Thursday, December 16, 2010

Ode to Autumn: Critique and Analysis/ Faultless construction and masterpiece

Keats was inspired to write Ode to Autumn after walking through the water meadows
of Winchester, England, in an early autumn evening of 1819. The poem has three stanzas
of eleven lines describing the taste, sights and sounds of autumn. Much of the third
stanza, however, is dedicated to diction, symbolism, and literary devices with decisively
negative connotations, as it describes the end of the day and the end of autumn. The
author makes an intense description of autumn at least at first sight.
The first stanza begins showing this season as misty and fruitful, which, with the help of
a maturing sun, ripens the fruit of the vines. Next, we can see clearly a hyperbole. Keats
writes that a tree has so many apples that it bends, while the gourds swell and the hazel
shells plumps. The poem widely has been considered a masterpiece of Romantic English
poetry. Harold Bloom described it as: "the most perfect shorter poem in the English
language." Conciseness is reflected as follows:

And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease?

Keats suggests that the bees have a large amount of flowers. And these flowers did not
bud in summer but now, in autumn. As a consequence, the bees are incessantly working
and their honeycombs are overflowing since summer. In both its form and descriptive
surface, "To Autumn" is one of the simplest of Keats's odes. There is nothing confusing
or complex in Keats's paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers,
and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of
this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes
without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovelydescription of autumn. Where "Ode on
Melancholy" presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, "To Autumn" is concerned with
the much quieter activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the
gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.
Keatss approach here is particular as the line shows:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

"To Autumn" takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats's
speaker paying homage to a particular goddess--in this case, the deified season of
Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes' themes of
temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats's ode is a time of warmth and
plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter's desolation, as the bees enjoy "later
flowers," the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now "full
grown," and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter
migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the
most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining
summation of the entire human condition. Despite the coming chill of winter, the late
warmth of autumn provides Keats'sspeaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage
and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the
second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats's speaker is able to
experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has
learned in the previous odes: He is no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world
through ecstatic rapture (as in "Nightingale") and no longer frustrated by the attempt to
eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in "Urn"). The poem
recalls earlier poems as in the lines:

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind

In "To Autumn," the speaker's experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the
goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but it
also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of Autumn
winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about creativity) recalls
an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for
artistic creation. In his sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be," Keats makes
this connection directly using the metaphor ripen'd grain. In "To Autumn," the
metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem
confronts the sorrow underlying the season's creativity. When Autumn's harvest is over,
the fields will be bare, the swaths with their "twined flowers" cut down, the cider-press
dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens
the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and
the birdsong will return. Thespeaker knows joy and sorrow, song and silence are as
intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. Thus the prime note of the
poem is that of optimism as the following lines reveal.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

Ode to Autumn reveals not Keatss pictorial quality only; but also a deep sense of
purpose underneath. Although the first impression may be that John Keats is simply
describing the main characteristics of autumn, and the human and animal activities
related to it, a deeper reading could suggest that Keats talks about the process of life.
Autumn symbolizes maturity in human and animal lives. Some instances of this are the
full-grown lambs, the sorrow of the gnats, the wind that lives and dies, and the day that
is dying and getting dark. As all we know, the next season is winter, a part of the year
that represents aging and death, in other words, the end of life. However, in my opinion,
death does not have a negative connotation because Keats enjoys and accepts autumn
or maturity as part of life, though winter is coming. Joys must not be forgotten in times
of trouble. Blakes dictum, Under every grief and pine/Runs a joy with silken twine.
The two are the part of life. Thus thou has thy music too is the right approach to life
showing the process of maturity and optimism.

In short, what makes "To Autumn" beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that
connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. We
are part of Autumn when it is personified and presented to us in the figure of the
winnower, sitting careless on a granary floor, the reaper on a half-reaped furrow
sound asleep, the gleaner keeping steady thy laden head across a brook, and a
spectator watching with patient look a cider-press and the last oozings the refrom. The
reaper, the winnower, the gleaner, and the cider-presser symbolize Autumn. Through
his process, the poet has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an
appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time that it
is engagement; not escape is the purpose of life.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Ode to Nightingale: Critique and Analysis/ Keatss Ode to Nightingale is a fine
piece of impersonality and journey into Negative Capability. Discuss!
The speaker responds to the beauty of the nightingales song with a both happiness
and ache. Though he seeks to fully identify with the bird to fade away into the
forest dim he knows that his own human consciousness separates him from nature
and precludes the kind of deathless happiness the nightingale enjoys.
First the intoxication of wine and later the viewless wings of Poesy seem reliable ways
of escaping the confines of the dull brain, but finally it is death itself that seems the
only possible means of overcoming the fear of time. The nightingale is immortal
because it wast not born for death and cannot conceive of its own passing. Yet without
consciousness, humans cannot experience beauty, and the speaker knows that if he were
dead his perception of the nightingales call would not exist at all. This paradox shatters
his vision, the nightingale flies off, and the speaker is left to wonder whether his
experience has been a truthful vision or a false dream. Referred to by critics of the
time as "the longest and most personal of the odes," the poem describes Keats' journey
into the state of Negative Capability. John Keats coined the phrase 'Negative Capability'
in a letter to his brothers and defined his new concept of writing:

that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

Keats' poems are full of contradictions in meaning ('a drowsy numbness pains') and
emotion ('both together, sane and mad') and he accepts a double nature as a creative
insight. In Nightingale it is the apparent (or real) contradictions that allow Keats to
create the sensual feeling of numbness that allows the reader to experience the half-
swooning emotion Keats is trying to capture. Keats would have us experience the
emotion of the language and pass over the half-truths in silence, to live a life 'of
sensations rather than of Thoughts!'. Thus, Ode to the Nightingale is more feeling than
a thinking poem. Keats often deals in the sensations created by words rather than
meaning. Even if the precise definition of words causes contradiction they can still be
used together to create the right ambience. Negative Capability asks us to allow the
atmosphere of Keats' poems to surround us without picking out individual meanings
and inconsistencies.

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen

Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join
the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through alcohol--in the second
stanza, he longs for a "draught of vintage" to transport him out of himself. But after his
meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being
"charioted by Bacchus and his pards" and chooses instead to embrace "the viewless
wings of Poesy." The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture
of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine
himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the
speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while
enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or
disappointment.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known
The poet explores the themes of nature and mortality. Here, the transience of life and
the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale's fluid music.
Man has many sorrows to escape from in the world, and these Keats recounts feelingly
in the third stanza of his poem, a number of the references apparently being drawn from
firsthand experience. The mention of the youth who "grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies," for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom
the poet nursed through his long, last struggle with consumption. But the bitterest of all
man's sorrows, as it emerges from the catalogue of woes in the third stanza, is the
terrible disease of time, the fact that Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. It is the
disease of time which the song of the nightingale particularly transcends, and the poet,
yearning for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one with the bird.
Even death is terribly final; the artists die but what remains is the eternal music; the
very song heard today was heard thousands of years ago. The poet exclaims:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

The reverie into which the poet falls carries him deep into where the bird is singing. But
the meditative trance cannot last. With the very first word of the eighth stanza, the
reverie is broken. The word forlorn occurs to the poet as the adjective describing the
remote and magical world suggested by the nightingales song. But the poet suddenly
realises that this word applies with greater precision to himself. The effect is that of an
abrupt stumbling. With the new and chilling meaning of forlorn, the song of the
nightingale itself alters: it becomes a plaintive anthem. The song becomes fainter.
What had before the power to make the sorrow in man fade away from a harsh and
bitter world, now itself fades and the poet is left alone in the silence. As the nightingale
flies away, the intensity of the speaker 's experience has left him shaken, unable to
remember whether he is awake or asleep; thus "Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well.

The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without
record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the
speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in
favor of the other senses. In "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has
placed his faith in it, but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and
without physical manifestation. This is an odd poem because it both conforms to and
contradicts some of the ideas he expresses elsewhere, notably the famous concept of
Negative Capability,. This can be taken several ways, but is often linked with the
statement he made:

If a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and
pick about the Gravel.

While Keatss begins his poem with a drowsy numbness pains the poem that follows is
anything but numb. But the opening ties in with the words that end the poem: Fled is
that music Do I wake or sleep? Life is or may be a dream a very Shakespearean
image but, dreaming or awake, perception and empathetic participation are rooted in
Keatss own consciousness. It is only in dreaming, Keats says, that we can become
conscious of, and merged with, the life around us. Thus, Keats heads towards Negative
Capability in the poem. Keats is not as great as Shakespeare but he has the same power
of self-absorption, that wonderful sympathy and identification with all things, that
Negative Capability which he saw as essential to the creation of great poetry and which
Shakespeare possessed so abundantly.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Hyperion: Critique and Analysis/ Major Themes/ Human Sufferings in
Hyperion/ Discuss the agonies, the strife of human hearts. In Hyperion
Hyperion" is an uncompleted epic poem by John Keats. It is based on the Titans and
Olympians, and tells of the despair of the former after their fall to the latter. Keats wrote
the poem for about one year, when he gave it up as having "too many Miltonic
inversions." He was also nursing his brother Tom, who died in January of 1819 of
tuberculosis. Hyperion relates the fall of the Titans, elemental energies of the world, and
their replacement by newer gods. The Olympian gods, having superior knowledge and
an understanding of humanity's suffering, are the natural successors to the Titans.
Keats's epic begins after the battle between the Titans and the Olympian gods, with the
Titans already fallen. Hyperion, the sun god, is the Titans' only hope for further
resistance. The epic's narrative, divided into three sections, concentrates on the
dethronement of Hyperion and the ascension to power of Apollo, god of sun and poetry.
Book I presents Saturn fallen and about to be replaced and Hyperion threatened within
his empire. The succeeding events reveals the aftermath of the situation and the Titans
acceptance of defeat after Oceanus speech. In Hyperion, the quality of Keats's blank
verse reached new heights, particularly in the opening scene between Thea and the
fallen Saturn:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone

Many themes introduced in the Hyperion are identifiable as those associated with
Romanticism. Hyperion, which marks the exchange of the old powers for the new,
addresses ideas about poetry, beauty, knowledge, and experience. Hyperion's dominant
themes address the nature of poetry and its relationship to humanity and the sublimity
of human suffering the knowledge gained through it. Thenarrative suggests a thematic
consideration of progress, particularly toward enlightenment and depictions of beauty,
even as it evokes classical ideals found in Greek mythology. Visual and verbal
representations, in the use of language and of Greek sculptural forms, contribute to this
exploration. Through his representation of gods, Keats's commentary on Romantic
opposites includes the real and ideal, history versus myth, finite versus infinite. The
theme of truth is also prevalent. The speech of Oceanus and the ascension of Apollo both
point to Hyperion's concern with truth and its relationship with beauty, knowledge, and
suffering. Truth is closely associated with knowledge and both are acquired through
pain, which results from the understanding and acceptance of change and
impermanence. However painful, truth is pure and beautiful, and what is beautiful is
eternal. It is this honorable truth that the human spirit strives to attain. That is why
Keats calls Hyperion:

the agonies, the strife of human hearts

The poem is tragic with most of the qualities of a tragedy. Oceanus is working as a
chorus giving the poems moral and working as a mediator. Keats says: All I hope is that
I may not lose interest in human affairs. In his later poetry, the realm of Flora and Old
Pan are gone. His early poems were sensuous, but later he became aware of human
sufferings. He thought that poetry of escape is not the real poetry. Real poetry deals with
human beings. The function of poetry according to Keats is a friend to soothe the cares
of man and lift up his thought. In the poems, gods have been given human qualities
symbolizing sufferings of man. Gods are huge and Titanic, but have been given human
characteristics effectively and realistically. Saturns misery, Theas stature all perfect
human as exemplified in the line, I have no comfort for thee, no, not one. Keats has
humanized the gods to reveal human sufferings as frther in Saturns speech:

Who had power
To make me desolate? Whence came the strength?

For Saturn, dethronement is a question of identity as Napoleon or any human being,
may be Nawaz Sharif or Musharraf, could have felt. Theas reassurance to Saturn is a
typical human activity. The suffering of Titans is the collected suffering of humanity at
large. Hyperion is a militant whose spirit is dampened by danger. So Keats, unlike other
poems, has human concern in this poem. The Confidence with Saturn reminds us of
Duke in My Last Duchess by Browning as I gave commands and all smiles stopped.
Saturn is like Miltons Satan who doesnt want to establish his own kingdom for
sovereignty as much as to take revenge on God. So the gods are all humanized. This is
also visible in the Hyperions apprehensions about his dethronement and mock-
determinations.

I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove

He has seen certain omens which indicate that his downfall may be imminent. Human
beings feel apprehensive when they hear a dog howling or an owl screeching; and this
god is feeling apprehensive because the wings of eagles darkened his palace and because
the neighing of steeds has been heard which had never been heard before by gods or
wondering men. The omens are different no doubt, but Hyperions reaction to the
omens is the same as that of human beings is. And just as a human being might still
resolve to fight against a coming danger, so Hyperion too says that he will use his
terrible right arm. He feels most restless to think of the fate which might overtake him.
But his restlessness is human restlessness under the pressure of a coming danger. Just
as a wealthy man is afraid lest he should become bankrupt, so Hyperion is afraid lest he
should lose his lucent empire. Just as a wealthy man is afraid lest he should be
deprived of all his gains, so Hyperion is afraid lest he should lose the blaze, the
splendour, and the symmetry. Hyperion is at this time like a fish out of water. Ha
would like to begin the day sooner than usual, but the laws of Nature do not permit him
to do that. He picks up courage only when his father whispers to him from somewhere
in heaven and urges him to go and join his fellow-Titans on the earth; another human
activity.

Keats suffered from the two experiences of entirely different nature: imagination and
reality. It is evident, then, that Keats was grappling with the problem of human
suffering and with a human dilemma. He even suggests the simple formula: What
cannot be cured must be endured. Human beings should face the facts squarely and
calmly, and such a calm acceptance of realities shows not a defeatist mentality but a
manly or even a divine frame of mind. Having arrived at this stage in his thinking, Keats
went on to write the great odes in which his human concerns find a full utterance. Keats
has like Apollo, acquired the tragic vision and become a great poet. Had he lived longer,
he would have written even greater poetry and it would have been a poetry marked by
profound thought, intense emotion, and a portrayal of the stern realities of human life.

Thursday, December 16, 2010
Keats Concept of Beauty/ Discuss Keats Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty.
Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover
of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his
aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art. For him,
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
When we think of Keats, 'Beauty' comes to our mind. Keats and Beauty have become
almost synonymous. We cannot think of Keats without thinking of Beauty. Beauty is an
abstraction, it does not give out its meaning easily. For Keats, it is not so. He sees Beauty
everywhere. Keats made Beauty his object of wonder and admiration and he became the
greatest poet of Beauty. All the Romantic poets had a passion for one thing or the other.
Wordsworth was the worshipper of Nature and Coleridge was a poet of the supernatural.
Shelley stood for ideals and Byron loved liberty. With Keats the passion for Beauty was
the greatest, rather the only consideration. In the letters of Keats, we frequently read
about his own ideas about Beauty. In one of his letters to George and Tom, he wrote:

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other
consideration, or rather obliterates another consideration.

He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of
the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover
of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an
object or word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should
be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social
philosophy. Keats loved 'the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things'. He could see
Beauty everywhere and in every object. Beauty appeared to him in variousforms and
shapesin the flowers and in the clouds, in the hills and rills, in the song of a bird and in
the face of a woman, in a great book and in the legends of old. Beauty was there in the
pieces of stone with carvings thereon. He hated didacticism in poetry. For the poetry
itself was beauty so he wrote, We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us. The
lines of his poem Endymion have become a maxim:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness

He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of
social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as
For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or
experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the
realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained
untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems
such as Ode to a Nightingale and Hyperion show an increasing interest in human
problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have established a closer contact
with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of escape. With him poetry existed not
as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine but for the expression of
beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake. Keats did not like only those
things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to
see beauty even in those things is hostile to beauty for ordinary people. He said:
I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.

Keats perceives Beauty through his natural and spontaneous application of senses. He
has an extraordinary sense-perception. He could perceive objects more intensely than
other people. He derived great aesthetic delight at the sight of objects of Nature, of a fair
face, of the works of art, legends old and new. Haydon, his friend, observed that the
humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature
tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his mouth quivered. Every
moment revealed to him a sensation of wonder and delight. He wrote, The setting sun
would always set me to right, or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part in his
existence and pick about the gravel. He derived aesthetic delight through his senses. He
looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:

Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was
merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law,
and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and
the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what
was in his own heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or
dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers
loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics. Disinterested love of beauty is one of the
qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great
contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not
mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward,
the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he
was free from the wish to preach. Keats early sonnets are largely concerned with poets,
pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great
odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; and the season of
autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. The appreciation of Beauty in Keats
is through mind or spirit. The approach becomes intellectual as he endorsees in Ode on
Grecian Urn:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

Art has captured Beauty of life and made it a truth for all the ages to be a friend to
man. It is not the logical reaching after facts that helps in understanding the truth of
things. Keats wrote, 'What the imagination seizes as beauty must be true' and it is his
powerful assertion. His logic is simple: what is beautiful is truthful. What is ugly cannot
be truthful. Find truth through beauty and beauty through truth. Beauty is no more a
sensuous, physical or sentimental affair. It has spiritual associations; it is a concern of
the soul of man for the salvation of man. Search for salvation must come from the heart
of man and Keats knew it: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's
affections and the truth of Imaginationwhat the imagination seizes as Beauty must be
truth. But a true poet sees life as a whole. A true poet, in the words of Keats, enjoys
light and shade foul and fair with the same delight. Thus, his concept of beauty
encompasses Joy and Sorrow and Melancholy and Happiness which cannot be
separated. Imagination reveals a new aspect of beauty, which is 'sweeter' than beauty
which is perceptible to the senses. The senses perceive only the external aspect of
beauty, but imagination apprehends its essence.

Thursday, December 16, 2010
Keats as writer of odes/ Dramatic quality of Keats Odes/ Sensuousness as a path
to experience and reality/ Keats is not wholly Sensuous; Discuss!
Ode is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem praising and glorifying an
individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature or some object intellectually
rather than emotionally. Odes originally were songs performed to the accompaniment of
a musical instrument. The Odes of Keats are constructed with harmonious skill.
These poems deal with the favourite themes in Keatss romanticismthe sculptural
beauty and grace of a Greek urn, the charming myths of Hellas, the changing seasons
and the joys of the earth, the painful craving of the soul to find a beauty which endures,
the fascination of death and the bitter-sweet voluptuousness with which the poet
meditates upon it. Everything here cooperates to enchant a sensual and dreamy
contemplationthe outlines, the colour, the emotion and the melody. Sensuousness is a
quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and
tasting. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and
colourful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music, to our nose by arousing the
sense of smell. But the note of sadness sounds through all, that insistent minor that
rings dirge-like through all the haunting music of Nature and of Art; and the vivid joy of
the perceptive life, the ideal permanence of Art, the glamour of romance, the benison of
Nature's varying moods contrasted with the mutability of life and the transience of
pleasure as in:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

It would be true to say that the Keatsian Odes are the product of certain inner struggles
or conflicts. The principal stress in the most important of these odes is a struggle
between ideal and actual. They also imply the opposition between pleasure and pain,
imagination and reason, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life,
freedom and bondage, waking and dream. These conflicts give to his odes a dramatic
quality. The principal conflict, of course, is between the real world and the ideal world.
Keats is always trying to escape to the world of imagination, the world of beauty, the
world of perfection, such as, the world of the nightingale or the Grecian urn. But his
escape is always obstructed or thwarted by a painful realization of the actualities of life.
In midst of this pain, he does enjoy sensuousness as in heard melodies are sweet, but
those unheard are sweeter which further excites his sense of depravation. The same
depravation is in O for a beaker full of the warm South which is nothing but a futile
attempt to escape the pains. Almost each of the great odes of Keats paints this world as
in Ode to Nightingale:

Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

The poem has all these ideas, the contrast between the happiness and immortality of the
bird and the misery and mortality of human life. Through wine or his imagination, the
poet would like to escape from the world of reality. He wants to fade far away, dissolve,
and quite forget the weariness, the fever, and the fret. He would like to leave this world
where men sit and hear each other groan. Accordingly, the poet is carried into the
forest on the wings of Poesy and in the midst of the flowers and under the moon he
listens to the nightingales song and thinks of the birds immortality: Thou wast not
born for death, immortal Bird!/ No hungry generations tread thee down. The use of the
word forlorn summons him back from the world of beauty and romance to the actual
world. The poet discovers that his imagination cannot provide him with a lasting escape
from the real world. The conflict introduces several tensions in the poem, making it
highly dramatic. The desire to escape to a world of eternal joyous beauty collapses.
Furthermore, Keats notes in Ode to Grecian Urn:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

The poet thinks first of the perpetual non-fulfillment of love on the urn: Bold Lover,
never, never canst thou kiss, although there is the consolation that the beloved cannot
fade and that he will love her always, Love depicted on the urn has an ideal quality: it
has all the joy and none of the suffering that goes with actual human passion. But the
poet finds refuge in the world of beauty and imagination (as represented by the urn)
only temporarily because the eternity of joy and beauty (of the town on the urn)
becomes an eternity of silence and desolation. It is permanent; but permanently empty
and lifeless. Here he emphatically addresses this thing of beauty as just what it is a
Grecian urn. This work of art, he says, has teased us out of thought, that is, out of the
actual world into an ideal world where we can momentarily and imaginatively enjoy the
life that is free from the imperfections of our lot here. But this ideal world is not free of
all imperfections: it has very grave deficiencies because it is motionless and unreal
silent and cold. Even escape is not possible as in Ode to Autumn:

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

There are various hints of death in the final stanza, but the idea of death is not treated
with horror or resentment. The day is dying softly, the rosy bloom of sunset taking
away from the stark bareness of the now fully-reaped corn-fields. And, in any case, the
very reference to the close of the day, like the final line about the swallows, carries with
it a suggestion of its opposite. Just as the swallows will come back next year, so another
day will down, for the great movement of life goes on, however short the existence of the
individual. Thus autumn is rich in sensuousness and for Keats Poetry originates from
sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. It is what the poet sees and
hears that excites his emotions and imagination. But Keats goes further; his
sensuousness excites in him wisdom and sense of awareness too. Autumn itself is the
best example for this. In the first stanza fruits as well as bees seemed almost conscious
of fulfillment, in the last stanza every item carries an elegiac note. In To Autumn, Keats
does not evade or challenge actuality; he achieves the power to see and accept life as it
is, a perpetual process of ripening, decay, and death.

Keats may be called a poet of sensuousness more than a poet of contemplation.
Sometimes he passes from sensuousness to sentiments. But his sensuousness is marked
with high seriousness and contemplative wisdom. In his mature works like Odes or the
Hyperion, the poet mixes sensuousness with sentiments but also aestheticism with
intellectualism. However the nucleus of Keats majorpoetry is dramatic tinged with
sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty and wisdoms of things, the
beauty of world and the experience therein. Sensuousness for Keats is a path to wisdom
and intellect which makes him aware of the actualities of life. His odes are sensuous,
dramatic and realistic at the same time making him more and more intellectually and
spiritually conscious.