would. The materiality of the urn makes it more approachable and available to a larger audience throughout the centuries, “a friend to man” (“Urn” 48); the silent “marble men” (42) cannot be forgotten as a song or a poem could. The poet seems to bitterly admit that

“[h]eard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (11-12); aside from rousing the imagination due to their wordless depiction, the forms of the urn can be more resonant to the spirit because of their persistent tangibility (14), the physical reminder of their existence. Timelessness is sweetness for the poet, it is music to his ears, but even stone can be subjected to corrosion, or at least some alterity. For this reason, it is not the senses which the poet emphasises, for neither sight nor touch are mentioned as a means of contact with the artifact, and hearing is only used metaphorically. It is not through “the sensual ear” (13) that we are to experience the melody of the marble pipe, but through an imaginative one. A poet’s mind possesses the imagination to go one step further and not only experience but create art. The result is one type of art inspiring another; poetry comes to complement sculpture, offering a different perspective. Admittedly, it is an attest to mutability’s omnipotence, that creativity can be regenerated in this way, springing from the urn’s

“fixed perfection that lacks both the flaw and the virtue of green life”, as Harold

Bloom phrases it (406). Poetry is Keats’s attempt not to replace but to amend the shortcomings of the urn’s materiality, opening thus new possibilities for creativity as well as philosophical contemplation.

The poem’s beginning reminds us of that of “Psyche”; it opens with an exaltation of the central figure in the ode, this time not a deified ideality but a work of art. Judging from the content of this invocation, however, the ideal of Psyche which inspired Keats posed a smaller challenge than this tangible artifact, this “still

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unravished bride of quietness” (“Urn” 1). The only “unravished” aspect of the urn is, as I mentioned, its cold silence; the observer of the artifact can be an admirer or can speculate about its origins, its artistic depiction, its function, but can never reach a definitive answer. This state of things both intrigues and tantalises Keats. The poet exhibits an inquisitive spirit, assaulting the mute artifact with questions (5-10). The voice of the poet is thus not silenced entirely in this ode, yet he does not intend to focus directly on poetry itself, nor on his own inspiration and creativity, but on the sculpted representations of the urn. He attempts to approach the urn with objective distance, as if to investigate what facts and details time has obliterated, and as Helen

Vendler opines, the poet’s detachment is “comparable to the detachment of the urn itself” (134). The rational questions he poses, however, soon turn into irrational ones

– “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” (8-10). Had the poet maintained his initial distanced attitude, the questions would be merely rhetorical; however, the breathlessness they communicate carries the poet’s emotional reaction of frustration caused by the effects of time. Arguably, the failure of the interrogative method to confront mutability, hints at the need for a different response towards art.

While the poet’s inquisitive tendency in the poem indicates that he values the role of rational thought in his approach to art,12 I find that he favours a paradoxical synthesis of the detached and the personally involved aesthetic response to the artifact. Among the ode’s philosophical antecedents we can trace the Keatsian

12 Keats privately admits in his letters his thirst for knowledge, study and thought (“62 To John Taylor”

133).

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conception of “Negative Capability,13 that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (“32 To Benjamin Bailey” 71) as well as the theory of disinterestedness, adopted from his much-admired William Hazlitt (“123 To

George and Georgiana Keats” 122-123,) and applied to his own aesthetic theory.

Negative capability emphasises the subdued role of the rational mind in favour of the aesthetic experience itself; for Keats, this is not only a way to receive art, but to create it as well. It is a notion partly inspired by disinterestedness. Hazlitt, in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action, distinguishes between emotions caused by direct sensation, and indirect emotions, not related on a personal level to the individual experiencing them; he concludes that a person must be naturally disinterested towards the latter (5-6). For Hazlitt therefore, art is experienced disinterestedly; this notion is incorporated in the “Urn” by the poet’s initially distanced tone, which places the artifact itself at the centre of the poem and the poet’s emotional response in the background. Disinterestedness for Keats, much like negative capability, applies to the role of the creator of art as well. The way he imagines himself as a poet is as “the most unpoetical thing in existence” because a poet “has no identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body” (“93 To Richard Woodhouse” 227). The poet is not himself poetical – he is not his art – because he is not personally involved; he is naturally disinterested and can connect to his subject only through the empathy provided by his imagination. This is especially applicable in a poem like the “Urn,” where the poet is simultaneously an observer and a creator. Discussing the philosophical affiliation of Keats and Hazlitt, Jacques Khalip explains the concept of disinterested agency to be fundamentally opposed to “egocentric power” and to spring

13 Keats’s emphasis.

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from “the possibility of moral action without intentionality” (886,) without perceptible self-interest. The deliberate attempt to extract a moral out of art constitutes an act of self-interest which Keats considers unfit for his poetry; that is why the initial inquisitive tendencies are abandoned in the poem. As we can see, disinterestedness and negative capability reflect, from an objective and an emotional aspect respectively, the same tendency of Keats’s poetic mind – a wish for integration with his subject. Conscious of the limitations of temporal distance and physical reality, Keats attempts to achieve this through his poetry, and the “Urn” is a depiction of the struggle between competing ways of his artistic expression.

The role of the artist is a compromise between inherent contradictions, fluctuating between diverging tendencies. A poet must be both a disinterested observer as well as intensely empathetic, and he needs to accept that the forces of mutability will influence not only his materials but also himself, his art and the creative process. The disinterestedly observing poet in the “Urn” feels acutely the distance between the stable forms sculpted in the urn, “[f]or ever piping songs for ever new” (“Urn” 24) and his limited creativity subjected to finiteness and mortality.

He can only aspire that the product of his limited time will survive him and be inspiring to the succeeding generations. It might well end up being obscure, like the facts it was inspired by, like the little town Keats imagines once existed, surrounding the actual depictions on the urn (38-40). The ode communicates the poet’s assumed position in order to create, which is itself a mutation, caught between empathy and disinterestedness.

In the poem, the speaker struggles to find a language to communicate the personal impact of the urn; he ends up including both the language of objective information, as well as the intensity of expression the urn inspires; this verbal fluidity

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reflects the experience of Keats as an artist and a recipient of art. Historical facts can be useful, but they cannot be constitutive of art in themselves; the most resonant poetry comes when Keats sees of the artifact through his imagination. Indeed, the poet becomes inventive as he tries to create images which harmonise seamlessly diverse elements, such as in “Sylvan historian” (“Urn” 3). The phrase is paradoxical, implying both the analysing, distanced attitude we assume as we historicise art, but also a link with nature, a more natural, spontaneous response to art. Similarly, in the phrase “Attic shape! Fair attitude!” (41) the urn is “Attic”, a piece of information the poet knows beforehand, and it is also “fair”, a comment based on emotional reaction rather than objective observation. The poetry which Keats envisions can incorporate both, without making a statement out of their juxtaposition but acclimatising us to their codependence. The emotionally invested phrases which interject the poet’s observation of the urn’s depictions also attest to the fluctuation between colourful expression and objectivity. Keats’s description of the lovers, for example, is not without sentiment; he communicates with them on the first person, calling the youth

“fair” and “bold”, urging compassionately the pursuer of love not to grieve (15-20).

The over-punctuated repetition of words related to sentiment and eternity is also noteworthy, indicative of the poet’s intense engagement to the artwork’s human forms

(20-27). The urn as a work of art arouses the mind both in a rational and an emotional way; it is a “cold pastoral” (45) but also leaves the recipient with a “burning forehead and a parching tongue” (30). The poem is orchestrated around the acceptance and experience of both tendencies, the interplay between them.

The poet’s complicated response to the urn throughout the poem, is refined in the last lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (49-50). The two idealities of truth and beauty correspond to the

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rational and the emotional response to a work of art; I hold that Keats connects the two in the context of aesthetics. My interpretation of the rather generalised terms of

“beauty” and “truth” attempts thus to contextualise the infamous conclusion with the rest of the poem. Even T.S. Eliot, who found the last lines “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem,” admits that Keats must have meant something by them, “however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use”

(729). Cleanth Brooks argues similarly to Eliot that the last lines are a “troubling assertion,” “an intrusion” which “is not dramatically accommodated” to the rest of the poem (426). I suggest that if we identify “beauty” and “truth” in the poem as two coexisting forces which invoke the different reactions of the same mind towards an artifact, I do not see how Keats’s assertion is inorganic to the poem’s spirit and theme.

In the context of poetic creation, beauty and truth become indeed indistinguishable.

The urn’s epigraph is not to be overlooked as a commonplace phrase, equally distanced from reality. Given that the urn is an object, its silence is the only objective statement we can have; the idea which concludes the poem, imitating an enigmatic epigraph of antiquity, is therefore, as I have argued, Keats’s own. As such, it is not mere wordplay for rhetorical effect either, despite its stylistic resemblance to one – and there is perceptible irony in the poet’s choice to use aphoristic generalisations to sum up his otherwise ekphrastic descriptions. Keats’s writings of the same period do support his honest belief that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (“Urn” 49); he could

“never feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty” (“98 To

George and Georgiana Keats” 258). While logic and philosophical categorisation separates the two, they have never been dissimilar for Keats. A poem can be true to its purpose only through its beauty, not through its accuracy, and therefore beauty cannot but be the true motive for a poem – it has to be beautifully expressed in order to

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inspire any “truth” in the mind of the recipient, just like the urn excites the imagination with its refined forms. The poet’s failed attempts to demystify the urn’s historical origins prove that an artifact’s purpose is ultimately to capture the audience’s interest by itself, by the impression it makes in the present, while it excites for the past – to be approached through history – and the future – through inspiration and creativity. The affinity of art and reality exemplified in the urn is not confined to the sculptor’s experience during his creative process but, ultimately, applies to the way Keats perceives art as a recipient as well as a poet.

The poetry inspired by another artifact brings to the forefront the fluidity of artistic experience, between objective judgement and highly subjective responses.

Keats’s view indicates a very organic way of approaching art. The mood in the poetry of the “Urn” assimilates constant motion; the poet is not predetermined to follow one path but makes use of both factual information and emotional expression to enhance his creativity. Without suggesting that the poem was actually composed spontaneously, I observe that the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” feels as if it records the poet’s responses in all their authentic complexity. The marble urn itself, as well as the poem, are, albeit in different ways, writhen into the forces of mutability; they are both subjected to circumstances of constant change since the moment of their conception, throughout the creative process and even after that. The artist plays a central part in their creation but not in their evolution after he completes his task. The objective of poetry for Keats is not to interpret the world but merely to exist – interpretation becomes secondary and is always subject to alteration – all the more dependent on mutability. Art does not have to suffer in this way; instead, the artist can be inspired by the world’s changeability and accept it as part of the artifact’s unique identity.

What we ultimately see in the poem is not the urn itself but its various impressions on

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the poet’s mind as they form a coherent whole through their very alteration. The urn itself remains the same, a symbol of creativity, artistry and imagination, which remains stable only by changing, “μεταβάλλον αναπαύεται” (Heraclitus 52)14 ever affected by the times and the way we choose to perceive it, and, for Keats, to interpret it though poetry.

14 My translation here of the ancient Greek is, “that which changes, rests [only] as it is changing”.

Constant change gives the impression that things remain the same; or, according to Brooks Haxton, translator of the Penguin edition, “change gives rest” (52).

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III. Pain into Creativity: “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy”

Percy Shelley writes in one of his prose fragments that some persons, like children, “are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life” (“On

Life” 635). Although this was written around 1813 to accompany a poem, and the only correspondence we have between the two poets is from 1817, there is no doubt that Keats exemplifies the kind of personality described by Shelley. In the

“Nightingale” and “Melancholy” odes, the poet wishes to “dissolve” into nature

(“Nightingale” line 21) and describes the melancholy state in elaborate sensuous imagery (“Melancholy” 21-30). His mood in the poems exhibits many fluctuations, culminating in an intense realisation about mortality and decay, a perspective not expressed in odes so far. In the “Nightingale” in particular, the poet tends to lose himself into his subject; he experiences a temporary confusion or sleep of consciousness, partly identifying with the natural world of the singing bird, and partly reflecting on his own human condition and poetry. Keats has repeatedly tried to communicate that he, both as a poet and as a person, suffers from what we would call today, a case of extreme empathy. On a personal level, he has admitted of his sick brother’s identity, it “presses upon me” (“86 To Charles Wentworth Dilke” 215). As far as “the poetical Character itself” is concerned, he concludes “it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character”, and a poet is “filling some other body”

(93 To Richard Woodhouse” 226-227). Keats utilises his own idiosyncrasies and sensitivities in order to artistically transforms them, making them part of his creative process. This means that pain, along with the other emotions, becomes a constitutive

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part of his creativity; creativity itself is founded on the inconstant nature of emotions and the artist’s vulnerability. Mutability’s workings are explored internally; change takes place inside the poet’s mind, like in the “Ode on Indolence”, but the poet intensely contemplates death. Perhaps most poignantly expressed in the “Ode to a

Nightingale” but also infusing “Melancholy”, Keats’s capability to transform pain into beauty through poetry constitutes the strongest motive for him to write. Even in

“Psyche”, despite the poem’s joyful tone, he wanted to create a safe intellectual space for a neglected goddess, to turn her suffering into art. In the odes of this chapter, the tone is more complicated and the intentions less clear. Joy and suffering are presented entangled though always serving beauty and poetry.

In the “Nightingale”, the poet attempts to evade the pain of his own mind, entering a self-imposed state of narcosis, either by imagining fondly the numbing effects of wine and hemlock (1-4) or by giving in to the joys of nature symbolised by the nightingale’s song (5-10). Eventually, he forces himself to awaken (79-80), as he can find no solace in any variation of this “fancy” (73). The avoidance of pain has no real effect and his only recourse is to soberly compose poetry out of his tranced experiences. At the centre of his torment is the frail physical aspect of his being, the ultimatum of death and the uncertainty for his artistic posterity and purpose as a poet.

The pain therefore chiefly derives from the unknown changes brought on by the passing time. However, the worry and morbidity coming with mutability have not been a restraint for the poet’s creativity, and Andrew Bennett states that the poet’s

“failing body”, not in a biographical but a poetic context, “is precisely the condition of Keats’s success” (Bennett 151). My addition is that it is not only bodily frailty but the emotional distress accompanying it, which ignite his creativity.

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The experience of pain constitutes a testament to life, the ability to feel, though it is not enough to put the poet at ease. The only certainty is death, the invariable result of living. Only in death can human consciousness recognise a settling point for mutability. However, mortality of a being is, as I have stressed, by no means the end of mutability’s force in the world. Death is only an individual being’s solution to the instability of life. Keats in thus enamoured by the idea of Death – “I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme” (52-

53) – as it is the only certain escape from pain. Death is also a natural process, and

Keats is already attracted to nature through the spontaneous song of the bird (10).

According to Morris Dickstein, “the all-too-human poet reaches out wishfully toward the natural process as a healing balm, an antidote, for the pains of his humanity” but mortality and the pain of consciousness “are inseparably linked” (Dickstein 15-16).

Although he admits that the bird itself was “not born for death” (61) still, to experience nature to its fullest would be to die, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain” (56). The song of the bird even inspires death; the nightingale’s ecstatic song is innate, while the poet can only assimilate it temporarily or enter it fully by abandoning his consciousness through death (54-60).

The poet eventually settles on a different method of responding to mutability; it is neither a temporary nor a permanent loss of consciousness – through trance or death – but poetry. Death and the states akin to it in this poem, and even more so in

“Melancholy”, prove to be a stumbling block to creativity; either caused by methods of self-narcosis with substances – wine and hemlock – or through the spirit’s reverie surrounded by nature’s seemingly eternal character, those experiences constitute death in lesser degree. Therefore, I do not see how the nightingale’s song, as Robert

Gittings asserts, could be “a solvent for care and grief” (136); it is mere

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postponement, for the poet never stops having morbid thoughts, even during his trance-like experiences. The poet rejects death and instead of desensitising himself, he chooses to live – and write – with intensity. Accepting his own human limitations,

“the dull brain” which “perplexes and retards” (34,) he still resolves to pursue his art, albeit never feeling entirely safe and free from temptation – “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of

Poesy” (31-33). His choice of poetry is not a final resolution but foreshadowed even in his most slow, entrancing scenes, confirming Dickstein’s point that “the flight from the actual […] leads to a paradoxical engagement with actuality” (Dickstein 225). The

“actuality” becomes less paradoxical if we identify it with Keats’s reality of poetic impulses.

The poem indeed becomes progressively richer in imagery and ideas, even as it describes degrees of unconsciousness. In the fifth stanza, the poet indulges himself in the description of flowers, which however have been imbued with somber connotations – the boughs smell of incense (42), there is darkness all around hinting at a dead-like state, and the atmosphere is not simply fragrant but “embalmed”, reminding us of the flowers accompanying a funereal scene. The poet is almost as if buried alive during this trance, deprived of his sight but able to smell the flowers around him. The sequence of different flowers also signifies the changing of the seasons, with the “coming musk-rose,” for example, being “mid-May’s eldest child”

(48-49) and foreboding the summer season (50). Thus, consciousness is never truly excluded in his poetry, while mutability and death, and the pain they generate, are never defeated but the poet merges them with beauty. Similar to putting flowers on the dead, the role of poetry has been seen as “consolatory” for Keats, as Ronald Sharp argues (3,) and yet it feels to me we are doing an injustice to the way Keats perceived

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poetry in relation to suffering. As stated earlier, poetry is often a priority over his other concerns and even arises out of them; it is a “feverous Relief” (“87 To John

Reynolds” 216), as well as the main motivation, rather than consolation, in the face of change and uncertainty. In order to be relevant to life, poetry needs to incorporate intense emotional experiences while pleasing with its result, even if that process entails pain. And for Keats, the relief seems to come only after the fever.

The “fever and the fret” (23) the poet experiences are necessary for creating art, and they are initiated in the poem by the contrast of the human condition with that of the nightingale. Despite his wish to identify with it, here Keats’s negative capability fails him. This creature’s existence is an unsolvable mystery because it has nothing to do with his own life, as much as he feels the song of poetry to come natural to him. The bird knows little more than its own song (21-22), while Keats’s poetry is infused by empathy. It is the nightingale that Keats cannot penetrate, much more than the urn. He identifies with the urn’s human figures through his poetic imagination, but he fails to do the same with nature, the bird’s song. He can only conceive it in terms of its eternity (61-62), unchanging towards emperor and clown (63-64); it is puzzling, especially to a thinking being who is acutely aware of the consequences of mutability and his own actions. While the coldness of the urn is tempered with the poet’s imaginative narrative, mainly because it is a product of human conception and creativity, of another contemplative being. The nightingale does not partake in the human conscience of the poet; their songs are very different, and when the poet concludes the ode with “fled is that music” (80,) he means the unapproachable and unattainable birdsong, as well as his own poetic attempt to connect with it. If anything, the comparison with nature brings forth doubt, and rekindles the thoughts of purposelessness and self-annihilation.

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The poet needs to come back to his senses, quite literally since he has been asleep, and stop seeking an ally in nature. It is the trance state which equates nature and poetry, Harold Bloom holds (409), but for the poet this fancy becomes a

“deceiving elf” (73-74) after a while. Besides, constant change is a natural phenomenon, unhinged by the human perspective, therefore the answer cannot be the same as the problem, nature itself cannot overcome nature. Art comes to the forefront instead of nature; it is the only advantage in the battle with mutability, though not by being flawless and imperishable itself. Keats’s poetry is infused with mutability instead of resisting it, making beauty out of it – beauty which “cannot keep her lustrous eyes” (29). Beauty and art’s power is not really their endurance – the poet’s song fades – but their very existence, despite the burden of unstoppable change. If a being can live creatively, then mutability ceases to be a threat.

In this ode, the poet is never truly free of his dark wishes. Up until the end he is in between states wondering, “[d]o I wake or sleep?” (80); it is a moment of fluidity between entranced fantasy and alert thought, even between nightmare and the reassuring reality. This is because the tormented poet has been oscillating between the creative impulse and a death-wish. The routes he contemplated to exit the dilemma are proven equally unsustainable, and he has to reject the consolation of nature, focusing on human pain instead. He is by the end of the poem bereft of the song of the bird and no longer feels the need to compare himself to it; he is now forced to depend on his “sole self” (72). It is human pain which is potent enough to motivate his poetry and allow creativity to proliferate. Keats cannot emulate the serene, unaffected song of the nightingale, because for him, “the excellence of every Art is its intensity” (“32

To George and Thomas Keats” 70), which is produced out of emotional experiences.

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Keats offers an artistic response to the fear of annihilation, not by denying pain and transforming it into happiness, but by translating it into aesthetic pleasure.

The “Nightingale” leaves us on a discordant note, a state between dreaming of death while surrounded by nature, and the awakening which leaves the poet in the solitude of his own mind. The “Ode to Melancholy” sets off the narrative from a similar point; the poet advises someone, or himself15, not to give in to the consolation of death. Being in this poem fully awake, living rather than dreaming of escaping, he is not inclined anymore to succumb to the charms of Lethe but still experiences the feeling of melancholy, a residue from his dangerous reveries into real life. He soon finds out that melancholy accompanies him even in times of happiness. His psychological state as a human and as a poet is volatile, and aesthetic enjoyment, whether of another person or of Beauty in a broader – and artistic – sense, brings forth gloomy thoughts. The poet surmises that any kind of experience, if it is intense and rich in sensation, can be transformed into a shadow of itself through melancholy thought. Art itself is necessarily subjected to a similar kind of change, he implies, without negating that it should be pursued anyway, like life itself. Melancholy is not a

“fancy” but a constant, unwanted companion in the poet’s conscious, creative life, and an agent of emotional alteration.

15 Jeffery Baker argues that the ode is a dramatic lyric, even if it is Keats talking to himself. By the third stanza, however, the poet is found abandoning his “persona” or “the persona has forgotten the interlocutor”, performing a “contemplative monologue” (Baker 156). This corresponds with my idea of an earlier version of Keats in the “Nightingale” talking with the Keats of “Melancholy”.

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Melancholy is related to perception; it involves both the mind and the senses, the way the mind interprets the sensuous experiences. Keats stresses the role of the senses, especially pleasant ones, saying in a metaphor that melancholy can be “seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine”

(lines 27-28). Then, the “soul” is the one who “shalt taste the sadness of her might”

(29). The imagery Keats uses is crucial; the soul can “taste”, borrowing from one of the senses. It appears to be one of Keats’s recurring poetic methods, to describe psychological states in sensual imagery. The poet often creates fluid connections between the two through poetic metaphor, rather than calcifying them in an aphorism.

I argue that this is not merely a stylistic choice; Keats conceives the mind and the soul as inseparable from the bodily experiences, especially in this ode. He does not prioritise either but seems to create poetry out of an organic flux of the two. He gives to melancholy the role of the mediator between the senses and the mind, a reverse mediator between the experience of life and the contemplation of death. This reverse energy of melancholy means that, as a person experiences moments of happiness, the contrast grows sharper between the fullness of the joyful experience and the emptiness of death; the person thus experiences a sense of unjustifiable sadness. The mind, especially the imaginative mind of the poet, can be an independent and treacherous interpreter of the senses, burdened as it is with previous experiences. This might be what led Keats to famously declare, “O for a Life of Sensations, rather than of Thoughts” (“31 To Benjamin Bailey” 31).

Melancholy is also a form of pain which is like a fit, sudden like rain by “a weeping cloud” in an otherwise heavenly bright sky (11-12), but also lingering in a dormant state, dwelling (21) in anything beautiful and pleasurable. Experiences of

“Delight”, be it artistic or otherwise, necessarily include melancholy. For a poet like

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Shelley, the very existence of sorrow negates the spirit of delight, who “with the joyous and the free” it will “scoff at pain” (“Rarely, Rarely Comest Thou”, lines 9-

10). Keats plays more with contradiction, placing melancholy at the centre of

Delight’s temple, in “a sovran shrine” (25-26). We have encountered the poet once before using religious worship as metaphor, in “Psyche”; his goddess there was, ultimately, an ideality nesting in the mind, an inspiration. Here I argue that the words

“temple” and “shrine” conceptually bring together the human and the divine element, although for Keats, religion is a metaphor for the high aspirations of the mind. I agree with the view of Ronald Sharp that Keats “sees all myths and religions as purely human phenomena”, as “attempts to give meaning to human life” (Sharp 26).

Therefore, the space of divine worship allocated to Melancholy symbolises the communion of the physicality of life with the human mind, their connection and mutual influence. The space in which the pain of melancholy nestles is one of unpredictable interchange and, consequently, of change unimpeded by the human mind.

For Keats, melancholy has a constant presence in the mind and draws its power from the liminal space it occupies; it incorporates the concepts of life and death, feeding off both. Therefore, Harold Bloom is right arguing that “for Keats true melancholy involves a sudden increase in consciousness, not a gradual evasion of its claims” (Bloom 413). Morris Dickstein seems to agree, finding that “Keats no longer seeks passive dissolution, freedom from the flux and tension of actuality” (Dickstein

231). In this respect, the feeling of melancholy is different from the fantasies of living-death in the “Nightingale”. The images of nature in “Melancholy” is indeed reminiscent of the other ode in the deepest stages of the trance-like state. In the

“Nightingale” the beauty of flowers brings pleasure by detaching the poet from

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reality, although this temporary delight is not invulnerable to the intrusive thoughts of death; they ultimately make him wish the dissolution of his self, body and spirit, into nature. Melancholy, by contrast, colours with painful shades aspects of his reality; it is not to be found in reveries. The poet’s experience here works in reverse. When the joy is blotted out by sadness, he prescribes a reconnection with the senses, pleasurable smells, colourful sights and love in the eyes of another human. The advice to the one afflicted by melancholy is,

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (15-20)

The senses are fully alert before and after the melancholy fit; the role of nature is to ground the person, not to hypnotise him. It is a temporary relief, since we know melancholy to be immanent in sensations, but it is still akin to that state of awakening and reconnection which we have at the end of the “Nightingale”. And while in the

“Nightingale” the poet resolves to make creative use of his pain, in “Melancholy” it is again the reverse; the intensity of both life and art, “Joy” and “Beauty”, is shown to lead to pain. Melancholy looks from afar the deceptively sweet world of the nightingale and arises only when the poet engages with the tangible world of the senses. Examining both poems sequentially, we gain a panoptic view of the motion of mutability, which in “Melancholy” comes full circle. Pain has been ascribed with both

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the role of the motivator of creativity and instigator of death. Aside from the connection of the two poems, “Melancholy” is itself similarly ambiguous. The tone is bittersweet, like the feeling of melancholy; the beginning is bright enough to divert from the death-wish, but the ending is ominous, taking for granted the recurring rule of melancholy over the mind.

The first and last stanzas contrast each other thematically; they also present internal contradictions, between the central idea and the unconventional imagery they poet chooses. The first stanza (1-10), reminiscent of the other ode’s opening –

“Lethe” (1) / “Lethe-wards” (“Nightingale” 4), “poisonous wine” (“Melancholy” 2) /

“hemlock” (“Nightingale” 2) and “a draught of vintage” (11) – is not about pain in the form of melancholy, but of the unbearable pain which leads to willful death. The poet enumerates a few suicide methods (1-8), beginning however with the urgent “No, no, go not to Lethe” (1). This warning does little, in my opinion, to diminish the poignant images of death conjured by Keats, even as he implores the person not to give in. He draws inspiration for death from myth, which is unusual compared to his previous descriptions of serene mythical scenes, as in “Psyche”, or lively human urges in the

“Urn”. In the last stanza (21-30,) he wishes not to dissuade from death but to describe the inherent misery of life. Here too, he is being exuberant with mentioning bright emotions, “Joy” and “Pleasure”; he even places “Delight” in a temple, but as we have seen, the imagery of glorification is shifted towards “Melancholy” (25-26). The poem seems to be built on unexpected contradictions, a method which arguably exemplifies the very nature of melancholy. In life, Keats seems to say, one type of emotion eventually calls forth others in a ceaseless flux. Our experiences are not coherent but coalesce with each other, and that is what Keats communicates with the complex imagery of his verses. Taking this into consideration, the inconsistency between

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themes and imagery appears organically inspired, as the poem explores the different experiences of reality.

The most resonant statement the poet makes is that “Beauty” is not only infested by melancholy, but itself “must die” (21). This is another epigrammatic phrase, scarce in Keats’s poetry, and for that reason it draws attention to itself. It is perhaps the only statement in the ode we can assume directly refers to art. The concept of beauty might apply to nature, as well as the woman he mentions earlier (8), but in any case, it is aesthetic appreciation Keats refers to, which infuses every aspect of his life as a poet. The necessity in the word “must” makes finiteness a condition of beauty. This is the clearest declaration against the belief in the immortality of art, and it is significant when posed next to the “Urn”. It enforces the poet’s previous realisation that any kind of beauty, including that of a song or a sculpture, is temporary, and therefore must be enjoyed intensely. While the poet’s honesty hits us suddenly like a fit of melancholy (11) there is another psychological dilemma masked behind this realisation; “the brutal fact,” for Walter Evert, “is that escape from the world of mutability entails as a necessary correlative the loss of that same world’s beauty” (Evert 265). I find this pertinent to the ideological motivation of Keats in this ode. It is true perhaps that his own melancholy does not allow him to end the poem in a positive note; he cautions that melancholy is

seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung. (27-30)

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As Dickstein cautions, “[w]e ought not to misread the bittersweet ending,” because the poet presents us with “real death, an ineluctable fate, involving real pain and real destruction, but also involving the pleasures and pains of heightened awareness, lucid anguish, and momentary sensory intensity” (Dickstein 230-231). The poem’s overall concept is not to passively succumb to melancholy but accept it as another aspect of life, unavoidable but by no means unchangeable. By giving in, the poet would expose himself to morbid thoughts – as he has tried in the “Nightingale” – which may lead to actual death and permanent loss of the value of beauty; contrariwise, by accepting melancholy as part of life’s circles of mutability, one can try to cure it, even if it is a superficial appeasement through sensual stimulation, or a temporary one through aesthetic pleasure.

In this ode, death is a certainty, not a desperate pursuit of an enfeebled mind.

The poet seeks not salvation from mortality, but has turned his attention to life, and how to make it tolerable. He passionately seeks beauty in the world around him, the world of the senses, regardless of the invasion of melancholy in his thoughts. It is a risk which a poet is and should be willing to take, Keats seems to say. It might be that melancholy abides at the centre of Delight’s temple, but Delight inhabits in the rest of the temple. Life, not death, possesses in its infinite variety and potential, the solvent for misery. In the “Ode to Melancholy,” the poet is left with little hope than the pursuit of beauty itself and his trust in the forces of continuous change. The poem intervenes between “Nightingale” and “Autumn,” connecting the fear of death with the final acceptance of finiteness. In “To Autumn,” the poet is comfortable with the changing seasons to fully unleash his creativity, finding beauty in all aspects of life’s cycles.

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IV. The Limits of the Cycle: “To Autumn”

In the tradition of poems which contemplate human life through the natural changes of the seasons, autumnal poems proliferate. Autumn is a season between endings and new beginnings, and for a poet, a period ripe with metaphors for creativity and the workings of the mind; as such, it carries an undercurrent of melancholy, even when a poet like Emily Brontë declares, “[e]very leaf speaks bliss to me / Fluttering from the autumn tree” (Brontë 3-4). For Keats, as we have seen, melancholy is a by-product of beauty. He composes his ode “To Autumn” to explore the beauty of the season, infused with the spirit of reconciliation. He accepts the transitory nature of experience, as well as the finiteness of his human life. In this poem he appears closer to nature, which is no longer a “deceiving elf” (“Nightingale”

74), but a “close bosom-friend” (“Autumn” 2) to his maturing self, assisting him philosophically to accept the cyclic motion of the changing seasons, as well as poetically, inspiring some of his richest verse.

Keats structures the poem in such a way as to resemble a whole life, while describing a season. Each stanza depicts a different phase of autumn and the poem progressively lead us from early to deep autumn, right before winter. The beginning of the poem depicts natural plenitude; the sun is still able to “bless” although

“maturing” (2-3,) the trees are loaded with fruit and the fruit themselves are filled

“with ripeness to the core” (5-6,) marking the end of summer. The poet mixes the imagery of plenitude with over-ripeness, hinting that the warm days will actually cease (10). So far however, the only sign of autumnal weather is the mists (1). Then the second stanza brings us to the heart of autumn. The figure of Autumn, like a human who had been resting (13-17,) is now awake and working for the harvest (19-

22). Sometimes, autumn may even come early, when there are still poppies, in

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September (17-18); in this middle stanza too, Keats has added a hint of menace or at least uncertainty for the termination of the warm days. By the end of the ode, the poet becomes more empathetic towards Autumn, perhaps because he identifies personally as a poet – a fellow manipulator, not of nature, but of ideas and words. The end is the least productive, least beautiful stage of the season, with the initial over-ripeness long forgotten. The fruit of summer have gone off, and even the grass has lost its vitality

(26). In this dreariness Keats adds, instead of another hint of menace, one of hope.

The clouds which hide the sun and bring gloom to the landscape are also capable of giving it an occasional “rosy hue” (25). The personified season seems to have sunk into a melancholy state after the excess of its own beauty, and yet the sun is not entirely gone; the creatures are alive, as the sounds they make prove (27-33). Keats reminds Autumn that there is still music and therefore vitality in nature, even if it resembles a mournful sound (27). The serene depiction of nature’s variations and changes within the season of autumn, reinforces the impression of the personal element in the poem. Keats is here chiefly preoccupied with the motion of mutability, though his attitude is not frantic but rather unperturbed; we find neither the breathlessness of the “Urn”, the ardour of “Psyche”, nor the passivity of “Indolence” and the stupor of the “Nightingale”. The emotional burden somberly accepted in

“Melancholy”, brought on by involuntary change, is organically accommodated in

“Autumn”, as is the implicit certainty that difficulties are themselves transitory, and warmer days will come again.

The imagery of the poem contributes to the perceptible presence of the human element in the descriptions of nature. Keats does not write in the first person singular, but he still describes the season through the human perspective, and as Vendler notes,

“all five senses come into play” (241). Taste is in the “sweet kernel” (“Autumn” line

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8,) and smell in the “fume of poppies” (17). Touch is not left out; almost anything is tactile, as if the poet attempts to physically approach nature. He inventively adds

“clammy” (11) to the bee’s shells; he mentions not just plains but “stubble-plains” which the clouds “touch” with “rosy hue” (25-27) titillating both our sense of touch and vision. The poem is rich in visual imagery which becomes especially prominent in the second stanza, when Keats uses words like “seen” (13) “with patience look” and “thou watchest” (21-22) in relation to the personified figure of Autumn. The human perspective, already present in the poem, is applied now to the perspective of the season, working and resting, according to the needs of nature and the cycle of the seasons. Autumn thus abounds in creative energy, a quality shared by the poet. In the last stanza, it is as if we return to the perspective of the poet. This part of the poem is the only one which is musical, allowing the sense of hearing to arise. Hearing is introduced in the first stanza, with the mention of the bees and the implied buzz they make in their season of industry (9), but it is not presented there as music. Hearing becomes the most impactful sense in the ode, not only because the auditory images overpopulate the last stanza, but because Keats offers music as a concluding remark to the poem. The gnats, the lambs, the hedge-crickets and the swallows, all sing in their own way, and the song ranges from a “wailful choir” to a “loud bleat” (27-33). By choosing to describe the animal sounds as music, the poet offers to Autumn a consolation which is human, as well endorsed by nature; his contribution is through poetry. He recreates the music of the landscape through his own music; his poetry is his gift to autumn, to make up for the coming decay of nature. Poetry does not possess the power to bring back the spring, but it completes nature, offering what it currently lacks, partaking in its character as an organic force. As such, poetry follows the tone

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of nature’s music, which in the poem is bittersweet, like the autumnal wind which unpredictably “lives or dies” (29).

To be able to see more clearly the analogy of the human with the natural, one must pay attention not only to autumn but to the different seasons mentioned in the poem. Those are not clearly distinguished but, as we have seen, there can be a bit of summer in autumn, and vice versa. In the lines in which the poet appears highly consolatory, empathising deeply with Autumn, they have a short conversation which could be also read as the poet reverting to his own self, “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” (23-24).

The poet values the season of autumn for its difference to spring and, I infer, his own poetic character for its strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally he is a melancholy poet, feeling distanced from spring; still, the amalgamation of beauty and melancholy that the metaphor of autumn communicates has proven a productive state for him.

Keats’s creativity is strengthened through pain, rather than the cheerfulness of spring songs. If, as Helen Vendler supports, we see “Nightingale” as a spring ode (244), profuse in violets and May roses, then we can agree that Keats recognises spring as another passing phase of his life. Not that he attempts to overwrite it in “Autumn,” but he accepts the necessity of mutability and incorporates all the seasons of his mind in his poetry. Both poems are equally resonant and explore different phases, different moods even, of the same poetic mind. The poet needs to recognise the complexity of his emotions in order to creatively utilise them, and Keats is such a poet. The odes I have discussed all contained some undercurrent of emotion which contrasted their main stream; indeed, the melancholy autumn was present in the “Nightingale,”

“[w]here palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs” – “palsy” reminding us of the shaking leaves of autumn – and “[w]here youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and

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dies” (24-26), much like the enfeebled nature at the end of autumn. The difference is that in the “Nightingale,” the poet communicates his fear of decay and death, but in

“Autumn”, he creates music for those experiences. In other poems he wishes to hasten death, but not here. He luxuriates as much in autumn as in any season. He refers to the summer bees, who think “warm days will never cease, / For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells”, and although the lines might contain the hint of a warning for the carelessness of youth, he does not chastise them for their behaviour; they have been acting naturally, in accordance to the poet’s new attitude of respect for the idiosyncratic qualities of each stage, of each season. Even so, Jeffrey Baker reminds us that the references to summer and spring underline that in “Autumn”, “we are not contemplating an invulnerable state of things, but a passing season” (Baker 189) and despite Keats’s praises, Autumn, like all beautiful things, must die (“Melancholy”

21).

By the end of the poem we realise the significant absence of winter, the natural conclusion of the ode. In a poem about mutability, the circle of the seasons is left incomplete. The argument of Vendler, that “[t]here is no implication in the ode of a cyclical process which would, left to its own devices, produce the fruit of the following spring,” underlines the importance of the human parameter in the harvesting of the earth (248). This is true from the perspective of the georgic tradition of poems (Vendler 248,) but I cannot agree that the cooperation of humanity and nature is necessary for nature. Not all plants need harvesting, and it is only humanity which cannot survive independently of nature, not the other way around. As far as the relationship of creativity and mutability goes, I argue that the silence of the poet for the season of winter originates from a bittersweet realisation of his own human mortality in contrast to the eternally renewed nature. Keats appears to be an honest

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poet; he creates from experience and, as a living, breathing being, has not yet reached the state of death, has no testament of it to base his poetry on. To him, “beauty is truth” (“Urn” 49) it is the force which motivates his poetry, and as winter has no life and therefore no beauty, it cannot become his truth, it cannot be a subject for his poetry. Winter is suggestive of tiredness, intellectual dryness; such thoughts the poet has tasted in other odes and did not lead him to a productive conclusion. In this ode he decidedly depicts life, in its different forms, and cannot sink back to death. He limits himself in the “soft-dying day” (25,) still in the process of dying, but he does not describe the result. The darkness of death is not suitable for this ode; Keats is conscious and can see at all times what flowers are at his feet (“Nightingale” 41).

The reason for this ode not actually coming full circle in terms of seasons is not because the poet shies from death, but because the poem is not about nature per se but about change, and how it affects the human poet. As Owen Barfield argues in relation to nature and human consciousness, for the Romantics, “art can represent nothing but Man himself” (45) and it would thus be insupportable if Keats’s poetry delved into aspects of nature which do not reflect his experience as a human being. It is the interpretation of natural change through the human perspective which motivates the poet, and the human perspective is itself invariably subjected to mutability. In

“Autumn,” he finally creates poetry which is harmonised with the necessity of mutability. It is a poem of vitality as much it is of reflection, without communicating the feeling of being creatively constrained by mutability. Keats, far from vainly seeking to alter nature, to rewrite it through his poetry, explores his own consciousness by perceiving his own mind as part of an organic process. Therefore, reaching past his human limits as a poet would not be hubris, but it would be futile,

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especially when there is so much creative potential in between, so much richness in the flowers and fruit of life itself.

From a human perspective, the way the poem works is not in a full cycle, like the seasons, but in a spiral. Borrowing the notion from M.H. Abrams (183) I use it here to contend that the human mind, although mortal compared to the eternally renewed nature, can make gradual progress through a series of difficulties – the autumn months – which are periodically recurring. Each time a cyclic movement is completed, the mind has incorporated the prior experiences and is fortified to start a new cycle of trials – moving upwards (Abrams 183-184). I find this notion useful as it approaches mutability from a purely human perspective and, for Keats, it diversifies from the notion of human perfectibility. Perfectibility, of which he was not an advocate (“123 To George and Georgiana Keats” 334,) would entail a single high point of ideal perfection one could reach in the confines of mortality. The Romantic spiral incorporates change more organically and in a way that makes it potentially beneficial for a person in the long run, as well as morally neutral, neither to be shunned nor to be uncritically embraced. Keats does not include winter in the poem because he does not intend to close the circle of experience in the first place. Death is not the goal anymore, intensity and diversity are, only to be achieved through life.

Unlike nature, which remains the same in its infinite cycles of variation, the mind of the poet, and consequently the poetry itself, evolves and is enriched through change.

Nature inspires the poet through the cycle of the seasons, but Keats accepts his and his poetry’s finiteness by making Autumn the central figure of the poem. It is not nature in whole which resembles humanity, but a small season, which despite its brevity and transience, can live a full life. Keats humanises autumn for this very reason, adding it to a list of personified figures of human emotions, along with

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Psyche, Beauty, Delight, Melancholy, Indolence, Ambition, Love and Poesy itself, the pinnacle of emotional expression. Only the nightingale is not approached in human terms, and in that poem, Keats shows distrust towards nature – including his own human nature. Here, however, the poet does not feel the need to separate himself from nature, neither is tempted to be prematurely engulfed by the earth. He seeks to explore his complicated emotions, because solely to struggle against the forces of mutability is to waste the creative potential it engenders. Change is part of our own nature, and the world we inhabit is one of necessary perpetual motion.

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Conclusion

The way I approached mutability in relation to Keats’s poetry in the great odes has been as a condition, rather than a force. As such, no mortal being should possess the power to counter it, because it is not fundamentally against human endeavour.

This rule of constant change, a concept adopted by the Romantics, is infused with the notion of necessity and fluidity of experience, concepts based on pre-Socratic theories. The necessity of mutability has been unpopular among modern western philosophers,16 who mainly distrusted its disinterested involvement with the archetypical ethical categories of good and evil. It was the Romantic poets which were comfortable to abide by its chaotic tenets. Shelley, Blake, and very differently,

Keats have been influenced by the concepts of fluidity, adaptability and ceaseless motion; the resistance of these ideas to be delineated according moral categorisation, as well as their complicated effect on the emotional aspect of a being, renders them more easily approachable through poetry rather than philosophy. Perhaps the inclination of Keats to accept change as a guiding principle, is related to his poetic nature; he realised that, “[w]hat shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon Poet” (“93 To Richard Woodhouse” 227). While from the point of view of traditional ethics, mutability is infertile ground, it has creative potential for aesthetics.

As I have shown, it played a very active part in the evolution of Keats’s poetics. The poet experiments with different manifestations of mutability’s forces in each ode, eventually coming to realise that there is a limit to the manipulation human beings can

16 With the exception perhaps of Hume, and his intellectual successor, William Godwin. For an analysis of their similarities on the doctrine of Necessity, see Frank B. Evans.

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effect in the world – we are not in full control of our lives. This idea proves, paradoxically, very empowering and liberating for his creativity.

Many doctrines influenced Keats intellectually in his brief life, but his adaptability to the challenges posed by mutability become no less than a motif in his poetry. Be it in passivity or ardour of emotion, both in moments of high inspiration and deep reflection, in self-paralysing fear and extroverted creativity, he appears in constant negotiation with his own mortal self and his role as an artist in an eternally changing world. The profitable outcomes of contemplating the changeability of reality can be found in his poetry, attesting to the fact that one does not have to outlive change in a battle, but can learn from it by following its current.

As for the eternal character of art opposed to the alterity of life, it is at best an unfounded hypothesis. For who is indeed to guarantee that even Keats’s seemingly timeless work will not disappear in the distant reality, or that Shakespeare, his most adored idol, will not be extinguished by time and be referred to only as an obscure influence of the Romantic poet? Never achieving great recognition during his lifetime,

Keats’s fantasies were not of fame but chiefly of annihilation, and yet his poetry is motivated by neither of those. Far from exercising a sonorous tone, uninterested in composing statements of moral magnitude, John Keats chooses to be like water, never remaining still, poetically fascinated by the variety of human experience. The following words, engraved in his headstone and reputedly chosen by himself, embody his spirit as a natural poet,

“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”.

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