William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey

THE COURSE MATERIAL IS DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED BY INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY (IGNOU), NEW DELHI, OSOU HAS BEEN PERMITTED TO USE THE MATERIAL. BESIDES, A FEW REFERENCES ARE ALSO TAKEN FROM SOME OPEN SOURCES THAT HAS BEEN ACKNOWLEGED IN THE TEXT.

BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS) IN ENGLISH (BAEG)

BEG-5 British Romantic Literature

Block-3

British Romantic Poets and Their poems

Unit 1 William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

Unit 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan, Christabel

Unit 3 John Keats

Unit 4 P.B.Shelly’s Ode to The West Wind

UNIT 1: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S TINTERN ABBEY

Structure 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 William Wordsworth and his Poetry 1.3 Introduction To the Poem 1.4 Tintern Abbey 1.5 Glossary 1.6 Self Assesment Questions 1.7 Let Us Sum Up 1.8 Bibliography 1.0 OBJECTIVES

While going through this unit, you will be able to know:  The age of the writer and its contemporary scene.  The features of the poetry and prose of the time that the writer belongs to;  The concept of thought and framework of the text and its meaning;  The concept of thought and framework of the text and its meaning;  About the poem and its surface meaning, with various words and phrases used within the poem’s text.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

(a) Broadly speaking, the earlier decades of the nineteenth century saw the full harvest of the promises that slowly came into existence during the latter half of the eighteenth century. This age, therefore, is more easy to understand. It is more of a unity, and there is less of the interweaving of different influences. In European history the great event was the French Revolution, which, long in its development, came suddenly to a head in 1789. In England, as in most other European countries, it was hailed with joy by all liberal thinkers. Wordsworth, who was typical of this class among the poets, has chronicled in immortal blank verse the thrill of delight that pervaded enthusiastic souls at that stirring moment:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.

But as the dawn grew into day the earlier transports disappeared. The excesses of the revolutionaries turned many of their friends against them. Then came war between England and France, which lasted from 1793 with hardly a break till 1815. The exhaustion caused by this prolonged conflict meant misery and starvation in England. To remedy these evils a race of young and devoted revolutionaries sprang to life in this country. Among such writers we observe Leigh Hunt, shelley, Godwin, Ebenezer Elliott, and many more who desired to alleviate the lot of their less fortunate countrymen.

(b) The Poetry of Romanticism Compared with the complex nature of the transition period the poetry of this time is outstanding of them.

(i) It is the poetry of nature. This is the real nature, observed in Burns and Blake. Instead of being an ornament and convention, nature becomes an essential part, almost the essential part, of poetry. In the case of Wordsworth it becomes almost a religion.

(ii) It is the poetry of man. Pope said that “The proper study of mankind is man.”. The Romantic poets carried this theory to its greatest development.

(iii) It is the poetry of revolt. And it means revolt in its widest sense – in subject and in form. There are no more rules, if these rules mean bonds and confinement. Every poet is accustomed to write as the spirit moves him. This enthusiastic spirit of liberty led to an enormous output of poetry, some of the highest merit. Not even the Elizabethan age can surpass this period in abundance.

(iv) It is the poetry of simplicity, turned to the high seriousness of the time. Wordsworth, in the preface to The Lyrical Ballads, which with the assistance of Coleridge he published in 1798, says that he intends to “choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout in a selection of the language really used by men.” This is the challenge to the ‘classical’ school, with its theory of ‘correct’ style.

1.2 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND HIS POETRY (1770-1850)

In the history of English literature this poet stands for two dominant ideas in poetry, the poetry of nature and the poetry of simplicity.

He devoted his genius and his life to the working out of these two theories. As a young man he was infected by the Revolutionary fever, and left his university of Cambridge to go to France and assist the new French Republic. He narrowly escaped death at the hands of the people he wished to assist, and was compelled to seek safety in England. After some wandering in the country he at length settled down in the Lake District of England, near which, at Cockers mouth, he had been born. In this romantic neighborhood quite a school of literary men assembled, who in the course of time came to be known as the Lake School of poets. Among them were Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Christopher North, and several more. As first Wordsworth’s literary theories were derided, but he lived to see them generally applauded. In 1842 he was awarded a State pension, and on the death of Southey (1843) he was appointed Poet Laureate.

(a) Wordsworth and Nature: An extract from one of his best poems may reveal this vital part of his poetic faith. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all object of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create, And what we perceive ; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul OF all my moral being (Tintern Abbey) This passage tells us what he found in his contemplation of nature

(i) “The still, sad music of humanity” – the sympathy of nature with man and his sorrows. (ii) An inner presence, a mysterious and compelling force, that permeates all things; in other words, a kind of religious ecstasy. (iii) A wide and plenteous joy that embraces all things. (iv) A sense of nature everywhere – in meadows, woods, and mountains, but also in stars, setting suns, and in the mind of man. This omnipresence of nature gives Wordsworth’s theory its distinguishing touch. In its wide scope, in its sense of beauty and in its piercing vision, Wordsworth’s treatment of nature is the most wonderful of its kind in English literature.

(b) Wordsworth and Simplicty: Wordsworth’s theory of poetical style, as set out in the preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1799). He expounds his doctrine : “Humble and rustic life was generally to be chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil … and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.

From this statement two points emerge. His choice of subjects was humble and rustic life. To this plan he generally adhered, for nearly all his poems deal with simple rustic them. His style was to be “the language really used by men. We have to admit that in the course of his poetry Wordsworth used two species of vocabulary. In his simple rustic poetry, such as Lucy Gray and We are Seven, he employed the simplicity of language suited to the theme, and so he could be faithful to his theory. When he attained to thoughts of great elevation, as in his wonderful “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”, he was compelled by the very nature of his subject to go beyond the language used by ordinary men. In a fair number of cases Wordsworth’s theories came into conflict with his common sense. He used language of such simplicity that it became ridiculous.

(c) His Poetical Works : During his long life Wordsworth composed a large amount of poetry, but only a small proportion of it is of the highest class, and most of this was written in the early

4 stage of his carrier. The years 1799-1814 are his best period, for they saw the production of the three following volumes: (i) The Lyrical Ballads (1799), written in collaboration with his friend Coleridge. This book contains some of this most famous pieces, including The Idiot Boy and Tintern Abbey. The nature of this (i) volume was so little understood by the critics of the day that it was received either with neglect or derision. (ii) Poems, published in 1807. This is Wordsworth’s most important single book, for it contains the majority of his best shorter poems, such as Lucy Gray, Ruth, and Nutting. (iii) The Excursion (1814), the first portion of an enormous blank-verse poem, the subject of which was to be his own education and mental development. The complete poem was to be called The Recluse. Already in 1805 he had written the Prelude to this, but this part was not published till after his death. The entire scheme was not completed. Though much of the poem is dull and heavy, it contains many magnificent passages upon his observation of nature and the effect this had upon his growing consciousness. During the later years his poems are many, but the really good ones are few. Perhaps the best in is Yarrow Revisited (1835)

1.3 INTRODUCTION TO THE POEM

In the summer of 1798 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, walking from Alfoxden to Bristol, visited the beautiful ruins of Tintern Abbey, located on the Wye River in Monmouthshire, Wordsworth had been there in 1793, and in this poem he records his impression after a five-year absence. Summing up Wordsworth’s creed of the ministering power of nature (especially through the function of memory) and the development of his appreciation of nature from childhood to maturity, Tintern Abbey is a key poem to any understanding of Wordsworth’s nature philosophy.

Four stages in Wordsworth’s Poetic Development

Wordsworth’s poetic career consists of four periods. He gives an account of the growth of his mind in The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind and Tintern Abbey. These poems show a definite development in Wordsworth’s conception of nature and human life.

(i) First Period :

Wordsworth’s early years were spent in solitude among the hills. The “ceaseless music” of Derwent filled his soul and gave him an unconscious foretaste of the calm

– “That Nature breaths among the hills and groves.” In the Book I of The Prelude Wordsworth describes his feelings and impressions of his childhood. He begins the Second Book of The Prelude with a description of the tumultuous joy and eagerness of boyhood in its sports among a rich and varied scenery. During his boyish days, nature was; But secondary to my own pursuits And animal activities, and all Their trivial pleasures.

His early intercourse with natural objects developed in him a calmness and tranquility of soul, which was to be a characteristic feature in later years: The visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery

(ii) Second Period :

Then followed the period of senses, when the young poet drank in the beauty of nature with the passion of a lover: The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain and the deep gloomy wood, Their colours and forms, were then to me An appetite, a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.

During this period “nature was loved with an unreflecting passion altogether untouched by intellectual interest or associations – the kind of intrest that found such full expression in the poetry of Keats.”

(iii) Third Period:

This stage of “dizzy joys” and “aching raptures” came to an end with his experience of human sorrow and suffering in France. He had kept watch over “human mortality” and in his eyes nature now took on a “sober colouring”. He heard “the still, sad music of humanity,” and his love of nature became linked with the love of man. He found strength and force and beauty in the character of humble people. He saw into the depths of human souls: Souls that appear to have no depth at all

To careless eyes. He bent in reverence To Nature and the power of human minds, To men as they are men within themselves.

(iv) Fourth Period:

The final stage was the period of the soul, when the poet’s love of nature became reflective, mystical and spiritual. He felt in Nature “a presence” that disturbed him with “the joy of elevated thoughts,” He now felt God in nature and its creations; His Pantheism or Mysticism. a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of men.

Wordsworth now felt that there is one soul immanent through the universe, but it objectifies itself into various forms and phenomena perceived by the sense. This was the greatest period of Wordsworth’s poetic life. His poetic powers gradually declined after 1808 and his later poetry became didactic and even prosaic.

1.4 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH : TINTERN ABBEY

COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEYON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798

Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! And again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. – Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines, Of sportive wood run wild : these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But often in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: - feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. ‘Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gifts, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight, Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened :- that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us one, - Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power, Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things, If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! How oft- In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Have hung upon the beatings of my heart – How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future Years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all – I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest’ Unborrowed from the eye. _ That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed ; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay, For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friends, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! Yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, Thy memory be as a dwelling place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! Then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance- If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence – wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service : rather say With warmer love – oh! With far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for the sake!

1.5 GLOSSARY

Seclusion: away from bla-bla of town and public life Beauteous forms : sensuous, subjects of eye and ear Coarser pleasures: unintelligible enjoyment, no stress on intellect and reason Still sad music of humanity: sorrows and sufferings of human being Sense sublime: elevated feelings Interfused : intermingled, intermixed Perceive : look into surface

1.6 SELF ASSESMENT QUESTIONS

1. After how many years has Wordsworth returned to the Tintern Abbey? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………...... 2. Who has accompanied Wordsworth during his visit to the Abbey? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 3. What are the beauteous forms of nature referred to in this poem? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 4. What was it that Wordsworth always missed amid the din of town and cities? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 5. When did Wordsworth very often miss the company of nature and its form? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 6. Which lines describe the serene blessed mood of the lover of nature in his ecstacy? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 7. At times of perplexity, where did Wordsworth use to go ?

………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

8. What was the first stage of the poet’s growth of mind? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 9. What are the things that made the poet use his intellect at the second stage? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 10. Did the French Revolution influence Wordsworth during the third stage of the development of the poet’s mind? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 11. Why is the fourth stage called as the stage of pantheism or mysticism during the poet’s growth of mind? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

12. “Nature was his guide and nurse” Do you agree with this statement as Wordsworth poses in his poetry? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

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13. What kind of faith did Wordsworth have in the nature and its company? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

14. What do you feel about Wordsworth’s concept of nature after going through the poem? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

15. In what form of verse Wordsworth’s long poem Tintern Abbey has been written? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

16. What do you mean by the Blank Verse? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

17. What are the main features of Wordsworth’s poetry? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

1.8 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Donald B.Clark: English Literature A college Anthology 2. B. Prasad: A short History of English Literature 3. Longman: A History of English Literature 4. M.H. Abrams: (ed) English Romantic Poets 5. David Perkin: Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity 6. F.W. Bateson: Wordsworth, a Reinterpretation

UNIT 2: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: KUBLA KHAN, CHRISTABEL

Structure 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 ‘Kubla Khan’ 2.3 ‘Christabel’ 2.4 Self Assesment Questions 2.5 Let Us Sum Up 2.6 Bibliography 2.0 OBJECTIVES

After going through the unit, you will be able to  understand the theme and content of the poems  explain, interpret and rewrite the meaning of the text in your own words  understand the literary terms, the characteristics of the Romantic Age and the ballad form of Poetry

2.1 INTRODUCTION

The Romantic Revival

With the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798, a new mode of writing evolved. ‘Romanticism’ is the name given to this new literary trend. Walter Pater defines it as “the addition of curiosity to the desire of duty”. More than this it was a revolt against authority, tradition and convention, whether political, social, religious or literary. If classicism had kept too closely to the beaten tract, romanticism struck out in bewildering number of directions. It expressed a new delight in simplicity of theme, feeling, and expression, in the worship of nature, and in familiarity with the lives and thoughts of humble men and women, but at the same time it was fascinated by the morbid and the supernatural, by whatever was remote in time, like the pagan world and the Middle Ages. The romantics had a fervour and vitality, ‘a free, onward impulse’, that their predecessors had not known had restrained.

The teachings of Rousseau and the principles of the French Revolution helped to form the ideas of the Romantics and to make them widely accepted in England. Rousseau preached the return to Nature, the superiority of feelings to ideas and the need for a great change in the established order of things to secure the rights of the individual. In the French Revolution, with its three fold ideal of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity many of them saw, as the young Wordsworth did, the dawn of a new hope for the human race.

Characteristics of the New School i. A Reaction against Rule and Custom. In the words of Victor Hugo, Romanticism is ‘liberalism in literature’. It insist upon spontaneity and freedom of expression. Individualism is its keynote. It was not, however, altogether unguided.

It derived much of its inspiration from Spencer, Shakespeare and Milton and was therefore in most respects a revival and not an innovation. ii Return of Nature and the Simple Life The Romantics commended the simple natural country life of which so many poets had written before them. While for the Augustans, country life meant nymphs and shepherds, the idylls and pastorals; for Wordsworth and his friends the country side meant simple, rustic characters engaged in simple labour. On such themes, the poets of lie Lake School, Wordsworth, Coleridge, southey and their followers, achieved most moving effects by using as Wordsworth puts it ‘a selection of language really used by men’. iii. Variety and Individuality Romanticism had another aspect, which we associate with the work of other poets such as Shelley, Keats and Byron. It favoured subjectivity and emotionalism, impulse, colour rather than line, and the free play of the imagination over a limitless variety of subject. iv. The Return of the Lyric The free expression of feeling demanded a lyrical mode of expression. Poetry once more became musical, non-intellectual, sensuous and impassioned. In the hands of Shelley, in particular, lyrical verse attained new heights.

17 v. Interest in the Middle Ages The art and culture of the middle ages, made an appeal to the feeling for the picturesque strongly in theses writers especially Scott and Keats. One of the result of this interest in the period was the revival of the ballad form, of which Coleridge became a master craftsman.

In units 3-4 you are going to study some poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You will be able to comprehend the poetic qualities that characterized his poem and thereby be able to compare him with the contemporary poets of this period, discussed in the order units.

S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834), poet, critic and metaphysician collaborated with William Wordsworth in bringing out ‘Lyrical Ballad’s in 1798. The famous poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ appeared in this collection. Among other well- known poems are ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’. He had great poetic qualities and mastered the ballad form of poetry. These poems are marked by Gothicism and are a unique blend of naturalism and supernaturalism. Apart from his poem his prose writings like ‘Biographia Literaria’ and ‘Table Talk’ and his critical comments on Shakespeare are still much valued and discussed.

'Kubla Khan' Humphry house the great critic and scholar has described ‘Kubla Khan’ as “a fragment of inspired incoherence, a piece of verbal magic to ask the meaning of which would be impertinent.”

‘Kubla Khan’ was written in 1797 and can best be described as a dream poem. The poem is as unusual as the circumstances that led to its writing. Coleridge has been ill and having taken an anodyne (or opium) for pain fell asleep reading an account of the magnificence of Kubla Khan’s summer palace inXanadu from a book called ‘Purcha’s Pilgrimage’. He had been asleep for about three hours during which some three hundred lines but was called away on business. Unfortunately, after he returned he could not recall the poem clearly and therefore calls it a ‘fragment’. But although it is called a fragment, the poem is perfectly structured with a definite rhyme pattern and clearly divided verses. It is divided into two parts - the first describes the magnificent palace and the source of the river Alph while the second part describes the power of poetic creation. The poet can, by his divine poetic imagination and creative power create the miraculous palace in air. The images flow easily into one another and the poem builds up tension steadily. It is characterized by a remote dream like quality, elements of romance, mystic features and native imagery.

Read the following poem and try to do the given exercises. After completing each exercise check your answers with those given by us. Notes and annotations are given wherever necessary.

KUBLA KHAN : OR, A VISION IN A DREAM, A FRAGMENT In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-done decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And’ mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the scared river Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And’s mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves: Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves

It was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinia maid And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight would win me, That with music loud and long I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Wave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise

Notes and Annotations L.1 Kubla Khan : (1216-1294) was the founder of the Mongol Dynasty and was the grand son of Ghenghis Khan. L.1 Xanadu : name changed, by the poet form Purcha’s Xambu, the summer residence of Kubla Khan, 100 miles north east of Peaking. L.3 Alph : a reference to the river Alpheus in Greek legend which flows under ground and then comes up a fountain L.8 rills : small streams L.13 athwart : from one side to the other side L.13 cedarn cover : a cover of cedar trees L.17 seething : bubbling L.19 momently : every now and then, from moment to moment L.21 vaulted : jumped up L.22 flail : old fashioned tool used for threshing L.31 ancestral voices: a belief that voices of their forefathers guided them to war L.35 device : invention, plan L.39 Abyssinia : (Ethiopia) is a country in Africa. It has intersected deep valleys. A mysterious land for the non-African

L.41 Mount Abora : It seems to be the poets own inventions and may be a fusion of two references a) Mount Amara from Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (BK IV 280-284) b) Tributary of River Nile called Abola or Albora that flows through Abyssinia. L.53 Honey-dew : ‘Manna’, food fit for Gods.

CHRISTABEL' PART-I The first part of ‘Christabel’ was written in 1797 and the second in 1800. Although intended for publication in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798) Coleridge failed to complete it and it was ultimately published in 1816. As in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in this poem also Coleridge successfully achieved the task he assigned to himself in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ i.e. the task of creating “a willing suspension of disbelief”. In this poem he renders the marvelous real and intimate by investing it with vivid details of daily life and the shifting shades of nature. The chief merit of the poem lies in its power of suggestiveness threatening some unknown danger and thereby casting a spell of the supernatural. ‘Christabel’ is a piece of romantic composition, a narrative ballad characterized by a strange melody, chivalry and a medieval atmosphere. The tale is about a sorcerer named Geraldine whom the innocent maiden Christabel befriends and brings to her father’s castle. The woman casts an evil spell on Christabel and prepares to destroy her. But Christabel partially succeeds in breaking the trance with the blessings of God and her Guardian Spirit. Read the following extracts of the poem and try to do the exercises given here. After completing the exercise check your answers with those given by us.

CHRISTABEL - PART I Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu-whit! - Tu-whoo ! And hark, again ! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. She Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch ; From her kennel beneath the rock Shri maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour ; Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud ;

Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full ; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray : ’Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, what makes her in the wood so late, A furlong form the castle gate? She had dreams all yester night Of her own betrothed knight ; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that’s far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest mistletoe ; She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel ! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is she cannot tell. - On the other side it seems to be, Of the hug, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill the forest bare ; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady’ cheek - There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

22 hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! Shr folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees see there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of whit, That shadowy in the moonlight shone : the neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare: Her blue-veined feet unsandal’d were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair.

I guess, ’twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she - Beautiful exceedingly! Mary mother, save me now! (Said Christabel,) and who art thou? The lad strange made answer meet, And her voice was faint and sweet :- Have pity on my sore distress, I scare can speak for weariness : Stretch fourth thy hand, and have no fear! Said Christabel, How camest thou her here? And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, Did thus pursue her answer meet :- My sire is of a noble line, And my name is Geraldine ...... Then Christabel stretched fourth her hand, And comforted fair Geraldine: O well, bright dame! May your command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal To guide and guard you safe and free Home to your noble father’s hall. She rose ; and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast.

Her gracious stars the lady blest, And thus spake on sweet Christabel : All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me The crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well: A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain So free from danger, free from fear, There crossed the court : right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the lady by her side, Praise we the Virgin all divine Who hath rescued thee from thy distress! Alas, alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court : right glad they were. Outside her kennel, the mastiff old Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. The mastiff old did not awake, Yet she an angry moan did make ! And what can ail the mastiff bitch? Never till now she uttered yell Beneath the eye of Christabel. Perhaps it is owlet’s scritch :

For what can ail the mastiff bitch? They passed the hall, that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christable saw the lady’s eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. O softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepth well...... And with low voice and doleful look These words did say: ‘In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of may sorrow ; But vainly thou warrest’ For this is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heard’st a low moaning, And found’st a bright lady, surpassingly fair; And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.’ The LET US SUM UP to Part I ...... A star hath set, a star hat risen, O Geraldine! Since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady’s prison. O Geraldine! One hour was thine - Thou’st had thy will! By train and rill, The night-birds all that hour were still. But now they are jubilant anew, From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo! Tu-whoo! Tu-whoo! From wood and fell! And see! The lady Christabel

Gathers herself from out her trance; Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids Close o’er her eyes; and tears she sheds - Large tears that leaved the lashed bright! And oft the while she seems to smile As infants a t a sudden light!! Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, Like a youthful hermitess, Beauteous in a wilderness Who, praying always, prays in sleep. And, if she move unquietly, Perchance, ’tis but the blood so free Comes back and tingles in her feet. No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. What if her guardian spirit ‘twere, What if she knew her mother near? But this she knows, in joys and woes That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all! Notes and Annotations L.7 toothless mastiff : a large sized female dog. ‘toothless’ suggest decay and death. L.13 lady’s shroud : the ghost of ‘Christabel’s mother. L.28 betrothed knight : medieval touch; the knight to whom she was engaged. L.30 weal : welfare, health, happiness L.33 naught was green : all the leaves of the oak tree had dried up

2.4 SELF ASSESMENT QUESTIONS

Explain the following:- i) ‘Stately pleasure dome decree” ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ii) ‘caverns measureless to man” ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 2. How many miles of fertile ground was girdled round and with what? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 3. Describe the nature imagery in II. 9-11. 4. What is meant by “that deep romantic chasm”? Where was it located? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 5. Pick out the words/phrases that convey supernatural, mystic features ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 6. Describe the source of the river in your own words. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 7. Explain the words “chaffy grain’ and “thresher’s flail”. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 8. Why does the poet refer to the rocks as “dancing rocks”? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

9. Describe the course of the river? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 10. What was the "miracle of rare device"? Why does the poet call it a 'miracle"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 11. What is the poet recalling and why? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 12. What is the power of the poet? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 13. Describe the appearance of the poet. What is he looked upon as? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

14. Explain the following phrases:- i) "sunless sea"…………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………….. ii) “waning moon”………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

28 iii) “mingled measure”………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………… iv) “holy dread”……………………………………………………………………….. v) “honey- dew”………………………………………………………………...... vi) “milk of Paradise”……………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… vii) “ancestral voices”………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

15. Pick out a word from the poem which means the following:- i) encircles, like a belt ______ii) gaps ______iii) deep opening in the ground ______iv) decreasing ______v) stopping at intervals ______vi) frozen rain drops ______vii) thrown ______viii) fore-telling ______ix) musical instrument with strings over a box ______x) musical composition ______xi) with great noise and confusion ______xii) bubbling over ______

16. Write a summary of the poem Kubla Khan

17. Give the full name of the poet who wrote ‘Christabel’

18. When was ‘Christabel’ (Part-I) written? In which year was ‘Lyrical Ballads’ published? 19. i) Pick out words and phrases from stanza I that create an atmosphere of mystery and Suspense ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

29 ii) Give an example of onomatopoeia ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

20. Fill in the blanks with appropriate words and phrases. i) Sir Leoline was a rich ...... ii) Sir Leoline lived in a ...... iii) It was the month of ...... iv) Christabel went o pray under a huge ...... tree covered with moss and rarest…… v) The richly clad, beautiful lady was ...... vi) ...... would shield Christabel . vii) ...... was weak in health. viii) ...... made an angry moan. ix) The ...... are jubilant again x) ...... praying always, prays in sleep.

21. Give five qualities that characterize Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. Give examples

22. Why was Christabel praying and for whom? 23. Name the elements of Nature mentioned in lines 43-52. How does the poet describe them

24. Explain the following :- i) “Shield her well” ii) “the neck that made the white robe wan” iii) “Have pity on my sore distress” iv) “I beseech your courtesy” v) “Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.”

25. Why did the appearance of the lady instill fear? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………

26. “and the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet,/Did this pursue her answer meet:-” i) who is the lady referred to here? ii) What does “meet” mean here? iii) Whom did the lady answer to?

27. What do we learn about Christabel form lines104-112?

28 . i) Why did Christabel ask Geraldine to walk “as if in stealth”? ii) Pick out one simile and one alliteration from the poem.

29. Give the meanings of the following words/phrases:- i)moat………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………….. ii) weary……………………………………………………………………………… iii) threshold………………………………………………………………………….. iv) devoutly………………………………………………………………………….. v) moan………………………………………………………………………………. vi) owlet’sscritch……………………………………………………………………… vii) in charity………………………………………………………………………… viii) hermitess………………………………………………………………………… ix) jubilant……………………………………………………………………...... x) countenance………………………………………………………………………..

30. Mention three things that indicate that Geraldine is evil. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… 31. Explain these lines: “In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell/ which in lord of thy utterance, Christabel! / Thou knowest tonight and will know tomorrow, / This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow,”

32. Explain “A star hath set, a star hath risen, ... lady’s prison.”. 33. Quote the lines which convey that the spell is broken ...... 34. What does Christabel know?

35. What does Christabel know?

2.5 LET US SUM UP

In this unit, we have given you practice in the study of the age of Romantic Revival and theme and contect of Coleridge’s two most famous poems Christabel and Kubla Khan.

2.6 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Oxford Companion to English Literature : Sixth edition, Sep 2006 2. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory - J.A. Cuddon 3. ‘Coleridge : A collection of Critical Essays - ed Kathleen Coburn

UNIT 3 : JOHN KEATS

Structure 3.0 Objectives 3.1 Introduction 3.2 About John Keats 3.3 Poem 3.4 Analysis 3.5 Let us Sum up 3.6 Check Your Progress 3.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit our purpose is to discuss the salient features of the Romantic Movement, Keats as a writer of odes and also their qualities such as unity of impression, elements of drama, their style, etc which make them so remarkable in themselves. This we shall do by discussing in detail the two major odes of John Keats

3.1 INTRODUCTION

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through an emphasis on natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature. Some of the most acclaimed works of Keats are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Sleep and Poetry", and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

3.2 ABOUT JOHN KEATS

John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795 to Thomas Keats and his wife, Frances Jennings. There is little evidence of his exact birthplace. Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records give the date as the 31st.He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889) who eventually married Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez .Another son was lost in infancy. His father first worked as an hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn, an establishment he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed that he was born

33 at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support his belief.The Globe pub now occupies the site (2012), a few yards from the modern-day Moorgate station.He was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and sent to a local dame school as a child.

Life mask of Keats by Benjamin Haydon, 1816

His parents were unable to afford Eton or Harrow, so in the summer of 1803, he was sent to board at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The small school had a liberal outlook and a progressive curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools.In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats developed an interest in classics and history, which would stay with him throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations. The young Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character, "always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. However, at 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died from a skull fracture, suffered when he fell from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats and his brother George at school,Thomas Keats died intestate. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards, and the four children went to live with their grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.

In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother. She appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, to take care of them. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour and the doctor of the Jennings family. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street until 1813.[4] Cowden Clarke, who remained a close friend of Keats, described this period as "the most placid time in Keats' life."

Early career

From 1814, Keats had two bequests, held in trust for him until his 21st birthday: £800 willed by his grandfather John Jennings (about £50,000 in today's money) and a portion of his mother's legacy, £8000 (about £500,000 today), to be equally divided between her living children.It seems he was not told of either, since he never applied for any of the money. Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may also have been unaware.William Walton, solicitor for Keats' mother and grandmother, definitely did know and had a duty of care to relay the information to Keats. It seems he did not. The money would have made a critical

34 difference to the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty for him, as he struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

October 1816

Having finished his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) and began studying there in October 1815. Within a month of starting, he was accepted as a dresser at the hospital, assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a distinct aptitude for medicine; it brought greater responsibility and a heavier workload.Keats' long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guy's Hospital led his family to

35 assume he would pursue a lifelong career in medicine, assuring financial security, and it seems that at this point Keats had a genuine desire to become a doctor.He lodged near the hospital, at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens who became a famous inventor and ink magnate.

However, Keats' training took up increasing amounts of his writing time, and he was increasingly ambivalent about his medical career. He felt that he faced a stark choice.He had written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser," in 1814, when he was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself".In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he was resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

Although he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats devoted more and more time to the study of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly the sonnet.In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet "O Solitude" in his magazine, The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the day.It was the first appearance in print of Keats' poetry, and Charles Cowden Clarke described it as his friend's red letter day,the first proof that Keats' ambitions were valid. Among his poems of 1816 was To My Brothers. In the summer of that year, Keats went with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began "Calidore" and initiated the era of his great letter writing. On his return to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself for further study in order to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

In October 1816, Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Leigh Hunt, a close friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later came the publication of Poems, the first volume of Keats' verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry," both strongly influenced by Hunt. The book was a critical failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds reviewed it favourably in The Champion. Clarke commented that the book "might have emerged in Timbuctoo."Keats' publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt ashamed of the book. Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey on Fleet Street. Unlike the Olliers, Keats' new publishers were enthusiastic about his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became a steady friend to Keats and made the company's rooms available for

36 young writers to meet. Their publishing lists eventually included Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and Lamb.

Through Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who advised them on literary as well as legal matters and was deeply impressed by Poems. Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily daunted," Woodhouse was convinced of Keats' genius, a poet to support as he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two became close friends, and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting as much as he could about Keats' poetry. This archive survives as one of the main sources of information on Keats' work. Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell to Keats' Johnson, ceaselessly promoting the writer's work, fighting his corner, and spurring his poetry to greater heights. In later years, Woodhouse was one of the few people to accompany Keats to Gravesend to embark on his final trip to Rome.

In spite of the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young Poets" (Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds) and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," foreseeing great things to come.He introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.He was also regularly meeting William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of the day. It was a decisive turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry." At this time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."This passage would eventually be transmuted into the concluding lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". In early December 1816, under the heady influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey that he had decided to give up medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. Keats had spent a great deal on his medical training and, despite his state of financial hardship and indebtedness, had made large loans to friends such as painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats would go on to lend £700 to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats could no longer cover the interest of his own debts.

Having left his training at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into rooms at 1 Well Walk in the village of Hampstead in April 1817. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house was close to Hunt and others from his circle in Hampstead, as well as to Coleridge, respected elder of the first wave of Romantic poets, at that time living in Highgate. On 11 April 1818, Keats reported that he and Coleridge had a long walk together on

Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, Keats wrote that they talked about "a thousand things,... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics." Around this time he was introduced to Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Rice.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. Keats' brother George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, from where the couple emigrated to America. They lived in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, until 1841, when George's investments failed. Like Keats' other brother, they both died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no effective treatment until the next century.[34][35] In July, while on the Isle of Mull, Keats caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey."[36] After his return south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom, exposing himself to infection. Some biographers suggest that this is when tuberculosis, his "family disease," first took hold. "Consumption" was not identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until 1820, and there was considerable stigma attached to the condition, as it was often associated with weakness, repressed sexual passion, or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a name" in his letters. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.

Wentworth Place

Wentworth Place, now the Keats House museum (left), Ten Keats Grove (right)

John Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown. It was on the edge of Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk south of his old home in Well Walk. The winter of 1818–19, though a difficult period for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth.Keats may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.

He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden.Brown wrote, "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum- tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his

38 poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale."Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

First stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale",

May 1819

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale".Keats' new and progressive publishers Taylor and Hessey issued Endymion, which Keats dedicated to Thomas Chatterton, a work that he termed "a trial of my Powers of Imagination".It was damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article", suggesting that he never truly got over it. A particularly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly Review. John Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes".It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.

In 1819, Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great (critically damned and not performed until 1950).The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies".The final volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review. It would come to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published.

Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.

Isabella Jones and Fanny Brawne

Fanny Brawne

Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings. She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats' circle. Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitates to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seem to enjoy circling each other rather than offering commitment. He writes that he "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818–19, and in his letters to George says that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her". The trysts may have been a sexual initiation for Keats according to Bate and Gittings. Jones inspired and was a steward of Keats' writing. The themes of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "The Eve of St Mark" may well have been suggested by her, the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her, and that the first version of "Bright Star" may have originally been for her.In 1821, Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats' death.

Letters and drafts of poems suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne visited the Dilke family at Wentworth Place before she lived there. She was born in the hamlet of West End (now in the district of West Hampstead), on 9 August 1800. Like Keats' grandfather, her grandfather kept a London inn, and both lost several family members to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats' sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a natural

40 theatrical bent. During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period.

Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850

On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration. It was a work in progress which he continued at until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship. "All his desires were concentrated on Fanny".From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones.Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "...your loveliness, and the hour of my death".

In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October 1819: "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you ... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder'd at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr'd for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you."

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate. In September 1820 Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again. After leaving he felt unable to write to her or read her letters, although he did correspond with her mother.He died there five months later. None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive.

It took a month for the news of his death to reach London, after which Brawne stayed in mourning for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children; she outlived Keats by more than 40 years.

Last months: Rome

During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February.On first coughing up blood, on 3 February 1820, he said to Charles Armitage Brown, "I know the colour of that blood! It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die."

He lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of the following summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig Maria Crowther, where he made the final revisions of "Bright Star". The journey was a minor catastrophe: storms broke out followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship's progress. When they finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days due to a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on 14 November, by which time any hope of the warmer climate he sought had disappeared.

Keats' house in Rome

Keats wrote his last letter on 30 November 1820 to Charles Armitage Brown; "Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence".

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. In November 1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet: a standard treatment of the day, but also likely a significant contributor to Keats' weakness.Severn's biographer Sue Brown writes: "They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again... Severn was in such a quandary he didn't

42 know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all." Keats was angry with both Severn and Clark when they would not give him laudanum (opium). He repeatedly demanded "how long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"

Death

The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. Keats was coughing up blood and covered in sweat. Severn nursed him devotedly and observed in a letter how Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive. Severn writes,

Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him[68]...about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] "Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy; don't be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come." I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.

Keats' grave in Rome

John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821. His body was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery. His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, includes the epitaph:

This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821

The text bears an echo from Catullus LXX

Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua (What a woman says to a passionate lover / should be written in the wind and the running water).

Severn and Brown added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats' work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review's scathing attack of "Endymion". As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan;

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

(canto 11, stanza 60)

Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonais.Clark saw to the planting of daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the furniture in Keats' room, scraped the walls and made new windows, doors and flooring.The ashes of Shelley, one of Keats' most fervent champions, are buried in the cemetery and Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats. Describing the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".

Reception

Relief on wall near his grave in Rome

When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820; and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats' three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only 200 copies.His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude, appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before his last visit to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats' work.

Although prolific during his short career, and now one of the most studied and admired British poets, his reputation rests on a small body of work, centred on the Odes,and only in the creative outpouring of the last years of his short life was he able to express the inner intensity for which he has been lauded since his death. Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime. Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."

Keats' ability and talent was acknowledged by several influential contemporary allies such as Shelley and Hunt.His admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses", for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: "loading every rift with ore".Shelley often corresponded with Keats in Rome and loudly declared that Keats' death had been brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral he wrote Adonais, a despairing elegy,stating that Keats' early death was a personal and public tragedy:

The loveliest and the last,

The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew

Died on the promise of the fruit.

Although Keats wrote that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", poetry did not come easily to him; his work was the fruit of a deliberate and prolonged classical self-education. He may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, but his early works were clearly those of a young man learning his craft. His first attempts at verse were often vague, languorously narcotic and lacking a clear eye. His poetic sense was based on the conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the classics, and also came from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats read as a boy.Hunt scorned the Augustan or "French" school, dominated by Pope, and attacked the earlier Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unsophisticated, obscure and crude writers. Indeed, during Keats' few years as a published poet, the reputation of the older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a "new school" for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing the basis from the scathing attacks from Blackwood's and The Quarterly.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

First stanza of "To Autumn"

September 1819

By the time of his death, Keats had therefore been associated with the taints of both old and new schools: the obscurity of the first-wave Romantics and the uneducated affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School". Keats' posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.

The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted. Marked as the standard-bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably.His work had the full support of the influential Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson, later a popular Poet Laureate who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century.Constance Naden was a great admirer of his poems, arguing that his genius lay in his 'exquisite sensitiveness to all the elements of beauty'.In 1848, twenty-seven years after Keats' death, Richard Monckton Milnes published the first full biography, which helped place Keats within the canon of English literature. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Millais and Rossetti, were inspired by Keats and painted scenes from his poems including "The Eve of St. Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats' work.

In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages".[84] In the twentieth century, Keats remained the muse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his death date as a day of mourning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot.Critic Helen Vendler stated the odes "are a group of works in which the English language find ultimate embodiment".[85] Bate declared of To Autumn: "Each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English"and M. R. Ridley claimed the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language."

The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of material are archived at the British Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Since 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a prize for romantic poetry. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque was unveiled in 1896 to commemorate Keats at Keats House.

Biographers

None of Keats' biographies were written by people who had known him.Shortly after his death, his publishers announced they would speedily publish The memoirs and remains of John Keats but his friends refused to cooperate and argued with each other to the extent that the project was abandoned. Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats' supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues.Given that he was becoming a significant figure within artistic circles, a succession of other publications followed, including anthologies of his many notes, chapters and letters.[90] However, early accounts often gave contradictory or heavily biased versions of events and were subject to dispute.[90] His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and his guardian Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary on Keats' life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded in a body of Keats legend.

Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline and too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.The first full biography was published in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes. Landmark Keats biographers since include Sidney Colvin, Robert Gittings, Walter Jackson Bate and Andrew Motion. The idealised image of the heroic romantic poet who battled poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography and the lack of an accurate likeness. Most of the surviving portraits of Keats were painted after his death, and those who knew him held that they did not succeed in capturing his unique quality and intensity.

Other portrayals

Sculpture of poet John Keats (seated on bench) by Vincent Gray – Chichester, West Sussex, UK. August 2017

John Keats: His Life and Death, the first major motion picture about the life of Keats, was produced in 1973 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.. It was directed by John Barnes. John Stride played John Keats and Janina Faye played Fanny Brawne.

The 2009 film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, focuses on Keats' relationship with Fanny Brawne.Inspired by the 1997 Keats biography penned by Andrew Motion, it stars Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny.

In Dan Wells's book A Night of Blacker Darkness, John Keats is portrayed in a comedic tone. He is the companion and sidekick of the protagonist.

In Dan Simmons' book Hyperion, one of the characters is a clone of John Keats, of whom he possesses personality and memories.

In Tim Powers' book The Stress of Her Regard, John Keats, along with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, is the victim of a vampire and his gift with language and poetry is a direct consequence of the vampire breed's attention.

Letters

The poem On death on a wall at Breestraat 113 in Leiden, Netherlands.

Keats' letters were first published in 1848 and 1878. During the 19th century, critics deemed them unworthy of attention, distractions from his poetic works. During the 20th century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, and are highly regarded within the canon of English literary correspondence. T. S. Eliot described them as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." Keats spent a great deal of time considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, displaying a deep interest unusual amongst his milieu who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science. Eliot wrote of Keats' conclusions; "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which ... will not be found to be true, and what is more, true for greater and more mature poetry than anything Keats ever wrote."

Few of Keats' letters are extant from the period before he joined his literary circle. From spring 1817, however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive skills as letter writer. Keats and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other daily, and Keats' ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary. They glitter with humour and critical intelligence.Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of awareness of his own nature and his weak spots.When his brother George went to America, Keats wrote to him in great detail, the body of letters becoming "the real diary" and self-revelation of Keats' life, as well as containing an exposition of his philosophy, and the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats' finest writing and thought. Gittings describes them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis.

Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry, and specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. In February to May 1819 he produced many of his finest letters".[4] Writing to his brother George, Keats explored the idea of the world as "the vale of Soul-making", anticipating the great

48 odes that he would write some months later. In the letters, Keats coined ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, concepts that came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination, despite only making single appearances as phrases in his correspondence. The poetical mind, Keats argued: has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade;... What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.

He used the term negative capability to discuss the state in which we are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason ...[Being] content with half knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's perceptions.He wrote later: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty"again and again turning to the question of what it means to be a poet.[40] "My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk", Keats notes to Shelley. In September 1819, Keats wrote to Reynolds "How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it ... I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now – Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm – in the same way as some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it".The final stanza of his last great ode: "To Autumn" runs:

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

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Later, To Autumn became one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language.

There are areas of his life and daily routine that Keats does not describe. He mentions little about his childhood or his financial straits and is seemingly embarrassed to discuss them. There is a total absence of any reference to his parents.In his last year, as his health deteriorated, his concerns often gave way to despair and morbid obsessions. The publications of letters to Fanny Brawne in 1870 focused on this period and emphasised this tragic aspect, giving rise to widespread criticism at the time.

3.3 POEM

“Ode to a Nightingale"

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

3.4 ANALYSIS

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem which describes Keats's journey into the state of negative capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats.

The nightingale described experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man sitting in his garden,

52 is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. The presence of weather is noticeable in the poem, as spring came early in 1819, bringing nightingales all over the heath.

Background

Joseph Severn's depiction of Keats listening to the nightingale (c. 1845)

Of Keats's six major odes of 1819, "Ode to Psyche", was probably written first and "To Autumn" written last. Sometime between these two, he wrote "Ode to a Nightingale". It is possible that "Ode to a Nightingale" was written between 26 April and 18 May 1819, based on weather conditions and similarities between images in the poem and those in a letter sent to Fanny Brawne on May Day. The poem was composed at the Hampstead house Keats shared with Brown, possibly while sitting beneath a plum tree in the garden.According to Keats' friend Brown, Keats finished the ode in just one morning: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of the nightingale."Brown's account is personal, as he claimed the poem was directly influenced by his house and preserved by his own doing. However, Keats relied on both his own imagination and other literature as sources for his depiction of the nightingale.

The exact date of "Ode to a Nightingale", as well as those of "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is unknown, as Keats dated all as 'May 1819'. However, he worked on the four poems together, and there is a unity in both their stanza forms and their themes. The exact order the poems in which the poems were written is also unknown, but they form a sequence within their structures. While Keats was writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the other poems, Brown transcribed copies of the poems and submitted them to Richard Woodhouse. During this time, Benjamin Haydon, Keats' friend, was given a copy of "Ode to a Nightingale", and he shared the poem with the editor of the Annals of the Fine Arts, James Elmes. Elmes paid Keats a small sum of money, and the poem was published in the July issue.The poem was later included in Keats' 1820 collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.

Structure

"Ode to a Nightingale" was probably the first of the middle set of four odes that Keats wrote following "Ode to Psyche", according to Brown. This is further

53 evidenced by the poems' structures. Keats experimentally combines two different types of lyrical poetry: the odal hymn and the lyric of questioning voice that responds to the odal hymn. This combination of structures is similar to that in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". In both poems, the dual form creates a dramatic element within the text. The stanza form of the poem is a combination of elements from Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets.

Keats incorporates a pattern of alternating historically "short" and "long" vowel sounds in his ode. In particular, line 18 ("And purple-stained mouth") has the historical pattern of "short" followed by "long" followed by "short" and followed by "long". This alternation is continued in longer lines, including line 31 ("Away! away! for I will fly to thee") which contains five pairs of alternations. However, other lines, such as line 3 ("Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains") rely on a pattern of five "short" vowels followed by "long" and "short" vowel pairings until they end with a "long" vowel. These are not the only combination patterns present, and there are patterns of two "short" vowels followed by a "long" vowel in other lines, including 12, 22, and 59, which are repeated twice and then followed up with two sets of "short" and then "long" vowel pairs. This reliance on vowel sounds is not unique to this ode, but is common to Keats's other 1819 odes and his Eve of St. Agnes.

The poem incorporates a complex reliance on assonance—the repetition of vowel sounds—in a conscious pattern, as found in many of his poems. Such a reliance on assonance is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode to a Nightingale", an example of this pattern can be found in line 35 ("Already with thee! tender is the night"), where the "ea" of "Already" connects with the "e" of "tender" and the "i" of "with" connects with the "i" of "is". This same pattern is found again in line 41 ("I cannot see what flowers are at my feet") with the "a" of "cannot" linking with the "a" of "at" and the "ee" of "see" linking with the "ee" of "feet". This system of assonance can be found in approximately a tenth of the lines of Keats's later poetry.

When it comes to other sound patterns, Keats relies on double or triple caesuras in approximately 6% of lines throughout the 1819 odes. An example from "Ode to a Nightingale" can be found within line 45 ("The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild") as the pauses after the commas are a "masculine" pause. Furthermore, Keats began to reduce the amount of Latin-based words and syntax that he relied on in his poetry, which in turn shortened the length of the words that dominate the poem. There is also an emphasis on words beginning with consonants, especially those that begin with "b", "p" or "v". The first stanza relies heavily on these three consonants, and they are used as a syzygy to add a musical tone within the poem.

Compared to his earlier verse, spondees are relatively abundant in his 1819 odes and other late poems. In "Ode to a Nightingale" they are used in just over 8% of his lines (compared to a mere 2.6% in Endymion). Examples include:

/ × / / × × / / × /

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth (line 12)

× / × / × / / / / /

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last, gray hairs (line 25)

To Walter Jackson Bate, the use of spondees in lines 31–34 creates a feeling of slow flight, and "in the final stanza . . . the distinctive use of scattered spondees, together with initial inversion, lend[s] an approximate phonetic suggestion of the peculiar spring and bounce of the bird in its flight."[14]

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale written in May 1819

The first and sixth stanzas exemplify the juxtaposition of rapture and morbidity in the poem:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

...

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.[15]

— Stanzas 1 and 6 (lines 1-10, 51-60)

Themes

"Ode to a Nightingale" describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature. In the words of Richard Fogle, "The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and common sense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream." Of course, the nightingale's song is the dominant image and dominant "voice" within the ode. The nightingale is also the object of empathy and praise within the poem. However, the nightingale and the discussion of the nightingale is not simply about the bird or the song, but about human experience in general. This is not to say that the song is a simple metaphor, but it is a complex image that is formed through the interaction of the conflicting voices of praise and questioning. On this theme, David Perkins summarizes the way "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" perform this when he says, "we are dealing with a talent, indeed an entire approach to poetry, in which symbol, however necessary, may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry, any more than it could with Shakespeare, but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".However, there is a difference between an urn and a nightingale in that the nightingale is not an eternal entity. Furthermore, in creating any aspect of the nightingale immortal during the poem the narrator separates any union that he can have with the nightingale.

The nightingale's song within the poem is connected to the art of music in a way that the urn in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is connected to the art of sculpture. As such, the nightingale would represent an enchanting presence and, unlike the urn, is directly connected to nature. As natural music, the song is for beauty and lacks a message of truth. Keats follows Coleridge's belief, as found in "The Nightingale", in separating from the world by losing himself in the bird's song. Although Keats favours a female nightingale over Coleridge's masculine bird, both reject the traditional depiction of the nightingale as related to the tragedy of Philomela.Their songbird is a happy nightingale that lacks the melancholic feel of previous poetic depictions. The bird is only a voice within the poem, but it is a voice that compels the narrator to join with in and forget the sorrows of the world. However, there is tension in that the narrator holds Keats's guilt regarding the death of Tom Keats, his brother. The song's conclusion represents the result of trying to escape into the realm of fancy.

Like Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To a Skylark", Keats's narrator listens to a bird song, but listening to the song within "Ode to a Nightingale" is almost painful and similar to death. The narrator seeks to be with the nightingale and abandons his sense of vision in order to embrace the sound in an attempt to share in the darkness with the bird. As the poem ends, the trance caused by the nightingale is broken and the narrator is left wondering if it was a real vision or just a dream. The poem's reliance on the process of sleeping is common to Keats's poems, and "Ode to a Nightingale" shares many of the same themes as Keats' Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes. This further separates the image of the nightingale's song from its closest comparative image, the urn as represented in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The nightingale is distant and mysterious, and even disappears at the end of the poem. The dream image emphasizes the shadowiness and elusiveness of the poem. These elements make it impossible for there to be a complete self-identification with the nightingale, but it also allows for self-awareness to permeate throughout the poem, albeit in an altered state.

Midway through the poem, there is a split between the two actions of the poem: the first attempts to identify with the nightingale and its song, and the second discusses the convergence of the past with the future while experiencing the present. This second theme is reminiscent of Keats's view of human progression through the Mansion of Many Apartments and how man develops from experiencing and wanting only pleasure to understanding truth as a mixture of both pleasure and pain. The Elysian fields and the nightingale's song in the first half of the poem represent the pleasurable moments that overwhelm the individual like a drug. However, the experience does not last forever, and the body is left desiring it until the narrator feels helpless without the pleasure. Instead of embracing the coming truth, the narrator clings to poetry to hide from the loss of pleasure. Poetry does not bring

57 about the pleasure that the narrator original asks for, but it does liberate him from his desire for only pleasure.

Responding to this emphasis on pleasure, Albert Guerard, Jr. argues that the poem contains a "longing not for art but a free reverie of any kind. The form of the poem is that of progression by association, so that the movement of feeling is at the mercy of words evoked by chance, such words as fade and forlorn, the very words that, like a bell, toll the dreamer back to his sole self."However, Fogle points out that the terms Guerard emphasizes are "associational translations" and that Guerard misunderstands Keats's aesthetic. After all, the acceptance of the loss of pleasure by the end of the poem is an acceptance of life and, in turn, of death. Death was a constant theme that permeated aspects of Keats poetry because he was exposed to death of his family members throughout his life.Within the poem, there are many images of death. The nightingale experiences a sort of death and even the god Apollo experiences death, but his death reveals his own divine state. As Perkins explains, "But, of course, the nightingale is not thought to be literally dying. The point is that the deity or the nightingale can sing without dying. But, as the ode makes clear, man cannot—or at least not in a visionary way."

With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death, the poem, according to Claude Finney, describes "the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty". Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney, but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the themes of Keats's Mansion of Many Apartments when he says, "the core of the poem is the search for the mystery, the unsuccessful quest for light within its darkness" and this "leads only to an increasing darkness, or a growing recognition of how impenetrable the mystery is to mortals."With these views in mind, the poem recalls Keats's earlier view of pleasure and an optimistic view of poetry found within his earlier poems, especially Sleep and Poetry, and rejects them. This loss of pleasure and incorporation of death imagery lends the poem a dark air, which connects "Ode to a Nightingale" with Keats' other poems that discuss the demonic nature of poetic imagination, including Lamia.In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—he uses an abrupt, almost brutal word for it—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination.

Reception

Contemporary critics of Keats enjoyed the poem, and it was heavily quoted in their reviews.An anonymous review of Keats's poetry that ran in the August and October 1820 Scots Magazine stated: "Amongst the minor poems we prefer the 'Ode to the Nightingale'. Indeed, we are inclined to prefer it beyond every other poem in the

58 book; but let the reader judge. The third and seventh stanzas have a charm for us which we should find it difficult to explain. We have read this ode over and over again, and every time with increased delight."At the same time, Leigh Hunt wrote a review of Keats's poem for the 2 August and 9 August 1820 The Indicator: "As a specimen of the Poems, which are all lyrical, we must indulge ourselves in quoting entire the 'Ode to a Nightingale'. There is that mixture in it of real melancholy and imaginative relief, which poetry alone presents us in her 'charmed cup,' and which some over-rational critics have undertaken to find wrong because it is not true. It does not follow that what is not true to them, is not true to others. If the relief is real, the mixture is good and sufficing."

John Scott, in an anonymous review for the September 1820 edition of The London Magazine, argued for the greatness of Keats's poetry as exemplified by poems including "Ode to a Nightingale":

The injustice which has been done to our author's works, in estimating their poetical merit, rendered us doubly anxious, on opening his last volume, to find it likely to seize fast hold of general sympathy, and thus turn an overwhelming power against the paltry traducers of talent, more eminently promising in many respects, than any the present age has been called upon to encourage. We have not found it to be quite all that we wished in this respect—and it would have been very extraordinary if we had, for our wishes went far beyond reasonable expectations. But we have found it of a nature to present to common understandings the poetical power with which the author's mind is gifted, in a more tangible and intelligible shape than that in which it has appeared in any of his former compositions. It is, therefore, calculated to throw shame on the lying, vulgar spirit, in which this young worshipper in the temple of the Muses has been cried-down; whatever questions may still leave to be settled as to the kind and degree of his poetical merits. Take for instance, as proof of the justice of our praise, the following passage from an Ode to the Nightingale:--it is distinct, noble, pathetic, and true: the thoughts have all chords of direct communication with naturally-constituted hearts: the echoes of the strain linger bout the depths of human bosoms.

In a review for the 21 January 1835 London Journal, Hunt claimed that while Keats wrote the poem, "The poet had then his mortal illness upon him, and knew it. Never was the voice of death sweeter." David Moir, in 1851, used The Eve of St Agnes to claim, "We have here a specimen of descriptive power luxuriously rich and original; but the following lines, from the 'Ode to a Nightingale,' flow from a far more profound fountain of inspiration."

At the end of the 19th century, Robert Bridges's analysis of the poem became a dominant view and would influence later interpretations of the poem. Bridges, in 1895, declared that the poem was the best of Keats's odes but he thought that the poem contained too much artificial language. In particular, he emphasised the use of the word "forlorn" and the last stanza as being examples of Keats's artificial language. In "Two odes of Keats's" (1897), William C Wilkinson suggested that "Ode to a Nightingale" is deeply flawed because it contains too many "incoherent musings" that failed to supply a standard of logic that would allow the reader to understand the relationship between the poet and the bird.However, Herbert Grierson, arguing in 1928, believed Nightingale to be superior to "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to Psyche", arguing the exact opposite of Wilkinson as he stated that "Nightingale", along with "To Autumn", showed a greater amount of logical thought and more aptly presented the cases they were intended to make.

20th-century criticism

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudyard Kipling referred to lines 69 and 70, alongside three lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, when he claimed of poetry: "In all the millions permitted there are no more than five—five little lines—of which one can say, 'These are the magic. These are the vision. The rest is only Poetry.'In 1906, Alexander Mackie argued: "The nightingale and the lark for long monopolised poetic idolatry—a privilege they enjoyed solely on account of their pre-eminence as song birds. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley's Ode to a Skylark are two of the glories of English literature; but both were written by men who had no claim to special or exact knowledge of ornithology as such."Sidney Colvin, in 1920, argued, "Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage […] To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza […] to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself."

Bridges' view of "Ode to a Nightingale" was taken up by H. W. Garrod in his 1926 analysis of Keats's poems. As Albert Gerard would argue later in 1944, Garrod believed that the problem within Keats's poem was his emphasis on the rhythm and the language instead of the main ideas of the poem.When describing the fourth stanza of the poem, Maurice Ridley, in 1933, claimed, "And so comes the stanza, with that remarkable piece of imagination at the end which feels the light as blown by the breezes, one of those characteristic sudden flashes with which Keats fires the most ordinary material." He later declared of the seventh stanza: "And now for the great stanza in which the imagination is fanned to yet whiter heat, the stanza that

60 would, I suppose, by common consent be taken, along with Kubla Khan, as offering us the distilled sorceries of 'Romanticism'". He concluded on the stanza that "I do not believe that any reader who has watched Keats at work on the more exquisitely finished of the stanzas in The Eve of St. Agnes, and seen this craftsman slowly elaborating and refining, will ever believe that this perfect stanza was achieved with the easy fluency with which, in the draft we have, it was obviously written down." In 1936, F. R. Leavis wrote, "One remembers the poem both as recording, and as being for the reader, an indulgence."Following Leavis, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in a 1938 essay, saw the poem as "a very rich poem. It contains some complications which we must not gloss over if we are to appreciate the depth and significance of the issues engaged."Brooks would later argue in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) that the poem was thematically unified while contradicting many of the negative criticisms lodged against the poem.

Richard Fogle responded to the critical attack on Keats's emphasis on rhyme and language put forth by Garrod, Gerard, and others in 1953. His argument was similar to Brooks: that the poem was thematically coherent and that there is a poet within the poem that is different from Keats the writer of the poem. As such, Keats consciously chose the shift in the themes of the poem and the contrasts within the poem represent the pain felt when comparing the real world to an ideal world found within the imagination.Fogle also responded directly to the claims made by Leavis: "I find Mr. Leavis too austere, but he points out a quality which Keats plainly sought for. His profusion and prodigality is, however, modified by a principle of sobriety."It is possible that Fogle's statements were a defense of Romanticism as a group that was both respectable in terms of thought and poetic ability.Wasserman, following in 1953, claimed that "Of all Keats' poems, it is probably the 'Ode to a Nightingale' that has most tormented the critic [...] in any reading of the 'Ode to a Nightingale' the turmoil will not down. Forces contend wildly within the poem, not only without resolution, but without possibility of resolution; and the reader comes away from his experience with the sense that he has been in 'a wild Abyss'".He then explained, "It is this turbulence, I suspect, that has led Allen Tate to believe the ode 'at least tries to say everything that poetry can say.' But I propose it is the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' that succeeds in saying what poetry can say, and that the other ode attempts to say all that the poet can."

Later critical responses

Although the poem was defended by a few critics, E. C. Pettet returned to the argument that the poem lacked a structure and emphasized the word "forlorn" as evidence of his view. In his 1957 work, Pettet did praise the poem as he declared, "The Ode to a Nightingale has a special interest in that most of us would probably regard it as the most richly representative of all Keats's poems. Two reasons for this

61 quality are immediately apparent: there is its matchless evocation of that late spring and early summer season […] and there is its exceptional degree of 'distillation', of concentrated recollection". David Perkins felt the need to defend the use of the word "forlorn" and claimed that it described the feeling from the impossibility of not being able to live in the world of the imagination. When praising the poem in 1959, Perkins claimed, "Although the "Ode to a Nightingale" ranges more widely than the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poem can also be regarded as the exploration or testing out of a symbol, and, compared with the urn as a symbol, the nightingale would seem to have both limitations and advantages."Walter Jackson Bate also made a similar defense of the word "forlorn" by claiming that the world described by describing the impossibility of reaching that land.When describing the poem compared to the rest of English poetry, Bate argued in 1963, "Ode to a Nightingale" is among "the greatest lyrics in English" and the only one written with such speed: "We are free to doubt whether any poem in English of comparable length and quality has been composed so quickly."In 1968, Robert Gittins stated, "It may not be wrong to regard [Ode on Indolence and Ode on Melancholy] as Keats's earlier essays in this [ode] form, and the great Nightingale and Grecian Urn as his more finished and later works."

From the late 1960s onward, many of the Yale School of critics describe the poem as a reworking of John Milton's poetic diction, but, they argued, that poem revealed that Keats lacked the ability of Milton as a poet. The critics, Harold Bloom (1965), Leslie Brisman (1973), Paul Fry (1980), John Hollander (1981) and Cynthia Chase (1985), all focused on the poem with Milton as a progenitor to "Ode to a Nightingale" while ignoring other possibilities, including Shakespeare who was emphasised as being the source of many of Keats's phrases. Responding to the claims about Milton and Keats's shortcomings, critics like R. S. White (1981) and Willard Spiegelman (1983) used the Shakespearean echoes to argue for a multiplicity of sources for the poem to claim that Keats was not trying to respond just to Milton or escape from his shadow. Instead, "Ode to a Nightingale" was an original poem, as White claimed, "The poem is richly saturated in Shakespeare, yet the assimilations are so profound that the Ode is finally original, and wholly Keatsian". Similarly, Spiegelman claimed that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream had "flavored and ripened the later poem". This was followed in 1986 by Jonathan Bate claiming that Keats was "left enriched by the voice of Shakespeare, the 'immortal bird'".

Focusing on the quality of the poem, Stuart Sperry, argued in 1973, "'Ode to a Nightingale' is the supreme expression in all Keats's poetry of the impulse to imaginative escape that flies in the face of the knowledge of human limitation, the impulse fully expressed in 'Away! away! for I will fly to thee.'"Wolf Hirst, in 1981, described the poem as "justly celebrated" and claimed that "Since this movement

62 into an eternal realm of song is one of the most magnificent in literature, the poet's return to actuality is all the more shattering." Helen Vendler continued the earlier view that the poem was artificial but added that the poem was an attempt to be aesthetic and spontaneous that was later dropped. In 1983, she argued, "In its absence of conclusiveness and its abandonment to reverie, the poem appeals to readers who prize it as the most personal, the most apparently spontaneous, the most immediately beautiful, and the most confessional of Keats's odes. I believe that the 'events' of the ode, as it unfolds in time, have more logic, however, than is usually granted them, and that they are best seen in relation to Keats's pursuit of the idea of music as a nonrepresentational art."

In a review of contemporary criticism of "Ode to a Nightingale" in 1998, James O'Rouke claimed that "To judge from the volume, the variety, and the polemical force of the modern critical responses engendered, there have been few moments in English poetic history as baffling as Keats's repetition of the word 'forlorn'".When referring to the reliance of the ideas of John Dryden and William Hazlitt within the poem, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, in 1999, argued "whose notion of poetry as a 'movement' from personal consciousness to an awareness of suffering humanity it perfectly illustrates."

In fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald took the title of his novel Tender is the Night from the 35th line of the ode.

According to Ildikó de Papp Carrington, Keats' wording, "when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn", seems to be echoed in by Alice Munro's Save the Reaper (1998), the end of which reads: "Eve would lie down [...] with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark" (book version).

The Dutch folk band The Black Atlantic took the name of their 2012 EP "Darkling I listen" from the start line 51.

The poem is quoted in Chapter 1 of P. G. Wodehouse's novel Full Moon (1947): "'Coming here? Freddie?'.A numbness seemed to be paining his sense, as though of hemlock he had drunk."

Part of the poem is quoted in an episode of Penny Dreadful, when Lucifer appears to Vanessa Ives to tempt her, and quotes the poem in his conversation.

The poem inspired Tennessee Williams to name his first play Not About Nightingales.

In music

"Ode to a Nightingale" is the subject matter for Ben Moore's piece, "Darkling, I listen," a song-cycle written for baritone in 2010, commissioned by Bruce and Suzie Kovner. This song-cycle uses the entirety of the work with the cycles' eight songs based on the eight stanzas of the poem. Nearly all the songs in the cycle have preludes, interludes and postludes, possibly hinting at a Schumann-like effect, where the piano is the main voice and the sung part merely adds decoration.

There is also a very fine setting by Hamilton Harty, set for soprano and orchestra. It was first performed at the Cardiff Festival in 1907, and later magnificently recorded by Heather Harper.

3.5 LET US SUM UP

Three main thoughts stand out in the ode. One is Keats' evaluation of life; life is a vale of tears and frustration. The happiness which Keats hears in the song of the nightingale has made him happy momentarily but has been succeeded by a feeling of torpor which in turn is succeeded by the conviction that life is not only painful but also intolerable. His taste of happiness in hearing the nightingale has made him all the more aware of the unhappiness of life. Keats wants to escape from life, not by means of wine, but by a much more powerful agent, the imagination.

3.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1. What are the romantic characteristics in his poem "Ode to a Nightingale?"

2. What is the theme of the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

3. What is Keats's description of nature in "Ode to a Nightingale"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

4. Why does he want to “dissolve” and to forget? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

5. "John Keats is haunted by the conflict between the ideal world and the real world." Discuss this statement in relation to his poem, "Ode to a Nightingale." ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

6. How does the voice of the nightingale affect the poet in "Ode to a Nightingale"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………......

7. What does the nightingale do at the end of stanza 1 of "Ode to a Nightingale"?

8. What does the speaker of the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" want to forget? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

9. Didn't understand what is poet saying...help me. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

10. Can you explain what Keats meant in these lines from "Ode to a Nightingale"? Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

11. Discuss at least two characteristics of Romanticism in John Keat's poem "Ode to a Nightingale". ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………….…. ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

UNIT 4 : P.B.SHELLY’S ODE TO THE WEST WIND

Structure

4.0 Objectives 4.1 Introduction 4.2 About P.B.Shelly 4.3 Poem 4.4 Analysis 4.5 Let us Sum up 4.6 Check Your Progress

4.0 OBJECTIVE

Ode to the West Wind” is a poem written by the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. According to Shelley, the poem was written in the woods outside Florence, Italy in the autumn of 1819. In the poem, the speaker directly addresses the west wind. The speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this death and decay because it means that rejuvenation and rebirth will come soon. In the final two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote this rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.

4.1 INTRODUCTION

In this unit you will know about the Romantic era how it was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1890. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[1] the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education,[4] the social sciences, and the natural sciences.[5][failed verification] It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism, and nationalism.

4.2 ABOUT P.B.SHELLY

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was an English poet of the early nineteenth century. He is widely thought of as one of most important poets of the Romantic movement in English literature. Some of his poems, like Ozymandias and Ode to the West Wind, are among the most famous in English.

Shelley was born in Horsham, Sussex. He was the son of a member of Parliament. He attended the University of Oxford, for only one year; he was expelled for being an atheist. In his own time Shelley was very unpopular for his political and religious views and for his personal conduct. He married young, but left his wife to run away with Mary Godwin. After Shelley's first wife committed suicide, Shelley married Mary Godwin; she later became famous as Mary Shelley, the author of the novel Frankenstein.

Shelley left England and spent much of his life travelling in Europe, especially in Italy. He became a close friend of poet Lord Byron, who also left England and travelled in Europe because of sexual controversy at home. Shelley continued to write poetry throughout this time; he wrote several major works, like the verse drama The Cenci and long poems like Alastor and Adonais, as well as many shorter poems.

About a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Italy. He was one of three important English Romantic poets of the same generation who died young; the other two were Lord Byron and John Keats.

4.3 POEM

ODE TO THE WEST WIND.

I. O, wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!

II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear! III. Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!

IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O, uncontroulable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

4.4 ANALYSIS

"Ode to the West Wind" is an ode, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819 near Florence, Italy. It was originally published in 1820 by Charles in London as part of the collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems.Perhaps more than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. Some also believe that the poem was written in response to the loss of his son, William (born to Mary Shelley) in 1819. The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorises the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. At the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. His other poems written at the same time—"The Masque of Anarchy", Prometheus Unbound, and "England in 1819"—take up these same themes of political change, revolution, and role of the poet.

Structure

Percy Bysshe Shelley's fair draft of lines 1–42, 1819, Bodleian Library

The poem "Ode to the West Wind" consists of five sections (cantos) written in terza rima. Each section consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter.

The poem begins with three sections describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. In the last two sections, the poet speaks directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him up and make him its companion in its wanderings. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far.

Interpretation of the poem

The poem can be divided in two parts: the first three cantos are about the qualities of the Wind and each ends with the invocation "Oh hear!" The last two cantos give a relation between the Wind and the speaker.

First Canto

The first stanza begins with the alliteration "wild West Wind" (line 1). The form of the apostrophe makes the wind also a personification. However, one must not think of this ode as an optimistic praise of the wind; it is clearly associated with autumn. The first few lines contain personification elements, such as "leaves dead" (2), the aspect of death being highlighted by the inversion which puts "dead" (2) at the end

72 of the line. These leaves haunt as "ghosts" (3) that flee from something that panics them.

"chariotest" (6) is the second person singular. The "corpse within its grave" (8) in the next line is in contrast to the "azure sister of the Spring" (9)—a reference to the east wind—whose "living hues and odours" (12) evoke a strong contrast to the colours of the fourth line of the poem that evoke death. In the last line of this canto the west wind is considered the "Destroyer" (14) because it drives the last signs of life from the trees, and the "Preserver" (14) for scattering the seeds which will come to life in the spring,

Second Canto

The second canto of the poem is much more fluid than the first one. The sky's "clouds"(16) are "like earth's decaying leaves" (16). They are a reference to the second line of the first canto ("leaves dead", 2).They also are numerous in number like the dead leaves. Through this reference the landscape is recalled again. The "clouds" (16) are "Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean" (17). This probably refers to the fact that the line between the sky and the stormy sea is indistinguishable and the whole space from the horizon to the zenith is covered with trailing storm clouds. The "clouds" can also be seen as "Angels of rain" (18). In a biblical way, they may be messengers that bring a message from heaven down to earth through rain and lightning. These two natural phenomena with their "fertilizing and illuminating power" bring a change.

Line 21 begins with "Of some fierce Maenad" and again the west wind is part of the second canto of the poem; here he is two things at once: first he is "dirge/Of the dying year" (23–24) and second he is "a prophet of tumult whose prediction is decisive"; a prophet who does not only bring "black rain, and fire, and hail" (28), but who "will burst" (28) it. The "locks of the approaching storm" (23) are the messengers of this bursting: the "clouds".

Shelley also mentions that when the West Wind blows, it seems to be singing a funeral song about the year coming to an end and that the sky covered with a dome of clouds looks like a "sepulchre", i.e., a burial chamber or grave for the dying year or the year which is coming to an end.

Shelley in this canto "expands his vision from the earthly scene with the leaves before him to take in the vaster commotion of the skies". This means that the wind is now no longer at the horizon and therefore far away, but he is exactly above us. The clouds now reflect the image of the swirling leaves; this is a parallelism that gives evidence that we lifted "our attention from the finite world into the macrocosm". The "clouds" can also be compared with the leaves; but the clouds are more unstable and

73 bigger than the leaves and they can be seen as messengers of rain and lightning as it was mentioned above.

Third Canto

This refers to the effect of west wind in the water. The question that comes up when reading the third canto at first is what the subject of the verb "saw" (33) could be. On the one hand there is the "blue Mediterranean" (30). With the "Mediterranean" as subject of the canto, the "syntactical movement" is continued and there is no break in the fluency of the poem; it is said that "he lay, / Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, / Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, / And saw in sleep old palaces and towers" (30–33). On the other hand, it is also possible that the lines of this canto refer to the "wind" again. Then the verb that belongs to the "wind" as subject is not "lay", but the previous line of this canto, that says Thou who didst waken ... And saw" (29, 33). But whoever—the "Mediterranean" or the "wind"—"saw" (33) the question remains whether the city one of them saw, is real and therefore a reflection on the water of a city that really exists on the coast; or the city is just an illusion. Pirie is not sure of that either. He says that it might be "a creative you interpretation of the billowing seaweed; or of the glimmering sky reflected on the heaving surface". Both possibilities seem to be logical. To explain the appearance of an underwater world, it might be easier to explain it by something that is realistic; and that might be that the wind is able to produce illusions on the water. With its pressure, the wind "would waken the appearance of a city". From what is known of the "wind" from the last two cantos, it became clear that the wind is something that plays the role of a Creator. Whether the wind creates real things or illusions does not seem to be that important. Baiae's bay (at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples) actually contains visible Roman ruins underwater (that have been shifted due to earthquakes.) Obviously the moss and flowers are seaweed. It appears as if the third canto shows—in comparison with the previous cantos—a turning-point. Whereas Shelley had accepted death and changes in life in the first and second canto, he now turns to "wistful reminiscence [, recalls] an alternative possibility of transcendence". From line 26 to line 36 he gives an image of nature. But if we look closer at line 36, we realise that the sentence is not what it appears to be at first sight, because it obviously means, so sweet that one feels faint in describing them. This shows that the idyllic picture is not what it seems to be and that the harmony will certainly soon be destroyed. A few lines later, Shelley suddenly talks about "fear" (41). This again shows the influence of the west wind which announces the change of the season.

Fourth Canto

Whereas the cantos one to three began with "O wild West Wind" and "Thou" (15, 29) and were clearly directed to the wind, there is a change in the fourth canto. The

74 focus is no more on the "wind", but on the speaker who says "If I ..." (43–44). Until this part, the poem has appeared very anonymous and was only concentrated on the wind and its forces so that the author of the poem was more or less forgotten. Pirie calls this "the suppression of personality" which finally vanishes at that part of the poem. It becomes more and more clear that what the author talks about now is himself. That this must be true, shows the frequency of the author's use of the first- person pronouns "I" (43–44, 48, 51, 54), "my" (48, 52), and "me" (53). These pronouns appear nine times in the fourth canto. Certainly the author wants to dramatise the atmosphere so that the reader recalls the situation of canto one to three. He achieves this by using the same pictures of the previous cantos in this one. Whereas these pictures, such as "leaf", "cloud", and "wave" have existed only together with the wind, they are now existing with the author. The author thinks about being one of them and says "If I were a . . ." (43 ff.). Shelley here identifies himself with the wind, although he knows that he cannot do that, because it is impossible for someone to put all the things he has learned from life aside and enter a "world of innocence". That Shelley is deeply aware of his closedness in life and his identity shows his command in line 53. There he says "Oh, lift me up as a wave, a leaf, a cloud" (53). He knows that this is something impossible to achieve, but he does not stop praying for it. The only chance Shelley sees to make his prayer and wish for a new identity with the Wind come true is by pain or death, as death leads to rebirth. So, he wants to "fall upon the thorns of life" and "bleed" (54).

At the end of the canto the poet tells us that "a heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd" (55). This may be a reference to the years that have passed and "chained and bowed" (55) the hope of the people who fought for freedom and were literally imprisoned. With this knowledge, the West Wind becomes a different meaning. The wind is the "uncontrollable" (47) who is "tameless" (56).

One more thing that one should mention is that this canto sounds like a kind of prayer or confession of the poet. This confession does not address God and therefore sounds very impersonal.

Shelley also changes his use of metaphors in this canto. In the first cantos the wind was a metaphor explained at full length. Now the metaphors are only weakly presented—"the thorns of life" (54). Shelley also leaves out the fourth element: the fire. In the previous cantos he wrote about the earth, the air and the water. The reader now expects the fire—but it is not there. This leads to a break in the symmetry.

Fifth Canto

Again and again the wind is very important in this last canto. At the beginning of the poem the wind was only capable of blowing the leaves from the trees. In the

75 previous canto the poet identified himself with the leaves. In this canto the wind is now capable of using both of these things mentioned before.

Everything that had been said before was part of the elements—wind, earth, and water. Now the fourth element comes in: the fire.

There is also a confrontation in this canto: Whereas in line 57 Shelley writes "me thy", there is "thou me" in line 62. These pronouns appear seven times in the fifth canto. This "signals a restored confidence, if not in the poet’s own abilities, at least in his capacity to communicate with [. . .] the Wind".

It is also necessary to mention that the first-person pronouns again appear in a great frequency; but the possessive pronoun "my" predominates. Unlike the frequent use of the "I" in the previous canto that made the canto sound self-conscious, this canto might now sound self-possessed. The canto is no more a request or a prayer as it had been in the fourth canto—it is a demand. The poet becomes the wind's instrument, his "lyre" (57). This is a symbol of the poet's own passivity towards the wind; he becomes his musician and the wind's breath becomes his breath. The poet's attitude—towards the wind has changed: in the first canto the wind has been an "enchanter" (3), now the wind has become an "incantation" (65).

And there is another contrast between the two last cantos: in the fourth canto the poet had articulated himself in singular: "a leaf" (43, 53), "a cloud" (44, 53), "A wave" (45, 53) and "One too like thee" (56). In this canto, the "sense of personality as vulnerably individualised led to self-doubt" and the greatest fear was that what was "tameless, and swift, and proud" (56) will stay "chain'd and bow'd" (55). The last canto differs from that. The poet in this canto uses plural forms, for example, "my leaves" (58, 64), "thy harmonies" (59), "my thoughts" (63), "ashes and sparks" (67) and "my lips" (68). By the use of the plural, the poet is able to show that there is some kind of peace and pride in his words. It even seems as if he has redefined himself because the uncertainty of the previous canto has been blown away. The "leaves" merge with those of an entire forest and "Will" become components in a whole tumult of mighty harmonies. The use of this "Will" (60) is certainly a reference to the future. Through the future meaning, the poem itself does not only sound as something that might have happened in the past, but it may even be a kind of "prophecy" (69) for what might come—the future.

At last, Shelley again calls the Wind in a kind of prayer and even wants him to be "his" Spirit: "My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" (62). Like the leaves of the trees in a forest, his leaves will fall and decay and will perhaps soon flourish again when the spring comes. That may be why he is looking forward to the spring and asks at the end of the last canto "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" (70).

This is of course a rhetorical question because spring does come after winter, but the "if" suggests that it might not come if the rebirth is strong and extensive enough, and if it is not, another renewal—spring—will come anyway. Thus the question has a deeper meaning and does not only mean the change of seasons, but is a reference to death and rebirth as well. It also indicates that after the struggles and problems in life, there would always be a solution. It shows us the optimistic view of the poet about life which he would like the world to know. It is an interpretation of his saying, If you are suffering now, there will be good times ahead. But the most powerful call to the Wind are the lines: "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!" Here Shelley is imploring—or really chanting to—the Wind to blow away all of his useless thoughts so that he can be a vessel for the Wind and, as a result, awaken the Earth.

4.5 LET US SUM UP

This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

4.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1. What is the breath of autumn in “Ode to the West Wind”?

2. How is the natural world being transformed in "Ode to the West Wind"? How is the speaker being transformed?

………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

3. Discuss Shelley's idea of spiritual and imaginative force with reference to Ode to the West Wind. ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

4. What is the central image in each of the first three cantos of Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

5. How are sections 4 and 5 different in tone and emphasis from the first three in "Ode to the West Wind"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

6. How are the leaves and clouds affected by the wind? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………...

7. In the poem "Ode to the West Wind," the poet has personified the west wind. Whom do you think the poet has personified the west wind as? ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

8. Is Shelley an escapist or an optimist in "Ode To The West Wind"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

9. What is Percy Shelley's prayer to the west wind? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

10. What can the west wind do to the clouds in "Ode to the West Wind"? What are clouds compared to? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

11. What kind of life does the poet say he is leading at the time the west wind is blowing in "Ode to the West Wind"? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

12. What are some lines in "Ode to the West Wind" that deal with nature, senses, and emotion? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

13. What do the following phrases mean from "Ode to the West Wind"? "Thou dirge of the dying year", "Cleave themselves into chasms", "The tumult of thy mighty harmonies." ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………

14. How do the natural images in "Ode to the West Wind" by Shelley endorse his political views? ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………