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The document provides a detailed analysis and critique of John Keats's poem "Ode to Autumn". It discusses the poem's themes of temporality, mortality, and change represented through the personification of the season of Autumn. The poem is praised for its ability to explore rich themes in a calm and gentle manner through its descriptions of the sights and sounds of autumn. The analysis also examines how the poem relates to and recalls Keats' earlier poems, particularly through its imagery of harvesting and winnowing representing artistic creation.
The document provides a detailed analysis and critique of John Keats's poem "Ode to Autumn". It discusses the poem's themes of temporality, mortality, and change represented through the personification of the season of Autumn. The poem is praised for its ability to explore rich themes in a calm and gentle manner through its descriptions of the sights and sounds of autumn. The analysis also examines how the poem relates to and recalls Keats' earlier poems, particularly through its imagery of harvesting and winnowing representing artistic creation.
The document provides a detailed analysis and critique of John Keats's poem "Ode to Autumn". It discusses the poem's themes of temporality, mortality, and change represented through the personification of the season of Autumn. The poem is praised for its ability to explore rich themes in a calm and gentle manner through its descriptions of the sights and sounds of autumn. The analysis also examines how the poem relates to and recalls Keats' earlier poems, particularly through its imagery of harvesting and winnowing representing artistic creation.
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.