The Dialectics of Beauty and Melancholy i Keats' Odes

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:SuperviseeAhmed LAHMAR

A final project submitted in partial fulfillement of the B.A degree in English literature

:SupervisorPr .Omar BSAΪTHI

C.N.E : 2321877831N d’insc : 14704

Academic year : 2005 / 2006

Dedication

I am so indebted and grateful to my supervisor Dr. Omar BSAΪTHI whose help

and advice were a motive for me to fulfil this researchI offer the fruit of three years of hard work to my beloved mother and father whose love and affection have been, and still, the elixir

my life to my grandmother FadmaTo the spirit of my deceased grandparents

Ahmed LAHMAR

The dialectics of beauty and melancholy in Keats' odes - Ahmed LAHMAR

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Introduction

April 21st, is the day that witnessed the birth of the firstKeatsian ode, which is that of to a psyche. This announced a new poetic period in Keats life. A period which knew, in addition to the changes in the level of poetic creativity, many psychological problems and disturbances. Keats's psychological state, at the time, was in bad conditions, series of crises, depressions and indefinite feelings of sadness and (sometimes) madness. The pains that Keats experienced during his life, his deep reading of the human literary heritage and the richness of his imagination, were behind the magic of his odes.

In this research, I will be dealing with the theme of melancholy in Keats' odes, since it is the pot in which all the "sub-themes" are melted and I will be dealing with beauty and how he did illustrate it. This does not mean that it is a thematic study or approach towards the odes, but it is an attempt to analyse and examine the ways in which he incorporated both melancholy and beauty to his odes in that way to his odes.

Indeed, the process of explicating those odes involves different variables that are to be taken into account; one of them is the socio-cultural background of the poet, which is a debatable issue in modern critical approaches. Honestly speaking, I prefer, when studying literature, to isolate the text from any external factor, believing that the text is to be studied from inside and not from outside, because the writer cannot reflect his life in a photographic way, neither can he be totally out of his human experience.

No two people can claim their complete understanding of a literary text, no matter how it seems easy, because literature and poetry in particular does not explain thing, but it rather provides a symbolic language and opens widely the door of interpretation and criticism. Hence, when dealing with Keats' odes, I found


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myself in a dilemma, and wondered whether to include the biographical and socio-cultural background of the poet or not; especially that the odes as mentioned before, were written in a specific period of Keats' life.

After a deep thinking in this mater, that really worried me , I decided to shed light on some relevant biographical elements before moving to the stage of critical analysis.


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I – Keats' socio-cultural background

John Keats' was born in Finsbury pavement, near London in October 31st, 1795. He had a sister and three brothers, one of them died in infancy, when john was eight years old. His father, who was working as a stable-keeper, was killed in an accident. In the same year, his mother married again, but little again divorced from her husband and took her children to live with her mother. John attended a good school where he became well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature.

In 1810, his mother died, leaving the children to their grandmother. In 1814 john left school and became a student of medicine in London. Under some circumstances, he sacrificed his medical ambitions and devoted himself to poetry and its beautiful madness. He soon became acquainted with the poets of his age and published his first poem in a magazine.

After receiving a negative feed-back, Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight on his own in spring 1817. First signs of his fatal disease forced him to go back to England1, where he found his brother seriously ill. In December 1818 Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead hath, where he lived in the house of Charles Brown. Keats son made the acquaintance of Mrs. Brown and her sixteen years old daughter Fanny. Since the ladies were still living in London, John fell in love with Fanny. Being absorbed in love and poetry, he exhausted himself, and in autumn 1819, he tried to gain some distance from literature through an ordinary occupation after the composition of the odes.

In February 1820, his life knew a new period. He couldn't enjoy the positive reaction of the readership after the publication of his first volume "lamia and Isabella", including his most famous odes. Keats was suffering from a bad sore throat and had to be shipped back to London. This experience was very

1 G.S.Fraser, “John Keats’ odes”. Macmillan, 1970. p: 446


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influential on Keats' ideas about life and poetry. In the late summer of 1820, his doctors ordered him to avoid the English winter and move to Italy, his health improved temporarily to collapse finally2, he died in Rome on 23 rd of February, 1821. The following line was engraved in his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ (written) in water".

Keats' poetic life can be divided into two main periods, the first one is that of the "pre-odes" period which is characterized by his serious attempts to create his own poetic personality and remain individual in the way he conceptualizes the existence. He composed many poems and sonnets but he was known for the second period in which he composed the odes3, to which we will come back in an extensive and more detailed way. He spent many years studying Greek mythology and reading literary classical and contemporary masterpieces

What made Keats' life more tragic is his love story and his inability to reveal his feelings to Fanny, to whom he wrote an ode (Ode to Fanny), despite they were living under the same walls. Anyway we cannot call it a story since love was aroused only from the part of Keats while Fanny was not even aware that she inspired a magician. Soon later, an other lady stole his heart and inspired him "bright star". This one is called Mrs. Jones4.

2 Ibid, p : 3813 John Halloway, “the ode of Keats” in “John Keats’ odes”, G.S.Fraser. p : 1664 Robert Gittings, John Keats: “the living year”. London: Heinemann, 1978. p: 25


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II- Beauty and melancholy in the odes

1) What are the odes?

The term ode in Oxford dictionary stands for a long poem that speaks to a person or celebrates an event. If we apply this academic definition to the odes of Keats, we will find out that he used the preposition "to" to refer to the destination of his speech , or , in other wards, to whom he is addressing his message . A close scrutiny here proves also that he used a sort of narration of events and description of the concrete and the abstract, which enhances the feeling that he didn't go beyond the common meaning of the term .yet, his use was objective and pictorial in a manner that did not empty the word from its inherited significance and further connotations. But "Ode" became closer to the term "song" rather than "poem" that is suggested by the literal interpretation.

Keats wrote more than ten, but only eight of them were published, namely: To a nightingale, On melancholy, On indolence, To autumn, To Fanny, On the sonnet and On a Grecian urn. They were all written between April and June, 1819, except To autumn which he composed in September. Those were written under the pressure of pain and illness: “they make up a psychological document an unexpected one of unique interest”5

and “speak of desires and yearnings, of possibilities and impossibilities, of the joys of imagination and the frustration of human state”6 .they, above all, explore internal conflicts and the problems of the human psychology.

The odes are explorations of these preoccupying conflicts and it is important to realize that they are the mature expressions of a number of deep-seated anxieties, so that the occasions in which they were written come as

5 John Halloway, “the odes of Keats” p : 1666 Kenneth Muir, “the meaning of the odes” in “John Keats’ odes” p: 223


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unbidden yet appropriate moments, containing with themselves an essential presentation of the idea which the poet had the genius to perceive and make into great art… the odes are rich because they contain material from many areas of Keats’ sensibility7.

To make things clearer and more practical, I chose only four odes to illustrate what has been said. Indeed, the criterion upon which I based my choice was the relevance and the artistic value. This does not mean that those that are not chosen are not of a unique importance and relevance. But, the ones chosen are more representative

2) The incorporation of beauty and melancholy in the odes

2.1) Ode to a nightingale

The nightingale ode in Keats’ nightingale ode is not only used as a symbol of the imaginary world in which he longs to live , but it is also an intimate companion in his solitary life and journeys of exile . a semantic and semiotic approach towards this poem proves that the poet is addressing his message to a potential partner which is the nightingale, this may be proved by the repetition of : “thou”, “thee”, and “thy”. This technique (the personification of the elements of nature) which is used by most romanticists, such as Edgar Alan Poe in his “the raven”, including Keats’, makes the reader closer to the poet’s aims by dramatising the events of the poem in a poetic way.

The poem opens by revealing the poet’s “heat aches” and “pains”, and then he affirms that his happiness goes back to the happiness of the bird “not through envy” of him. Keats’, who was not satisfied at all with his life, says that he “might drink and leave the world unseen” and “fade away into the forest dim” with the nightingale by flying on “viewless wings of poesy”. Many

7 J.R Watson, English poetry of the romantic period 1789-1830.London & New York: Longman.1985. p:280


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critics consider Keats and some f his contemporary romanticists as escapists because they couldn’t cope with the harsh dictations of their lives. In the fifth stanza we discover that the sense of sight was suppressed in favour of the other sense, the poet was not seeing what is around him, but rather he was feeling it an experiencing that sort of connection with nature and its elements.

The theme of death is also extensively tackled throughout the ode, despite the ambiguity that surrounds it. Death accompanied Keats since his childhood (the death of his parents and his brother Tom), so he believed that it is the destiny of all mankind, but the fact of being “half in love with easeful Death” and calling “him soft names in many a mused rhyme” to “take into the air” his “quiet breath” reveals much and speaks up for how sorrowful his life was. As we mentioned before, Keats couldn’t cope with reality and complexity, so death, at least, would set him free and help him gain some peace of mind. He contrasted the mortality ofthe mankind with the immortality of the bird “whose art is endlessly changeable and renewable”. The last stanza is Keats’ coming back ticket to “his sole self”, but still, he wondered whether his journey was “a vision, or a waking dream?”, after that music fled.

2.2) Ode on a Grecian Urn

This ode states many paradoxical possibilities such as being closer to the beloved and unable to kiss her, preferring the unheard music to that which is heard and the association of beauty and truth as though they were two faces of the same coin. The ode opens by the description of the ode as “unravish’d bride of quietness” and as a historian (story teller) who “canst thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than” the poet’s rhyme (poem). This stanza seems to be introductory to the following ones since it raises many questions that are either discussed or left unanswered:


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In the tempe or in the dales of Arcady?What men are gods are these? What maidens loth?What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy.8

With the second stanza we move to the world of the urn to examine to what extent it represents the values given to it by the poet in the first stanza. But as we go along the paradox of unheard music breaks our reading hypothesis. How can silence be melodious if it is below the “heard”? The song does not cease, the lover cannot leave his song, the maiden is supposed to be kissed but actually never kissed, just like the urn (unravished), still new, untouched and not ravished even by a kiss and perhaps the beauty of the Urn and the maiden springs from this fact. The last verse of this stanza (the 2nd) “forever wilt thou love, and she be fair” came as a conclusion and a judgement: Forever the lover will love the maiden, and forever she will be fair, beautiful and more importantly unravished (this verse perhaps has something to do with Keats’ inability to reveal his love to the women he knew). So, neither love nor music were achieved.

The third stanza, as various critics pointed out, recapitulates earlier motifs, the melodist and the lover reappear. It (this stanza) seems to be a sort of pause or a break for Keats to go back in the later with. The repetition of the word “happy” is very significant here, it recapitulates the previous stanzas. The fourth stanza forms a contrast with the previous ones; it emphasizes communal life rather than individual desires and yearnings. It is an other story told by the “sylvian historian”, we don’t know the occasion of sacrifice nor the town from which the celebrants came.

This stanza (the 4th) raises many questions and every single word in it suggests more than one connotation. The image of the silent and desolate town can embody both pain and joy; these two themes seem to “co-exist” throughout the stanza. In the fifth

8 Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1st stanza


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stanza the poet remembers the Urn as a whole vision an we don’t know whether he is involved in the life of the Urn or he is just an observer ; perhaps the Urn “dost tease us of thought as does eternity” refers again to the “dull brain” that “perplexes and retards”. Again the idea of out-of-body experience repeats itself, eventhough there isn’t much emphasis on it, like the nightingale ode. Hence, the Urn ode does not seem to be a temporary escape as the nightingale ode seems to be. The beautiful truth and the true beauty, as mentioned before, break the reading hypothesis and represent the climactic point of the poem. Much was written on this poem, but none of the critics claimed the legacy of his analysis. Anyway some of them suggested that this statement may be said either by the Urn “since it is quoted” or by the poet himself, and it is in knowing the speaker that we can attempt to understand the statement. T.S.Eliot called these lines “a blemish on a beautiful poem and the reason must be either” he “failed to understand it, or it is a statement which is untrue”.9

As in the nightingale ode, the poet wants to create a world of pure joy. But what differentiates the two odes is the two different ways of life that the poet tackled (imaginary and individual lifeVs down to earth communal life).

The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is significantly different. It is an indoor not an outdoor poem and it deals with art and not nature. It belongs to the part of Keats’ mind which responded eagerly to the Engin marbles and to all other Examples of great art: its style, in consequence is subtly altered… The “Ode on Grecian Urn” has a network of sound patterns, of assonance, of deliberate echoes, all of which suggest that the poet was aiming for a purposeful effect.10

2.3) Ode to a psyche

9 Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’ sylvian historian” in “John Keats’ odes” . p: 13210 English poetry of the romantic period 1789-1830, p : 284


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The basis of the story of the psyche ode is a Greek myth. Psyche was the youngest and the most beautiful daughter of a king. She was so beautiful that Aphrodite, the Goddess of love and beauty, asked her son Eros, the God of love (the winged boy in the poem) to punish her for being so beautiful. But Eros was so startled by Psyche’s beauty that he picked himself with an arrow and fell in love with her. Eros summoned psyche to his palace but he remained invisible to her, coming to her only by night and ordering her never to try to see his face.

Keats opens this poem by asking Psyche to hear his words. He probably saw her wondering through the forest that very day, they embraced each other with both their arms and their wings, and though their lips did not touch, they were close to each other that they were ready “past kisses outnumber”. The poet says he knew the winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He answers his own question, she was Psyche. Then, in the second stanza, the poet describes her as the youngest and the most beautiful of all the Olympian Gods and Goddesses despite the fact that Psyche had none to worship: she has no temples, no altars and no chair to sing for her. In the third stanza the poet afire that he can be Psyche’s chair, music and oracle. Then he continues declaring that he will become Psyche’s priest and build her a temple in an “untrodden place” of his mind, a region that will be surrounded by thought and resembles the beauty of nature. Finally, he promises her that the window of her adobe will be left open so that her winged boy can come in.

In this ode Keats discovered a Goddess to worship since he dedicated himself to be her temple, her priest and prophet at the same time. It is (this ode) a song of love and creative imagination, it represents something between “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode to a Nightingale”. He wrote a letter contextualizing it:

The following poem, the last I have written is the first and the only one which I have taken even moderate


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pains, I have for the most part dash’d off my lines in a hurry.11

Again the theme of escapism seems to dominate the poem. This time through fancy, imagination and madness. Keats perhaps, when composing this ode, was suffering from a sort of alienation and boredom that’s why he chose such imaginative journey in the dreary areas of the self to explore hidden things. Fancy in the elixir of life of this ode and almost all the odes. Escape and again escape, but escape from what? No doubt from melancholy, a feeling that changes essentially the perspective from which the one sees life.

2.4) Ode on Melancholy

In a critical essay entitled “the ambiguity of melancholy”, William Empson12 affirms that the ambiguity of the melancholy ode resides in the paradox it represents:

Opposite notions combined in the poem include death and sexual act… the conception of the woman as at once a mistress and a mother, at once soothing and exiting, whom one must master, to whom one must yield13.

The way those contradictions are associated and stated makes direct appeal to the logical habits of the mind:

But when the melancholy fit shall fallSudden from heaven like a weeping cloudThat fasters the droop- heades flowers all And hides the green hill in an April shroud14

For Keats, weeping produces the flowers of joy which are themselves sorrowful, the hill is green and young, fresh and

11 Kenneth Allot, “the ode to psyche” in “John Keats’ odes”. odes p: 195 12 Wiliam Epson, “the ambiguity of melancholy” in “John Keats’ odes”. p: 14613 Ibid. P : 14714 Ode on melancholy, 2nd stanza


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springing, and April’s mouth is both rainy and part of spring time. Either “Give rein to sorrow, at the mortality of beauty” or “defeat sorrow by sudden excess and turn it to joy at the intensity of sensation . Morning is parallel to April and pun with morning. The flowers stand at once for the more available forms of beauty and for the mistress at the meantime:

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows Imprison her soft hand, and left her rawAnd feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes15

The mistress that Keats speaks about is so in the beginning because it represents some degree of joy

She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die

However, taking this verse as a meaningful unit proves that this joy will not last long. This is an other instance of the co-existence between joy and “veiled melancholy”; she is veiled because only in the mistress of her ambivalence, true joy isfound. The mistress has become joy and melancholy, but above all, she remains a mistress.

This ode is the only one written in he first person and the use of the imperative mode to advise sufferers of melancholy springs from the fact that this advice is the result of a hard-won experience which deserves being taken into account. It is a synthesis of al the odes, the passion and the fancy of the “Nightingale”, the philosophy of the “Urn”, and the beautiful descriptions of nature in the “Psyche”. Hence, it explores also the nature of life and the connection of pleasure and pain.

15 Ibid


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III –Beauty and melancholy, any correspondence

The first question that came to my mind when I chose to work on this challenging topic was: How did Keats manage to unite beauty and melancholy. The attempt to answer this question needs, to my understanding, a deep semiological and semantic study of the text to see what connotations every paradigm (within a syntagm) can suggest.

But, assuming that my research is only an attempt to examine the ways in which Keats did incorporate both beauty and melancholy into his odes, I did rely on my own explication and on some critical essays that are of a unique relevance.

Most critics consider Keats’ odes as philosophical texts since they raise unprecedented existential and philosophical questions such as that of the “Grecian Urn”: “beauty is truth, truth is beauty…”

For Keats, no beauty leaves such an impression, strikes so deep, or links the souls of men closer than beauty. He went for the platonic conception of beauty which associates beauty with virtue, good with wisdom; “On a Grecian Urn” illustrates clearly this idea. Beauty and truth are interchangeable throughout this ode. However, the emphasis was also put on the co-existence between beauty and pain; the infatuation with life despite painful moments that the one experiences. Beauty depends on the perspective from which we see life not on life itself. Yet, Keats tackles it with a tone of sadness and disappointment.

In fact, it was difficult to contextualize beauty within Keats’ odes. If melancholy is, essentially, a theme that governs almost all the odes beauty is not so; it is a value given by the poet to the elements of nature that he describes (autumn, Grecian Urn, nightingale….). He has a more delicate perception of the beauty than common people. The “Grecian Urn” presents, in fact, the


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same world as the world of passions, a world which is introduced to us by art:

In addition to these problems of the existence of the imagination in some middle state-neither in heaven nor on earth-these is the further difficulty of the coexistence on earth of beauty and pain.16

Melancholy, as the Oxford dictionary provides, id a deep feeling of sadness that lasts long and this applies to a further extent to what the odes suggest:

Do you see ho necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school in intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse way?17

What differentiates Keats from his contemporary romanticists is the difficulty, the complexity, and the variety of hardships that made him feel and experience pain. Hence, he keeps shifting from optimism to pessimism and the other way around. He sometimes reveals his love and infatuation with life, but in some other cases he affirms that “the best way to live is to die”

Melancholy is the pot in which all the themes are melted. It is the common characteristic. Horror of death, failure of love, and the collapse of dreams are factors that aroused melancholy in Keats. Melancholy is seen in love as in joy, pain and death. It satisfies him since:

His soul shall taste the sadness of her mightAnd be among her cloudy trophies hung

16 “English poetry of the romantic period” 1789-1830, P : 28017 “John Keats : the living year” , p : 131


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Conclusion

In fact it was not an easy matter for me, as a little critic, to deal with one of the greatest poets of English literature. But, I considered this task as a challenge that I have to find a solution to regardless of the modesty of my knowledge in the field and the difficulties that I encountered in the process of my research.

Keats remains, in my opinion, the greatest poet of all the romanticists of his age. Not only because his odes were of a unique artistic value, but because he came up with new meanings, suggestive of different connotations and somewhat difficult to decode and interpret (if we want to speak in semiological terms).

His poetry has been, and still, a rich raw material for critics to work on, and regardless of what interpretations they suggest, the odes will always remain controversial, ambiguous, and beautiful; neither Keats could turn his emotions and depressions into clear words, nor could we interpret his words , and here lies the magic and beauty of great poetry.


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Bibliography

- Fraser, G.S. John Keats’ odes. London: The Macmillan Press, 1971.

- Gittings, Robert. John Keats, London: Heinemann, 1970.

- Gittings, Robert. John Keats: the living year, London : Heinemann, 1978.

- Watson, J, R. English poetry of the romantic period 1789- 1830. London & New York: Longman 1985.

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………..1

I – Keats' socio-cultural background…………………2

II- Beauty and melancholy in the odes…………….…5

1) What are the odes?...................................................5

2) The incorporation of beauty and melancholy in

the odes………………………………………...……..6

2.1) Ode to a nightingale……...……...………….6

2.2) Ode on a Grecian Urn……...….……………7

2.3) Ode to a psyche……………......……………9

2.4) Ode on Melancholy………..…………...….11

III –Beauty and melancholy, any correspondence.....13

Conclusion…………………………………………..15

Bibliography………………………………….……..16

Documents

The Dialectics of Beauty and Melancholy i Keats' Odes