Ode on Indolence

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Ode on Indolence

Summary

In the first stanza, Keats's speaker describes a vision he had one morning of three strange figures wearing white robes and "placid sandals." The figures passed by in profile, and the speaker describes their passing by comparing them to figures carved into the side of a marble urn, or vase. When the last figure passed by, the first figure reappeared, just as would happen if one turned a vase carved with figures before one's eyes.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the figures directly, asking them how it was that he did not recognize them and how they managed to sneak up on him. He suspects them of trying to "steal away, and leave without a task" his "idle days," and goes on to describe how he passed the morning before their arrival: by lazily enjoying the summer day in a sort of sublime numbness. He asks the figures why they did not disappear and leave him to this indolent nothingness.

In the third stanza, the figures pass by for a third time. The speaker feels a powerful urge to rise up and follow them, because he now recognizes them: the first is a "fair maid," Love; the second is pale-cheeked Ambition; and the third, whom the speaker seems to love despite himself, is the unmeek maiden, the demon Poesy, or poetry. When the figures disappear in the fourth stanza, the speaker again aches to follow them, but he says that the urge is folly: Love is fleeting, Ambition is mortal, and Poesy has nothing to offer that compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by "busy common-sense."

In the fifth stanza, the speaker laments again the figures' third passing, describing his morning before their arrival, when his soul seemed a green lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows, and sunbeams. There were clouds in the sky but no rain fell, and the open window let in the warmth of the day and the music of birdsong. The speaker tells the figures they were right to leave, for they had failed to rouse him. In the sixth stanza, he bids them adieu and asserts again that Love, Ambition, and Poesy are not enough to make him raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He bids them farewell and tells them he has an ample supply of visions; then he orders them to vanish and never return.

Form

Like all the other odes but "To Autumn" and "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on Indolence" is written in ten-line stanzas, in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. Like the others (again, with the exception of "Ode to Psyche"), its stanzas are composed of two parts: an opening four-line sequence of alternating rhymed lines (ABAB), and a six-line sequence with a variable rhyme scheme (in stanzas one through four, CDECDE; in stanza five, CDEDCE; in stanza six, CDECED).

Themes

Chronologically, the "Ode on Indolence" was probably the second ode. It was composed in the spring of 1819, after "Ode on Melancholy" and a few months before "To Autumn." However, when the odes are grouped together as a sequence, "Indolence" is often placed first in the group--an arrangement that makes sense, considering that "Indolence" raises the glimmerings of themes explored more fully in the other five poems, and seems to portray the speaker's first struggle with the problems and ideas of the other odes. The story of "Indolence" is extraordinarily simple--a young man spends a drowsy summer morning lazing about, until he is startled by a vision of Love, Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow the figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning outweigh the temptations of love, ambition, and poetry.

So the principal theme of "Ode on Indolence" holds that the pleasant numbness of the speaker's indolence is a preferable state to the more excitable states of love, ambition, and poetry. 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 inevitable in human life, which are contrasted throughout the poems with the permanence of art. 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 own life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of ending (of love, the speaker wonders what and where it is; of ambition, he notes the pale cheek and "fatigued eye," and observes that it "springs" directly from human mortality). He longs never to know "how change the moons" and to be "sheltered from annoy." This is why Poesy offers the most seductive, and also most hateful, challenge to indolence. Poetry is not mortal and changeable (Poesy, in fact, is a "demon"), but it is anathema to indolence and would require the speaker to feel his life too acutely--thus it has "not a joy" for him as sweet as the drowsy nothingness of indolence.

Though the poem ends on a note of rejection, the persistence of the figures and the speaker's impassioned response to them indicate that he will eventually have to raise his head from the grass and confront Love, Ambition, and Poesy more directly--a confrontation embodied in the other five odes, where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality, imagination, and art. Many of the ideas and images in "Ode on Indolence" anticipate more developed ideas and images in the later odes. Each ode finds Keats confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in "Indolence," he confronts three. The lushly described summer landscape, with its "stirring shades / and baffled beams," anticipates the 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" and also cast back to an earlier poem, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," in which the speaker's confrontation with some ancient Greek sculptures makes him feel overwhelmed by his own mortality. (The "Phidian lore" the speaker refers to at the end of the first stanza is a direct reference to the earlier poem: Phidias was the sculptor who made the Elgin marbles.)

In this way, the "Ode on Indolence" makes a sort of preface to the other odes. It does not 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 the other odes. Its lush, sensuous language, and its speaker's oscillation 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 his indolence.

Ode to Psyche 

Summary

Keats's speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess Psyche, urging her to hear his words, and asking that she forgive him for singing to her her own secrets. He says that while wandering through the forest that very day, he stumbled upon "two fair creatures" lying side by side in the grass, beneath a "whisp'ring roof" of leaves, surrounded by flowers. They embraced one another with both their arms and wings, and though their lips did not touch, they were close to one another and ready "past kisses to outnumber." The speaker says he knew the winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He answers his own question: She was Psyche.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses Psyche again, describing her as the youngest and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods and goddesses. He believes this, he says, despite the fact that, unlike other divinities, Psyche has none of the trappings of worship: She has no temples, no altars, no choir to sing for her, and so on. In the third stanza, the speaker attributes this lack to Psyche's youth; she has come into the world too late for "antique vows" and the "fond believing lyre." But the speaker says that even in the fallen days of his own time, he would like to pay homage to Psyche and become her choir, her music, and her oracle. In the fourth stanza, he continues with these declarations, saying he will become Psyche's priest and build her a temple in an "untrodden region" of his own mind, a region surrounded by thought that resemble the beauty of nature and tended by "the gardener Fancy," or imagination. He promises Psyche "all soft delight" and says that the window of her new abode will be left open at night, so that her winged boy--"the warm Love"--can come in.

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Form

The four stanzas of "Ode to Psyche" are written in the loosest form of any of Keats's odes. The stanzas vary in number of lines, rhyme scheme, and metrical scheme, and convey the effect of spontaneous rhapsody rather than considered form. Lines are iambic, but vary from dimeter to pentameter; the most common rhymes are in alternating lines (ABAB), but there are abundant exceptions, and there are even unrhymed lines. ("Hours," at the end of line ten in the third stanza, is an example.) The number of lines in a stanza is simply organic and irregular; stanza ...

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