Thomas Gray’s ode and ‘To a Mouse’ by Robert Burns, both have simple rhyme schemes, which are common to all the stanzas. On the other hand, Keats’ odes are made up of more complex rhyme schemes with not all stanzas following the same pattern. In these, it is only the last three or four lines which differ, changing the pace and rhythm of the poem.
In three out of the five poems, the central character is an animal; The nightingale in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the mouse in ‘To a Mouse’ and the cat in ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’.
Despite the personification, which goes on in all of Keats’ poems, he never has any person or animal, acting unnaturally. Similarly, it is in fact the natural instinct of the cat to try and catch the fish, which brought about its death, in Gray’s ode. In ‘To Autumn’, Keats’ uses personification to talk about autumn. He makes it seem like a friend, someone you can relate to:
“Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”
The thing that separates ‘To a Mouse’ from the other four odes is that it is written in Scottish dialect;
“A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request:”
The use of dialect changes the mood the language can create because it is unfamiliar. The dialect is lifted from how the people of Scotland spoke at the time. This limits the possibility for creating grandeur and opulence because it allied it with the Scottish peasants. This poem is written in a conversational style making it much less formal and more ‘common’. Because the poem is written as a conversation, it leaves little to the imagination or the senses. The structure of the stanzas is much simpler, with the simpler rhyme scheme. In Keats’ ‘To Autumn’, some of the lines end with punctuation, whereas others continue from one line to the next. This is called enjambment and causes the sense of being dragged out, the passage of time. In the final stanza, he drags the lines out, not only by enjambment but also by the repetition of ‘and’ to join each line. This gives the impression that it is one continuous process or sequence.
He uses the same technique in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ when describing how “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies:”
There is none of this in ‘To a Mouse’; all the lines end with punctuation, Similarly in ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’, there is very little enjambment.
Keats writes in a very sensual way, encouraging our senses with lines like;
“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”
In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he imagines the whole scene around him, without using his eyes:
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet…
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet”
He uses his other senses and seems to enjoy doing so. This encourages the reader to use their imagination also. The first stanza uses sibilance and imagery to create the feeling of dreaming in a drowsy state:
“drowsy numbness pains
My sense,”
He goes on to use alliteration in the second stanza, again on the same theme of drugged sleep:
“blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”.
In ‘To Autumn’, Keats’ used onomatopoeia to encourage the long, slow feeling of autumn. The use of the word “oozings” is a prime example;
“Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours”
‘To Autumn’ and ‘To a Mouse’ were written to make you to think about their subject and to heed their moral;
“The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft a-gley,”
The ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’ was written for a specific purpose. It was in fact written to cheer up a friend of the writer, Thomas Gray, whose cat had recently died in the manner mentioned in the poem. This illustrates that a poem as well as having a range of subjects can also have a very different purpose.
The theme of ‘To Autumn’ is to value everything for itself:
“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -”
In some ways, this sums up the morals of the other odes, in that with ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Keats is suggesting that mortal beauty being transient should not be too highly valued. The moral for the ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’ is that:
“Nor all, that glisters, gold.”
meaning that one should not judge things on their appearance. In ‘To a Mouse’ Robert Burns suggests that we should value things as we go because the future might not turn out as we expect:
“In proving foresight may be vain: …
An’ lea’e us nought but grief and pain,
For promis’d joy.”
Although, at first these odes appear to have widely differing subjects and styles, and structures when studied more closely, it appears that they are connected by a variety of themes and common elements.
