“Keats’s Odes of May 1819 articulate a Profoundly Divided Se

The poetry of John Keats articulates an astonishing literary liturgy, which has influenced much of the study of nineteenth century literature; though during his short lifetime he was deemed to be a ‘lower class cockney,’ and an ignorant, unsettled ‘pretender’ to a higher culture. Barnard (1999) asserts that Keats is one of the great English romantic poets, whose prime belief was in art and beauty. The most famous of Keats’s poems, the Odes, can be seen to reflect the notion that he was a poet preoccupied by the nature of imagination and that these Odes are the ‘product of the reaction of his poetic faculties to the facts of his experience’ (Finney 1936:3).

The Odes, Ode To Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on Indolence and To Autumn were written in a period of around two weeks in May 1819. These short romantic poems can be seen to be linked both structurally and thematically by a sequence of closely related problems and, as an effect, show Keats both at his most vulnerable and possessing the literary genius he has subsequently been accredited with. These works, although they have been subject

ed to much critical analysis, remain the ‘ultimate expression of Keats’s genius’ and as such ‘secure his reputation as a great poet.’ (Englishhistory.net). The Odes are poems of imaginative meditation, exploring the reaction of Keats to an intense contemplation of an object, creature or mythical goddess (Hollindale 1988:54). These all signify for the writer an understanding of his own predicament both as a human being and as an artist. The Odes themselves reflect a development of his thoughts and emotions; and hence are pliable to accommodate differing significances. They are, it can be said, a contemplation and overtly subjected response to a reading of a particular human condition. Keats hence goes about teaching the reader of his own humanity and identity, which can be grasped, from his own experience. As a group, the Odes show the reader a centralised experience. They contemplate and demonstrate to the reader the absolute and indescribable intensity that is endured procures pain at its core. They aim to show how Keats experiences the world around him and how he aims at constructing this world for himself. These two are polar opposites and show to great extent the profound and deep intensity with which Keats constructs his poetry. In doing this, he unveils a deeply divided self. The odes, as Hollindale (1998:57) states, show this to a magnificent effect as Keats rejects notions of diminished consciousness and turns away from the ‘escapist consolations of death, narcotic slumber, drugged unconsciousness and forgetfulness’. Keats appeared as a poet who, through his art, escaped the ‘sordid and disturbing environment of nineteenth century life’. In its place he created and evolved a picturesque world, ‘painted in colours and felt intensely through the senses’ (Ford 1945:32). Keats’s poetic strength did not lie merely in unfolding vast narratives of Gods, but in his ability to record with ‘thin skin sensitivity’ (Watts 1988:15) these heightened moments of personal experience.

The Odes are all illuminated by one another but whether read individually or as a whole go deeper into Keats’s personal psyche than merely formal or superficial correspondences. Ultimately for Keats, his ideal poetry involved a terrible burden, through which the distinctions between joy and pain became intoxicated with one another (Pettet 1957:353). He searches for images which will suspend the processes of age and decay and carry him easily through the apt of poetic imagination; combining him with stability and peace. These contrary experiences, which Keats lavishly describes, can be understood as being real and true to the author. He moves from the unrelenting realities of living, but returns when he must; hence showing two kinds of truths. In the return to the real world he shows how profoundly divided his worlds are from an honest, yet deeply and resolutely painful standpoint. Keats’s unattainable reality is recurrent throughout his Odes. He contemplates the perfect images of reality in the world he desires but instead this journey becomes corrupted and brings him directly back to the evident absence of these desires; and as readers we are aware that he feels the need to question “Was it a vision or a waking dream?…Do I wake or sleep?”

These poems grasp at common and inconsolable senses of loss and alienation of where they belong. As the poems sees it reality, they discover that reality is absent, merely wished for and essentially unattainable “Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well.” What at one moment seems real comes a moment later to be receding illusion. The Ode on Melancholy expresses the fundamental sensation of ‘drowsy numbness;’ and eventually ascertains that Keats makes a sights movement towards the acceptance of a certain level of pain in human life; ending powerfully with “His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.” This complex and paradoxica

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