Keats Sensuousness :

Introduction:-

Keats short life was perceived by those

Who knew him to be of unusual intensity;
It insisted on being recorded in many ways, from the
Attempt to capture his ardent look with pencil
Or pen to the watchful preservation of his hastiest
Scrap of verse..
Edmund Blunden
English romanticism attains in Keats the final stage of its progress. Keats grew to be a
poet in the atmosphere of romanticism dominate by Wordsworth and Coleridge. He felt their
great influence and in the fervor of enthusiasm wrote, Great spirits now on earth are
sojourning. The traditions of the great romantic poets were carried forward by Keats There
traditions reached their culminating point in his poems. All the qualities that characterized the
romantic movement during the early nineteenth century found their culmination in Keats
poetry. Since in his poetry we notice both romantic and classical features, it is necessary for us
to differentiate between classical and romantic poetry. Romantic poetry aims at the complete
expression of the individual as compared to classical poetry which aims at the expression of
social experience.
Romantic poetry is marked by heightened sensibility and imagination, while
classical poetry is marked by a sense of balance and proportion. Romantic art creates the kind of
beauty which is strange, mysterious and uncommon; classical art tries to create the kind of
beauty which is orderly, familiar and significant. Repose satisfies the classic; adventure lays
emphasis on individual talent. In spite of the fact that in Keats poetry there is a fusion of both
romantic ad classical qualities, he is most romantic of all the romantic poets of his times. H is is
purest poetry. Let us now analyze the romantic qualities in Keats poetry.
All the romantic poetry had love of Nature and Keats was also a great poet of Nature.
He had loved Nature for her own sake without finding any mystical meaning as Wordsworth
found in the objects of nature. He was tremulous with joy at the presence of natures loveliness
and charms. There was not a mood of earth he did not love, not a season that did not cheer and
inspire him. For him the poetry of earth was never dead. He was in his glory in the fields. The
humming of the bee, the sight of the flower, the glitter of the sun seemed to make his nature
tremble. He was so deeply fascinated by Nature that he composed wonderful descriptions of
the beauties of nature.

Romanticism had its roots in the soil of melancholy and weird sadness. In Keats
poetry the note of melancholy and sadness is at many a place. We hear it only in La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, in the Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Melancholy, but also in poems dealing mainly with
Nature. The poet strikes this sad note of despair in the following lines from Ode to a Nightingale:
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
The Indian Maids lament in Endymion is particularly representative of this haunting
note of sadness in Keatss romantic poetry:
To sorrow I bade good morrow
And thought to leave her far away behind
But cheerly, cheerly,
She love me dearly
She is so constant to me, and so kind
I would deceive her
Bt ah! She is so constant and so kind.

Keatss Sensuousness

The term sensuousness in poetry implies that it is related, not to didacticism, but
mainly to the task of making a strong appeal to the senses of sight, he arms, small, taste and
touch and employs techniques which simultaneously exploit the sensuous use of language (
among them, rhythm, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia, generating clusters of mouth
filling sounds). A complicating factor is that in the past there has been a strong tradition of
Christian asceticism, warning people against the seductions of the senses. However, it was
Milton who declared that poetry should be simple, sensuous, impassioned, and so various
poets have attempted to give extreme aural richness to poetic diction.
Among all these poets Keats remains unparalled for the sensuous impact of his verse.
What creates the impression of Keatss supremacy is partly the sheer abundance of Keatss
sensuousness. He made an excellent use of all the genius. It was a temper in Keats, says Stop
ford A. Brooke, of unruffled pleasure, sensitive, girl-like sensuous pleasure in beauty and in the
consolation of beauty to the soul. He flies from one beautiful object of beauty to another in a butterfly
fashion, tasting and sipping honey and little caring to settle upon anyone. He is thus completely and
frankly sensuous in his attitude towards Nature. Keatss friend Haydon also bears testimony to
the sharpness of his sense percetions: 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.

Keats as the most sensuous of English poets

At the beginning of his review of Keatss poems and letters (1880), included in Essays
in Criticism : Second series, Matthew Arnold wrote:
No one can question the eminency, in Keatss poetry,
Of the quality of sensuousness Keats as a poet is abundantly,
And enchantingly sensuous; the question, with some people,
Will be whether he is anything else.
This impression does, to some extent, still persist that Keats was above all else a poet of
sensuous experience, a poet who early in his career once proclaimed, O for a Life of Sensation
rather than of Thoughts! (Keats letter to Bailey, 22 November 1817) Sensuousness is the part
and parcel of Keatss genius. Recently an anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement,
nearly a hundred years after Arnolds essay spoke of the fleshly, sensuous, pictorial,
unreflective nature of Keatss verse:
Fleshly is a fair and obvious epithet for Endymion, and the truth of the second and
third of those adjectives is evident even to a casual reader. Keats is the most sensuous of English
poets, although other poets are quite as sensuous, in their various ways what creates the
impression of Keatss supremacy in this respect is partly that the other poets are often doing
additional things at the same time, whereas in his the sensuous tends to be isolated: they may
put the experience in a critical framework, whereas he tends to relish it relatively uncritically. In
other comparable poets the abundance of sensuousness is frequently the cumulative effect of
extensive passages of writing, in Keatss mature style what is so particularly remarkable is the
richness of sense impression and sensation that he continually compacts into a few words into
such characteristic lines as.
1.

Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

Blue, silver-white and budded Tyrian,

2.

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The two brief quotations from the Odes just offered clearly illustrate the variety of diverse sense
impressions, often in swift succession, that are so frequently evoked. In the first quotation, for
instance, just thirteen words, there are references to colour, shape, scent, coolness, and even an
odd, but characteristic, suggestion of silence.

Density of sensuousness as the most obvious quality of Keatss poetry.

Keats is not philosophical poet as Milton and Wordsworth are. Even then we notice
his concern about the mystery of human life both in his poetry and letters. In the process of
throwing out scattered guesses and observation Keats touches on those problems of human life
which have concerned the philosopher and the moralist. Yet a whole side of his work is strong
in sensuous descriptions and does not seek to probe the mystery of life. In this connection
David Masson writers, The most obvious characteristic of Keatss poetry is certainly its
abundant sensuousness. Some of his finest little poem are all but literally lyrics of the sensuous
embodiments of the feeling of ennui, fatigue, physical languor, and the like, in tissues of fancied
circumstance and sensation. In following his in there luxurious excursions into a world of ideal
nature and life, we see his imagination wining about, as if it were his disembodied senses
hovering insect-like in one humming group, all keeping together in harmony at the bidding of a
higher intellectual power, and yet each catering for itself in that species of circumstances which
is its peculiar food.

Keatss use of all five senses in his poetry :-

More than Wordsworth and Shelley, Keats reveled in sensuous pleasures of life. In
Wordsworth the dominant sense is sight. He becomes a mere epicure of visual sensations, but
he has not the falcons eye that Dorothy noted and admired in Scott. J. C. smith tells us that
other senses save the sense of sight do not have a fair play in Wordsworths poetry. In Shelleys
poetry senses of sight and ear are dominant but he was not a pure sensuous poet because he
made his poetry the instrument of social reforms. He is full of fire and fury against despots and
tyrants, kings and priests. It goes to the credit of Keats alone that he enchantingly made use of
all the senses in his poetry. He believed in a life of intuition, guided by high test of feeling,
rather than a life lived by rule and devoted to purely mental activity. His art was full of passion;
it was above all aspiration and desire, and the object of this desire was not the intellectual
beauty of Shelley, but beauty that revealed itself to the enchantment of the senses. Keatss
poetry works by encouraging us to perceive - to feel vivid and district sensuous impressions.
We illustrate it from theOde to a Nightingale:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the doughs
The above lines taken from stanza 5 of the Ode to a Nightingalealludes to the sense of sight, or its
absence (I cannot see); the senses of touch and of smell (soft incense); and by the end of the
verse, with its evocation of the coming musk- rose, full of dewy wine, the murmerous haunt of
flies, the senses of taste and hearing have also been incorporated. A general recognition of this
quality lead to the consensus that Keatss poetry is particularly successful at depicting,
representing or conveying reality or experience, persuades us to imagine that we are literally
perceiving the objects and the experiences that the verse describes.

His sensuous word pictures :-

Keatss poems are saturated with sensuousness. All the five senses of sight, smell,
touch, and taste are enchantingly put together in his poems. In the following lines from The Eve
of st. Agnes the appeal is to the eye, to the sense of touch, to the sense of smell, and to the ear:
Of all its wreathed pearls, her she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
(Stanza XXXVI)
As Madeline prepares for bed we are told how she Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one.
Now the sensory qualities we normally associate with jewels are brilliance, colour, and to some
extent perhaps, their tactile properties Keats might have positively suggested any one of these
qualities by some epithet like brilliant, dazzling, etc., or he might have left the sensory
association to our imagination as he does in the preceding line, Of all its wreathed pearls her
hair she frees. In either case (and this is true of the different descriptive reference wreathed)
there would probably have been some remoteness of suggestive effect. As it is, the perception
communicated through warmed, that the jewels still retain something of the heat of
Madelines body, not only leads us to experience the jewels of this particular episode, instead of
precious stones in general, but also bring us into imaginary physical with living woman.
For Sound there is the willful choir of small gnats in To Autumn, or the surging of the
sea in one of his best sonnets:
It keeps eternal whispering around
Dissolate shores
For the sensation of touch there is;
Cooled a long age in the deep- deled earth
In the Ode to a Nightingale, or the cold full sponge to pleasure pressed in Isabella.
The opening lines of the Eve of st. Agnes describe extreme cold:
St. Agnes Eve Ah, bitter child it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a cold;
The hare limpd trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsmans fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemd taking flight for haven, without a death
Past the sweet virgins picture while his prayer he saith.
We see the sense of smell in there line:
She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and hlue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barrd.
Again, for visual description we take an example from Lamina:
Full of silver moons that, as she breathed.
Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed,
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries.
The sense of taste is well expressed in Ode to a Nightingale:
O for a breaker full of warm south:
Full of the true, blushful Hippocrene.
In La Belle Dame Sans Merci:
She found me roots of relish sweet
Of honey wild and manna dew.

Instinctive response to life:-

Keatss response to life was deeply instinctive, as he wrote to Benjamin Bailey, I have
never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning.
Although it is possible to dscern a pattern of thought in his work, the dominating lecture of his
poetry is his delight in the senses. He welcomed every lovely sensation and reveled in it to the
full whenever the opportunity occurred. We learn that nothing escaped him, the song of a bird

and the undernote to response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of
the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the montions of the wind just how it took
certain tall flowers and plants- and the way-faring of the clouds. We can illustrate it
from Endymion:
The nested wren
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken,
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf
Takes glimpses of thee; thou art a relief
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps
Within its pearly house. The mighty deeps,
The monstrous sea is thin the myriad sea!
O Moon ! far spooming Ocean bows to thee,
And Tellus feels his foreheads cumbrous load.
C.N Herford is of the opinion,
poetry as it came to Keats, was not a spiritual vision as with Wordsworth, nor an emancipating
vision, as with Shelley but a joy wrought out of sensations as exquisite as Coleridges by an
imagination not weird and mystic like his but plastic and pictorial Whereas Wordsworth
spiritualises, and Shelley intellectualizes Nature, Keats is content to express her through the
senses. As a sensuous poet he falls into line with Marlowe and Tennyson.

Blending of sensuousness and contemplation in Keatss poetry:-

This delight in pure sensations gave way to the perception of the necessary relation of
beauty with truth, and both with joy. As his mind matured, his symyathies broadened, and
after the death of Tom he murmured: Scenery is fine but human mature is finer. Thus, we
can say that there is a blending of sensuousness and contemplation in his poetry. Keatss mind
is mainly sensuous by direct action but it also works by reflex action passing from sensuousness
into sentiment. Certainly, some of his works are merely, extremely sensuous; but this is the
work in which the poet was trying his material and his powers, and rising towards mastery of
his real faculty, and his final function. In his mature performances in the Odes, for example, and
Hyperion, sensuousness is penetrated by sentiment, voluptuousness is permeated by vitality,
and aestheticism is tempered by intellectualism. In Keatss place of poetry, the nucleus is
sensuousness, but the superstructure has chambers or more abiding things and more
permanent colours.

Life must be undergone:-

Keats wrote in one of his letters, Life must be undergone. The carefree, sensuous
delight of the earliest verse gave way to a sterner mood in The Fall of Hyperion On 10 June, 1818,
he wrote to Bailey, I would reject a Patriarchal coronation on account of my dying day, and
because woman have cancers. This is the world, he wrote to George and Georgiana in March
1891, after the trying ordeals of 1818, - thus we cannot expect to give away many hours to
pleasure Circumstances are like clouds continually gathering and bursting while we
laughing, the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events while we are
laughing it spouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck. He wrote
elsewhere: I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a fly my troubles
were all of the Imagination. Now I find I must buffet it I must take my stand upon some
vantage ground and being to fight I must choose between despair and energy I choose the
latter though the world taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once thought was
impossible :
Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass and glory in the flower
I once thought this a Melancholists dream
(Letter to Sarah Jeffrey, 31 May, 1819)
There was a tendency in The Fall of Hyperion to be free from the hold of
sensation. He was not satisfied with the life of grapple with the sorrows and suffering of the
world. The spirit of humanitarianism that touched Shelley also came to have its influence on
Keats. He started to cherish the vision of glorifying human life, and the grim truth began to
Have its way with the poet that higher scales of life could not be attained by anyone except
those:
To whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries and will not let them rest.
The poet sought to give up the early ideal of sensuous poetry when he had once,
written.
And they shall be poet kings
Who simply tell the most heart easing things.
For something higher and noble. Now he realized that he could attain immortality better by
moving to higher tasks than merely reveling in sensuous joys:

Yes, I must pass for a nobler life.

Of human heart.
If Keats had lived for a few years more, he would have surely succeeded in realizing his new
destiny, would have been another Wordsworth in his impassioned love of humanity.

Conclusion

At the end we came to know that how Keats use sensuousness in his work, and how
it appear in his poetry.