8 John Keats’s Poems

Dr. Smita Naik

John Keats: John Keats was prominent figure in Romantic era. He portrayed the passionate and ardent emotions with his creative imagination. The present module covers some interesting facts about his life and the substance and analysis of his poetry. So we talk about three of his poems, Ode to Nightingale, to Autumn and The Fall of Hyperion; two of which are beautiful odes and the third being the reflection of the process of Keats becoming the mature poet.

John Keats (1795-1821): Some Interesting Facts about His Life

John Keats was one of the leading poets of the second generation of Romantic poets along with P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron as his contemporaries. A prominent feature of John Keats was that he was very sensitive to criticism and had an extraordinary ability to transform all criticism into inspiration. His development as a poet was rapid as well as particularly individualistic. During his short literary career he wrote poems which are fondly read, enjoyed and studied even today. All his literacy works were published in last four years of his life and his reputation grew substantially after his death.

John Keats was the eldest of four surviving children born to Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings. Though there is no clear evidence of Keats‟ exact birth place, he is thought to be born in Moorgate, London. Uncertainty also lies in his birthdate, Keats and his family seems to have marked his birthday on 29th October, baptism records give the date as 31st. His father worked as a hostler at the stables later on became a manager at Inn. His parents were unable to afford Eton or Harrow and so he was sent to John Clarke‟s School in Enfield, close to his grandparent‟s house. The almamater played a crucial role in sharpening his sensibilities. The liberal outlook and progressive curriculum molded the capabilities of Keats. Edward Holmes described Keats‟ volatile character, “always in extremes”. At the age of 14, he won his first prize for poetry. When Keats was eight years old, he lost his father. His mother married again but soon left the new husband and shifted the family to the custody of grandmother. At 14, Keats lost his mother too, started apprenticing with an apothecary. For almost three years he stayed in the attic of the surgery which is considered to be the placid time of his life. Soon finishing his apprenticeship with surgeon he took an admission to medical field. It seems that actually at that time Keats had desire to become surgeon. Gradually more time being spent on medical career he could devote less time to writing which was his soul‟s call. He became ambivalent about his medical career. Though he got the license to practice as an apothecary and physician-surgeon, he resolved to become poet. „O Solitude‟, „To My Brothers‟ and „Calidore‟ are few of his early poems. His first collection of poetry was influenced by Leigh Hunt. In 1817 he shifted to Hamstead, where he met Coleridge. Keats made a mention of one of the special walking detours of him with Coleridge. In June 1818, Keats started a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake district, which he could not continue due to his failing health. Like his two brothers, Keats also suffered from tuberculosis infection, his family disease. There was a phase in his life where his poems were not accepted and criticized severely by critics. John Lockhart quipped with biting sarcasm, “It is better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes.” Keats intently grieved, continued writing till his poems received critical acclaim. Keats was very close to Isabella Johns whom he befriended in 1817. In 1818 he first met Fanny Brawne with whom he developed an intimate relationship. Their love remained unconsummated, as he was struggling poet, which resulted in depression , darkness and disease. In 1820, he left for Rome, as was suggested by his doctors to shift to warmer climate. This did not work and he passed away in February 1821.

Shelley and Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review‟s scathing attack of „Endymion‟. Keats died at the age 25. Though not well received by contemporaries, today he is one of the most admired and studied British poet. His reputation rests on a small body of work he produced. His admirers praised him for thinking „on his pulses‟, for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: “Loading every rift with ore” (Wikipedia).

His development as a poet was expressed fervently by him in his energetic self-analysis in his letters. He was extremely well read and his letters record his critical impressions about variety of writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Dante, Boccaccio and others. His impressions about Shakespeare deserve a special mention. He habitually refers to the example of Shakespeare in his letters when he seeks to demonstrate a sudden insight into the nature of poetic creation. When he coined and propounded on „Negative Capability‟ in 1817, he again refers to Shakespearean example.

“When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Above all he was a creature of impulse moving to a dedicated absorption and adaptation of stimuli through a process of intellectualization and poetic articulation” (Sanders, 386).

Keats always portrayed his immediate experience into poetry drawing images and metaphors from nature, painting, sculpture and other arts. He was an endless experimentor with form and metre as the high-flown essays in sub-Shakespearean historic drama usually favoured by his contemporaries.

To the end of his shore career, it was a disappointment which inspired the notions of self-denigration and disintegration implicit in his choice of epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. His poetry was thus full of sensuousness, aesthetic and humanitarian beauty.

1. Introduction

An ode is an exalted and sustained lyric with a greater theme and longer lengths and Ode to a Nightingale is no exception to this. It is the finest expression of Keat‟s genius, where one finds his inner self. Keats wrote eight odes out of which The Ode to a Nightingale, is with other three (the Ode on Grecian Urn, the Ode on Melancholy and the Ode to Autumn) is among the most magnificent achievements of English verse. There is the note of sadness striking through the haunting music of Nature and Art, the vivid joy of the perceptive life, the ideal permanence of art, the glamour of romance, the benison of Nature‟s varying moods contrasted with the mutability of life and the transience of pleasure”. (Goodman, 142).

According to one of Keats close friends Charles Brown, in the spring of 1819, a nightingale had built her nest near his house, in Hamstead where Keats was living with him then. Keats was mesmerized and felt tranquil and continued joy in her song and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree where he sat for two or three hours. He returned with a bunch of papers full of his drenched impressions about the song which later on was arranged into stanzas to be formed as this ode.

2. Substance and Analysis

The nightingale experiences a type of death but does not actually die. The singing bird lives through its song. One has to accepts that pleasure cannot last and death is an inevitable part of life. With a wonderful vein of imagination the contrast between immortal nightingale and mortal man is portrayed. There are eight stanzas with ten lines each.

In stanza I, the speaker says that with the impact of the bird‟s song his heart aches and this ache is pleasurable, he feels as though he had drunk hemlock, the poison which Socrates took or some drug (opiate). The pain he feels is not because he envies the bird but because he is too happy after listening to his song. The poet also remembers the river Lethe and feels that he has drunk from it and forgotten all the memories. The poet goes on to compare nightingale to Dryad, a female nymph in trees and says that it sings in full-throated ease sitting all day long there in the trees.

In the IInd stanza, the poet longs for the vintage wine, which will have floral taste. Good wine needs to be kept cool. For Keats, the earth is like a giant cellar. The poet wants to distill the earth down to its powerful intoxicating essence. Hippocrence is a fountain of muses, the group of eight women who inspire struggling women. The poet‟s ernest wish is to drink and disappear with nightingale in the jungle so that he forgets his worries and enjoys the mirth.

Stanza III beautifully brings forth the poet‟s desire to fade away far into the jungle quietly and forget the hurries and worrries of mundane world. The poet compares the material world with the beautiful world of nightingale .Here people groan, complain against each other, they are sad, dissatisfied all the time, with a growing age, they become bald, have grudges against each other and their lives are full of sorrows. Time is a villain here as with passing time, beauty fades away, youth becomes old. he says, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow”. Any thinking leads you to sorrow and despair. Neither beauty, nor love can survive here for long.

“Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow”

Love like beauty is fickle and does not last more than couple of days.

With the every new stanza, the poets experience becomes versatile and elegant and stanza IV and V are the perfect blend of this. The poet wants to fly with the bird with the wings of poetry; he knows that he cannot rely on Bacchus, the Greek God of wine or his pards or friends. Poesy‟s wings are „viewless‟ (invisible) but more powerful than confusing realms of brain. The poet becomes one with the bird and takes the experience of „tender is the night‟. Nightingale lives in the thick jungle where the moonlight is not reaching in the trees and it is the magical and mystically elated world. It is a kind of dream like world he has created in which he is feeling happy. There is a kind of soft, pleasant fragrance (incense) in the atmosphere. He is guessing these trees-the grass, the thicket, white hawthorn and others.

The poet experiences the wonderful feeling of being in spring and summer and being surrounded by musk-rose, violets and enjoys the solitude. The stanzas are seamlessly connected with each other. The last three stanzas ( VI, VII & VIII) portray the poets‟emotions beautifully. Keatsean poetry appeals to all the senses. From sights and smells he turns to sounds, and says that he is trying to listen the darkness. In this ecstatic experience, he does not feel bad to die. The obsession with the idea of death is striking, to the extent that he calls it „rich to die‟. For a moment after his death also, the bird would keep singing as if nothing had happened, this reveals the themes of the poem as death is the only thing certain though the pleasure and happiness in nightingale‟s song is also true and divine. The poet calling himself „Sod‟ also highlights the mutability and futility of life that finally thus all things are going to end and go to the soil.

The poet calls the bird immortal and the song is such a divine as Ruth also must have heard his song. The another image is of a casement on a ship which is magically opened with the impact of the bird‟s song but surprisingly suddenly the bird is done and abandoned on wide sea as it flies outside. The word „Forlorn‟ calls up a train of other associations which wake him from his dream. The song of the nightingale fades away in the distance and the poet returns to his conscious real life state, half dazed. Everything becomes topsy-turvy and we do not understand what is real and what is fancy. The poet concludes with the rhetorical question where he himself is puzzled.

The ode progresses through the series of precisely delicate evocations of opposed moods and ways of seeing, some elated, some depressed, but each serving to return the narrator to his sole self and to his awareness of the release from the unrelieved contemplation of temporal suffering which the bird‟s song has offered.

Summary

Thus the poem portrays the mesmerizing song of nightingale and its impact on poet. The nightingale experiences the death, but does not actually die and lives through its songs.Death is inevitable and pleasure does not last. The poet tries to compare the mortal and the immortal.

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To Autumn

INTRODUCTION

To Autumn was written in September1819. In this ode, the tensions, oppositions and conflicting emotions are diminished amid a series of dense impressions of a season whose bounty contains both fulfillment and incipient decay. There is an intensification of life and natural ageing and dying. The following comment by Keats himself shows the theme of this ode very clearly, Keats wrote to John Hamilton Reynolds, “How beautiful the season is now- how fine the air- a temperate sharpness about it! Really, without joking, chaste weather! Dian Skies! I never like stubble fields so much as now- aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow stubble- field looks warm in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday‟s walk that I composed upon it. (Goodman 156)

SUBSTANCE & ANALYSIS

The three stanzas depict the gradual rise of thought. In the first stanza, Autumn is viewed as the season itself, doing the season‟s work, bring all the fruits of the earth to maturity in readiness for harvesting. He says that autumn and the sun are bosom (best) friends plotting how to make fruits grow and ripen crops before the harvest. The ripening will lead to swell the ground (dropping seeds and growing plants) and that will set the stage for blooming spring flowers. Beesbuz around the flowers ceaselessly as they think that the season will last. They are busy in clammy cells (inside soft moist space) of flowers seeking nectar.

In the IInd stanza, Autumn, personified in woman‟s shape is present at the various operations of the harvest and the vintage. The poet depicts the scene after the harvest, the granary, where the harvested grains are kept. As most of the work is done, autumn can take nap in the fields. Autumn has been personified as a woman whose hair are soft and lifted by a gentle wind. The real autumn is in winnowing where grains and chaff are separated from each other. Like in Ode to Nightingale, in his poem also there is a reference to poppy seeds. Autumn is resting and watch ciders (juice/ intoxicants oozing out. (squizzed).

In the last stanza, the close of the year is associated with sunset, the songs of springs are over and night is falling but this sense of sadness is merged in the feelings of the continuous life of nature. It renews itself in animals, insects and birds and harks the optimistic note and hope in the end. All the sights and sounds produce a veritable symphony of beauty. The poet alludes to the pastoral tradition of singing and merry making. The poet describes the barred clouds, they appear to be in bloom. It is sunset time (soft dying day). The buzzing gnates is compared to choirs and it contributes to the musicality of the poem. While concluding this poem, we notice many animal images, full- grown lambs, cricket‟s singing, birds whistling, and twittering swallows.

This is an unconventional appreciation of the season autumn. For Keats autumn is „season of mists and mellow fruitfulness‟, the positive note. He understands youth and age are complementary, to each other, ripeness, death and rebirth is the cycle of life.

Commenting on the popularity of Keats‟ odes Bridges says, “Had Keats left us only his odes, his rank among the poets would not be lower than it is” (Goodman, 142). His odes are the honest reflection of his innermost mind. Though they are sometimes joyous, sometimes pensive, they are natural and self- contained. Beauty is cultivated to its highest degree.

SUMMARY

Thus the poem is most anthologied poem,depicting the beauty of the season Autumn.The poet has described how does the nature celebrates the season of Autumn.Death and rebirth is the cycle of nature.

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THE FALL OF HYPERION – A DREAM

1. INTRODUCTION:

The Fall of Hyperion – A Dream is Keat‟s epic poem written in 1818 and in 1819. This poem was started by Keats in 1818 with the title “Hyperion”, left it unfinished, started it again in 1819 and it is an attempt to define the position of poetry. The poet has to define the position of poetry. The poet has his dream like other men but unlike common men, being a poet he remembers it and saves it from obscurity. Unlike fanatics, poets are dreamers, far-sighted and imagine and create wonderful future with their visions. This helps common men (who are scientists sometimes) to bring those visions into reality. The poem is full of allusions and references. It was influenced by three major previous works like Milton‟s Paradise Lost, Dante‟s Divine Comedy and Virgil‟s Aeneid. There are explicit considerations on truth, beauty, imagination and poetry by Keat‟s, in this poem. The present poem being longer and rich in allusions has been divided into some parts for analysis.

2. SUBSTANCE:

The poem runs in 540 lines: Canto one being little longer consists of 479 lines and Canto II is little short, consists of 61 lines. There are two frames the narrator‟s Dream of Moneta, Goddess of Memory (Mythological references, discussed later) and her narrative of the fallen gods. The power once failed is taken over by others .The narrator seems to be uncertain. The poem is subtitled as “A Dream”. It seeks to rehearse a dream both like and unlike that of a „fanatic‟. Actually the poets and fanatics express a great affinity and as a part of which form have many commonalities. This affinity is troublesome, though the writing is not. Keats express „pity‟ that the dreams of fanatic and savage have not achieved articulation. He says, “Poesy alone can tell her dreams” (line 8). He further, says that every man who is nurtured in his mother tongue would speak. The poets unlike fanatics have optimistic visions of future. Further he thinks that he was standing where there are trees from various countries with various climes, like palm, myrtle, oak, sycamore, beech and what not!! There is a beautiful arbour, summer fruits, a feast which he enjoyed and drank a transparent juice and had a dream after that which he saw in the deep slumber as a result of that drink. He describes the place in detail and tries to fathom what exactly is the place. He says there was „Forgetfulness of everything but bliss‟ (line 104) suddenly there is a voice which says that if he cannot march ahead, he will die there, his flesh, bones will wither there. He felt the tyranny and tried hard to move on further steps which was near impossible. He felt a kind of numbness and heaviness. He asks for forgiveness and what can be done to avoid and overcome that moment of death? The voice of high prophetess says that the poet has powers to feel his death and he can go back now and live. Then the voice speaks about the other thousands who die on the first step and are complaining nature in their life instead of living it fully. Ordinary mortals are not visionaries like poets.

Thou art a dreaming thing (168). It explains that he is different from all the others.

“…..sure poet is a sage;

A humanist, Physician to all men.‟‟ (189-90)

The voiced figure further asked him

“Art thou not of the dreamer tribe ?”  (198)

Further hazed the poet asks for the identity of the voice. She says, “I Moneta, left supreme/ sole priestess of this desolation”. She was mourning on the battle (228-9).

She says that my power is curse to me and I am deep in pain but your eyes look like you are free from all pain. The poet peeped in the dark secret chambers of her brain to understand what pain she is going through. He saw Saturn‟s temple. It was a weird atmosphere, stream went voiceless Saturn‟s realmless eyes were closed. He had bowed head to seek some comfort from his ancient mother earth. It is the feeling of „being lost‟.

The poet says,

“Saturn! look up and for what, poor lost King?”

I have no comfort for thee; no not me; (354-55) “….

Saturn, sleep on, while at thy feet/ weep” (371).

There was grieving atmosphere. The frozen God bent his head to the earth and the Goddess was weeping at his feet. And then comes the description how he was deep in grief 401-452.

There is Thea engrossed in grief. Canto I ends with Moneta‟s speechless, deep grief.

Canto I ends on a melancholy note and it is deepened in Canto II. Everywhere there is grief. Even the natural element like wind is blowing the unhappy chords.

…. It (wind) blows legend laden through the trees. (Canto II, 6)

It is such a huge and lofty woe that mortal tongue (common beings) will not be able to pen it down or scribe it or pronounce it. Titans, lost and grieved groaned far the old allegiance once more. The only ray of hope is blazing Hyperion.

He, “still sits, still snuffs the incense teeming up

From man to the sun‟s God: yet unsecure” (II, 1617).

Hyperion is aching, he has a lofty, valorous, bright palace, there is gold, bronze and he savours the poisonous brass and metal sick.

Saturn, awakening from his icy trance goes into deep woods. Hyperion blessed by her powers by Mnemosyne rose high with his flaming robes. Hyperion is risen powerful and given a roar while reinstating this the Poet says,

“…. As if of earthly fire

That scared a way the meek ethereal hours

And made their dove wings tremble. On he flared” (57-61).

The Titan‟s only hope, the sun god Hyperion, with its flaming robes steaming beyond the heels gets ready for resistance.

3. ANALYSIS:

In the poem there are two strands – poets little lengthy prorogue and Moneta‟s account of fall of the Titan‟s and new order of Gods. This explores the idea of the influence of suffering on the imagination of a modern poet. There should Grieving Saturn be a vision and understanding in the poet to understand the giant agony of the world. Moneta‟s tale of the past, as it begins to emerge, serves to illuminate and reinforce what the poet has already partially discovered in his vision. The poem the Fall of Hyperion begins with the clear distinction between dreaming fanatics of religions, which Keat‟s had rejected and the poet seeking new cosmos with his vision. The poet goes beyond Miltonic or Dantean vision in describing nature of evolution “It seeks to balance the darkness the misery, the ruin and the disillusion with the still uncertain hope that the suffering and responsive poet may yet find his voice. It is Keat‟s most triumphant declaration of his independent self-hood as a poet.” (Sanders, 390).

The idea of old power being replaced by new, beauty, knowledge, vision and experience are quite similar and show affinity to Romantic ideals. We find the idea of „truth‟ very strikingly. The tension between material representatives and inner visions is revealed. The poem is concerned with pleasure and pain. The suffering leads to wisdom. There is a reference to money also. Intentionally or otherwise, there is a symbolic economy. Woodhouse comments on the poem, “It has an air of calm grandeur that is indicative of true power.” (wikiversity).

4. ALLUSIONS AND REFERENCES:

This poem has various references and allusions. Hyperion in the title The Fall of Hyperion is a mythological figure. He is a Titan, son of Uranus and Gaea, father of Helios (Sun), Selene (Moon) and Eos (Dawn). The word Titans has also an allusion.

Titans are any of the sons of Uranus and Gaea including Coeus, Crius, Cronus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Oceanus. Another mythological reference is Moneta. Moneta is a Goddess of memory and an epithet of Juno called Juno Moneta. Moneta is also the source of the word „Money‟. Saturn is seen as the God of generation, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation and later development also the God of time. His reign was the golden age of plenty and peace. But in the present poem he appears as the fallen General of defeated Titans.

5. SUMMARY:

The poem is about beauty, truth, imagination and romanticism. It depicts how poets are different from fanatics. They imagine a better future for the world. In the second Canto, Moneta portrays the fallen Titans. Hyperion is their only hope. She allows the poet to witness a vision of the Titans and of Hyperion. In the end Hyperion rises and gets ready to soar.

Reference

1. Abrams M.H. The Mirror and The Lamp.London: OUP, 1971.
2. Bowra C.M. The Romantic Imagination.London: OUP, 1963.
3. Daichess David. ACritical History Of English Literature,IInd edi. Vol IV,New Delhi:Allied Publishers Ltd.
4. Ryan Robert M. The Romantic Reformation Cambridge Studies in Romanticism,32.Religious politics in English Literature 1789-1824: Cambridge University Press,1997.
5. Shinde Jayprakash YCMOU Understanding Poetry,The Romantic Poetry.Nashik:Vadnere Rajendra,YCMOU Press.