“She dwells with beauty- beauty that must die” – we know see why Keats turns Melancholy to beautiful things: it is inevitable decay of beauty, which is at the core of Melancholy. Not only does the imminet passing of beauty and joy give rise to melancholy but at every moment the pleasurable experience turns to one of pain or satiety. Thus pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, are immediately linked belonging even to the selfsame experience. A series of powerful images enforces these ideas: Joy always on the point of departure, the bee’s nectar turning to poison, the veiled goddess of Melancholy enshrined in the temple of delight, the bursting of Joy’s grape, whose taste turns out sadness.
If the Ode on Melancholy sags a little in the stanza two is certainly prevented from collapse by the vigor and vividness of stanzas one and three. The third stanza is full of images suggesting life and activity such as the figure of Joy caught at a moment of arrested action and the bee at work, culminating in the energetic act of bursting a grape with ‘strenuous tongue’. The ‘taste’ images, too, suggest the physicality of the experiences of pleasure and joy.
In on a Grecian Urn, the subject is a marble urn with scene in relief running around it; it has been shown that the urn here described was not one actually seen, but a creation of Keats’s imagination. The mysterious and beautiful opening lines at once give rise to several ideas: the stillness of the urn, its remaining unspoilt, thought holding out a promise of delight.
‘What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?’. The urns power lies in its appealing to the imagination rather than the senses; sensual experience is always reaching after, or being set against, an ideal of which it falls short: ‘ Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;/ Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d/ Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
The figures on the urn have a sort of ideal existence because they are frozen at a moment of the time and so are immune from life’s vicissitudes: ‘…nor ever can those tress be bare; Bold lover,…………For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.’
The unchanging happiness of the figures is emphasized in stanza three by the repetition of words and phrases: ‘happy’, ‘for ever’, ‘move’, even though their passion is unsatisfied their state far transcends that of mortals for whom satisfaction turns pleasure into safety.
Stanza four introduces a new scene (as if the urn were being turned round). The first scene was wild and ecstatic, suggesting Bacchanalian rites; this one is serene in comparison, showing a formal procession to make sacrifice. The almost frenzied questions of stanza one contrast sounds are suggestive of tranquility.
The poet helps us to understand what he has in mind. The pipes on the urn sound “not to the sensual ear” but “to the spirit”. It is significant that Keats does not use a more literally precise word like “physical” to describe the ear. “Sensual” (like “physical”) refers to the body, but it also connotes excessive indulgence, particularly in sexual pleasure, and moral disapproval. Keats then uses this tension between sense and spirit to add one more layer to this tissue of paradox.
Stanza four traces the same curve of feeling as the first three. It begins with the poet’s excited interest, and a rapid-fire series of questions directs his attention more and more closely onto the details of the urn. Now the subject is man at worship. As before the scene is lovely, with its green alter, it’s sleek garlanded heifer, and its procession of worshippers.
As he did at the very beginning of the poem, Keats in the fifth stanza addresses he has traveled by comparing the titles that he gave the urn itself rather than the figures upon it. Now the poet seems ready to answer some of the questions that he flung out at the urn in wonder. Were its figures men or gods? What was this “leaf-fring’d legend” on the urn’s face? The answer is direct figures are a “brede”, that is, embroidery or decoration; not living persons at all, nor gods, but only “marble men and maidens”. And the human figures share the urn with nothing more extraordinary than “forest branches and the trodden weed”. This is not to say that instance, is a rare word – not often to be found outside of poetry – and rareness is felt throughout the passage. The poet shows us how much he can do with a single word in his use of “overwrought”. The men and maidens are “overwrought” birth in the sense that they have been worked into or wrought upon the face of the urn and in the sense they are overexcited by their passion. The urn is “overwrought” that is filled to excess, taxed almost to the bursting point with the figures upon it.
The ‘Sylvan historian’ gave us a picture of human life, Greek life in particular but did not provide the associated
facts which we tend to regard as history. The urn organizes its material in a way that is beautiful and thus presents not a set of facts but a truth: this is the function of a work of art. It encourages the imagination to work and gives rise to speculation but finally eludes reasoned analysis: ‘Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/ As doth eternity:….
We should be content to accept that its beauty offers us a truth and its truth lies in its beauty.
In ‘Ode to Autumn’ the poem begins with an apostrophe, an address to the season, autumn, whose beautiful colours and products are before the speaker. It displays an altogether calmer response to beauty than the May Odes. The personality of the poet, which breaks through in all the May Odes, is entirely submerged in this evocation of a season: there is a sense of acceptance of the beauty offered, without any probing of its meaning of agonizing over its transience. In its flawless technique, its richness of imagery and its breath of gaze within the limits of its subject it is a perfect poem.
The opening line, beautifully balanced to lend weight to the three significant words, at once sums up the character of Autumn: it is an abundantly productive season, a season of ripeness and maturity (‘mellow’), yet its mists herald the coming cold and damp of the year’s decline. The first stanza concerns itself with the fruitfulness of the season; it is crammed with images suggesting fullness and abundance: ‘load’, ‘bend’, ‘swell’, ‘plump’, while summer has ‘o’er-brimm’d their………cells’. The fruit is filled with ‘ripeness to the core’, to illustrate which we are taken right inside the hazel nuts. The seemingly endless budding of the flowers gives the feeling that summer will go on forever.
The scene of stanza one is a cottage garden, a setting whose intimacy is emphasized by the phase in line two, ‘close bosom-friend’, and by the image of the bee’s honeycomb, suggesting a small, tight-knit world. The poem moves outwards in space and onwards in time. From the cottage garden it moves to the fields, the granny, the cider-press, larger areas but still limited; stanza three gazes into the distance, across the stubble plains, along the river bank, to a hill and to the limitless space of the sky itself. The first stanza is perhaps suggestive of the mourning in the reference to mists and certainly there is brightness and an implication of energetic activity in the verbs (‘load’, ‘bends’, ‘fill’, e.t.c.), which contrasts, with the languor of the midday heat in stanza two. Stanza three takes us to evening: ‘barred clouds bloom the soft dying day/And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue’. The time sequence runs not only from mourning to evening but from early to late autumn, from the maturity of the fruits on the tree, through the gathering of it, to the completion of the harvest which leaves only stubble on the plains; the ‘lambs’ are now fully grown, the swallows gather for their migratory passage.
‘Ode to Autumn’ is rich with appeal to the sense because the season is experienced through the senses; sensuousness is not merely incidental to the subject as it tends to be in some poems; Autumn is made up of the sights, sounds, scents and particular feel of things which Keats evokes. Alliteration is used throughout with fine effect: notice the p sounds suggesting fullness to bursting in stanza one, the f and w sounds for the light wind in stanza two and the z sounds which combine with the long vowels as the juice is squeezed out of the apples. The addition of a line to the usual stanzaic forms also gives a sense of fullness to overflowing as line ten, instead of rhyming as expected with line seven, rhymes with line nine always causes a slight pause in the reading of a poem and tends to throw emphasis onto the opening of the next.
Keats exploits this tendency particularly well: ‘And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/ Steady thy laden head across a brook;’
Where the pause after ’keep’ and the heavy stress on ‘steady’ pulls one up so that one feels in the reading the efforts of the gleaner not to topple into the water. Again, the rising and the falling of the cloud of gnats is caught by the rise and fall of the verse at the end of one line and beginning if the next in: ‘Among the river sallows, borne aloft/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;’
Although the poem’s absorption in the concrete images of autumn renders metaphor and simile unnecessary, it uses personification with brilliant subtlety to create a sense of intimate relationship between the season and the poet or reader. In stanza one Autumn is a ‘close bosom-friend’ of the sun. It conspires, it loads, it blesses, it blends, it fills, e.t.c. It is both a human reaper and Autumn personified who sleeps on the furrow. The personification is still present in stanza three as Keats tells Autumn to ‘think not’ of ‘the songs of Spring’, for ‘thou hast thy music too’, but the personification so to speak, fades out with the dying season. Autumn is almost gone, like the swallows, in the last line. The last stanza inevitably contains a touch of nostalgia with the dying of the day and the dying of season and the Keats, as it were, comforts Autumn for its lack of spring music, the music of growth. But the images of departure and death are only lightly touched upon and carry with them the implications of renewal as the revolution of the seasons goes on.
The Odes display a fine descriptive power and a concentrated richness of expression. Other poems of his contain richly sensuous writing but this tends to be a matter of decorative elaboration which detracts from the subject of the poem. Here the word pictures are integral to the poem and a wealth of detail is concentrated into a few words often boldly used; nothing is redundant, nothing can be spared. The epithets ‘ cool-rooted’ and ‘fragrant-eyed’ in ‘Psyche’ compress many images into a very few words; ‘to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees’ (‘to Autumn’) conjures up a vivid picture of a cottage garden with long-established trees laden with fruit and the phase ‘cottage-trees’ to mean ‘trees in a cottage garden’ is highly original use of language: ‘the coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine’ (‘To Nightingale’) contains ideas of freshness, yet maturity (‘full’) and heady intoxication (‘musk’, ‘wine’)
The stanzaic form of the great Odes seems so natural and inevitable. The ten-line stanza of the Odes has a firmness and clarity of structure without inflexibility of rhyme: a quatrain (abab) gives anchor to the verse and is followed by variable sestet (generally cdecde) which allows the verse room to expand (‘To Autumn’ replaces the sestet by a septet which gives the stanza an appropriately fuller quality.
Hence we see, that Keats exploited the angularity of the English language and we see his poetry reflects rich sensuousness, well-wrought form and depth of thought.
