ambiguous endings Keats: Ode to a grecian urn, p 21 "Sleep and poetry"

examples of ambiguity in Keats:

1) Lamia: "The story of the love of Lamia, transformed from serpent to woman, and Lycius. They live,
unseen by the world, in her fairy palace. Lycius insists upon marrying her publicly. His old tutor comes to
the wedding feast, recognises Lamia's true nature and denounces her. She disappears and Lycius dies."
With the numerous contrasts it presents - dream and reality, imagination and reason, poetry and
philosophy - 'Lamia' has generated more allegorical readings than any other of Keats's poems. The three
main characters, Lamia, Lycius and Apollonius, have respectively been read, for example, as poetry, the
poet, and the philosopher; as poem, Keats / Poet, and reviewers; and as dream / illusion, the dreamer,
reason / reality. Full of shifting perspectives and unresolved tensions, the poem nevertheless ultimately
resists all neat diagrammatic links between character and concept. In Keats's source for the events
related in this poem, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the story is quite straightforward: an innocent
young man is rescued from the enchantment of a lamia through the aid of a wise philosopher. In retelling
and modifying the story, however, Keats introduced far more ambiguity and complexity, and the poem is
coloured by as much ambivalence as the shape-shifting serpent-woman after whom it is named. Keats's
most significant modification is the addition of the opening episode concerning Hermes, the nymph and
Lamia. What might be the relationship between this, introductory episode and the main narrative? Does
the former provide an ironic counterpart to the second? We are told that the dreams of gods are real, the
implication being that the dreams of mortals are deceptive, unreliable. Mortal lovers are said to grow
pale, while immortal lovers do not. The opening episode suggests that in this world of the immortals,
love may indeed be simple and easily fulfilled. For Lycius and Lamia in the mortal world, by contrast, Love
is complex. Although Lamia's dream comes true and she is united with Lycius in a magic palace where an
intense and very human passion is reconciled with permanence, this dream of an immortality of passion
is no sooner affirmed than it is rejected, shown as an impossibility.

Keats also introduces some ambiguity about where our sympathies should lie. In Part l, we are alerted to
Lamia's real nature, her status as deceptive shape-shifter, her associations with demons and madness.
When she foams at the mouth during her transformation, the foam makes the very grass wither and die.
There is a clear suggestion that she puts Lycius under a magic spell: when he first meets her and swoons,
he is awakened by her kiss 'from one trance ... Into another' (Part 1, line 296-7). He is 'tangled in her
mesh' (Part 1, line 295), a victim, and she is in complete control. Compare her as she is presented here
with the femme fatale of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. In Part 2, however, Lamia loses this control as she in
turn becomes the victim of Lycius's human vanity and arrogance. In his overwhelming and pathetic desire
to dominate, to parade his 'prize' so that others may be 'confounded and abash'd' (Part 2, lines 51-8), he
insists on the public marriage feast. Now he becomes cruel, taking delight in her sorrows, becoming
'fierce and sanguineous' (Part 2, lines 75-6) and he is berated by the narrator as a madman. For the
narrator, Lamia's response - 'She burnt, she lov'd the tyranny' (Part 2, line 81) and is subdued - is more
than proof of her human nature: 'The serpent - Ha, the serpent! certes, she / Was none' (Part 2, lines 80-
1). Lamia has now shape-shifted into a weak woman; with all what the narrator considers to be a mortal
woman's predictable qualities. As the lovers alternate between the roles of cruel abuser and innocent
victim, our sympathies are split too.

The question is further complicated when we consider the nature of Apollonius. In Burton's original, he is
simply the wise sage who saves Lycius. For Keats, who adds the detail of Lycius's death, Apollonius is a
sage whose wisdom brings destruction: he is the philosopher who uses reason to save his former pupil,
and yet, in the process, kills him. The memorable passage (Part 2, lines 229-38) in which the narrator
rhetorically asks 'Do not all charms fIy / At the mere touch of cold philosophy' suggests a rejection of
pure reason. Does the poem as a whole suggest Keats is completely condemning the 'cold philosophy'
which Apollonius embodies and is pleading instead for the primacy of the poetic imagination, the dream
world of Lamia? To claim this we have to ignore all her monstrous and deceptive traits as shown in Part 1.
In some ways, Apollonius can be seen as performing the same function as the brothers in 'Isabella',
bringing the world of cold reality into the lovers' secret and intimate world. And yet Lycius himself is
already marked by and a part of this world; it is after all he who wants to expose the 'secret bowers' (Part
2, line 149) of their "sweet sin" (Part 2, line 31) to 'common eyes' (Part 2, line 149). As a man of Corinth, a
city characterised by competition and rivalry, he wants to display Lamia so others can envy his 'prize'
(Part 2, line 57).

Romanticism: against reason of the augustan poets (befor them) p 29 Haskell

Keats as an anti-philosopher (cf. Beckett) Knowledge vs. imagination and Keats and Beckett

Lamia (II 229-37) Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?

KEAT'S "ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE" -HEidi scott

the ode form is appropriate for prolonged mental excursions, yet the momentum remains alive with the
tight, regular meter and rhyme, the footprint of his ode stanza. Meditative and restrained, not so much a
celebration of its subject, as a deep contemplation sparked by some externality (Scott 139)

"And with thee fade away into the forest dim" as a microcosm of the poem as a whole, which dwells on a
vagueness of place, a waning of the senses, the passage of time in a world of "hungry generations (line
62)" (Scott 140)

Seeks to leave behind the world of mortals who are slaves of time or "the weariness, the fever and the
fret" (23). A confident voice if lugubrious as he takes on subjects that are both external and internal.

The end of the ode: Keats is in a state of confusion 'Do I wake or sleep" (Scott 79-80)

Eliot's polemic with keats in the waste land - Patrick d murphy

two allusions to keats: Ode to grecian urn and nightingale. Resonance of Kyd's line from the Spanish
Tragedy.
The nightingale's song transcends the world and the romanticization of violence and lust portrayed by
keats in his description of the Dionysiac revelry recorded by a "Sylvan historian". (Murphy 91)

The romantic treatment of the nightingale (D Murphy 92)

Death is not the answer for keats <>Beckett: cyclical life, no end and no beginning.

TO CEASE UPON THE MIDNIGHT KEATS AND GIBBON

Brother Tom's approaching death (tbc) he read Gibbon the description of the death of Emperor Julian
(47)

To cease upon the midnight = envisioning an ideal death, a death that inspired its witnesses to compare
"the tent of Julian with the prison of Socrates". On could indeed fall "half in love" with the desire to die
as Julian died. (Gardner 49)

ANDREW KAPPEL - THE IMMORTALITY OF THE NATURAL

An unexpected allusion to the Book of Ruth.

The immortality is relative, not one person, but the whole species is immortal. man as well as the
nightingale is immortal. But no: the poem insists on the difference between mortal and immortal
(Kappel 270)

The nightingale according to David Perkins, its song is the composite lyric voice of poetry as it has
sounded throughout the ages and whose life extends beyond the deaths of successive individual bards.
But this humanizes the bird!! The song of the nightingals as a symbol of lyric poetry, but keats is not a
singer of a song like the nightingale, the nightingals is not the poet The literary nightingales, with past
generations who sang the same song (Kappel 270)

The bird is not the poet, the poet fails...

The bird is an actual bird in the natural world as Keats heard the song, account of Brown t retreats more
deeply into the natural world "thou among the leaves". Difference between bird (nature) and man
(humanity): bird is oblivious to death, man is painfully AWARE! (Kappel 272).

What the nightingale's song expresses is not known to humans (but humanly imaginable), so the poet
seeks in the draught of vintage "numbed sense to steel it", that is the obliviousness to passed joy or
ultimately death.

The poet seeks intensification of the senses which contrasts with the passitivity and torpidity that
plague the human ontology, from which the poet seeks escape "full of sorrow".

(Kappel 273).

Man can approach the natural only through the senses whose heightened activation as the mind fades
can establish for the human consciousness they now direct a local temporal focus, an infinitely narrow,
instantaneous temporal perspective that an active mind, remembering and anticipating incessantly, can
never achieve... Engage the senses directly, intimately, and exclusively with their object and in that act to
create a closed impenetrable node of attentiveness and intensity. Lips and finger (taste and touch)
locked to rose leaf and lovers' locked hands an eyes define two self-contained configurations, two
universes, each of which knows nothing but itself (Beckett???) (Kappel 274)

ESCAPE THROUGH THE SENSES, AS THE MIND FADES AND THE AWARENESS DISSOLVES, WITH BECKETT
THERE IS ALWAYS A LEG CUT OFF (UNNAMEABLE) SO THE SENSES ARE CUT OFF, HE CAN ONLY RETRIEVE
INTO THE MIND AND BE INDIFFERENT. HE CANNOT APPROACH THE NATURAL WORLD, BUT
MATERIALISTIC WORLD.

in all keats' poetry: he seeks the same two-fold experience of a forgetting and quickening at once: the
sorrows of stanza three fade as the sensual pleasures of stanza five accumulate.

The loss of sight as the invigoration and exercise of the imagination (Milton). Sight is the one sense
greatly given to panoramic perception, at least in Keat's poetry where the eye characteristically
positions itself so as to enjoy the widest possible focus, preferably encompassing infinity. See his
sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" (Kappel 274)

But: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, ... = perception, eyes with Beckett!!!.. Side aside, the
imagination seeks through the senses of taste "dewy wine", "each sweet", hearing 'murmurous haunt of
flies", smell "musk-rose", touch... to achieve the intense engagement that will afford to the
consciousness now living predominately through its physical senses the collapsed temporal focus that
permits obliviousness to transience. This night world is the perfect arena for imagination's enactment of
the dessired transformation.

Collapsing all time into this instantaneaity. Keats cripples time's erosive hand (Kappel 275). The
nightingale is time-blind, death is where the temporal order is, the march of seasons.

Death is a denial of the senses. The song is only heard by living people (276)

But inadequacy of death <> Bright star: death is either a door to another realm or it is not, it is
UNRESOLVED WHAT HE THINKS OF DEATH. THere is a stanza in nightingale where is courts death
asserting the nightingale's immortality (thou wast not born for death). Here death is desirable for mortal
men. Death is what Keats' mind cannot forget. The nightingale is the the object of ignorance of death.
Nothing with duration of existence, but the quality. "No generations tread the down, because there are
no such things for the bird's realm. Its unregulated self-enactment or full livingness "singest of summer in
full-throathed eas" is not an acceleration of its life in fear of death's imminence, because for the bird
there is, in a stricter sense no tomorrow, only a series of todays, and the easy ecstasy of its singing can
seem wasteful only to an ontology for which there is a tomorrow and which, hoping to live in it, invents
conservation (generations etc.)

(Kappel 276)

In the first six stanzas: the bird's immortality against the mortality of man and its naturalness.
bird-like protagonist Willie in Happy Days: winnie is buried up to her neck in act ii , in act one to
her waist = numbness of the senses. She is imprisoned in the earth (Ben ZVI)

https://books.google.be/books?
id=J7V0wgLGE0oC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=happy+days+beckett+bird&source=bl&ots=PLoMXgC_Mr&si
g=dKEo8iTX9Z2qJzzPUg2tbZGGXqw&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiF79y-
0aHLAhUGFQ8KHbFMA4IQ6AEINzAG#v=onepage&q=happy%20days%20beckett%20bird&f=false

Through sources like the book of ruth (who was called to a foreign relam by Boaz (nightingale's song, not
seen but heard) seeking alien ears...

Keats is not out to prove anything but seeks instead, as the speculative nature of his analogues suggests,
to explore the nature of the experience those analogues image, his own experience has recorded so far in
the poem (not proving anyting: negative capability) Through own experiences he seeks to comprehend
and validate that experience, to confirm his suspicion the imagination can so invigorate/versterken the
senses as to allow a mortal man to share the immortality of the natural. At the endo of the poem he
neither denies nor confirms anything, David Perkins and Walter Evert see Keats' poetic career as a
gradual rejection of the visionary imagination (and approve that rejection), acknowledge this tendency
in stanza seven. .. The poet's logic and inevitability of the final turn of the poem: movement from the
historical (emperor and clown) to the purely fictive (Ruth). The poet's experience, his uneasy union with
the nightingale, finally snaps at the end of an analogical comprehension of that experience that allows it
validity only on a level of reality, the supernatural realm of magic and charms, that is far removed from
the one on which it was achieved in the first place, the natural (Kappel 278)

Keats' early naive yearning for immoratlity, as he wrote Endymion, had matured by 1819. It had clarified
itself into a desier for a certain inner experience of time quite unrelated to the fact of death. The old
desire and this new insight into its meaning inspire and guide the action of Ode to a nightingale where
he explores ways of achieving the nightingale's sense of things. In September 1819 he wrote To
Autumn, he abandoned the quest for a nightingale-like experience of time. (Kappel 282)

The poetic consciousness in autumn does not leap to and fro, boldly asserting a sense of presence, then
sinking in regret as that sense dissipates; instead it slides gently in non-commitment, quietly courting
possibility. This is an application to his poetry of the desired negative capability. He can remain, with
desire undiminished, 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason."

(Kappel 282)

in autumn this metaphic finds a complementary stylistic poise: slow, meditative rhythms; flat, matter-of-
fact diction; a vocabulary of tentativeness. Timeless perspective.

“Let us not therefore go hurrying about”: Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity in Keats's Poetics

Ode on Indolence engages the poet’s use of retreat and suspension to invite
readerly engagement and argues for re-thinking Keats’s relationship to indolence

and poetic production

In a letter to J. H. Reynolds of 19 February 1818, John Keats describes “the beauty of the morning
operating on a sense of Idleness” and, comparing busy bees with feminine flowers, he exclaims, “let us
not therefore go hurrying about . . . [but be] passive and receptive” (Letters 1: 232). Presupposing a
binary between “hurrying” actively and receiving passively, such a statement might seem to reinforce
that Keats saw a connection between psychological openness and bodily inactivity, an assumption that
locates Keats’s view of passivity easily within a Wordsworthian lexicon, right under the entry for “wise
passiveness.” Yet attending to Keats’s own, active use of passiveness illuminates other ways of striving.
For flowers call to bees without effort, through colors indiscernible to the human eye, and, for all his
idleness, Keats judges his morning to be both beautiful and operational. Passivity, Keats implies, is both a
choice and an attitude, which may be struck even, or especially, in writing – “I am sensible,” Keats teases,
that “all this is a mere sophistication . . . [designed to] lift a little time from your Shoulders” (1: 233).
(Mathes 309)

Walter Jackson Bate, for instance, has noted that Keats’s sustained work on Endymion caused the poet to
seek out “mere passivity,” a “natural reaction,” which explains why “the image of the receptive flower,
visited and fertilized by the bee, caught his fancy” (250). (Mathes 310). Nature is passive or natural,
nothing forced... Keats – a diffuse or open mind, and a stationary body... Keatsian passivity suspends
action in such a way as to produce the affective force of reservation or retreat. Like the Romantic
theatrical practice of striking attentiongrabbing poses, or “attitudes,” on stage, Keats treats passivity as an
embodied and even physically demanding attitude, which stages detachment in order to prompt the
engagement of others. While Ode on Indolence has been taken as a work about the burden of poetic
creation, in which the luxury of idleness competes with the pressure to produce, such critiques too often
read the speaker as helplessly enervated, motivated, as Jacques Khalip asserts, by “a consciousness
forever craving to disappear into the art it imagines and wants” (50). Such utter self-negation,
psychological and physical, fails to appreciate the active negotiations between poet and audience that
the speaker’s passive encounters animate. Following Jonathan Mulrooney’s claim that Keatsian
subjectivity depends vitally on the affective pressures of other bodies (Avatar 314), I would like to
propose that passivity, for Keats, draws out and on the affective register of perception in order to invite
(and even, sometimes, to compel) an embodied response. Keats’s love of the theatre, evinced in letters
and his review of Kean, opens Ode on Indolence to critical engagement with the art of the theatrical
attitude, and most especially to Kean’s dramatic innovations. Propelled by these contexts, Keatsian
passivity reveals its aesthetic as well as its social dimensions, as the poet’s passive retreats invite his
audience to read, as well as sit, on the edges of their seats.... For Keats, passivity helps gauge whether,

despite knowing a potential friend’s flaws, that friend’s attractions are enough to

compel the poet to pursue the relationship. By this account, passivity prompts intimacy
without agency,(Mathes 310)

For Keats, Kean’s passive attitudes become part of a reciprocal relation

between actor and audience, mediated by the play’s language, in which Kean gives

himself over to these influences and his audience, in turn, finds him utterly compelling.

That Keats later claimed to want “to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic

writing as Kean has done in acting” further establishes Kean’s influence, and it also

suggests that Keats saw enough similarity between the roles of writer and actor that

Keats’s own works, and specifically the play, Otho the Great, might garner responses

comparable with those surrounding Kean’s acting (Letters 2: 139). While much scholarship

has devoted itself to characterizing Keats’s concerns about reception, as the

symptom of the Romantic “anxiety of audience,” for instance, or of his sensitivity to

issues of class (Bennett 4) (Mathes 312)

Ode on Indolence offers an alternative relation of poet to

audience, which mobilizes the affective possibilities of passivity and, in so doing,

casts the ode’s speaker-poet as the viewer and receiver of “instant feeling.” Readings

of the ode that identify its central tension in the practical necessity of poetic production

for Keats and his fear of negative reviews rest too heavily on assumptions of the poet’s

desire to escape from or efface these pressures. Such criticism notices Keats’s dramatic

language only to diminish it, as the “display of ease,” Levinson asserts, is “another

device for converting nothingness into prolific tension” (Allegory 24). This is not to

say that the ode is devoid of such tensions – in Christopher Rovee’s evocative

account, Keats crafts a “museal poetics,” typified by “characteristically Keatsian

states of intense suspension and eerily estranged enjoyment” (1007) – rather, it is to

ask how Keatsian passivity’s social and theatrical dimensions square with the suspended,

“museal” quality of Ode on Indolence, a poem that has been read as sumptuous

(312 C. F. Mathes)
In Ode on Indolence, to deliberately adopt a passive attitude

means the addition of artistry or craft – the aesthetic, in other words – which both distances

and compels affected subjects to seek the source of their affections.

Ode on Indolence is a poem in pursuit of itself, which is to say it is a poem about

indolence, in which indolence measures the desirability of poetic composition. Keatsian

passivity here becomes a means to express the speaker’s changing relationship to poetic

perception – figured by the muses Love, Ambition and Poesy – from his initial state of

unsuspecting indolence, to his pursuit of the muses’ passive retreats, to the dramatically

passive attitude by which the speaker finally claims to throw off the muses’ influence. (Mathes 313)

Beckett was drawn to the great early Modernists: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and especially
James Joyce, whom Beckett befriended and worked with. The experience of the war, however,
made Beckett reconsider what fiction could accomplish. In 1945, while visiting his family in
Ireland, he experienced the epiphany that would open up a new kind of writing. He concluded
that—at least for him—it was no longer possible to invent realistic fictional images of the world.
‘I realized’, said Beckett: that Joyce had gone as far as he could in the direction of knowing more,
[being] in control of one’s material … .I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in
lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding. (Knowlson, 1996, p.
352) Thus enlightened by the knowledge of his ‘own stupidity’ and failure, he resolved to make
art that arose directly from these two conditions (S. Johnson 641).