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Romanticism
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STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM_
VOLUME 12 SUMMER 197 3 NUMBER 3
1. The assumption of sequence arises tacidy from the way in which com
mentaries generally begin at the beginning and continue on to the end, using
such connectives as "Next Yeats notices X" or "Keats then reflects," etc., thereby
assuming that the sequence presented in the poem is immutably coextensive with
the psychological sequence generating the poem.
591
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592 HELEN VENDLER
2. John Jones, in his original and rewarding book John Keats's Dream of
Truth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), says righdy that "without tho
stubble-fields there would have been no ode To Autumn" (p. 225).
3. Robert Gittings, in The Odes of Keats (Kent, Ohio: Kent State U. Press
1970), p. 6s, believes that Brown's story of the composition of the Ode to
Nightingale really concerns the composition of the Ode to Indolence; he bas
his skepticism on Dilke's. Other manuscript critics, M. R. Ridley among them
have argued persuasively for the essential verity of Brown's account.
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KEATS'S ODES 593
the bird in its plot, but he requires for the purposes of the poem
midnight scene, lit indirectly by the moon. Since the external
experiential (the morning, the garden, shadows and greenery) wou
not suffice, the psychologically necessary (a moonlit forest at mid
night) supervened. We are left, then, to seek the true experientia
origins of the poem, which must have demanded the expunging of
the morning scene and the substitution of a more appropriate tim
and place for the nightingale.
It is true that Milton's nightingale "sings darkling," like Coleridge
and it is also true that both were in Keats's mind; but surely it is tr
as well that the poem centers round death, and that Keats cou
scarcely, in the decorum of a requiem, find it rich to die while sitt
in the sunlight under a plum-tree. The proper surrounding had to
"embalmed darkness," where Keats could wish "to cease upon th
midnight with no pain." We might say, then, that the psychologic
beginning of the poem was a profound desire to die,4 which w
interrupted, so to speak, by the ecstatic song of the nightingale,
song which came as a shocking contrast to Keats's mood. If the son
at first stands for the sunlit world of love, spring, mating, and ha
ness so apparently unattainable for Keats, we can understand his fir
two responses?a wish to obliterate the bird by obliterating his ow
consciousness in Lethe, hemlock, numbness, opiates; and an immedia
self-reproach, prompted by the usual Keatsian generosity, for
grudging the bird his happiness. And so Keats tries to feel with th
bird, as Wordsworth tried in his Ode to feel with the bounding lambs.
Keats even imagines joining the summer bird via a sunlit path, the
wine "full of the warm South," full of "dance and Provengal song,
and sunburnt mirth." No way could be more false, and the stanza is
forced, a divagation,5 as Keats himself recognizes some lines later:
I will fly to thee
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
4. By "a desire to die" I do not mean a conscious wish to commit suicide. "To
cease" into "easeful death" rather implies a happy coincidence of the desire for
death and a natural death itself, rather than (as in the Ode on Melancholy) an
explicit wish to take violent means. An unconscious suicidal intent would seem
to appear in the similes referring to hemlock and Lethe.
5. William Michael Rossetti, in his Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott,
1887), p. 201, saw the falsity of these lines: "Surely nobody wants wine as a
preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music. . . . Taken in detail, to call wine
'the true, the blushful Hippocrene'?the veritable fount of poetic inspiration
seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase 'with beaded bubbles winking at
the brim' is (though picturesque) trivial."
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594 HELEN VENDLER
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KEATS'S ODES 595
there were a choice in the matter. And though Keats's bitterness and
plaintiveness preclude any truce or compact between himself and the
nightingale proper, he does make a compact of fellowship with the
other listeners to the bird: "The voice I hear this passing night was
heard" by countless others. There is the true connection and link,
although necessarily in exile with Ruth or in the heartless land of
faery, where no one stands at the casement, the seas imperil the
quester, and the awakening on the hillside is forlorn.
In the end, everything in the poem has finally harmonized with
Keats's original sadness?the past listeners (in Ruth's tears), the
landscape (in its midnight darkness), faeryland (in its emptiness),
and, astonishingly, the bird's song, which from "ecstasy" has become
a "plaintive anthem." Such an attuning of context to feeling, though
it may not resolve anything, at least assures us that Keats is no longer
fretfully and strenuously attempting a false sunlit vision. But unless
one recognizes the wish to die as the experiential base of the poem,
one risks being taken in by the sunlit protests, and one finds it hard to
explain the metamorphosis from sunshine and ecstasy and Bacchus
into darkness, plaintiveness, and yearnings for death. Of course
Keats's metaphors in the opening lines reveal the original sadness and
wish to die, and yet their being cast into similes ("as though of hem
lock I had drunk") has led to their not being taken very seriously.
Critics in general have seemed to believe Keats when he avers that he
is "too happy" in the nightingale's happiness. Rather, if we see the
wish to die (a subliminal one becoming gradually visible as it surface
to full consciousness) as the center of the poem, we can see that at
no point, not even in his fevered fantasy of Bacchic intoxication, is
Keats happy at all.9
The Ode to a Nightingale shows, then, the way in which a psy
chological beginning can so condition a poem that the verse must
change its landscape and its attitudes. In the Ode on Melancholy,
which follows the poem on the nightingale, Keats encountered
greater problems. He plays in the poem the role of the physician
wast not born for death." In each case the reference to the poet's own case must
be grasped for a proper reading of the poem.
9. I cannot therefore agree with Albert Gerard, who writes: "It is typical of
Keats's mature integrity that he makes no attempt to evade reality by seeking to
prolong the dream and stay in that blessed spot. . . . On the contrary, the sheer
intensity of the scene recalls to his mind the heartbreak of actual life" (emphasi
added), English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), pp. 226-227.
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596 HELEN VENDLER
io. The critical reaction to this language has been an embarrassed one. Not
recognizing Keats's own subsequent abandonment in the poem of such language,
and therefore the implied criticism by Keats himself of the spirit which expresses
itself in such hysterical language, some critics have seen fit to view the whole
poem as hysterical. Robert Bridges noticed the awkwardness in the mistress*
appearance as an appendage to other sensations: "Among the objects on which
a sensitive mind is recommended to indulge its melancholy fit, the anger of his
mistress is enumerated with roses, peonies and rainbows, as a beautiful phe
nomenon plainly without respect to its cause, meaning or effect" (quoted in
TLS [Friday, 2 April 1971], p. 1). See also the remarks of Douglas Bush in
John Keats (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. i45ff.
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KEATS'S ODES 597
Given the strong undertow toward death, the reaction is, not
surprisingly, equally immoderate. Instead of withdrawal, immersion:
when your mistress raves, glut your sorrow by feeding on her eyes.
We have been given, so far in the poem, only two alternatives:
withdrawal or a forced masochistic aestheticism. Both responses are
sexual ones. The frustrated sexual desire which is the basis of the
poem is nowhere clearer, incidentally, than in the cancelled first
stanza, where the rudder to a Petrarchan bark distractedly seeking
Melancholy is "a dragon's tail,/Long sever'd, yet still hard with
agony." The hatred of woman, too, is clear in the same stanza, when
Keats confects the ropes for his bark from "large uprootings from
the skull/Of bald Medusa." (Neither the dragon's tumescent tail
nor the plucked and impotent phallic Medusa appears in Keats's
source in Burton.)
How then, faced with his two equally unsatisfactory responses to
his mistress' anger, was Keats to resolve the poem? He had evoked
first one stratagem and then another?and they were wholly incom
patible (oblivion and glutting) and both, finally, unworthy. He
solved the dilemma by focussing not on his mistress' anger but on
her beauty, at first in the forced exercise he recommends to himself
in destructive language ("feed deep, deep") but next in genuine
contemplation. As the almost petulant exercise becomes gradually
real, Keats's tone becomes grave, and he sees his two previous al
ternatives, drugged melancholy or a hectic absorption in beauty, no
longer as opposites but as a continuum: Joy's hand is ever at his lips
breathing adieu, and life, by a terrible metabolism, makes the nectar
of Pleasure metamorphose into the venom of Passion. If Melancholy,
then, is intrinsic in life, it takes no mistress' anger to evoke it: her
being alone, her beauty alone, should provoke the divinest Melan
choly. To undergo depression only from a coarse external impetus
like a mistress' anger is to mistake accident for essence.
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598 HELEN VENDLER
ii. See, e.g., Jack Stillinger, "Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keat
in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs, N.
Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 8-9: "The first stage tells what not to do 'when th
melancholy fit shall fall.' . . . The second stanza advises what to do instead. .
The third stanza gives the rationale for these prescriptions." A similar view
expressed by David Perkins in the same volume, p. 89.
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KEATS'S ODES 599
12. John Jones (p. 220) truthfully remarks about this ode: "Nowhere, except
in the dream-consummation of St. Agnes, does Keats's mature verse place
heavy a burden on sex. Sex sustains the private metaphysic of intenseness in bo
poems."
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600 HELEN VENDLER
13. The "unity" of the Ode on a Grecian Urn has been a mare's nest for
critics. A critical hybris has resulted by which critics rewrite or re-order the
poem to their own specifications. Thus W. J. Bate: "The second and especially
the third stanzas have been a digression. We have only to apply the simple test
of omitting them both, or else the third alone, and we find that what remains
will still make a complete poem, though admittedly less rich," John Keats
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1963), p. 514. In this grand disposal
of two-fifths of the ode via a "simple test," Bate differs from another dis
tinguished Harvard Keatsian, Douglas Bush, who tells us that "The fourth
stanza ... is a total digression from the line pursued so far" {John Keats,
p. 140). Adding the two critics together, we find that only the beginning and
end of the poem are not, by these canons, "digressions." F. W. Bateson, too,
seems able to dismiss the whole middle of the ode: "Stanzas in and iv draw
certain pathetic and whimsical corollaries, and Stanza v sums up the paradox
of poetry. . . . Stanza iv had been a relapse into Romanticism. The 'green
altar,' the 'mysterious priest' and the 'litde town' were alluring invitations to
reverie. But Keats was too honest to leave it at that," English Poetry: A Critical
Introduction (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1950), pp. 218, 220. The
problems with stanzaic sequence and decorum have perplexed critical accounts
of Keats's feelings in the poem. Just as Gerard (n. 9 above) thought that the
nightingale recalled to Keats's mind "the heartbreak of actual life," so Bush
here says, of the third stanza, "But the erotic theme brings in frustration and
negation" (p. 139, emphasis added). I would argue, on the contrary, that
"heartbreak" and "frustration" preceded both poems and are the motivation for
the initial feelings in each case: the wish to join the nightingale and the wish to
be immortal like the urn-figures. Bush, as his phrasing implies, is thinking of
"Dover Beach," but in that poem as well, the sea "brings in" "the eternal note of
sadness" only because that note is already present in Arnold's mind.
14. John Jones suggests a similar notion in his fine description of the urn:
"It counters warm immortal love with the desolation of aesthetic experience,"
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KEATS'S ODES 601
But here we are always on the way, never at the green altar, nev
the little town.
It remains for us to explain Keats's rapidly successive views of
urn in the last stanza. No longer the incarnation of erotic perfec
forever warm, the urn is now frigidly addressed as nothing mo
than a visual shape, a gesture and a pose, cold and marmoreal. In
imagining of the green altar and the little town the imagination
speculative poet has gone beyond the imagination of the p
urnmaker, and the bourne proper to the urn has been proved in
ficient to contain the ranging Fancy. 15 The urn has become noth
more than the shell of a fledge soul left behind, to use Herb
and in his opposition of "feel" and "watch" in "Bright Star" (p. 230). How
I think that in the ode "the desolation of aesthetic experience" is essent
being opposed to warm mortal love?to what exists off the Urn, not on
Yeats will continue the theme in a number of poems including the
Byzantium poems and "Among School Children."
15. The source of Keats's sadness here, it has been suggested to me by
student Catherine Slater, is the incapacity of his own invented urn to b
sufficient. The mind necessarily extrapolates beyond its own image of perfe
(the urn) to the images of extension (in time and space) beyond its lim
(to the altar and town).
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602 HELEN VENDLER
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KEATS'S ODES 603
He had also written, two years before the ode, that in a season of calm
weather,
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding?fruit ripening in stillness?Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves?. . .
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs?
A woodland rivulet?a Poet's death.
("After dark vapors")
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604 HELEN VENDLER
And he had reminded us that man's soul has "quiet coves ... in i
Autumn":
. . . when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness?to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
("The Human Seasons")
The gleaner, not (as would be more logical) the thresher, is the last
figure seen in the mythologized pathos of the grain harvest. Keats
sensed himself an exile already, like Ruth, and through the sad hear
of Ruth his own sad heart recalled the spring song of the nightingal
pouring its soul abroad in ecstasy. The minimal music which Autum
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KEATS'S ODES 605
16. Harold Bloom asserts about the passage from the visual to the aural
"The allocation of the senses is crucial: the late-harvest art is plastic and
graphic; the art of millenium. The art past ripeness and harvest is the art of th
ear, apocalyptic, the final harmonies of music and poetry," The Visionary
Company (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1961), p. 422. I am not at all sure
that Keats is being "apocalyptic" here, any more than Milton was in ending
"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" with music. Keats is still, at the ending of th
poem, speaking of the poetry of earth which is never dead, and not, I think, o
any conception of time or the end of time which might support the wor
"apocalyptic."
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606 HELEN VENDLER
Boston University
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