department of english maharajah krishnakumarsinhji bhavnagar university
Topic:-Critical note on john Keats’s odes
paper no.5:-romantic age
Semester:-M.A SEM 2
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TOPIC: -Critical note on john Keats’s odes.
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.
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¨ What is ode?
Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories of literature and life, were drawn to lyric poetry; they even developed a new form of ode, often called the romantic meditative ode.
Odes were one of the classical verse forms reintroduced and experimented with in the Romantic period. This ode consists of five 10-line stanzas, each composed of a quatrain followed by a sestet. The quatrains have an ABAB rhyme scheme, sometimes employing off-rhymes. The base meter of Ode is iambic pentameter.
¨ Characteristics of the Ode
Ø A single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse
Ø Tends to focus on one purpose and theme
Ø Its tone and manner is typically elaborate, dignified, and imaginative
There are three types of Odes in English:
1) The Pindaric or Regular ode
2) The Horatian or Homostrophic
3) The Irregular.
Keats' odes tend to be ten-line stanzas in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcdecde. On the basis of this, one could argue that Keats is broadly Horatian.
Keats poem with explanation
1) In the ode to psyche,
The poet tries to retreat from the realities of life by building a temple or a shrine in his mind dedicated to the worship of psyche. By implication Keats also expresses the idea that love, poetry, and indolence are the nature medicines of the soul against the living death it must accept from cold philosophy. In the last stanza of this ode, the poet declares that the paradise for that soul is to be built by the poet’s imagination within the poets own consciousness. Psyche’s temple will be built in “some untroddenregion” of Keats mind. To build psyche’s temple is to widen consciousness. But an increase and consciousness carries with it the dual capacity for pleasure and for pain. The thoughts that will grow in that untrodden region will be new grown with “pleasant pain”. To psyche is neither flawless nor the best of Keats ode but, it has been said, it illustrate better than any other Keats’s possession of poetic power combined with an unusual artistic detachment. It is the most architectural of his odes, and it is certainly the one that culminates most dramatically.
“And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rose sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name”
2) In the ode on a Grecian urn,
Keats gives us a contrast between the permanence of the urn and the transience of life but we are also made conscious of deficiencies in the value of art as represented by the urn. art alone can never satisfy us completely, because the urn is a cold pastoral. This ode contains one of Keats’s most famous lines:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” which most probably means that beauty is total reality properly understood or that beauty is the true significance of things in our world and in the ideal world. This ode represents an exquisite fusion of the imaginative, emotional, and intellectual elements.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, yet soft pipes, play on”
3) The ode to a nightingale,
Is remarkable for its note of reflection and meditation though at the same time it shows the splendor of Keats’s imagination on its purely romantic side. The central idea here is the contrast of joy and beauty and apparent permanence of the nightingale’s song with the sorrow of human life and the transistorizes of beauty and love in the human world. Keats’s profusion and prodigality, we must recognize, is here modified by a principal of sobriety. Wholeness, intensity, and naturalness are the qualities of this ode.
“The same those oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn”
4) To autumn is,
by general agreement , flawless In stricture texture and rhythm it is purely impulsive in personal objective description if we think of the conflicts that constitute the theme of the nightingale, Grecian urn , this ode may at first seem beautiful but shallow, a poem of a unquestioning surrender sensuous luxury. But such a view would be in inadequate. Even this poem conveys to us sense of impermanence which is to be found in the foregoing odes. The summer has done work it’s works and departing it is autumn now but the gathering swallows imply that winter. Cannot be far behind where in the first stanza fruit as well as bees seem almost conscious of fulfillment, in the last stanza every item carries and elegiac node the day is dying and gnats an labs and cricket and birds all seem to be aware of approaching darkness thus Keats here accepts life as it is perpetual process of repining decay, and death.
“Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft”
¨ Themes in Keats's Major Poems
Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts." For example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil."
Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:
Þ Transient sensation or passion / enduring art
Þ Dream or vision / reality
Þ Joy / melancholy
Þ The ideal / the real
Þ Mortal / immortal
Þ Life / death
Þ Separation / connection
Þ Being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion
Keats' Theory of Negative Capability
'The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.’
“Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, lives with mystery, and makes peace with ambiguity.
John Keats (along with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) is referred to as a “second generation” Romantic poet. (Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge make up the so-called “first generation.”)
The second generation writers tend to be more skeptical and philosophically ironic. They are more dubious, for example, about a Wordsworthian “spirit that rolls through all things.” In Keats’s case, this second-generation skepticism also applies to the poet’s ego. Keats felt that Wordsworth was too “self focused,” too consumed by the quest of the subjective self trying to wed with Nature and the “spirit that rolls through all things.” For Keats, any “epiphany” or visionary “spot of time” could only come about by way of what he called “negative capability,” which involves the erasure of self to experience the potent otherness of the world.
That is what Keats means by “negative capability.” We do need philosophies, codes, world views—we have to have those things to survive. But we also have to be able to suspend them, because they are filtering models. They can only tell us what we put into them to begin with. They can therefore keep us, according to Keats, from seeing something new.
So Keats’s ideal of “negative capability” has to do with suspending the ego, the subjective identity, and becoming something else. That’s a process, and process is a watchword for the Romantics.
. For Keats, we have to suspend whatever it is that makes us a self or an ego. That’s why, for Keats, the poet is the most “unpoetical” of all things. He has no self. He is always becoming another being—a nightingale, a Grecian urn.
Conclusion:-
In short, john Keats’s remarkable or invaluable contribution in English literature .he was started second romantic age and reintroduced odes, with using Greek myths and theory of negative capability. His odes or poems are abstract and beyond the understanding of human sometime it seems philosophical elements. In this way he described pain and pleasure equally. We should never forget his remarkable contribution and it remains source of inspiration for new comer and provides aesthetic delight.
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