English Literature Project

Question: Keats wrote in one of his letters to a friend “Don’t you know how important a life of sorrows and suffering is to school an intelligence and make it a soul.” Discuss this statement in any two Odes of Keats and discuss how far this is correct to say that the genius of poet is matured in the warmth of grief.

John Keats is considered one of the most important poets in the English Romantic movement. His work is considered exceptional because of his elaborate use of words and a sensual imagination.

An ardent worshiper of the Hellenistic concept of beauty, he believed beauty to have an ever lasting joy but man “sinks into nothingness”. Pain for Keats was part of his life and surrounded him. With his own brother dying, and his premonitory fairs of his own death led him to write Odes filled with sorrow and pain. Keats held the belief that ‘a life of sorrows and suffering is to school an intelligence and make it a soul’.

We shall observe this idea of John Keats in light of two of his most famous odes, which he wrote nearing the end of his life. Ode to Melancholy and Ode to Autumn.

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Ode to Melancholy No, no, go not to Lethe1, neither twist Wolf's-bane2, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine2; Make not your rosary of yew-berries3, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth4 be Your mournful Psyche5, nor the downy owl4 A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She6 dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. 1

Lethe, a river whose waters in Hades, land of dead, bring forgetfulness to the dead. Ruby grape of Proserpine and Wolfsbane are poisonous herbs from which sedatives and opiates were extracted. 3 Yew-berries usually grow in cemeteries and are considered symbols of mourning. 4 The death-moth, beetle and the downy owl have been traditionally associated with darkness, death and burial. 5 Psyche sometimes symbolized by a moth that escapes the mouth in sleep or death. This can also be a reference to ‘Psyche’ wife of Cupid, who Keats calls ‘The Goddess of Love’ in his Ode to Psyche. 6 Melancholy 2

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In ‘Ode on Melancholy’ Keats accepts the truth he sees: that joy and pain are

inseparable

and

to

experience

joy

fully

we

must

experience

sadness

or melancholy fully. This ode expresses Keats's view wholeheartedly; it differs significantly from the other odes written by Keats, in which he has attempted to escape from reality of this brutal world, into the ideal world of wild imagination. Keats had always valued intensity of emotion, thought, and of experience; as fulfillment to Keats comes from living and thinking passionately. He does not shrink from feeling intense grief or anguish because for him, grief is what leads to the better nourishment of the soul.

Much of the effectiveness of this poem derives from the concrete imagery of Keats by drawing together elements, which are ordinarily regarded as incompatible or as opposites. *7

The poet's passionate outcry not to reject melancholy is presented in negative overtones in the first stanza, presenting to us imagery and the symbolism to match it. The first two words, "No, no," are emphasized through their repetition. The degree of pain that melancholy may cause is implied by the suggestions of the poet, which include avoiding the River Lethe in order to drown their sadness or employ the help of the powerful sedatives like "the ruby grape of Proserpine," (which is a poison), or may look for the signs of death and misery like “downy owls”, beetle or the death-moth3. The above stated serve to numb the pain that we feel while according to the poet, in order to understand melancholy, we have to suffer through it.

With the last two lines of the stanza, Keats provides us with the consequences of seeking escape from pain--a numbing of the soul or consciousness. The anguish is wakeful, because the sufferer still feels and so still contains the capacity to experience joy.

The starting of the second stanza describes the physical circumstances literally, and the emotional circumstances figuratively. The weeping of the clouds and the droop-headed flowers 7 For further elaboration, refer to Appendix: Ode to Melancholy

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specifically the words ‘droop-headedness’ and ‘weeping’ represent to us sadness, grief. The rain temporarily hides the view, however the hill is green, connoting fertility, lushness, beauty and these qualities are there regardless if we can see them or not. The ‘shroud’ is a reference to death but the month is of April, a time of renewal from winter’s harshness. This is an obvious reference to the fact that

In the rest of the stanza, the poet tells us to enjoy as fully as possible the beauties of this world, and thereby welcome melancholy. To glut sorrow is to gorge or to experience to the fullest. The rose is beautiful, but as a morning rose, it lasts a short time, meaning the experience is transitory. It is also the case as the poet describes, that the rainbow produced by the wave is beautiful and short-lived.

The imagery of wealth and eating intently, tie the natural and the human worlds and the two divisions of the stanza together. The intensity of words used, imply passionate involvement in experience, also it suggests to us that melancholy is incorporated into, becomes part of and nourishes the individual. The lover, while being the object of her mistress’ angry raving, also enjoys her beauty at the same time by relishing it. Where can melancholy be found?

As has been implied, it is found in pleasure, in delight. Melancholy is veiled because it is hidden from us during pleasure, which is generally what we are aware of and are absorbed in. However there are also those who see melancholy-in-delight by living intensely, vigorously; by being sensitive to life.

The knowledge that joy will come to an end sometime makes its experience such a ravishing one, and something, which is to be cherished. In the same way, the fact that beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more thrilling. The key is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at the heart of all pleasure - to "burst joy's grape" and gain admission to the inner temple of melancholy, whose experience is but bittersweet.

Ode to Autumn

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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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Ode to Autumn depicts Keats’ rich mood of serenity, noted through the absence of questions and conflicts in it. Autumn, here, is not regarded as a prelude to winter but it is presented as season of fruitful joy. 8

In the first stanza of the ode, autumn is described as a season of “mellow fruitfulness”. In referring to autumn and the sun working together reinforces Autumn as a time of warmth and plenty. The vines are weighted down due to the fruit that they bore and all fruits are ripened by the warmth of autumn. Autumn encourages the growth of different varieties flowers, which the bees prefer drawing nectar from, for their extra sweetness.

In the second stanza, the poet personifies autumn as a goddess often seen sitting on the granary-floor. It seems to him, as a woman is doing the taxing work of winnowing the chaff from the grains, while the breeze ruffles the locks of her hair. The second personification implied by the poet is that he considers autumn as a reaper who, during reaping, is so overcome by the drowsiness-inducing smell of poppies, that she fell asleep while the next row of corn remains unreaped, or it is depicted as someone who watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples.

The third stanza moves towards the more painful questions such as the withering of spring, but the poet consoles himself by saying that autumn possesses its own beauty and its own music. At twilight, the "small gnats"9 hum above the shallows of the river, lifted and dropped by the wind, while "full-grown lambs" bleat from the hills while the crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden whereas swallows who are gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

8 For further elaboration, refer to appendix: Ode to Autumn 9

A small insect which are found flying in thick clusters in marshy places in the evening

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The tone of tragedy is momentarily alluded by the poet, in order to emphasize on the loveliness of autumn. Hence we can conclude that most of his odes are based on his specific undercurrent sadness and grief, which makes his poetry so unique amongst the romantic poetry.

In this poem, Keats pays homage to a particular goddess- Autumn. The selection of this season alone, 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 the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss at the end 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 the reader 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.

Conclusion:

In the end, we can say that it is quite correct to say that the genius of poet is matured in the warmth of grief and there is no poet who can serve as a better example for this statement than John Keats. His life was fraught with pain and he wrote his best Odes in the last years of his life when he was fighting a loosing battle with tuberculosis. He also dealt with heartache when he fell in love with Fanny Brown and that love never came to be. Not only did he face extreme hardships in his personal life, but his work was a subject of constant criticism during his short life.

Most of his Odes reveal the inner pain and anguish he suffered, which he considers is an important part of life of a poet, because pain and sufferings are essential to nurture the soul of a poet, making him different from an ordinary human being.

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Appendix

Word Count (Excluding poems): 1,484 words.

Ode to Melancholy:

1. Form:

"Ode on Melancholy," the shortest of Keats's odes, is written in a very regular form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza is ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter.

The first two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme, ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas.

As in some other odes (especially "Autumn" and "Grecian Urn"), the two-part rhyme scheme of each stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well, in which the first four lines of each stanza define the stanza's subject, and the latter six develop it. (This is true especially of the second two stanzas.)

2. Themes and Background:

If the "Ode to Psyche" is different from the other odes primarily because of its form, the "Ode on Melancholy" is different primarily because of its style. The only ode not to be written in the first person, "Melancholy" finds the speaker admonishing or advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode; presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience.

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In many ways, "Melancholy" seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes-the Greek mythology of "Indolence" and "Urn," the beautiful descriptions of nature in "Psyche" and "Nightingale," the passion of "Nightingale," and the philosophy of "Urn," all find expression in its three stanzas--but "Melancholy" is more than simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at last explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of "Urn" and achieve the deeper understanding of "To Autumn." For the first time in the odes, the speaker in "Melancholy" urges action rather than passive contemplation. "Ode on Melancholy" originally began with a stanza Keats later crossed out, which described a questing hero in a grotesque mythological ship sailing into the underworld in search of the goddess Melancholy. Though Keats removed this stanza from his poem (the resulting work is subtler and less overwrought), the story's questing hero still provides perhaps the best framework in which to read this poem. The speaker has fully rejected his earlier indolence and set out to engage actively with the ideas and themes that preoccupy him, but his action in this poem is still fantastical, imaginative, and strenuous. He can only find what he seeks in mythical regions and imaginary temples in the sky; he has not yet learned how to find it in his own immediate surroundings. That understanding and the final presentation of the odes' deepest themes will occur in "To Autumn."

(SOURCE: SparkNotes - Keats’s Odes: Ode to Melancholy)

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Ode to Autumn:

1. Form:

Like the "Ode on Melancholy," "To Autumn" is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as opposed to ten in "Melancholy", and each is metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and rhyme scheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and the second line rhyming with the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme scheme: The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzas are arranged CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second part offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic division is only very general.)

2. Themes and Background:

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 lovely description 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.

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"To Autumn" takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows the person’s reverence to Autumn.

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting "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.

As the speaker knew in "Melancholy," abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. 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. The development the speaker so strongly resisted in "Indolence" is at last complete: He 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.

(SOURCE: SparkNotes - Keats’s Odes: Ode Autumn)

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REFERENCES

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http://www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=103692

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http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/melancholy.html

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http://www.123helpme.com/search.asp?text=Horation+Ode

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http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/new_criticism/new_crit3.html

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Autumn

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

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