department of english maharajah krishnakumarsinhji bhavnagar university
Topic:-Critical note on john Keats’s odes
paper no.5:-romantic age
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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.
