Psyche Notes

Keats in particular embraced the historical meaning of poet as prophet, or visionary. (The words for poet and prophet are the same in Hebrew; exploiting this overlap is a standard practice in English poetry.)

Perhaps the best statement of this position is in Keats's "Ode to Psyche," address to Psyche, one of the latecomers to the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses. He laments that her late arrival meant that she lacked the forms of praise that the other gods enjoyed: prayers, music, temples, and poetry. Psyche lacks her own poets who are true believers: she has no "pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" on her behalf. Keats returns to this description of the poet, "pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" in order to declare that he will take on this role; he will become the visionary priest who writes in praise of this goddess. He will build Psyche a temple in his mind, where he can complete the vision with music, flowers, light, and love. Who was Psyche? A representation of the soul in Greek Mythology and sometimes represented as a butterfly. She was a nymph who attracted the love of Cupid but who left her, angry at her disobedience. She desperately sought her lover all over the earth and had to carry out superhuman tasks. Eventually Jupiter, at Cupid's entreaty, consented to their marriage and Psyche was brought to heaven. The tale has often been seen as an allegory of the soul's journey through life and its final union with the divine after suffering and death. The form of 'Psyche'. It comprises four verse paragraphs of different lengths, respectively of 23, 12, 14 and 18 lines. In each stanza the structure reflects Keats's manipulation of excitement and climax and Keats' fastidiousness about rhyme, for, uniquely in the Spring Odes, four lines in the poem 10,15,44 and 45 are left unrhymed presumably because any rhyme words which suggested themselves would have harmed the sense. Keats did not repeat this irregular form in the next three odes. This tale clearly relates to key Keatsian concerns: - the importance of love, idealised as an expression of emotional desire and sexual sensation and, unlike in 'Lamia', unambiguously fulfilling, and immortalised in the temple of the poet's imagination, ''To let the warm love in'. - the relationship between love and transience, and then a reunion after death - the concept of the 'vale of soul-making'. This concept first appears in a letter of May 1819 in which Keats wrote of his rejection of the Christian idea that the earth is a 'vale of tears' to see it as a 'vale of soul-making'. That is that the soul grew and matured through love and suffering ( this explanation of the value of suffering is called a theodicy) to a greater understanding of the balance of good and evil, the essential link in human experience between joy and pain. Psyche's story and experiences with Cupid are a mythical expression of this. - the opportunity to celebrate these ideas through evocation of sensation. How has the poem been read? It has been seen as an extended metaphor about poetry. The poet constructs a perfect setting for Psyche to enjoy her divine immortality. The poem is like a temple for

the worship of Psyche but also for the poet to deify and immortalise her, and therefore the power of Art itself. Compared to the other Odes this is perhaps the most happy and most unambiguously positive. The 'Nightingale' and 'The Urn' are much more concerned with the contradictory and ambiguous relationship between art and life, permanence and transience, dream and reality, 'Melancholy' is a more explicit recognition of the sterility of escape and the acceptance of the inevitable union between contradictory experiences; 'Autumn' is the most complete acceptance of the conflicts and contradictions in human experience reconciled and held together in nature and in the poetic imagination's ability to recreate experience in all its contradictions and celebrate the principles of growth and maturity. The passionate language of the poem reflects the passionate love Keats felt for Fanny Brawne, whom he met in 1818. In the spring of 1819, she and Keats became neighbors and several months later pledged to marry. When Keats wrote "Ode to Psyche" and later his letter to Fanny Brawne, he was suffering from a deadly affliction, tuberculosis. Perhaps he intended his ode to immortalize his feelings, just as Jupiter immortalized psyche. In the Ode to Psyche Keats describes two kinds of worship outward and inner. The outward worship was confined to the specific time of an ancient age in which the people worshipped natural elements the water, the fire and the air and believed in holy rituals. The inner worship is beyond time and space, and imagination plays an important role in it. Keats offers inner worship to Psyche. Among the Olympians Psyche is fairer than Phoebe or Vesper. Yet she was denied any kind of worship outward or inner. Keats himself assumes the role of a priest to Psyche. The poet is not interested only in the myth of Cupid and Psyche but in Psyche who represents human sufferings and woe. Unlike the dramatic mood of the Ode To A Nightingale that shifts from drowsiness to happiness, and death to life, the single thought of Psyche remains the same throughout the Ode. There is little change in the mood in the ode. Stanza wise analysis http://yabaluri.org/TRIVENI/CDWEB/keatsdictionintheodetopsycheapr88.htm\