Stanza 3
The figures pass by for the third time, they suddenly disappear leaving him curious, and the speaker feels a powerful urge to follow them. He learns that they are Love, Ambition and Poesy. He calls Poesy ‘my demon’ and ‘maiden most unmeek’ making it personal, and showing his inspiration tortures and torments him.
Stanza 4
The speaker urges to follow the figures again as they disappear (‘faded and forsooth’ – alliteration) but states that the urge is folly. Love is fleeting, Keats cannot find it. Ambition is mortal, it is short lived. Poesy offers nothing that compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by ‘busy-common sense’. He denounces poetry as it reflects the heart and soul, and he doesn’t want to be troubled by this. As the figures fade suddenly in this stanza so does indolence.
Stanza 5
The speaker describes his morning before the figures passed, when his soul seemed a green lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows and sunbeams. There were clouds in the sky, but no rain and the open window let in warmth and music of birdsong. He tells the figures they were right to leave and they had failed to rouse him. He tells the shadows to leave, as he is happy where he is. He doesn’t want feelings to replace his visions of a summer day. He decides he doesn’t want anything to do with the shadows afterall, Love will just make him hurt, Ambition will only give him things to do, and Poesy will hound him day and night.
Stanza 6
He bids adieu and asserts again that Love, Ambition and Poesy aren’t enough to raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He tells them he has had ample supply of visions and orders them to vanish and never return.
Form
- Ten – line stanzas
- Iambic pentameter (the way stresses fall)
- Two parts
- opening 4 line sequence, alternating rhyming lines (ABAB)
- 6 line sequence, with a variable rhyming scheme
What does the rhyme scheme give to the poem?
It parallels the poet’s emotions and thoughts, whilst also giving rhythm, pace, music and bringing out imagery and symbols.
Themes
‘Indolence’ raises the glimmerings of themes raised more fully in the other 5 poems, and seems to portray the speaker’s first struggles with the problems and ideas of the other odes.
The principal theme holds that the pleasant numbness of the speaker’s indolence is a preferable state to the more exciting states of Love, Ambition and Poesy. In this ode, the speaker’s indolence seems in many ways an attempt to blur forgetfully the lines of the world, so that the ‘short fever-fit’ of life no longer seems so agonizing. The speaker rejects love and ambition simply because they require him to experience his life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of ending. Poesy offers the most seductive and hateful challenge to indolence, as it is not mortal or changeable. Poesy is an anathema to indolence and would require the speaker to feel his life to acutely – thus is has ‘not a joy’ for him as sweet drowsy nothingness of indolence.
The poem ends on a note of rejection, however, the persistence of the figures and the speaker’s impassioned response to them indicate that he will eventually have to rise from the grass and confront Love, Ambition and Poesy more directly (a confrontation which is embodied in later odes, where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality, imagination and art).
“Ode on Indolence’ makes a sort of preface to the other odes. It doesn’t enter into a dramatic exploration of love, ambition, or art, but rather raises the possibility of such a confrontation in a way that casts light on the speaker’s behavior in other odes. Its lush, sensuous language and its speaker’s oscillation (balance between rejecting and accepting something) between temptation and rejection in the face of the figures’ persistent processional, indicate a fuller, deeper, and more acutely felt poetic exploration to come. But for now, the speaker is content to let the figures fade and to give himself wholly to the numb dreaminess of indolence.
Keats describes Love and Ambition in terms that suggest he can do without them but describes the third interrupter of his sojourn (break) in the late spring sunshine in language that reflects his obsession with poetry ‘my demon’. He recognizes and values the ability of Poetry to disturb as well as to soothe and his personification of poetry as a ‘maiden most unmeek’ indicates his own awareness of the ability of the genre to unsettle and provoke.
Links with Other Odes
- Keats describes a vision as he does in other odes such as an ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
- The urn in stanza one is a recurring image, as it is seen in “Ode on a Grecian Urn’. One of the great themes of Keats’s odes is that of the anguish of mortality – the pain and frustration caused by the changes and endings in inevitable human life, which are contrasted throughout the poems with the permanence of art.
- He denounces poetry, which he also does in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
- Is written in a ten line stanza, as are all other odes except ‘To Autumn’ and ‘To Psyche’.
- It has two parts to it, opening 4 lines and then a 6 line sequence with a variable rhyming scheme, as do all other odes except from ‘To Psyche’.
- It isn’t as intense as the other odes.
- In each ode Keats is found confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in ‘Indolence’ he confronts three.
- Many ideas and images anticipate more developed ideas and images in later odes.
- The lushly described summer landscape, with its ‘stirring shades/ and baffled beams’ anticipates he imaginary landscape the speaker creates in ‘Ode to Psyche’
- The experience of numbness anticipates the aesthetic numbness of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and the anguished numbness of ‘Ode on Melancholy’
- The birdsong of the ‘throstle’s lay’ anticipates the nightingale and the swallows of ‘To Autumn’
- The Grecian dress of the figures and their urn-like procession anticipate the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
