外
國
語
文
學
系
國
立
中
山
大
學
，
碩
士
論
文
國立中山大學外國語文學系
濟
慈
一
八
一
九
年
頌
詩
中
的
憂
鬱
及
憂
思
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
碩士論文
National Sun Yat-sen University
Master Thesis
濟慈一八一九年頌詩中的憂鬱或憂思
Melancholy or the Melancholic Mood in John Keats's 1819 Odes
研究生：徐葆權
Pao-chuan Hsu
研
究
生
：
徐
葆
權
指導教授﹕陳福仁 博士
Dr. Fu-jen Chen
中華民國 103 年 7 月
102
學
年
度
July 2014
，
國立中山大學外國語文學系
碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
Master Thesis
濟慈一八一九年頌詩中的憂鬱或憂思
Melancholy or the Melancholic Mood in John Keats's 1819 Odes
研究生：徐葆權
Pao-chuan Hsu
指導教授﹕陳福仁 博士
Dr. Fu-jen Chen
中華民國 103 年 7 月
July 2014
i
摘
要
憂鬱或憂思乃濟慈一八一九年六首頌詩中的重要主題之一。前人研究多著重
於濟慈憂鬱美學之討論，然少有對其頌詩中憂鬱機制之發展及詩人與失物之和解
的討論。本論文以精神分析方法切入，探討文本中憂思如何影響詩人。在五首春
季頌詩中，濟慈開展對其失落的閒散之追尋。受其夢般幻象影響，濟慈於「賽姬
頌」
、
「夜鶯頌」及「希臘古甕頌」中追索相對應之夢中形象－－愛情、詩歌、野
心，最後卻失敗，且更受古甕之為詩人分身之死亡威脅。詩人無法處理古甕，故
而在「憂鬱頌」中建立一隱喻之話語系統，以隱喻對抗死亡。然該隱喻系統卻又
令詩人耽於永生之幻象中。於「閒散頌」中，詩人依然無法逃離夢中的三位形象，
因其已成為詩人與失落的閒散和自在的憂思之間的唯一聯繫。最終，在「致秋天」
中，詩人從憂思下解放自我。藉由將秋天擬人化，詩人最終以語言面對謎般的大
他者，重得慾望之動機，並克服半年以來影響其甚巨的憂鬱。
關鍵詞：濟慈、精神分析、憂鬱、佛洛伊德、克里斯德娃
ii
Abstract
Melancholy, or the melancholic mood, is one of the major themes in John Keats's
1819 odes. Many studies focus on the aesthetics of Keats's melancholy, but the
development of the poet's self-melancholizing mechanism in the odes and the
reconciliation between the poet and his lost object are less discussed. This thesis
approaches Keats's melancholy in psychoanalytic methods, probing into the texts to
investigate how the melancholic mood arrests the poet. Indeed, The poet, disturbed by
his dream-like vision with the three figures—Love, Poesy, and Ambition—begins his
quest for the lost indolence in the spring odes. From "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a
Nightingale," to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats pursues the three figures in their
corresponding odes, but in vain. The poet then even faces a death threat from his
imaginary urn-doppelganger. Unable to deal with the urn, the poet develops a
metaphorical language structure to defend himself against death with a series of
metaphors in "Ode on Melancholy." The metaphorical language, soon, overwhelms
the poet and drowns him in the illusions of eternal life. And therefore, in "Ode on
Indolence," the poet has failed to escape from the three figures, for they are the only
connections to the lost indolence and the easeful melancholic mood. However, in "To
Autumn," the poet frees himself from the melancholic mood. By personifying
Autumn, Keats confronts the enigmatic Other with his language, recovers the cause of
desire, and finally redeems himself from his melancholic mood that troubles him in
the first half year of 1819.
Keywords: Keats, psychoanalysis, melancholy, melancholia, Freud, Kristeva
iii
Table of Contents
論文審定書……………………..................……………………………………..
i
中文摘要…………………………………………….................…………….…...
ii
Abstract………………………………………..……….................……………. . iii
Chapter 1: Introduction………………………….................……………………
1
Chapter 2: "Away! Away! For I Will Fly to Thee": Keats's Quest for
Melancholy in the Spring Odes……………………..........................………..… 22
Chapter 3: "No, No, Go not to Lethe": Keats's Suicidal Behaviors and
the Desire for Eternity ………………………..................…………………..…. 44
Chapter 4: "Where Are the Songs of Spring? Ay, Where Are They?":
"To Autumn" and the Spring Odes
………….................…..…………..……. 64
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Keats's Resolutions to Melancholy ……….................. 79
Works Cited ………………….................……………………………..….…… 93
iv
Chapter 1: Introduction
John Keats's odes of 1819 span almost half of the year. According to the dates of
composing and the relationships between the odes, the 1819 odes are generally
divided into two separate groups. One is the Spring Odes, including "Ode to Psyche,"
"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode on
Indolence," which are written across the whole spring of year 1819 with short
intervals; the other is "To Autumn," which is written in Fall. Besides, the emotions in
the two ode groups are distinctively different. The Spring Odes mostly present strong
passions, painful struggles, and a melancholic mood while "To Autumn" replaces the
agony of the other odes with a light-hearted tone. For such differences, which further
imply the resolution of the a melancholic mood in the Spring Odes, "To Autumn" by
itself has earned a whole chapter in this thesis as the Spring Odes are discussed twice
in two separate chapters due to their close relations.
Speaking of the relationships between the six odes, this thesis indeed greatly
owes Helen Vendler. Vendler in her The Odes of John Keats maps the cross-referral
relationship of the odes:
My context for the odes is consequently all of Keats's previous works; but I
believe that the most important context for each of the odes is the totality of
the other odes, that the odes enjoy a special relation to each other, and that
Keats, whenever he returned to the form of the ode, recalled his previous
efforts and used every new ode as a way of commenting on earlier ones. We
may say that each ode both deconstructs its predecessor(s) and consolidates it
(or them). Each is a disavowal of a previous "solution"; but none could
achieve its own momentary stability without the support of the antecedently
constructed style which we now call "Keatsian." (6)
1
Vendler, in her own words, intends to perform a "conjectural reconstruction of the
odes as they are invented, imagined, put in sequence, and revised" (1), associating all
the odes together with a deconstructive-consolidating structure. Vendler here sheds a
new light for reading Keats's odes of 1819. Although reading the poems individually
may grant a view of the poet's melancholy, Vendler's method further offers one extra
temporal dimension. By interpreting the odes in sequence, it is possible to trace and to
map out the development of the poet's melancholy in each period of the odes. But, as
Robert Kaufman criticizes, Vendler risks to "dissolve a previously foregrounded sense
of expressive selfhood" (364). Arguing the context for each ode to be "the totality of
the other odes" (6), Vendler indeed reinforces the relationship between an individual
ode and the other ones, manifesting the sense of "expressive selfhood" (Kaufman 364)
for the odes, but simultaneously represses such sense for she reads the odes as a whole
constructive structure "in sequence" (1) which hardly allows any space for each of the
odes to expend their selfhoods. To Kaufman, Vendler's "formalist defense" (356) for
both Keats's formalism and her "reconstruction of the odes" (Vendler 1) just exposes
how the Frankfurt analyses of (Neo-)Marxism deal with nineteenth- and
twentieth-century literature, aesthetics, and the dialectical tradition (356).
In addition, Vendler, in her own words, tends to narrate the tale of "a brief seven
months in Keats's artistic life—a period extending from March to September 1819,
from his first conception of the Ode on Indolence to his completion of the ode To
Autumn" (6) in her book. Her interpretations of the odes, according to herself then, are
oriented toward the understanding of the poet. Another setback of Vendler's method is
hence self-evident. Vendler's structure and her readings of the odes close onto a
certain pre-determined person—the poet, especially the formalist Keats. To use
Vendler's method on interpreting Keats's melancholy thus may cause three problems
which I admit may still be evident in this thesis. First, the structure itself undermines
2
the significance of individual odes, emphasizing the sequence as a "totality" (6).
Second, the structure assumes the odes are totally related to one another, and therefore
in the process of the "reconstruction" (1), which involves deconstruction and
consolidating, the structure may repress possible excessive, unrelated elements for
consistency. Third, the structure focuses on the poet. Inevitably, to comprehend the
odes in sequence touches the poet himself, for the temporal axis in the structure of
odes overlaps with the poet's life in the year of 1819. Today, thanks to numberless
Keatsian predecessors who have worked on the texts, letters, and biographies of the
poet, to have a genuine picture of Keats's life and thoughts in 1819 is no more an
issue. Like Vendler who accounts her knowledge of the poet himself for biographies
(7), my understanding of Keats's life depends on several reliable resources: Robert
Gittings, who insists on finding "the true origins of even the most often-repeated
events and the most familiar story" (19) of the poet in his John Keats; Aileen Ward,
who in her John Keats: The Making of a Poet offers some psychological view on the
poet's thoughts; and Albert Elmer Hancock, who in his John Keats: A Literary
Biography presents Keats according to the sequence of the poet's works. However,
this thesis is not for understanding the poet himself through the odes, but for
analyzing his melancholy. Although it is impossible to totally separate the poet's life
from his works due to the temporal dimension of the structure, to keep the poet is to
expose him to the analytic examination, especially when the methodology of the
analysis is psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis serves as the critical framework of this thesis for the investigation
of the poet's melancholy or a melancholic mood in the odes. In the field of
psychoanalysis, to discuss melancholy will inevitably encounter two of the greatest
psychoanalysts: Freud and Kristeva. In 1916, Sigmund Freud, in a short essay "On
Transience," has first mentioned mourning, stating that mourning occurs when "libido
3
clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute
lies ready to hand" (3096), and when it has "renounced everything that has been lost,"
the libido is freed from the lost object, and mourning respectively ends (3097). Later,
in 1917, Freud further divided melancholia from mourning in his "Mourning and
Melancholia":
The correlation of melancholia and mourning seems justified by the general
picture of the two conditions. Moreover, the exciting causes due to
environmental influences are, so far as we can discern them at all, the same for
both conditions. Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved
person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,
such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same
influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently
suspect them of a pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that,
although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life,
it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to
medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time,
and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful. (243-44)
For Freud, melancholia is rather pathological in comparison to mourning. But since
both conditions are generated from the same source—the lost object of love, and the
"environmental influences" (243) are all the same, whether a person should develop
melancholia or mourning seems to be very case-dependent. Symptomatically, the
melancholic present several distinguishing mental features:
The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful
dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love,
inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a
4
degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and
culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (244)
Indeed, except for the "disturbance of self-regard," most of the symptoms are the
same as the symptoms of mourning. In other words, the decisive difference between
mourning and melancholia falls here on the disturbed self-regard, or ego. For Freud,
the melancholic fails to redirect the libido from the lost object onto a new one, but
instead "served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object,"
and hence object-loss is transformed into an ego-loss (249).
However, the Freudian analysis on melancholia remains problematic when
applied onto Keats's odes. Clearly, Freud has labeled melancholia as "pathological"
(243) and mourning as non-pathological, or in other words, "healthy." The binary
opposition of melancholia the illness and mourning the healthy, as Freud constructs in
the essay, allows no space for ambiguity or dialectics. To distinguish whether the
subject of diagnose is ill or healthy relies on the observation of the subject's
symptoms and self-representations. What Freud offers in "Mourning and
Melancholia," hence, is a diagnostic structure in which the subject is examined for the
illness named melancholia. Exposing Keats to such a diagnosis is obviously
unnecessary and improper. The aim of this thesis is never to discover whether Keats is
sick or not, but to explore the relation of the poet's melancholy and his odes. Also,
since the "Keats" this thesis may refer to is just the "Keats" during March to
September in 1819 and mainly the "Keats" presented in the odes, no matter in terms
of time span or the amount of data, to diagnose the poet as having an illness is never a
proper analysis.
Julia Kristeva in her Soleil Noir, or Black Sun, basically applies Freudian view on
melancholia with several modifications. Unlike Freud, whose discussion of
5
melancholia focuses on the binary opposition of melancholia and mourning, Kristeva
investigates more into the relation between melancholia and art:
A written melancholia surely has little in common with the institutionalized
stupor that bears the same name. Beyond the confusion in terminology that I
have kept alive up to now (What is melancholia? What is depression?), we are
confronted with an enigmatic paradox that will not cease questioning us: if
loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and
nourish it permanently as much as they threaten it and spoil it, it is also
noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow
has been repudiated. The artist consumed by melancholia is at the same time
the most relentless in his struggle against the symbolic abdication that blankets
him . . . [until] death strikes or suicide becomes imperative for those who view
it as final triumph over the void of the lost object . . . . (8-9)
In terms of "loss, bereavement, and absence" (9), Kristeva states that melancholia, or
depression, both drains and enriches artistic imaginations. But for Kristeva, what is
lost, bereaved, or absent is not a Freudian object of love, but rather the "Thing" as
"the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion,
seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated" (13):
Ever since that archaic attachment the depressed person has the impression
of having been deprived of an unnamable, supreme good, of something
unrepresentable, that perhaps only devouring might represent, or
an invocation might point out, but no word could signify. Consequently, for
such a person, no erotic object could replace the irreplaceable perception of a
place or preobject confining the libido or severing the bonds of desire.
Knowingly disinherited of the Thing, the depressed person wanders in pursuit
6
of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats,
disconsolate and aphasic, alone with the unnamed Thing. (13)
Kristeva indeed echoes Freud's observation on the melancholic patients' senses about
what they have lost. Freud states that, in some cases, the patients feel "justified in
maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred," but is unable to see what
has been lost, and Freud supposes that the patient "cannot consciously perceive what
he has lost either" ("Mourning and Melancholia" 245). Freud explains that the patients
are unable to sense what they have lost because the loss in melancholia is
"an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness" into the unconscious (245).
The Freudian unconscious object-loss, actually, still attaches the subject to certain
supreme lost objects; Kristeva, on the other hand, with the "Thing" frees the subject
from a fixed subject-object relation but further emphasizes more on the subject's
feeling of loss and the inability to reach the lost "Thing" as the real. The subject in
melancholic relation to the "Thing," in Kristeva's own words, is the "depressed
narcissist" (13). Kristeva points out that the sadness of the depressed narcissists points
to a "primitive self" which is incomplete and empty, and therefore the narcissists will
only find themselves suffering from a "fundamental flaw" or a "congenital
deficiency." Hence the depressed narcissists' sadness is "the most archaic expression
of an unsymbolizable, unnamable narcissistic wound" (12-13). Kristeva further
suggests that, for these narcissistic depressed persons, sadness itself is the object that
they attach to:
For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is really the sole object;
more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, an object they
tame and cherish for lack of another. In such a case, suicide is not a disguised
act of war but a merging with sadness and, beyond it, with that impossible
7
love, never reached, always elsewhere, such as the promises of nothingness, of
death. (13)
Unable to reach the "Thing" that they lost, the depressed narcissists instead attach to
their sadness as a substitute; in other words, they are in love with their own sadness.
Comparing to that of Freud, Kristeva's understandings on melancholia fits better
as a critical framework. Unlike Freud who directly states that melancholia is
pathological, Kristeva avoids the binary opposition of illness and health by
intentionally blurring the boundary between melancholia and depression and not
"distinguishing the particularities of the two ailments but keeping in mind their
common structure" (11). Even when the analysis of the work cannot but touches the
author, Kristeva can still prevent herself from improperly accusing the author of
having melancholia as an illness. In addition, the "Thing" not only frees the subject of
analysis from a subject-object relation, but also saves the analysts from locating the
lost object for the subject. The Freudian way lures the analysts to find the origin of the
patient's melancholia—the repressed lost object, but even if there were such an origin,
several works of the patient and a short period of the patient's life is indeed
insufficient to reach it; besides, it also simplifies the complexity of a person to find a
transcendental object from which all the patient's writings and life is originated.
Kristeva's way, on the other hand, does not intend to find the ultimate object but
focuses on the feeling of loss the subject presented or represented in the work, and
therefore is better for inspecting the melancholic mood in Keats's odes. However,
Kristeva's method has its own problems: the most distinct one is its highly feminine
tendency. At the very beginning of her discussion on feminine depression, Kristeva
states:
Being caught in woman's speech is not merely a matter of chance that could
be explained by the greater frequency of feminine depression—a
8
sociologically proven fact. This may also reveal an aspect of feminine
sexuality: its addiction to the maternal Thing and its lesser aptitude for
restorative perversion. (71)
For Kristeva, the "Thing" seems to be maternal, on which feminine sexuality is
attached, as Janice L. Doane and Devon L. Hodges in their "Kristeva's Death-Bearing
Mother" further explain:
Yet [the different problems men and women might have with separation
from the maternal object] is an important question for Kristeva, who asserts
that whole "matricide is a vital necessity" for the psychic health of both men
and women, women find it enormously difficult to murder the mother. They
remain enthralled by the "Thing," suffering from what is obviously the "dead
mother complex" . . . . Because women identify with the mother that they have
encrypted within themselves, they too feel dead. (61-62)
The two critics comment that Kristeva has "gendered" a neutral system of
interpretation (61) for dealing with the daughter-mother relation, which Kristeva
in Black Sun provides both theoretical and clinical evidence to prove it
pathogenic (62). Besides, even though she uses the melancholy/depression composite
to avoid emphasizing pathological implication, by proving the daughter-mother
relation pathogenic, Kristeva still exposes her assumption that melancholy/depression
is rather related to illness.
To analyze Keats's melancholy with both Freud's and Kristeva's methods, this
thesis must avoid the problems in them. In this thesis, Freud's interpretation of
melancholia still serves as a diagnosis, but the subject to be diagnosed is not Keats
himself. Instead, this thesis only probes into the odes to locate the symptoms of
melancholia. Upon discovering the symptoms in the text, this thesis will then seek the
help of Kristeva's melancholia/depression for a structural support. This methodology,
9
indeed, could be rather arbitrary and subjective to judge whether the poet is in a
melancholic mood, but with this Freudian-Kristeva compound, the analysis may only
refer to the "Keats" persona which speaks for the poet in the odes, rather than the
actual John Keats. In addition, for avoiding the Freudian pathological accusation of
melancholia, this thesis, in terminology, uses rather "melancholic mood" to define
melancholy as an emotion or feeling of loss to be resolved rather than an illness to be
cured. Besides, although borrowing Kristeva's understandings on depression and
melancholy, this thesis aims only to discover the melancholic tendency in Keats's
odes. Since Kristeva in combination of feminism or gender may trigger discussions
upon the maternal function in a mother-child relation, this thesis refrains from
including both feminist or gender arguments in case of distraction.
Except for Freud and Kristeva, this thesis also uses Slavoj Žižek's works to
supplement the discussion on melancholy. According to Žižek, desire and melancholy
are structurally the same: both are about "the awareness that no positive object is 'it,'
its proper object, that no positive object can ever fill out its constitutive lack" (The
Plague of Fantasies 81). Žižek also in his "Melancholy and the Act," briefly discusses
his concepts on melancholy:
From this [Lacanian] perspective, the melancholic is not primarily the
subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning, but
rather the subject who possesses the object but has lost his desire for it because
the cause that made him desire this object has withdrawn, lost its
efficiency. Far from accentuating to the extreme the situation of the frustrated
desire, of the desire deprived of its object, melancholy rather stands for
the presence of the object itself deprived of the desire for itself.
Melancholy occurs when we finally get the desired object, but are
disappointed in it. In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment at all
10
positive, observable objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) effectively
is the beginning of philosophy. (662)
Žižek, like Kristeva, suggests that what is lost for the melancholic is not the object of
desire but rather the cause of desire (662). Though Kristeva associates melancholy
with the deprived "archaic attachment" and the "Thing" (Kristeva 13), Žižek
emphasizes more on the loss of the cause of desire.
There are still other works that investigate Keats's melancholia or melancholy
with psychoanalytic method. However, most of the study focuses on only one or
several odes rather than deal with the whole sequence, such as Thomas Pfau, who in
his Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790-1840, maps the
conceptual development of melancholy in great detail and discusses the poet's earlier
works. However, Pfau hardly investigates into the odes that this thesis chooses to be
the primary texts, except for "To Autumn":
Much ingenuity may and has indeed been expended to discern
"iconographical details" (Keach 194) in "To Autumn" from which to draw
conclusions about its author's likely preoccupation with and disgust at the
recent Peterloo massacre in Manchester on 16 August 1819. Yet, however
momentous and disconcerting in its day, it is the very particularity of that
calamitous event that also renders it ill suited as a semantic framework for the
carefully stylized, melancholic imagism of "To Autumn" with its insistent
juxtaposition of sensual plenitude and barren emotions, a pungent material
world encoding a denatured psyche. (341)
Clearly, Pfau is against the popular concept that "To Autumn" is in relation to
Peterloo massacre. Besides, Pfau highly values "To Autumn" for the ode's "carefully
stylized, melancholic imagism" and "insistent juxtaposition of sensual plenitude and
barren emotions" (341). However, Pfau does not give any explanation for his
11
comments, and he does not linger on "To Autumn" anymore, despite the time that he
discusses Chatterton with Keats.
Except for the critical framework, there is still another framework in this thesis.
Helen Vendler, in her The Odes of John Keats discusses the odes in the sequence of
"Ode on Indolence," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian
Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn." Other critics, like Beachy-Quick Dan,
also follows this sequence. Fundamentally, I agree that the odes should be discussed
in this sequence. However, in this thesis, I modify the sequence to be "Indolence,"
"Psyche," "Nightingale," "Urn," "Melancholy," and "Indolence." Since Keats himself
states that "Ode on Indolence" represents his "1819 temper" (Letters 116), I believe
that the ode itself may serve to be the framework of the other odes, and hence it
deserves to be discussed in this thesis.
"Ode on Indolence," written as late as in June, concludes the history of the poet's
melancholic mood during earlier months in the same year. In Keats's letter to Sarah
Jeffrey on June 8, the poet writes that "you will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell
you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence"
(Letters 116). The ode, for Keats himself, represents his mood in the first half year of
1819, and the writing process of the ode is enjoyable.
The writing process of "Ode on Indolence" takes perhaps the whole 1819 Spring.
In the poet's letter to George Keatses on March 19, Keats mentioned that three
masked figures, which he recognized as Love, Poesy, and Ambition, had bothered
him in his vision:
This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I
long after a stanza or two of Thompson's Castle of indolence. My passions are
all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the
animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this
12
side of faintness. . . . In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are
relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that
pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither
Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have an alterness of countenance as they pass
by me: they seem rather like three figures on a Greek vase—a Man and two
women—whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement.
This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body
overpowering the Mind. (Letters 78-79)
With Keats's letter to Sarah Jeffrey, this letter in March suggests that the poet had had
the stimuli for the ode as early as in March, but he finished the poem in June. In
addition, while writing "Ode on Indolence," the poet also composed the other Spring
Odes. "Ode on Indolence," then, in the ode sequence serves as the background that
underlies the other Spring Odes. However, in the poet's 1820 volume, "Ode on
Indolence" was not included; in fact, the poem remained unpublished until
1848—years after the poet's death. If the ode can represent his "1819 temper" (116), if
the poet really enjoyed writing it (ibid.), if the ode is indeed the Alpha and the Omega
of the Spring Odes, it is rather paradoxical that the poet had never published it but,
instead, hidden it from other people. Furthermore, the poet even left the ode on
several loose sheets without transcribing it into a complete poem so that its first
published version was in a wrong stanza order (Vendler 20). The poet had never
revealed his reason for leaving the ode undone and unpublished. However,
investigating the development of "Ode on Indolence" with other odes may offer some
clues for resolving the mystery.
In his letter dated March 19, Keats seemed quite serene, when the three
figures—Poetry, Ambition, and Love—cannot even disturb his happiness. In contrast,
the poet in "Ode on Indolence" complains about the annoying figures:
13
How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To seal away, and leave without a task
My idle days?
.................................
O why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness? (11-20)1
Even though the poet desires indolence, which promises him bodily happiness, he is
always haunted by the shadowy figures. In other words the thoughts related to Poetry,
Ambition, and Love roam around the indolent poet's mind, and Keats aches for wings
to follow them (23-24). In the letter, however, Keats claims that his indolent
experience is a "rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind"
(Letters 79), indicating that his desire for indolence has finally overcome his mind's
non-stop merry-go-a-round, though in the ode he bids the figures farewell several
times till the end but never mentions if he has finally freed himself from them.
Keats's indolence, then, according to the poet himself, may even overpower the
poet's desire for Love, Ambition, and Poetry. As "Ode on Indolence" reveals, for the
poet, indolence is both barren and rich. It dulls the poet's senses by benumbing his
eyes (17) and preventing him from hearing "the voice of busy common-sense" (40); in
addition, the poet's temporal feeling is also affected, for his unawareness of "how
change the moons" (39) suggests that he won't notice the passing of time. Indolence
also influences the poet's self-perceptions and even implies death, for it slows down
the poet's pulses (17). Moreover, Indolence desensitizes Keats to emotions because in
1
All Keats's poems cited hereafter is from: John Keats, Keats's Poetry and Prose, Ed. Jeffery N. Cox
(New York: Norton, 2009)
14
the indolent status the poet is less sensible to either pain or pleasure (18). Hence,
indolence voidifies the poet and haunts him with barren "nothingness" (20). On the
other hand, for the poet, indolence is full of richness as the sweet Spring:
My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o'er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Tho' in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press'd a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle's lay; (42-48)
Suggesting that Keats in these two explorations of indolence borrows the language of
"death" and "birth," Helen Vendler reveals that two indolent Keatses are presented in
the ode:
The first indolent one wishes to obliterate sensation and the sense, removing
at one gesture both the sting of pain (and even the writing of death, whence he
draws the phrase "pain's sting," we might guess, given the ode's biblical
epigraph) and the flower of pleasure. But the second indolent Keats is
overbrimmed with inner and outer sensations of the most exquisite sort,
mixing the apprehension of May's tears with the luxuriating in flowers,
budding warmth, light and shade, and the poetry of birdsong. (26-27)
I agree with Vendler that the gradual muting of both inner and outer senses implies
death, and it is true that the richness of the poet's indolence is related to the joy of new
birth. However, the two "Keatses," which are of death and of birth, are rather not
opposite to each other. As Bernard Backstone states that Keats "presents sound and
silence not in opposition, but as complementary: . . . for silence is the 'ground' of
sound and above all music" (58), death, for the poet, is perhaps not in opposition to
15
birth, but is rather the locus of birth. The poet situates both himself and his language
in the indolent state of death so that he can experience the joy and richness of birth.
Indolence, therefore, is not just "a matter of listening to silence" (58), but also a
matter of dying for birth. There is indeed an in-betweeness: the poet, in his indolence,
shuts down all his senses, floating in the "dim dreams" ("Indolence" 42) that grants
him a warm, sweet illusion of Spring.
No doubt that, during the whole ode, the indolent poet refuses to be mobilized.
Although he declares that he craves to follow the three figures, he still remains in his
indolence and eventually says that they "cannot raise / [His] head cool-bedded in the
flowery grass" (51-52) of rich indolence. But is this indolence really the "indolence"
that the poet praises in the ode? Clearly, the title of the ode marks that the poem is
dedicated to "indolence," but the content focuses rather less on indolence but the three
ghostly figures that keep walking around an urn. According to Vendler, the urn in
"Ode on Indolence" is indeed the poet's doppelganger. The poet, even still in his
chrysalis, projects his internalized ambition, love, and poetry onto the urn (24).
Vendler further suggests that, in the ode, three Keatses are presented: one is the Keats
of death, another is the Keats of birth, and the other is the urn doppelganger (26). The
three Keatses, then, strives to maintain a triangular balance with one another (26).
However, I argue that here are only two Keates: one is the indolent pupal Keats
which has two faces—death and birth—at the same time, and the other is the urn that
the poet (mis-)recognizes as his mirror reflection that accumulates Love, Ambition,
and Poesy around it. The internal struggle of the indolent poet in "Ode on Indolence"
is not that of a dialectic between death and birth; instead, the two aspects of indolence
work together in response to the threat of the poet's Doppelganger. The urn, or
the Doppelganger of the poet, has disturbed the indolent poet. Since the figures are
like "figures on a marble urn" ("Indolence" 5), for the poet, the figures belong to the
16
urn rather than to him. Seeing the urn, the poet will be reminded that his love,
ambition, and poetry are not yet included in his serene paradise. Keats's sweet
indolence is therefore flawed—or, as the poet himself states, becomes an "uneasy
indolence," in which the poet has nothing to do but is "surrounded with unpleasant
human identities" who "press upon on just enough to prevent one getting into a lazy
position" but "not enough to interest or rouse one" (Letters 77).
The imperfect indolence in "Ode on Indolence" may inflict symptoms of
melancholia, which feature:
a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss
of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the
self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and
self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment
(Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" 244)
Indeed, most of the symptoms can be observed on the poet in the ode; moreover, even
the poet's attempt to retreat into his indolence is rather melancholic. When the threat
of the urn Doppelganger as well as the three figures emerges, the intimate relation
which the poet builds with his indolence is shattered and broken. However, instead of
shifting to another status that may relieve him from his sufferings, the poet still stays
in his indolent chrysalis and tries to cast the annoying phantoms away. The poet thus
cannot love his Doppelganger, and nor can he love indolence again, for the indolence
is disturbed and may never return to its former status. In the ode, even when the
figures fade away, the poet, rather than enjoying the short undisturbed indolence, cries
for "wings" (23-24; 31) to chase after the figures. For the poet, then, the "indolence"
in the ode is ever out of his reach, and the ghosts serve as the very lack for the
"indolence" that troubles the poet. When the ghostly figures are present, the poet finds
the indolence flawed; when the figures fade, the poet cannot but wants them back
17
even though he himself understand that the figures may harm his indolence. For Keats,
indolence is forever disturbed or even lost.
Unable to maintain it, the poet intends to be indolence itself. In fact, in "Ode on
Indolence," there is a suspicious identity juxtaposition between the poet himself and
his indolence. While praising the sweetness of indolence, the poet says that his soul is
a lawn full of flowers (43-44); but when uttering his complaints and adieus to the
three figures, the poet mentions that his head is now "cool-bedded in the flowery
grass" (52). In other words, Keats, trying to reject his urn Doppelganger and the
figures, withdraws into his soul, and hence the meaning of the poet's soul shifts from
the place that is shaded by indolence to the cool tranquil indolence itself. Just as Freud
observes that when identification of the ego with the object occurs, the object-loss
may be "transformed into an ego-loss" (249), Keats, upon identifying with the
indolence, should then take the loss of indolence to be the loss of his own ego. The
poet's indolent gesture is therefore suicidal. He speaks a language of death and
retreats into his ego, wishing to be indolence itself. In the end, he would lost his own
ego as leaving it barren.
Tilottama Rajan suggests that melancholy "is still pure affect: a form of
sensation rather than cognition and thus idleness rather than worklessness"
(349). Melancholy or, at least, a melancholic mood hence fits well to be the
fundamental emotion in "Ode on Indolence." However, since the ode is finished very
late as in June, it is quite arbitrary to suggest that the poet had a melancholic emotion
when he first wrote the inspirations of the ode in his letters on 17 and 19 March.
However, the letters have perhaps betrayed the poet a little bit. When Keats
mentioned his encounter with the figures as "a rare instance of advantage in the body
overpowering the Mind" (Letters 79), it is quite clear that he is in favor of his indolent
body. Unfortunately, the indolence that the poet referred to in the letter should be the
18
"uneasy indolence" (77) that he had complained about earlier. With such a disturbed
indolence, the poet has perhaps developed a melancholic mood throughout the whole
sequence of the Spring Odes.
In chapter two, then, I begin with the Spring Odes and focus on how the poet
develops his melancholic mood in the odes. Since Keats craves for his lost indolence,
in the Spring Odes, he cannot but deal with the three figures: Love, Poesy, and
Ambition, in order to recover his indolence. From "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a
Nightingale," to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet intends to immobilize or internalize
Love, Poesy, and Ambition. Especially, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet attempts
to integrate the three figures onto the urn, which in the ode is his advocate. However,
the poet in the end is rather disappointed. The figures are nevertheless out of his reach,
and the attempt to integrate the figures onto the urn enables the urn to overpower the
poet himself. Saddened, the poet plunges into a series of infinite extended metaphors
in "Ode on Melancholy," arresting himself in both his melancholic mood and the
beauty of himself in his mistress' eyes rather than facing the outside world. In "Ode on
Indolence," hence, the poet is still unable to handle his fixation to indolence and is
paralyzed in the melancholic dilemma that whether he should get rid of the three
figures or not.
In chapter three, I probe into the relationship between the poet's suicidal
behaviors and his desire to live eternally in the Spring Odes. In the odes, the poet
always shows intentions to divide himself into pieces: in "Ode to Psyche," the poet
divides his senses from his linguistic expressions; in "Ode to a Nightingale,"
especially, the poet, while pursuing the nightingale, gradually abandons his senses; in
"Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet even gives up his existence. The reason the poet
dares to do such suicidal behaviors is that melancholic mood may arouse an illusory
sense of self-completion, in which the subjects enjoy their fantasized completeness.
19
When the threatening death is trapped in the metaphors in "Ode on Melancholy," the
poet drowns himself in the joy of melancholy and hence refuses to move forward in
both aspects of language and desire.
Chapter four, on the other hand, focuses on "To Autumn." Although the poet in
the Spring Odes has been deeply imprisoned in a melancholic mood, in "To Autumn,"
the poet is rather unaffected. "To Autumn" is different from the Spring Odes in two
aspects. First, the poet personifies Autumn and allows it to act and to give away its
own music in the ode, while in the Spring Odes the addressees are just objects to the
poet's praises. Hence, unlike the addressees in the former odes, the personified season
is never trapped, pursued, or even frozen by the poet as the addresser, and therefore it
can freely interact with the imageries in "To Autumn." Second, though still applies the
metaphorical language like the language in "Ode on Melancholy," the poet does not
suffer from melancholy. In other words, the poet may have relieved himself of his
melancholy so that "To Autumn" presents no trace of melancholic mood at all.
The conclusion, therefore, consists of the poet's resolution to melancholy. The
poet's resolution to melancholy relies mostly on personification. The influence of
personifying the season in "To Autumn" lies in two related aspects: language and
desire. In the aspect of language, personifying the season urges a new language to
emerge corresponding to the new poet-Autumn discursive structure. With such a new
language, personification may further resolve the poet's melancholic stasis. The
personification of Autumn actually offers the chance for the poet to confront an
enigmatic Other. Losing the language to arbitrarily assign his subjective observations
and imaginations to the addressee, the poet's depictions of the personified season may
not precisely refer to the season: there are always features of the season that the poet
fails to grasp, or the poet's text may generate new meanings that are related to but
indeed exceed the season itself. The objet petit a, which is indeed the cause of desire,
20
just hides in these lacks and excesses. Personifying Autumn, the poet will then
confront the impossibility to fully understand the season; and since Keats does not
retreat into his language as he in the Spring Odes, but instead try to depict the season
with his words, the sense of lack, or the objet petit a, should again support the
movement of his desire.
21
Chapter 2: "Away! Away! For I Will Fly to Thee": Keats's Quest for Melancholy in
the Spring Odes
During the spring of 1819, John Keats wrote a series of odes including "Ode to
Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and
"Ode on Indolence." These odes, sharing concepts and even prepositions ("to" or "on")
in the titles, form a fabric that depicts Keats's "1819 temper" (Letters 116). Just before
composing these poems, the poet had experienced perhaps one of the most important
incidents in his life: the death of his brother, Tom, who passed away in the December
of 1818. Tom's death continually reminded Keats of the inevitabilities of life and
death and perhaps further resulted in Keats's loss of "human passion" (Letters 81)
during early 1819. The Spring Odes, therefore, are weaved with a background of
death and life. Keats seemingly adores death more by announcing that "Death is Life's
high meed" ([Why did I laugh tonight] 14), and his desire of being both physically
and mentally undisturbed has perhaps forms his thanatosis-like indolence; however,
as Aileen Ward puts it, the poet who was troubled by thoughts of death may have also
"momentarily paralyzed his drive toward 'Verse, Fame, and Beauty'" (259) and hence
might temporarily be blessed by the power of life. The poet's struggle between death
and life had then triggered his later suicidal indolence. Disturbed by the imperfect
"indolence" that "verse, fame, and beauty" continued to infect, the poet was rather
desperate and depressed, and might have developed a melancholic mood or
melancholy. In this chapter, I focus on how Keats develops his melancholic mood in
the Spring Odes. It seems that the poet has established an intimate relationship with
his death-ward indolence, and when such a relation is interrupted by such figures of
life as Love, Ambition, and Poetry, the poet cannot but start to deal with them in the
odes. The Spring Odes, then, are not just the poet's own mental struggles, but more
22
like a circle of melancholization which Keats creates as a secluded prison in which he
imprisons himself.
The poet's self-melancholizing journey begins with "Ode to Psyche." The ode is
usually concerned to be the first in the sequence of Keats's great Spring Odes
according to its finalized date. Keats, in "Ode to Psyche" and in later odes, presents
his techniques to "petrify" his addressees. The ode starts with a dream-like vision: the
poet, while wandering in the forest, finds "two fair creatures" (9), which he believes
to be Psyche and her lover Cupid. The couple, however, motionlessly lay
"calm-breathing on the bedded grass" (15), as if they are frozen by a "slumber" (18).
But the poet, at the discovery of the goddess, gives an ambiguous statement that he
sees Psyche "with awaken'd eyes" (6). This statement may suggest that both the poet
and the goddess are rather not sleeping or in dream. Hence the slumber is but the
poet's poetic vision which seizes Psyche in the eternal scene. The poet then addresses
the goddess directly and praises Psyche with two structurally similar stanzas.
However, the poet's language in the two stanzas presents irregular repetitions:
Fairer than these, though temple thou has none,
Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. (28-35)
The poet, with a great number of "no," speaks of what Psyche lacks comparing to
other Olympian deities. Though the poetic structure remains intact, the usage of
language here is rather intriguing.
23
With repetitive sentence structures, the poet may intend to outline in the ode "a
program of poetry and religion, or poetry as religion" (Hooton 46) and emphasize that
the way which Psyche is worshipped is rather different from how the other deities are
treated. Clearly, for the poet, Psyche is in lack of many dedications that are related to
visual (flowers, shrine, grove), aural (virgin-choir, voice, lute, pipe, oracle), olfactory
(flower, incense) and bodily (heat) feelings. The poet separates these feelings and list
them out as if he is to show the richness of an ideal place in which Psyche should be
praised.
Unfortunately, the ideal rich land for the goddess is impossible, for Christianity
has dominated the world, allowing no pagan religion, not to mention the rituals and
sacrifices that the poet depicted in the ode. Unable to find the dedications and to
re-establish the rituals in the outside world, the poet turns inwards for the solution.
The final answer that the poet gives, as presented in the ode, is to identify with or
even become what the goddess lacks so that he himself can satisfy Psyche alone:
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. (44-49)
But there is a crucial problem: does the goddess really need all the poet offers in the
ode? Indeed, the goddess never speaks of her needs: she is made silent and motionless,
sleeping in the poet's fantasy world. All the poet's offerings are perhaps just to trap
Psyche forever in his fantasy, for Keats even intends to be her "priest" (50) and build
a temple for her "in some untrodden region of [his] mind" (51). Identifying with the
priest now, Keats summons the goddess by the worshipping rituals into her
24
temple—his mind. Moreover, the goddess, in the poet's mind, can never escape from
the poet. Since the poet also identifies with the elements in a worshipping ritual, the
summoning effect can be rather ever-lasting.
In short, Keats not only paralyzes the goddess but also imprisons her in his mind.
For the poet, it could have been satisfactory that both his feverish love for Psyche and
the fantacized needs of the goddess can be satisfied; however, the poet desires more.
Astonishingly, Psyche is but a bait. Having the goddess in mind, the poet obviously
has another target, as the last four lines of the ode writes:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in! (64-67)
The speaker, in the very last line of the ode, has exposed that his true target is Love
instead of Psyche. Keats summons Psyche into his mind and traps the goddess in her
wonderful temple, but then he leaves a "casement" (66) open so that Love may visit
Psyche every night according to the original mythological story. In other words,
Psyche is but a mediation that associates the poet with Love. It may seem
contradictory that the poet writes an ode titled "Ode to Psyche" to praise the goddess
but, in the very end, reduces Psyche to an empty signifier that points to Love solely.
In fact, in the poem, the poet never frees Psyche from her frozen status, not to
mention allowing Psyche to speak of what she wants. The dedications that the poet
offers to her, even the ode itself, are rather part of the poet's strategy to mute the voice
and desire of the goddess herself and to further deprives Psyche of all discourses
underlying her existence but that of the Greek/Latin mythologies which associates her
with Love.
25
But if the poet really desires Love, the poet could have summoned Love to him,
as how he calls upon Psyche into his mind. Indeed, the poet cannot summon Love to
him. According to his letter to the George Keatses on 19 March 1819, the poet at then
had retroactively named one of the figures that disturbed his indolence as Love
(Letters 78-79). For the poet, though he may intend to immobilize or even internalize
Love so that he may regain his indolence, to summon Love is but to remind him of his
separation from indolence. In other words, Love now serves as the lack which
reminds the poet of his traumatic failure to maintain his indolence. Besides, it is rather
"impossible to say anything meaningful or sensible about [Love]" (Evans 105). Even
if the poet could summon Love in an ode, his language should still fail him.
Amazingly, in the original mythological story of Psyche and Cupid, Love also rejects
illuminating: any attempt to reveal the shape or face of Love is doomed to
fail. According to the story, Cupid only visits Psyche in darkness. When Psyche one
night brings light with her to see Cupid's face, the God of Love just flies away.
The poet must have fully understood that his attempt to summon or speak of Love
may never be fulfilled, for he raises Psyche to be the substitution for Love in "Ode to
Psyche." The process to immobilize and internalize Psyche is rather successful, but
the poet's passionate invitation, "to let the warm Love in" (68) may disappoint the
poet. The whole ode, hence, presents a rather melancholic situation. Slavoj Žižek
comments on melancholy that it "occurs when we finally get the desired object, but
are disappointed with it" (The Plague of Fantasies 68). In "Ode to Psyche," the poet
can have Psyche as the object of his desire, but he can never be satisfied because his
real target, Love, is always impossible for him. Unable to internalize and neutralize
Love, which he believes threatening his indolence, the poet is even forced to face the
lacks, which Love itself stands for, in his language. Frustrated, the poet might have
developed a melancholic mood, but clearly the poet still continued trying to deal with
26
the other figures that ruined his indolence. In May 1819, Keats wrote the second ode
in the sequence of Spring Odes, "Ode to a Nightingale." At the beginning of the ode,
the poet addresses the nightingale, praising the singing bird's happiness. To Keats, the
bird attracts him because it is the "voice of pure self-expression" (Vendler 81). Indeed,
being a poet, Keats may have projected himself onto the nightingale. The bird's
happiness, hence, may just be the poet's wish to use language "in full-throated ease"
("Nightingale" 10). To Keats, the nightingale's power is indeed the key to resolve his
problems with language. If he is able to use language as the nightingale, he may have
the power to bring Love into language as well as to master the art of
language—Poetry. In fact, since the poet fails to cover Love with his language, it is
rather inevitable for the poet to deal with Poetry.
Instead of fantacizing lacks on the nightingale as in "Ode to Psyche," the poet, in
"Ode to a Nightingale," assumes that the nightingale's song is perfect. Encountering
such a flawless language, the poet approaches it as if being arrested by the bird's song.
Such an arrestment, however, implies death. Listening to the nightingale's song, Keats
feels like drinking "hemlock" (2) and "opiate" (3), both are medically lethal or may
dull the poet's senses; in addition, the poet intends to drink "a draught of vintage" (11)
so that he, in a coma, may mentally "leave the world unseen" (19) for a moment and
fly away with the bird. For Keats, the "death" that the bird song suggests indeed
coincides with the indolence that he strives to maintain in "Ode on Indolence"; both
feature diminishing senses, paralyzed body, and to forget the outside world. In other
words, the nightingale's singing, or the perfect language which Keats is deeply
arrested in, inflicts both death and indolence. The poet, then, recognizes that he
cannot maintain his perfect reunion with the nightingale by alcohol:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
27
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards . . . . (31-34)
Since alcohol can only provide the death-like effect in a short time, Keats, instead,
chooses to approach the nightingale with poetry, following every flapping of the
"viewless wings of Poesy" (33). However, not all of the poet's perceptions can really
catch up with the bird, and therefore the poet starts to suspend his senses in order to
concentrate on the bird's song. Keats first shuts his "dull brain" that "perplexes and
retards" (34) because it always questions with reason and may slow down the poet's
paces toward the bird's song; in other words, the poet splits from himself an imperfect
part—thinking—so that he can keep himself with the perfect language.
Disabling rational thinking, the poet moves toward another phase of his pursuit
for the nightingale:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (35-40)
The poet, imagining that he is now with the bird, begins to "sing of" the heaven.
However, the poet soon realizes that his visual senses still remain in the real world,
which he craves so much to leave. Therefore, the poet proceeds to deal with his eyes:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
28
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. (41-50)
Understand that his eyes cannot penetrate the darkness to meet his imaginative visions,
the poet just replaces his visual perception with rich poetic imagination. Poetry,
consequently, is not just a bridge that connects the poet to the nightingale, or just a
language that the poet intends to master. Instead, it is what the poet now identifies
with. When back in "Ode to Psyche," the poet has imprisoned Psyche to internalize
the goddess; in "Ode to a Nightingale," on the other hand, the poet replaces his
perceptions with poetic imagination, making poetry part of his body. What poetry
thinks and sees, for Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale," is what he thinks and sees. The
poet integrates himself to poetic imagination, and, in the end, when every part of him
is replaced by poetry, he would finally be poetry itself.
Keats, while pursuing the nightingale's singing, diminishes himself and to
substitute his perceptions with poetic imaginations. However, such a self-diminishing
gesture arouses the comfort of death in Keats's mind:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
29
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! (51-58)
While listening to the nightingale, Keats is lulled to death. As he continues to replace
his perceptions with poetry, the poet should meet his "death" when he totally becomes
poetry itself. In addition, the poet calls upon death in poetic language to both depict
the breath-taking effect of the bird's song and to cast away his quiet speechlessness
into the air. The poet now should had the power to speak in a perfect language with
the help and in the form of poetry, as the nightingale who sings out its soul
ecstatically (57-58). Sadly, the poet realizes that at the end he still cannot have the
perfect poetry, for death threatens to ultimately separate the poet from the
nightingale's singings:
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. (59-60)
The bird won't stop singing, but the poet will not hear the perfect song again. Rather
than being the nightingale and even poetry itself, the poet may become "a sod" (60).
Keats, therefore, traps himself in a painful dilemma. On the one hand, the
nightingale, as well as poetry, lures the poet with "easeful Death" (52); on the other
hand, death will also tear the poet away from poetry and the bird's singings forever.
The whole development of the poet's struggles is like Julia Kristeva's notion of
"depressed narcissist":
Far from being a hidden attack on another who is thought to be hostile
because he is frustrating, sadness would point to a primitive self—wounded,
incomplete, empty. Persons thus affected do not consider themselves wronged
but afflicted with a fundamental flaw, a congenital deficiency. . . . Their
sadness would be rather the most archaic expression of an unsymbolizable,
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unnamable narcissistic wound, so preconcious that no outside agent (subject or
agent) can be used as referent. (12-13)
For Kristeva, the depressed narcissists turn their aggressiveness inwards, believing
that it is their own "fundamental flaw" or a "congenital deficiency" (12) which results
in their loss. Likewisely, Keats, unable to speak of Love, has experienced the lack in
language, but he then in "Ode to a Nightingale" (mis-)recognizes the lack in language
to be the flaws of himself. When the poet finds that he cannot really "surrender to the
'immortal Bird'" (Bentley 123) as the nightingale leaves him, the poet cannot but
suffers from great sadness:
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. (71-74)
The double meanings of "forlorn" (71) exhibit the poet's despair: realizing that his
effort to become Poesy is now an endless dialectic of death and life, the poet has no
choice but to refrain from his fantasies about his unity with the nightingale and retreat
to his "sole self" (72). What is worse, when the poet loses the nightingale's perfect
language, he is left with his own imperfect language. Unable to perceive and to speak
of himself well, the poet can only ask for clarifications from his audience:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? (79-80)
In the end of "Ode to Psyche," the poet desires for Love but finds that he cannot reach
it, and therefore he intends to expend his language to catch Love with his language. In
"Ode to a Nightingale," likewise, the poet desires for a perfect language, but he soon
realizes that it is his imperfection that hinders himself from pursuing the "music" (80)
of the nightingale. However, the perfect "music" (80) reminds the poet of death, hence
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the poet is impossible to really gain it. At the end, the poet cannot do anything but
only laments for his loss—for now sadness is the only "substitute object" that the
narcissistic depressed poet can be attached to (Kristeva 13).
Right after "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats composed "Ode on a Grecian Urn" also
in May. In respond to "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet in "Ode
on a Grecian Urn" presents a distinctively different strategy to deal with the Grecian
urn. Comparing to the living addressees in former odes, the object that the poet deals
with in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is initially motionless and silent:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: (1-4)
The poet, at the very beginning of the ode, apostrophizes the urn as a "still unravish'd
bride of quietness" (1), but then he threatens to "ravish the bride" (Heffernan 305) by
making her speak:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both
In Temple or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (5-10)
For the poet, the urn's silence is not "merely the silence of an object, but the silence of
an object personified" (Beachy-Quick 125). Besides, since the urn has no inscriptions
for people to speak for it, the urn cannot answer the questions but just remains silent
throughout the poem. Comparing to the narcissistic depression that the poet presents
in "Ode to a Nightingale," in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the poet's aggressiveness has
32
turned towards the Grecian urn. Indeed, the questions correspond to the themes in
"Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale." With the sculptures on the urn, the poet
raises the urn as high as being the origin of the two former odes. It seems that, instead
of continuously suffering from the impossibilities and lacks that the two odes
implies, the poet seeks to escape from the melancholic spiral by confronting the origin
of the two odes directly to relieve him from the pains fundamentally.
Indeed, the topic of the ode, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," suggests a certain critical
distance between the poet and the urn. In the former odes, "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode
to a Nightingale," the "to" in the topics indicates that the odes are directly addressing
the objects praised; however, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the "on" implies that the ode
is not an dedication to the urn, but rather the poet's observation on it. The critical
distance has freed the poet from the one-way addresser-addressee relation in the
former odes, and Keats can finally deal with his aural perception that he fails to render
in "Ode to a Nightingale":
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (11-14)
Though "[fled] is that music" ("Nightingale" 80), the poet now can still have the
"unheard" (11) one, and therefore he may suspend his "sensual ear" (13). Hence, the
poet may fully integrating himself to Poetry, and the urn should play the imaginary
music for him directly to his soul. However, Marshall Brown, in his "Unheard
Melodies: the Force of Form," sees rather a crisis in the "unheard melodies":
A crisis, then, haunts these lines. The unheard melodies really are not there,
because they have always already turned into something else. Words or
pictures, more or less, comparable or contrasting: the poem gives us
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everything but the thing we are looking for, the music—or the muse itself.
("Unheard Melodies" 468)
For Brown, the music is totally absent in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for the poet has
deliberately transformed it into the "[words] or pictures, more or less, compatible or
contrasting" (468) devices in the ode. In other words, the whole ode, or the
enunciations of the poet, are now the place that the "unheard melodies" manifest
themselves.
Hence, at least throughout the ode, the poet's language is the perfect musical
language, like the Nightingale's singings in "Ode to a Nightingale." When the poet's
vocal language fails, the graphical language of the urn's "music" will supplement it to
present what is "unheard" in vocal language. With such languages, the poet
re-presents the first scene in "Ode to Psyche":
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (15-20)
In "Ode to Psyche," the immortal couple are lying on the grass motionlessly, as if
having a slumber; in contrast, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the undying mortal young
couple are indeed awake. Though the young couple cannot really kiss each other, the
frozen scene sculpted on the urn is just the way that the poet presents Love. Still, the
poet is unable to bring Love to his vocal language, but he instead depicts the love
scene on the urn, referring Love to the urn's graphical language. Love, therefore, is
"spoken of" and summoned onto the urn.
34
Douglas J. Kneale comments the ode that "Keats's text is addressed to a Grecian
urn as much as an ode written on it" (147). For Kneale, the poet has envoiced the urn
as if the ode is the inscription on the urn. McGrath Brian further explains the power of
lyric address:
The object becomes a sentient subject through the power of the lyric address;
and, as a result, a harmony between subjects is made possible. In addressing a
Grecian urn, for instance, Keats grants the inanimate object a face through the
power of address. The address to the urn turns the inanimate object into a
subject (an interlocutor, one with a face, a voice, and the capability of
responding to the poet). And the poem literalizes the impact of address (the
transformation of an inanimate object into a subject) when in the closing lines
the urn speaks: "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty." (Brian 98)
The poet addresses the urn, and, in the end, "the coy, teasing urn has been disciplined,
forced to speak by the ekphrastic poet, and . . . essentially ravished" (Scott 781). The
urn speaks both in the graphical language that the poet reads from the urn as the
inscriptions and in vocal language in which the poet forces the urn to speak. However,
by allowing the urn to speak, the poet remains speechless and inactive. Reading the
whole ode from the urn, the poet basically speaks none of his own words. More
fundamentally, Keats is totally absent in the ode, and his subjectivity is therefore in
doubt. The poet refrains to be the subject in the text; rather, he made the silent urn the
only subject in the poem to resolve the poet's struggles from it. Moreover, near the
end of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the urn meets its fullness:
Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
35
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! (41-45)
Upon completion, the urn with its fullness teases people "out of thought" (45), as if
the poet "meditates or ponders the urn and its invitation to self-extinction" (Brown,
"Negative Poetics" 121). G. Gabrielle Starr suggests that the urn is now a "gestalt"
(56), but I think that the urn is more than a gestalt of form. When the poet's struggles
cease to bother him, the urn has already embodied both Love and Poetry and become
the ultimate "Keats" who the poet in "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale"
strives to be. The urn, then, serves to be a gestalt that even threatens to exist as or
even better than the poet.
Therefore, again, the poet disappoints himself. He might have the desired
resolution to his bad indolence, but only in the very text of "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
that he can maintain it while he is totally absent. The urn, being the gestalt of the poet,
indicates both the poet's death and his ambition to be as widely praised as the urn's
perfect form. Ambition, for the poet, from then on is totally external, for the poet can
see the accomplishment of his ambition on the same urn that both in the poem and in
reality has the voice and power to replace him. The last of the three figures now
belongs to the urn. For Keats, the Grecian urn has become the very key to his bad
indolence—but the only way to approach the urn is to cease his own being. The poet
can either die to fully admit to his perfect gestalt and ends all his struggles, or live to
forever banish himself from the only resolution that may redeem his indolence. Now
that the poet has finally reached the very end of his three-ode-long quest for indolence,
but obviously he cannot be satisfied with the result. In addition, the poet can do
nothing to change the situation, for the urn now acts and speaks for him, removing the
poet from any attempts to escape from its influences. The poet is, indeed, arrested by
the urn—the gestalt—of himself, and hence later in "Ode on Indolence" Keats cannot
but stares at the urn because the poet, while looking at the urn, is teased "out of
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thought" (45). Seeing the urn, the poet loses the power to move, to speak, and even to
be himself, but he is rather reluctant to leave the urn, for the answer to his long pursuit
is there, in front of him.
Love, Poetry, and Ambition—the three figures are out of the poet's reach, and
the urn in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" now embodies the figures and threatens the poet's
existence. Keats, in such an environment, composed his third ode in May: "Ode on
Melancholy." Comparing to the other odes, "Ode on Melancholy" does not aim to
relieve the poet from his struggles, and, from this ode, the poet engages abstract
concepts as his addressees in the odes. However, "Ode on Melancholy" is still in close
relation with the other odes, for the poet writes the ode with an odd opening which is
related to his sufferings in the former odes:
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; (1-8)
Seemingly, the poet rejects death by continually saying "no" in these lines; however,
the poet's repetitious rejections are indeed to maintain the poet's connection with
death. Although the poet can extend the metaphors to death, it is very clear that the
poet's language is still insufficient to speak of death, for he switches from one
metaphor to another, trying to locate death in his language. Unable to directly
mentioning "death," the poet, by weaving the trails of death together, may at last
captures death. In other words, death seems to be immobilized by the poet with the
37
metaphoric associations here at the beginning of the ode. Whether he rejects death or
not, Keats has temporarily trapped death with his metaphorical language, allowing
himself to refuse death's influence before his reservoir of signifiers drains. This
method is indeed evasive, for it does not encounter the unbearableness of death, but it
enables the poet to temporarily escape from the threat of death, though death's
shadows still lull him to fall:
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. (9-10)
The poet cannot but stay awake. He must continuously generate metaphors for
himself to escape from death. Whenever a new metaphor is laboured in the "anguish
of the soul" (10), the poet shall experience the rebirth of himself. The "rebirth" of the
poet, however, is melancholic. Every time Keats finds a new metaphor for himself, he
will be disappointed, because there is no such a metaphor or substitution that can
ultimately save him from death. In addition, the poet has never moved out from his
new shell of metaphors. He is just there, wrapping himself with his own metaphorical
imaginations, rather than setting his eyes on anything outside. Now that Death is lost
in the poet's text—but this time such a loss is on purpose: the poet intentionally
represses death with his melancholic mood.
Melancholy, therefore, is what the poet now seeks as the substitute for his lost
object. The poet initially wants to set a sail towards death to find melancholy, as in the
removed stanza of "Ode on Melancholy":
Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, bloodstained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a Dragon's tail,
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Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa; certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy, whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.
The poet deleted these lines before publication. The removal of this stanza suggests
that perhaps the poet has understood the fact that he can never find melancholy in
death; rather, the comfort of death may totally overwhelm him. In fact, Andrea
Henderson associates this removed stanza with the island of lotus Eaters in Greek
mythology:
The original first stanza is about actively seeking melancholy, building a
ship to travel in search of it. Indeed, the island sought by this ship, a place "of
Lethe dull" on which Melancholy can be found dreaming, recalls the island of
the Lotus eaters, an allusion that underscores both the voluptuous aim of this
search and the wrongheadedness of those who go about it in this way. (240)
Henderson points out that, to actively search for melancholy may be effortless and
even lost in the sweet dullness of death. Keats, by deleting the original first stanza,
announces that he is not meant to call up another quest for melancholy, for such a
quest may still lead him back into the realm of death. Rather, he built a series of
metaphors in order to attract melancholy. Fundamentally, the poet succeeds in
summoning melancholy. The structure of the extended metaphors does temporarily
relieve the poet of his anxiety towards death and grant the poet a melancholic gesture.
However, the poet can only have glimpses of melancholy:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
39
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud . . . . (11-14)
Instead of looking for melancholy actively, the poet waits for melancholy to fall upon
him passively, though not even himself can predict when it shall fall. But when
melancholy comes, it should save the poet from his anxiety over death for a moment:
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. (15-20)
The poet, in these lines, evokes imageries of natural beauty to depict melancholy: the
"morning rose," "rainbow," and "globed peonies" (15-17). Amazingly, as he maps out
the representations of death in the first stanza, the poet, by putting together the three
imageries, draws the very idea of natural beauty. All the imageries are undoubtedly of
natural beauty; but since these imageries spread from single in number (a rose) to
multiple ones in a group (a wealth of peonies), from the land (rose and peonies) to the
ocean ("salt sand-wave" (16)), and the earth (rose and peonies) to the heaven
(rainbow), and from living plants (rose and peonies) to lifeless natural
phenomenon (rainbow), the poet has basically grasped the concept of natural beauty
as such in his language with all the dimensions that the three imageries cover. Via
these imageries, or even the idea of natural beauty, the poet nourishes his a
melancholic mood.
Moreover, the "mistress" (18) at the end of this stanza extends the poet's
melancholy to the perfect doppelganger that always troubles him. For the poet,
melancholy is generated from feeding deep upon the mistress's beautiful eyes (20).
40
But what will the poet see in them? What arrests the poet in the eyes of his mistress is
certainly not the beauty of the mistress; instead, it should be the illusion of the poet
himself, for perhaps in the mistress' eyes the poet can only see the reflection of
himself. To put it more clearly, the poet should see the "Keats" that his mistress sees,
and then from staring at the reflection as well as looking at himself through the
mistress' eyes that the poet is captured by melancholy. It is very close to what happens
when the poet encounters his urn-double in the aspect that both is for the poet to see
the reflection of himself. However, the situation here in "Ode on Melancholy" is still
different from that of the "urn-Keats." One of the most distinct structural difference
here is perhaps the mediation of the mistress in "Ode on Melancholy." When
confronting the urn-doppelganger, nothing is between the poet and the urn, and
therefore the perfect image of himself—the urn-Keats may arrest the poet directly. On
the contrary, the poet in "Ode on Melancholy" looks at the image of himself through
the eyes of his mistress, and hence may have the chance to render the image—though
still perfectly fits his shape—not as himself but as himself in the mistress's perception.
In other words, the poet, seeing his reflection in the mistress' eyes, may bear in mind
the mistress' presence, and recognize that his reflected image is but the result of the
interaction between himself and the other people—here the mistress—rather than an
imaginary self-image that threatens to eliminate his existence.
If the mistress of "perverted desire" (Havercamp 700) in "Ode on Melancholy"
could also reduce the effect of death on the poet, the whole ode would be the poet's
Exodus that depicts how he escapes from death. Nevertheless, in "Ode on
Melancholy," the poet has adjusted his attitudes toward his loss. If the loss and the
pursuit of perfect indolence inevitably arouses melancholic mood to the poet, then the
poet's final resolution to the whole situation is—melancholy. Honestly, this is not
41
really a resolution, for nothing is truly resolved, and the poet is just semi-permanently
delaying the day of judgment for himself. Indeed, the poet knows this fact very well:
She 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; (21-24)
For the poet, melancholy always accompanies Beauty, Joy, and Pleasure, and the poet
is doomed to lose all of them. When the poet enjoys in Beauty, Joy and Pleasure,
melancholy has already come upon him; when all of them are gone, melancholy may
also fade away. To maintain melancholy, the poet must continue to be arrested in the
melancholic mood. For this new melancholy, the poet thus develops in "Ode on
Melancholy" a new but rather short quest similar to the poet's former one for
indolence. The poet applies extended metaphors, which will only reach their end
when language dies, as his language instead of the perfect Poetry; he then appeals to
natural beauty or even Beauty itself as the object of his melancholy rather than Love.
In the end, the poet sees his own image through others' visions, arresting himself in
the beauty of himself in other's eyes rather than facing the unbearable, perfect beauty
of his urn-doppelganger.
From "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," to "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
the poet has built upon his vision and experience of the disturbed indolence a
melancholic quest that in the end urges the death of the poet himself. Through "Ode
on Melancholy," however, the poet establishes a new melancholic structure to
neutralize the threat of death that his perfect urn doppelganger in his quest radiates.
With the new melancholic structure, the poet can finally probe into the possibility of
summoning his lost indolence again, and the consequence is the composing of "Ode
on Indolence." Not directly speaking of his lost indolence, the poet addresses the three
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"Shadows" (11). With the passing and fading of Love, Poesy, and Ambition, the poet
actually implies how dearing and precious indolence is. The poet, however, doesn't
put much emphasis on indolence but on the three figures. Like the flowers and
rainbow ("Melancholy" 15-17) which are the vehicles of Beauty in "Ode on
Melancholy," the shadowy figures are the only viable and speakable vectors that
associate the poet to the indolence. The poet also develops a language to render the
figures and the indolence. Throughout "Ode on Indolence," the poet widely uses
imageries from "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian
Urn." For the sweetness of indolence, the poet speaks in the rich language of
"Psyche;" for mentioning his anxiety to fly away with the figures, the poet asks for
"wings" (24; 31) like in "Ode to a Nightingale;" for raising or expelling the figures,
the poet engraves the figures on the imaginary urn as in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The
poet thus shifts the main complaint of his melancholy from indolence to the three
figures, and, by addressing the figures, he can temporarily relieve himself from his
fixation on indolence. Although the poet bids farewell firmly to the figures at the end
of the ode (55-60), he still cannot suffer the loss of them. The poet's melancholy
hence reaches its climax: the loss of his indolence is due to the presence of the three
figures, but to expel the figures, for the poet, is to ultimately cut himself off from
indolence. The poet cannot help but feel disappointed at what he can have, for no
matter what his choice is, it is to put him away from his indolence further. This
melancholic deadlock therefore paralyzes the poet, keeping him from being either the
urn-Keats and the Keats without the figures, and remains unresolved during the whole
period of the Spring Odes.
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Chapter 3: "No, No, Go not to Lethe": Keats's Suicidal Behaviors and the Desire for
Eternity
In the previous chapter, I have discussed how the poet build a melancholizng
mechanism to deal with the loss of indolence and the threat of death. Although the
poet has named the factors for his disturbed indolence as Love, Poesy, and Ambition,
his efforts to immobilize, assimilate, integrate, or just approach these ones in "Ode to
Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" just lead to more losses
and even the death of himself. The melancholized poet then develops a new
methodology—though still a melancholic one—in "Ode on Melancholy." The poet
intends to neutralize death or at least temporarily suspends the power of it, but when
the poet applies such strategy onto indolence in "Ode on Indolence," he falls into a
deeper melancholy. Only by expelling Love, Poesy, and Ambition that the poet can
regain his perfect indolence, but soon the poet has realized that the three figures are
but his only connection with indolence. If he neutralizes the three figures, indolence
may never come back; however, if he just let the figures roam restlessly around him,
he will lose his indolence forever.
The two melancholic structures, then, are rather inter-locked with each other,
keeping melancholizing the poet in the two-fold deadlock. It seems that the whole set
of Spring Odes is about death: to regain the death-like indolence, Keats develops a
quest, which only points to death and further melancholizes the poet. Keats then
composes another quest for indolence in a new melancholic way, but soon
acknowledges that indolence is ever beyond his reach. However, throughout the
Spring Odes, the poet also resists death. Keats does not just accept death as the main
theme of his odes, but he keeps the power of life on himself against the effect of death.
In this chapter, I investigate the power of life in the poet's odes, and trace that if the
notions of life really appear to help or just annoy the poet in every stage of the poet's
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melancholic quests. Indeed, the poet's suicidal behaviors to leave parts of himself
behind in the odes, such as in "Ode to a Nightingale," imply the poet's wish to
overpower death. But, since melancholy features "non-integration" and "infinity"
(Kristeva 19-20) which embody in the poet's metaphorical language, the poet turns to
suicide for living in the eternity which melancholy grants.
With the purpose to immobilize Love, the poet, in "Ode to Psyche," exhibits a
worshipping device by himself (Hooton 46). He not only dedicates his enunciations to
praise the goddess, but also builds a temple within himself so that Psyche may have
all that she deserves as an goddess according to the poet's fantasy. Although the poet's
words are vivid and passionate, the scenes of the ode are rather serene: the Psyche is
found sleeping and motionless by the poet:
'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
Their arms embracèd, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoinèd by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: (13-20)
The sleeping, voiceless goddess hereafter suffers from the poet's one-sided praises,
pities, and dedications. Though Psyche is indeed silenced by Keats so that the poet
can further immobilize her, at least the poet is addressing her, and his language is still
full of passion. However, in the last stanza, what the poet plans to build for Psyche in
his mind is a rather tranquil place:
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
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And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same; (57-64)
The goddess, captured by the poet as the object of his worshipping, has been
mesmerized at the beginning; towards the end of the ode, even her reign in the poet's
mind is silenced, too. Amidst the "wide quietness" (59), the poet decorates a
"sanctuary" (60) for Psyche, where soon includes the "casement" (66) that the poet
leaves open for Love. Comparing to what the poet announced in the former stanzas,
the environment that the poet builds in his mind for Psyche is perhaps too quiet:
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swingèd censer teeming:
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. (44-49)
Where, in Psyche's temple, are the "choir," the "voice," the "lute," and the "pipe" that
the poet promises to offer? The poet should have worshipped Psyche with all that he
promises, but what he actually does to Psyche is but building a quiet forest where the
goddess is left for Love to visit. Also, in the last stanza, the poet spends almost all the
stanza to depict how beautiful and serene Psyche's place is in his mind, rather than
addressing the goddess as in other stanzas.
The missing sounds here indeed mark Keats's resistance against death. Though
the poet's attempt in "Ode to Psyche" is to exchange Psyche for Love so that the poet
46
immobilizes and assimilates Love within himself, the poet also pushes himself toward
death. If Love really came to the poet's mind and replaced Psyche, the text as well as
the whole world in the poet's mind would be destroyed. Both the text and the
fantasized sanctuary are build for the goddess rather than for Love. If Love visited the
poet, the language and the poet's mind might encounter unexpected breakdown. In
other words, The poet has stretched out his hands for what he cannot demand for, and
left no word about what happen after. The poet's language fails to describe what may
occur when Love really comes, and therefore he later seeks a perfect language that
can render everything without any lack or excess in "Ode to a Nightingale." However,
even before the poet expresses his desire for Love, he has perhaps dropped his
language behind. In the last stanza of "Ode to Psyche," the poet seldom directly
addresses the goddess; moreover, the poet starts the stanza with an intriguing,
redundant "yes" (50).
Comparing the lines across the two stanzas, it is clear that the "yes" is but an
emotional exclamation without any actual meaning. This exclamation, however, may
suggest a small gap in the poet's thinking and language. Just before invoking the
"yes," the poet addresses and worships the goddess passionately, but after the
exclamation, he turns rather in-wards to describe and praise the place where he in his
mind reserves for Psyche. Such a rapid difference across the exclamation gap may
imply the loss of the poet's language to speak of Psyche. Since all his enunciations are
dedicated to the goddess to be her "choir," "voice," "lute," and "pipe," the poet, indeed,
is separated from his own language.
Hence, what the poet says since his declaration of dedication can only be of the
goddess rather than of himself. But, in the next stanza to his announcement, the
goddess is imprisoned inside the poet himself. In consequence, the poet's language
fails. He cannot speak of the goddess, for referring to Psyche now equals to speaking
47
of himself, and the poet also does not have the language for self-reference. Therefore,
in the stanza, the poet talks in a way more like murmuring to himself rather than
addressing the goddess. In addition, all that the poet dedicated to Psyche, or even all
that should have their voices or sounds to praise or entertain the goddess in the forest
and her "rosy sanctuary" (60) in the poet's mind, are lost. When the language for
Psyche malfunctions or even stops functioning, the poet may fail in substituting the
goddess for Love. The failure of Keats's language hence may suggest a passive
resistance against his death-ward desire for Love. Since the poet 's strategy is to
substitute Psyche with Love, if the language the poet uses is not of Psyche, then,
fundamentally, the poet may fail to have Love. It is not only because of the
impossibility to reveal what Love really is, but also due to the decisive departure of
the poet's language for Psyche.
The gap before the exclamation "yes" which bursts out at the very critical
moment of this resistance, therefore, is but a painful cry where the power of life
dwells. However, the separation of the poet's language from himself still implies
death, for the loss of language may expose the truth that the poet is not a complete and
united subject, but is composed of many parts. In other words, the poet may
experience as if being disintegrated into many fragments. In defense against the
failure of self-integration, melancholy has become the poet's defensive reaction, as
Julia Kristeva states:
Following upon the deflection of the death drive, the depressive affect can
be interpreted as a defense against parceling. Indeed, sadness reconstitutes an
affective cohesion of the self, which restores its unity within the framework of
the affect. The depressive mood constitutes itself as a narcissistic support,
negative to be sure, but nevertheless presenting the self with an integrity,
nonverbal though it might be. Because of that, the depressive affect makes
48
up for symbolic invalidation and interruption (the depressive's "that' s
meaningless") and at the same time protects it against proceeding to the
suicidal act. (19)
Kristeva here points out that the depressive affect of melancholy helps reunite the
body parts and temporarily protects the subject from feeling being torn apart. Also, it
fixes the broken language of the subject and stops it from self-destruction. In the case
of "Ode to Psyche," the poet's melancholy grants the poet an illusion that, having
Psyche now, he is still with his language of Psyche, and therefore his sense of
self-completeness can be maintained. But the protection offered by melancholy, in
Kristeva's words, is "flimsy":
The depressive denial that destroys the meaning of the symbolic also
destroys the act's meaning and leads the subject to commit suicide without
anguish of disintegration, as a reuniting with archaic nonintegration, as lethal
as it is jubilatory, "oceanic." (19)
Due to the fact that melancholic denials may refuse to admit the departure of the
language of Psyche, the validity of the meanings generated from the language is in
doubt. Since Melancholy just forces the language of Psyche to serve the "Psyche" in
the poet's mind as well as the poet, ambiguities and flaws may be generated. The
enunciations coming out from the language in this way may fail to accurately point to
whatever they mean originally. With the failure of the language, the poet might fail to
recognize the painful disintegration which the melancholic denial refers to, and hence
drown himself in the comforts of melancholy.
In fact, the poet's melancholic mood in "Ode to Psyche" results in the poet's
suicidal acts to seek for a perfect language in "Ode to a Nightingale." In "Ode to a
Nightingale," rather than experiencing the painful departure of his pieces as in "Ode
49
to Psyche," the poet just drops off body parts from himself while he pursues the
Nightingale, the embodiment of a perfect language. First, his thoughts:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! (31-35)
When the poet thinks that he can fly with such a flawless language as if "on the
viewless wings of Poesy" (33), his brain just "perplexes and retards" (34), indicating
that his thoughts cannot really catch up with the speed and rapidness of the
nightingale's singing. Hence, the poet leaves his thoughts behind, claiming that he is
now with the nightingale (35). What occurs in these few lines can be a serious
warning. The poet's claim that he is already with the nightingale (35) functions as the
exclamation "yes" ("Psyche" 50) in "Ode to Psyche." The "[a]lready with thee"
("Nightingale" 35) exclamation here suggests the eruption of melancholic mood.
Facing the disintegrated piece of his own—his brain, or thoughts—and the possible
failure of it, the poet just suspends his brain.
For the poet's attempt to separate himself apart, as Alan Richardson observes,
many Romantic poems often employ "a deliberate exposure of the gaps between the
senses, even an exaggeration and exploitation of these gaps" or "explore these gaps,
even exacerbate them, using one sensory modality to revise or correct a different one"
(Richardson 51-52). Keats, in "Ode to a Nightingale," indeed turns from a "tritely
fanciful visual scene" to a "keenly etched imagery of olfaction" (Richardson 52):
And haply the Queen Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry fays;
50
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (36-40)
The poet situates himself in the breezy cocoon of nature, enjoying his imaginary
completeness in the perfect song of the nightingale. Maybe the poet still pains, for the
exclamation bursts out too suddenly that creates a semantic gap in the stanza. But,
obviously, the poet has been anaesthetized by the joy that the perfect language offers
him, feeling not his pain of disintegration, moving on to deal with more of his
perceptions.
As the poet's pursue for a perfect language continues, the poet, after dropping off
his brain or thinking, attempts to deal with his visions:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild . . . . (41-45)
Unable to see the flowers in the dark, the poet removes his visual perception away,
applying his olfactory sense instead to correct the ineffective visual sense. This time,
there is no sudden enunciation that covers the gaps in language, but only a rather
softer "but" (43). The poet hence accelerates and deepens his "Lethe-wards" (5)
sinking. The poet also presents his weakened struggle against death in replacing the
strong exclamation with a weaker "but" (43). Appealing to his imagination for
compensating the disposal of his perceptions, the poet "sees" what his imagination
now sees. As for the disintegration between his actual and imaginary vision, the poet,
in his melancholic mood, just ignores it to maintain his self-integrity. However, the
poet has already leaned very close to his "easeful Death" (52):
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Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! (55-58)
Melancholy grants the poet the impression that he is still with or at least connected to
the nightingale, and helps cover the disintegration of the poet himself.
But now the poet, due to his melancholic mood, drowns himself with the illusion
of his completeness shown in the bird's singing as well as the poet's bodily senses, as
Kristeva comments:
The relief that precedes some suicides perhaps translates the archaic
regression by means of which the act of a denied or numbed consciousness
turns Thanatos back on the self and reclaims the nonintegrated self's lost
paradise, one without others or limits, a fantasy of untouchable fullness.
(19-20)
Trapped in the shadow of fanticized fullness from which the poet may have ecstatic
enjoyments, the poet approaches death. But at this critical moment of death, the poet
suddenly realizes that there is still one bodily perception that he cannot suffer to
suspend: his aural sense.
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. (59-60)
These two lines have disturbed the poet's language of death. When the poet lingers in
the "ecstasy" (58) of his imagined unity with the nightingale during the exclamation
mark that temporarily silences the poet, one of his body parts—which still function on
the poet—forces him back into himself. The aural sense of the poet, different from
other senses, is rather problematic for Keats. In spite of the fact that it reminds Keats
of his bodily existence—the concrete fact of his living— as well as all the separated
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senses, it also plays as the very vehicle of the perfect music of the nightingale.
Therefore, in these two lines, the poet remembers his sufferings with the disintegrated
body parts, which has then forced him to stay on the ground. If he was to separate the
aural sense from him, the poet would be unable to listen to the bird. What is worse,
even melancholy cannot deal with the poet's aural perception, since the nightingale's
songs are sung in a perfect language. Unable to maintain his unity, the poet just
becomes a "sod" (60) or annoyance to the bird's perfect song.
In "Ode to a Nightingale," hence, melancholy fails for the first time. Knowing
that he cannot continue to pursue the nightingale, the poet finally addresses the
singing nightingale directly by calling the nightingale as an "immortal Bird" (61), and
then focuses his praises on the singings of the bird:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. (63-70)
In this stanza, the poet's language stuck, as when in "Ode to Psyche." Since
melancholy fails to constitute for him a structure where he is free from the feeling of
disintegration between his concrete self and imaginary perceptions, the poet's unity
with the nightingale is broken.
Unable to speak in a perfect language like the nightingale, the poet now must find
a way to represent the bird's singings with his own language. In the stanza, the poet
rather explains why he is but a "sod" to the bird's "high requiem" (60). For the poet,
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the nightingale's song is indeed transcendental. The bird's song spans from the poet's
time to "ancient days" (64). But the poet even expends the song to a broader extend.
Since the scene of "magic casements" that "opening on the foam / Of perilous seas"
(64-70) actually suggests the birth of Aphrodite, the poet points out that the bird's
song has penetrated boundaries between man and deities as well as that between
Christianity and pagan religion. For the poet, the bird's song is but the reconciliation
of all the impossibilities. From the poet's description of the nightingale's song, it
should be very clear that why the poet is so obsessed to the perfect song of the
nightingale. For Keats, when he is listening to the song, he can temporarily free
himself from the disturbing fact of his flaws and his language's insufficiency to go
across death, or the unbearable things in life, and live without any trouble forever. In
other words, throughout the whole "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet is in a
melancholic mood from the very beginning. When the melancholic mood fails to
support the fantasy of self-completeness, the poet cannot help but feel disappointed,
when he understands that not only the perfect Poesy but also the joyous sense of being
complete has gone away from him:
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades: (71-78)
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For Keats, therefore, as the feeling of loss returns to him, reminding him of his
imperfect language and urging him to desire for perfection (Simpkins 25), the poet
has no choice but to face the lack again.
On the other hand, completeness may just suggest death. Since he separates
himself with his perceptions in order to achieve completeness, the poet, in the end,
may only face either the death of the suicidal mechanism or the death or his own body.
Knowing that the bird's singing is but a "requiem" ("Nightingale" 60), the poet has
been casted back into himself, and hence able to maintain a critical distance for
examining the nightingale's music. But since the poet cannot but mourn for the loss of
perfect music as poetry in the end of "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet's journey
towards death persists in the next ode in sequence, "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet imagines a perfect agent to relieve himself
from quest for Love and Poesy. It is clear that the poet himself doesn't even appear in
the text. Rather, on the flawless urn he projects his wishes and desires—his
Ambition—that cannot be satisfied in "Ode to Psyche" and in "Ode to a Nightingale."
Afterwards, stepping aside to watch the perfect urn, the poet just enjoys in the fullness
of the urn and omits himself from the text as if he has finally accepted the death that
melancholy keeps luring him into throughout "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a
Nightingale." However, the poet's desire to live, indeed, is hidden behind such
suicidal behaviours. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the urn is the poet's advocate. On the
urn, the sculpted characters are in an eternal stasis, and, therefore, time is meaningless
for the urn:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
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More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young, (21-27)
Since the urn freezes the time on it, the shapes on the urn may not be affected by time,
and hence may exist forever. In addition, the poet raises the sculptures to a higher
status:
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (28-30)
In this stanza, the poet intends to raise the love on the urn over human passions;
however, M. R. G. Spiller argues that
Keats intended his speaker to refer, we believe, to the fever of sexual
passion, but textually it is the figure of iteration ("happy . . . happy," "for
ever . . . for ever,") itself perhaps the syntactic equivalent of fever, which leads
to repetitive speech and abrupt silences, that brings the parching tongue and
the silence when the stanza ends. (Spiller 55)
In other words, the high love that the poet praises is carried by a repetitive speech
which is the syntactic equivalent of an erotic fever. In the ode, the love is rather
immortal and eternal, for it transcends human passion; however, the repetitive
language that the poet applies to speak of it just fails to ascend as high as godly love.
The disintegration here may suggest the poet's inability. Immortality, or to live
forever, is indeed what the poet wants but always fail to obtain. The failure of his
language here just reflects that the poet has projected his wishes and desires on it.
However, the poet then encounters an enigma:
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
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Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. (35-40)
Since the location of the little town is unclear, it can only exists in the poet's
imagination (Wilson 838). For the poet, nobody ever returns from the altar to the little
town, and the town is left "desolate" (40) without the warmth and comfort that the
sculptures on the urn suggests. The little town is rather static, and the silent, still
atmosphere of the little town is rather related to the town's desolate status. As Douglas
B. Wilson points out: "Alienation is the inevitable shadow of permanence," the
fullness and eternity that the urn promises is always shadowed by alienation (838).
Indeed, enjoying the completion that the urn manifests, the poet has alienated himself
from both the outside world and his internal struggles. Suddenly realizing the
alienating effect of the urn, the poet soon in the end manifests himself to speak:
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (44-50)
Addressing the urn again, the poet re-locates himself to the "us" (44) in the ode. The
truth of imaginative insight for Keats seems to lie in a total abandonment of the
categories of observer/observed (Kabitoglou 127). When the observers merges into
the observed, the identities of the observers as thinkers and discriminators may be
dissolved, and consequently the distance or barrier between the subject and the object
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of observation is collapsed (ibid.). Although Keats still thinks that the urn can sustain
the power of time, the poet here admits that he shall fade away with time. But before
he is consumed by the tides of time, the poet just gives the famous conclusion to this
ode.
However, the punctuation of these two lines remains unresolvably arguable: it
could be "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know" or "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and
all ye need to know" (49-50)2. In the first version, the poet defines the boundary of the
urn at "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (49). Beyond this statement, the urn knows
nothing, and it also does not need to know whatever outside. For the second version, it
is but the urn that sets a doctrinal limit to human beings: except for "Beauty is truth,
truth beauty," all that unrelated to truth and beauty—including time and space, and
even human behaviours—should be expelled or forgotten. In terms of melancholy and
self-integration, each could be available. Reading in the former version, the
conclusion will be the poet's reflection on the linguistic foundation of the melancholic
mood that the urn suggests. The poet, reviving from his suicidal status, suggests that
the melancholic comfort and non-integration that the urn grants are built upon a gap in
the language, which is soon crossed by a metaphorical link, "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty" (49) that the urn proposes. In contrast, the latter version is the poet's
observation on himself. Reviving from the melancholic mood of the urn, the poet
notices that the urn traps him within the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (49),
in which there is no more disintegration but rather the joy of non-integration, the total
combination of everything. And therefore the poet may forget the fragmentality of
himself, drowning in the comfort of melancholy. The two versions, therefore, are just
the two sides of melancholy.
2
See Jack Stillinger, "Keats's Grecian Urn and the Evidence of Transcripts," PMLA (73.4, 1958).
58
But what does "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" means? Numerous critics have
offered their own explanations, for example, Jason Mauro suggests that
They are what [the poet] concludes from his encounter with the urn, not
what the urn tells him directly. Thus a crucial psychic distance has been
interposed between the urn and the speaker, and a palpable irony fills the gap.
"Beauty," says the speaker, "is the truth of process and transience, not the
stasis of you, the urn." (299)
Instead, I argue that they should be meaningless. Whether it is the very metaphorical
bridge that associates beauty and truth or the locus where the poet lingers, the
statement itself should remain meaningless. Though metaphor is the device that
condenses two signifiers together in order to generate meanings, the very linguistic
existence of the metaphor can only mean nothing. For metaphor itself but the
meaningless juxtaposition of two signifiers, and the juxtaposition alone won't create
any meaning:
Metaphor's creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of
two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two
signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other's place in
the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of
its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain. (Lacan, "Instance" 422)
Only when the two signifiers—beauty and truth—start to substitute each other in the
opposite's signifying chain and simultaneously remain in their owns according to the
connections with the other signifiers, metaphor creates meaning. Hence metaphor is
"situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning (Lacan,
"Instance" 423). From the nonmeaning of the metaphor that meaning should be
generated, but it is for the subject to proceed on. However, the poet just stops at the
metaphor itself. For the poet, the metaphorical statement implies the origin. Since
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metaphor can create almost unlimited numbers of meanings, the poet may have been
amazed by the infinity of metaphor; also, at the very crucial moment when language
temporarily ruptures and stops, the metaphor, for the poet, may remain unaffected.
These two factors have perhaps resulted in the poet's obsession with the metaphor.
Hence, the poet begins the next ode, "Ode on Melancholy," with a series of
extended metaphor. These metaphors, on the one hand, drag death into the flow of
metaphorical language in order to postpone the coming of death; on the other hand,
the poet, with the metaphorical language, creates the melancholic mood for the
descending of the melancholy. Soon, the melancholy comes upon to the poet and
"glut" (15) the poet's sorrow on elements of natural beauty. It finally helps the poet
dealing with his perfect image, which threatens to replaces him, with the presences
and visions of other people. The poet's journey for Love, Poetry, and Ambition
somehow ends here, but his quest for melancholy just begins. The poet borrows
natural beauty as the vehicle of melancholy to resist the losses that the poet
experiences all the way in his journey. Julia Kristeva criticizes that such beauty which
is based on the "denial of loss" will finally be "perishable" and hence "vanishes into
death;" also, it will fail to stop the poet's suicidal behaviors and just fade way "form
memory at the very moment of its appearance" (Kristeva 99). Recognizing that his
"Beauty" in the ode "must die" (21), the poet just removed the original beginning
stanza, which depicts a journey to seek melancholy in death.
It is partially because of the death threat which his urn doppelganger indicates.
However, it is also possible that the poet finds it unnecessary to search for death, for
he has already committed suicide and merged into the fullness and nonintegration that
the following metaphors give. In fact, the poet cannot really defend himself against
death:
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The speaking subject can thus react to trouble not only through defensive
parceling but also through slowing down—inhibition, denial of sequentiality,
neutralization of the signifier. Some immaturization or other neurobiological
features tending toward nonintegration may condition such behavior. Is it a
defensive one? Depressed persons do not defend themselves against death but
against the anguish prompted by the erotic object. Depressive persons cannot
endure Eros, they prefer to be with the Thing up to the limit of negative
narcissism leading them to Thanatos. They are defended against Eros by
sorrow but without defense against Thanatos because they are
wholeheartedly tied to the Thing. Messengers of Thanatos, Melancholy people
are witness/accomplices of the signifier's flimsiness, the living being's
precariousness. (Kristeva 20)
Kristeva points out the truth that the poet can never resist death or that the poet is
never away from death. In the state of melancholy, the poet is basically static. In his
imaginary completeness and nonintegration, the poet may prefer not to move, in case
that he should break the harmonious state in the melancholy. Indeed, throughout the
odes, the poet does not take any action. In "Ode to Psyche," the poet does not sacrifice
his enunciations, which he promises to fully dedicate to the goddess; instead, he just
stays where he is, imagining his mind to be the temple and casement for Psyche, then
waiting for Love to visit him. In "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet cries many times
that he is going to move: he wants to "leave the world unseen" with the nightingale
(19), claims that he will fly to the nightingale "on the viewless wings of Poesy"
(21-23) and wants to die while listening to the bird "pouring forth [its] soul abroad"
(57), but he has done none of them. Rather, from the beginning to the end of the ode,
the poet just stays there. Not to mention that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" depicts
motionless shapes even though the poet talks if they are just frozen from their actions
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and is still able to continue what they are initially doing. Hence the multiple "no" (1-8)
at the beginning of "Ode on Melancholy" just indicate how unwillingly the poet is to
move, for he refuses again and again the expending of each metaphors and leaving
himself in a series of metaphors which are immobilized to create any meanings. With
the joy that these metaphors as such suggests, the poet links joy to melancholy:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran 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. (25-30)
Although his language always threatens to create meanings from the metaphors, and
therefore his Joy is always "bidding adieu" (23) and ready to leave him, the poet
knows very well that if he dares not to taste the Joy with his suicidal attempts
to immobilize and wipe himself out from the text, he may not have the chance to be
blessed by Melancholy. And when the melancholy falls upon him, his soul may be
raised upon the heaven, transcending the boundary of live and death.
Escaping from the sense of self-disintegration that his insufficient language and
bodily perceptions exhibit during his melancholic journey across "Ode to Psyche,"
"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy," the poet
finally appeals to the sense of non-integration that melancholy, or melancholic mood,
can ever promise him. Keats, hence, drowns himself in the joy of melancholy. The
suicidal attempts of the poet to suspend his bodily senses—and in the end even
himself—in the texts successfully bring the poet into the realm of melancholy through
inactivated metaphors, though sometimes the poet still revives at critical points when
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some part of himself still lives untouched. In addition to his bodily senses, the poet
even omits his texts for the melancholic effect he desires.
In "Ode on Melancholy," the original beginning stanza is deleted by the poet so
that no movement, or just the intension to move, is mentioned in the text. However,
the poet even omits a whole poem, "Ode on Indolence," for the ode was not published
until the poet passed away. The omitting of "Ode on Indolence" blenders the
connection between the rest of his odes, since "Ode on Indolence" is indeed a
depiction of the poet's disturbed experience, and therefore can be considered as the
initiation of the other odes. It is still possible to guess that there are connections
between the rest of his odes without "Ode on Indolence," but clearly the other odes
may not associate with one another as closely as with "Ode on Indolence." Moreover,
"Ode on Indolence" is the last in the sequence of the Spring Odes, and to remove it
from the series may means that the conclusion to the odes will be missing. But
perhaps this situation is what the poet just desire in terms of melancholy. Without
"Ode on Indolence," there will be neither an origin nor a conclusion to the Spring
Odes. Hence, the meaning of the whole sequence as well as that of individual ode
may remain unclear. Such an infinite, meaningless, "oceanic" (Kristeva 19) pool of
language is perhaps the poet's paradise, in which he can freely invite his readers to be
mesmerized by the meaninglessness of the ode sequence, to seek the meanings of the
series, to fix themselves to the odes, and in the end, just like him, through the texts to
live forever in the infinite realm of melancholy.
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Chapter 4: "Where Are the Songs of Spring? Ay, Where Are They? ": "To Autumn"
and the Spring Odes
In the precedent chapters, I have discussed how the poet faces the loss of
indolence and self-integration with melancholy. Throughout the Spring Odes,
including "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on
Melancholy," and finally "Ode on Indolence," Keats builds a melancholizing
mechanism in order to render the loss of indolence. Since the poet has visualized the
factors of his loss into the figures—Love, Ambition, and Poetry—around an urn in a
vision that troubles him, the poet with all his effort tries to immobilize and assimilate
these three figures, but in vain. What is worse, during his quest, the poet soon faces
the problem of his own self-integration due to the strategies that he applies to dealing
with each figures in their corresponding odes. Confronting the challenge of his
perfect doppelganger as well as his fragmented body, the poet appeals to melancholy
to resolve the threat of death proposed by his imaginary flawless
urn-doppelganger and the desire to live requested by his disintegrated body. Upon the
resolution of his problems, the poet suddenly realizes that he has overly indulged in
melancholy and hence it becomes impossible to alienate himself from it. The
melancholic mechanisms that Keats establishes are indeed inter-locked with each
other, leading the poet into a melancholic deadlock.
Since the three figures are the poet's only connections to his indolence,
neutralizing them means the forever loss of indolence; but he still cannot leave the
restless figures unsettled, for as long as they exist, he would never have indolence.
Trapped in this dilemma, the poet falls into melancholy again. But through
melancholy, the poet is able to confront his self-disintegration, for melancholy grants
a sense of non-integration, in which the poet can enjoy his fullness. With the
development of his quest for indolence, the poet addicts to melancholy more and more
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deeply, and in the end completely hands in himself, committing himself to
melancholy and lives in eternity within the melancholic texts of the Spring Odes.
Hence the two structures, supporting each other, are intertwined, and it seems that the
poet can never escape from it. However, it is still possible for the poet to leap away
from the melancholic circles. In this chapter, I will discuss the last great ode that
Keats composed in the year of 1819: "To Autumn." Since the poet has so deeply
imprisoned in melancholy in former odes, I would like to investigate "To Autumn" in
order to see if the poet in "To Autumn" is still in melancholic mood, or if there are
differences between the melancholic poet and the poet in "To Autumn." Indeed, the
poet in "To Autumn" differs from the poet in the Spring Odes. The poet in "To
Atutumn," though still using a metaphorical language which is close to the language
in "Ode on Melancholy," actually modifies the language to fit the personifying of
Autumn, lights up a way to the resolution to the poet's melancholy.
Composed on 19 September 1819, "To Autumn" is often considered as one of the
most successful poems that Keats has ever written. The stimulus that encourages the
poet to write this ode is that, during the poet's trip across Winchester, the poet was
inspired all at a sudden:
How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness
about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik'd
stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring.
Somehow a stubble plain 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. (Poetry and Prose 359)
Comparing with the poet's motivation of composing the Spring Odes, that for "To
Autumn" is distinctively different. The Spring Odes are based on the poet's disturbed
dream or vision, while "To Autumn" is composed upon a sudden sensual experience.
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The poet, in the letter, also expresses his dislike of the weather in spring in contrast to
his praises for the weather in autumn. According to the poet's comments on the
weather of the seasons, perhaps the poet has finally gone through the spring—during
which the Spring Odes are written one after another in short intervals—and now
reaches autumn.
The poet hence composes upon the warmth that he encounters during his walk.
The ode begins with a direct addressing from the poet to Autumn followed by a series
of actions that the season plans to do together with the sun:
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. (1-11)
Here the poet personifies the season, but still keeps some of the ambiguities that
metaphorically suggest the non-human qualities of the personified Autumn. Most of
its works are indeed what the season should have done, but since the poet depicts
its "conspiring" (2) with the sun, the season just gains its initiative in all its works. It
is as if all the Autumn scenes here, including the growing and maturing of fruits,
gourds, hazel nuts, and even flowers, occur according to the season's plans with the
sun. The season, hence, is not just the object to the poet's praises or worships; instead,
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due to the personification that the poet casts upon it, the season now has the power to
behave based on its own will.
The personified Autumn, then, with the help of the sun, brings the sun's warmth
to the earth. In response to the poet who has seen the warmth on the land
(Keats, Poetry and Prose 359), the Autumn now exhibits the warmth in a visual yet
subtle way. Without any direct depiction that tells how warm the season is, the
Autumn transmits the warmth in the growing and maturing of the nature: it "load[s]
and bless[es]" (3) fruit to the vine, grows apples on the "moss'd cottage-trees" (5), and
by the maturing power of the sun's heat, the season inflates the fruit, the gourd, and
hazel nuts with maturity (6-8). In addition, it also grants the "late flowers" (9) more
buds: although the flowers will not persist long enough in its season for the sun's heat,
with the warmth they saved from summer and that from autumn, they should have the
power to have buds "more, / and still more" (8-9). Even though all these are just the
season's conspiracy which is not yet accomplished, by the undercurrent of the warmth
of the season, all the silent plants in the stanza are empowered as if they are ready to
grow beyond the text. The season, hence, by borrowing the soft heat from the
"maturing sun" (2), promises the richness in nature during autumn. On the other hand,
the warmth is rather implied in the text through the maturing processes of visible,
vibrant natural plants.
Though the poet has already personified Autumn, it is not until the second stanza
that the personification takes all its effects. If in the former stanza the poet is to depict
the power of the season over nature, then now he is to portray Autumn's personalities
in imagination:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
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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 . . . . (12-18)
Following the first stanza, the season here still embodies maturity and richness. But in
the first stanza, it is on the wild plants that the season implies its power; while in this
stanza, the season manifests itself in its relation to the agriculture. Since the season's
"store" (12) is the "granary" (14) and its hairs are "soft-lifted by the winnowing wind"
(15) as if undergoing the winnowing process, Autumn associates itself with the grains.
Then the scene moves to the on-going harvest. The "furrow" is thus another "store"
(12) where the season dwells and nearly falls asleep because of the drowsy "fume of
poppies" (17). Also, though the season is "careless" (14), it is still very careful: even
in half asleep, the season has unconsciously stops its sickle before a cluster of "twined
flowers" (18). Then, the season associates itself with more imageries that should
appear after the harvest:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. (19-22)
The scene changes in a sudden—from the field to the brook-side. Here the season, in
the pose of a gleaner, bends toward the stream (19-20). Another scene in these lines
also suggests that the season is watching the stream of apple juice for a long time
(21-22). Generally speaking, Autumn in this stanza is somehow static. It is either
"sitting" (14) on the floor of granary, nearly asleep on the furrow, or just staring at the
brook or the cider press; but the season is also moving, or at least there something
moving in the scenes: the hair that is lifted by the "winnowing wind" (15), the
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season's attempt to "keep steady" its head (19-20), and the flowing of the "last
oozings" (22).
Hence Autumn begins to expose its complicated, inconsistent, and even
paradoxical nature, but the poet does not continue to speak of the personified Autumn.
Instead, due to the lack of sounds in the previous stanzas, the poet questions Autumn:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
(23-24)
This is the first time and perhaps the only time in the ode that the poet directly talks to
the season. The poet's question here is rather abrupt, for the "songs of Spring" (23) are
off-season, and to ask of them is unreasonable. But the poet soon casts the question
away, and tells Autumn that it also has its own "music" (24):
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. (25-33)
In the previous stanzas, the poet has portrayed majorly the visual and sensual Autumn
with plants, and also has depicted the human actions with the personified season. Here,
in the last stanza, the poet speaks of the music with the creatures. The poet evokes a
variety of creatures, including "small gnats" (27) and "hedge-crickets" (31) that are
small insects, "full-grown lambs" that are domestic animals, and the "red-breast" (32)
and "swallows" (33) that are birds. From small insects to large fully grown lambs,
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from animals of the field to birds of the sky, from the water-side to the hills, from the
wilderness to the "garden-croft" (32), and from domestic animals to wild birds, with
these dimensions, the poet intends to refer to all the animals in nature. The music of
Autumn, hence, is granted with multiple sources which may never exhaust. Moreover,
the music is rather layered: the poet arranges the music from the gnats at riverside to
the lambs on hills, and back to the crickets in the near hedges, then to the nearer robin
in the garden, and in the end to the skies with the swallows. It is as if the whole local
nature is singing for the season, and the poet is just conducting the music to make it
more harmonious and arranged.
Comparing to the poet in the Spring Odes, the poet exhibits Autumn in ways
distinct from any of the strategies in the Spring Odes. In comparison to him in "Ode to
Psyche," the poet does not dedicate anything to the season in "To Autumn." Keats,
back in "Ode to Psyche," has given passionate self-sacrificial dedication:
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swingèd censer teeming:
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. (44-49)
Keats has attempted to dedicate himself to the goddess; however, the poet has just
fantacized that the goddess is in lack and might demand all his dedications. But in "To
Autumn," the poet appears once only when he questions and talks to Autumn in the
last stanza. Even then, the poet still shows no intention to devote any part of himself
to the season, not to mention the passions that have been seen in "Ode to Psyche."
Also, by his dedications, the poet has immobilized the goddess and even transformed
her into the poet himself in "Ode to Psyche;" while in "To Autumn," the season is not
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petrified by the poet. Although Autumn almost falls asleep once due to the effect of
the poppies (16-18) and it stays still to watch the juices flowing out from the
cider-press in a long time (21-22), the season is still in motion. When falls asleep, the
season "spares the next swath and all its twined flowers" (18), indicating that Autumn
can still move according to its own will, in contrast to Psyche, who is totally
paralyzed in her ode. As for staring at the "last oozings" (22) near the
cider-press, though motionless, Autumn is still staring at the juice, presenting its
livingness. Moreover, in "Ode to Psyche," the poet has silenced the goddess by both
putting her into sleep and giving her numerous dedications to prevent the goddess
from speaking of her desire as well as her lack. In "To Autumn," however, the season
is able to conspire with the sun (3), and it can even speaks in its music rather than
borrowing the poet's utterance to speak.
The season's music, undoubtedly, is not the nightingale's song in "Ode to a
Nightingale." The poet, in "Ode to a Nightingale," craves to "fade far away" (21) with
the nightingale because the poet has desired for the perfect singing of the nightingale
for him so that he might be able to speak of Love, which his language has failed to
cover in "Ode to Psyche." Also, the music of the nightingale is so attractive that the
poet has been lulled to a comfortable death:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! (51-58)
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Keats has been arrested in the perfect song of the nightingale. The poet's pains,
including his suicidal dedications to Psyche and his senses of self-disintegration
generated from his attempts to suspend imperfect bodily perceptions, could be eased
in the deadly "ecstasy" (58) in the bird's singings. On the contrary, in "To Autumn,"
the poet does not present such a tendency that he is attracted by the music of Autumn,
nor does he have the attempt to pursue that music. It is true that the poet in "To
Autumn" mentions the music of the season, but he is not merely describing or praising
that music. Instead, he talks to Autumn, reminding the season that it "hast [its] music
too" (24), and then the poet conducts the music for the season. The music, though still
composed of the vocal sounds of animals and insects, is indeed the poet's composition.
Therefore the poet needs not to pursue it, for the poet's language is rather part of the
season's music. Perfect or not, the music of the season has already weaved the poet
into it.
Moreover, in terms of time, the song of the nightingale is transcendental:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. ("Nightingale" 63-70)
The bird's song transcends many limits or boundaries, including time—"this passing
night" (63) and "ancient days" (64), class—"emperor and clown" (64),
religion—"Ruth" (66) for Christianity and Aphrodite (69-70) for Greek paganism, and
even space—the poet's place, Bethlehem according to "Ruth" in the "alien corn"
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(66-67) and Cypress where Aphrodite born in foams (69-70). The music of the
Autumn, on the other hand, is rather limited. For the aspect of time, the poet describes
that the music of the season in "To Autumn" is allocated only to the dusk of a day:
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue . . .. ("Autumn" 25-26)
Though it might be right to say that Autumn's music can be heard in every dusk and
therefore the music might be transcendental, it is still restricted to Autumn days.
Comparing to the everlasting and limitless bird song in "Ode to a Nightingale," the
music of the season is indeed restricted.
The dynamism of Autumn further differs it from the urn in "Ode on a Grecian
Urn." The poet in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" has assigned the urn to be the embodiment
of Love and Poesy:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (11-20)
With its "unheard" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn" 11) music, the urn freezes the young
lovers and engraves them onto itself. The lovers, therefore, can never kiss each other,
and are forced to produce Love for the poet. Hence, through the urn that the poet has
fanticized the fulfillment of his desire for Love and Poesy because both are the figures
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that had troubled him earlier in his disturbed dream. With the urn, the poet in "Ode on
Grecian Urn" freezes not only the scene of Love, but also the time on the urn:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young . . . . (21-27)
On the urn, the trees won't shed their leaves, and cannot "bid the Spring adieu" (22).
The poet, by freezing everything onto the urn, has enjoyed the illusional fullness that
the urn presents for him, though Jason Mauro criticizes the freezing effect of the urn
that it "shatters [the] continuity," on which human thought depends, between "action
and motivation, between feeling and origin" (295).
However, in "To Autumn," rather than being frozen, all imageries in "To
Autumn" are not static. In the first stanza, the season is "conspiring" (3) with the sun,
and plans to do a series of actions to ripen the fruit, gourd, hazel nuts, and to add buds
for the flowers. Although all that Autumn plans to is not yet occurred, the whole
stanza is already full of the power of warmth that the season and the sun bring to earth.
Every plant mentioned in the text is ready to grow or ripe. Indeed, Keats, in "To
Autumn," tries with all his efforts to capture the movement of the unmoved. Even in
the second stanza, when the season sits in the granary, its hairs are still lifted "by the
winnowing wind" (15), implying the movement in the serene scene. Also, as Autumn
watches the cider-press and remains motionless, in the scene there are still the dipping
of the "last oozings" (22). Moreover, it is needless to mention the dynamic music in
the last stanza. Besides, the time in "To Autumn" flows freely. There is mainly one
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span of time in the ode, covering the whole "To Autumn." In the first stanza, Autumn
is still planning to ripen the plants on earth. When it comes to the second stanza, the
time has already been the harvest time, for the imageries in this stanza, like
"winnowing wind" (15), "half-reap’d furrow" (16), "gleaner" (19), and "cyder-press"
(21), are all related to the harvest of crops or fruit. Then, in the last stanza, the
"full-grown lambs" (30) suggest that the time is close to the winter. Hence,
throughout the whole ode, though not directly described, a timeline related to different
aspects of agriculture can be drawn across the whole season without any problem. In
contrast, the urn in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" does not encourage its sculptures to more,
nor lets the time flow. Rather, the urn admires its own silent, still, perfect form and
put emphasis on the sculptures' inabilities to continue their actions. For
example, "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal"
(18-19) is to stabilize the lovers and to keep them in the pose forever. In sum, the poet,
in "To Autumn," not only portrays the season in a vivid, living way, but also presents
the whole season in the time span implied in each stanza.
The language structure of "To Autumn," on the contrary, is quite close to that in
"Ode on Melancholy." In "Ode on Melancholy," the poet has applied a series of
metaphors to keep the meanings from emerging, and therefore in the stasis of
language the poet might remain in his melancholic illusion. For instance, in the first
stanza of "Ode on Melancholy," the poet has given an extended metaphor on death:
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
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Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries . . . . (1-8)
Keats has switched quickly from one metaphor to another, leaving no time for the
generation of meanings through the metaphors. With these metaphors, the poet has
temporarily immobilized and trapped death in the center of a swirl of metaphors; but
the poet is still able to imply death, for all the metaphors are related to it. In "To
Autumn," the poet applies this metaphorical structure to depict the season without
directly summoning it. In the first stanza, with the actions of growing fruit (3-5),
ripening the fruit, gourd, and hazel nuts, (6-9), and arranging buds for the "later
flowers" (9-11), the poet metaphorically suggests that the season is Autumn. In the
second stanza, then, the poet personifies the season and, with imageries related to
harvesting, the poet again successfully refers the whole stanza to Autumn without
mentioning the truth. In addition, since the first stanza is mostly about nature, and the
second one is about humanity, the poet again through these two stanzas indicates that
the Autumn, is not just of nature but also of humanity.
By comparing "To Autumn" with "Ode on Indolence," Keats's attempt to
emphasize both his and the season's existence in language may be justified. In "Ode
on Indolence," the poet has never addressed Indolence, although the Indolence,
according to the topic of the ode, should had been the addressee in the ode. Instead,
the poet has appealed to the three ghostly figures—Love, Poesy, and Ambition. The
figures, walking around an urn, implies that the poet's indolence has been disturbed.
By depicting how the poet has suffered from the three phantoms, the poet indeed
highlights the comfort that his lost indolence might offer him. But when the poet
wants to escape from the ghosts, he soon realizes that he may not be able to escape:
So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
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For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return! (61-70)
Only in this stanza, the poet has commanded five times that the figures leave him, but
in vain. Since the poet has relied on the figures for keeping himself with his
fantacized lost indolence, without the three ghosts, the poet might really lost the
indolence. Hence, the poet is melancholized by the three ghostly figures, even though
they were just empty, faceless signifiers that metaphorically imply indolence. In "To
Autumn," on the other hand, Keats addresses Autumn, clearly defining Autumn as the
addressee in the addresser-addressee relation. Without metaphors as the bridge
between each other, the poet in "To Autumn" may free himself and the season from
the threat of the whole melancholizing language structure that traps people with
infinite metaphors.
Hence, in "To Autumn," the poet avoids all the factors that melancholized him in
the Spring Odes; furthermore, the poet even borrows the language structure from the
former odes for "To Autumn" without being influenced by the melancholizing effect
of the metaphorical language. Towards the addressed subject—Autumn, Keats applies
an attitude that is distinctively different from the other odes: instead of simply treating
the season as his addressee, Keats personifies Autumn, allowing it to act freely across
the whole ode rather than being trapped in the poet's subjective perspectives, and
simultaneously hides himself behind the metaphorical language structure to manifest
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the personality of Autumn. Seemingly unaffected by the melancholic mood in his
Spring Odes, Keats in "To Autumn" may have "recovered" from his melancholy. In
other words, the poet may have resolved his melancholy toward the lost indolence,
and therefore the two key differences between "To Autumn" and the Spring Odes: the
personification of the addressee and the metaphorical language may indicate Keats's
resolution to his melancholy.
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Chapter 5: Conclusion: Keats's Resolutions to Melancholy
Throughout the Spring Odes, Keats has been suffering from his melancholy.
Beginning with his dream-like vision in March, the poet has intended to regain his
lost indolence by dealing with the three factors—Love, Poesy, and Ambition—which
have disturbed his indolence. In the Spring Odes, the poet struggles to trap Love in
"Ode to Psyche," to reach Poesy in "Ode to a Nightingale," and to achieve as highly
as his Ambition reveals in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but he fails. Unable to reassure
his existence as a lover, a poet, or even a general ambitious person, the poet plunges
into his melancholy and creates a metaphorical world in "Ode on Melancholy" for
delaying the descent of death—or the reality of his failure in being a lover, a poet, and
an ambitious man, Finally, the poet traps himself in the melancholic dilemma in "Ode
on Indolence." However, in "To Autumn," Keats seems to have recovered from his
melancholic mood. Though still using the metaphorical language as he in "Ode on
Melancholy," the poet in "To Autumn" presents a distinctively different atmosphere.
Not aiming to deal with anything, Keats in "To Autumn" shows that he has rather get
rid of his melancholic mood as well as his lost indolence. In other words, the poet
may have resolved his melancholy, or melancholic mood, which has troubled him
during the first half year of 1819. Hence, in this chapter, I am going to discuss Keats's
resolution to his melancholy. In "To Autumn," there are two key points in the poet's
composition considering the Spring Odes: one is that the poet personifies the season
in "To Autumn" rather than just address the subject as in the Spring Odes; the other is
that the poet still applies the metaphorical language that he develops in "Ode on
Melancholy," and "Ode on Indolence." In other words, both the language and the
strategy of depicting the addressee may lead to the poet's resolution to his melancholic
mood. Indeed, with the Spring Odes as the pre-procedure that deals with the
melancholy in advance, the personification of Autumn helps the poet to confront the
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enigmatic Other and retrieve his lost cause of desire with the new metaphorical
language. In the end, Keats is able to find the resolution to his melancholy.
For the resolution of melancholy, according to Sigmund Freud, it requires time:
Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot
be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and
cathartic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is
psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in
which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and
detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. ("Mourning and
Melancholia" 244-45)
Freud here suggests that the resolution of melancholy is the detachment of the
subject's libido, which is attached to the lost object. The process of detachment
requires some time and certain "reality test":
The fact that it passes off after a certain time has elapsed without leaving
traces of any gross changes is a feature it shares with mourning. We found by
way of explanation that in mourning time is needed for the command of
reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and that when this work has been
accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost
object. (252)
For Freud, the melancholized subject needs to confront the reality bits by bits, and by
this work the ego's fixed libido may be freed from the lost object. In other words, the
subject in the end may accept the truth that the lost object has already passed
away—or lost forever, and the procedure consists a series of "reality-testing." During
the reality tests, the subject explores all that represents or associates to the lost object
one after one, acknowledging that there is no possibility to regain or reach his lost
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object, and in the very end accepts the sad truth, beginning to mourn for the beloved
lost object.
In terms of resolving the melancholy, the Spring Odes seem to have served as the
"reality-testing" (252) process for Keats. In the Spring Odes, the poet intends to deal
with the three disturbing figures: Love, Poesy, and Ambition. From "Ode to Psyche,"
"Ode to a Nightingale," to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet tries different strategies
to immobilize or reach for the three figures, but in vain. The poet's failures in stabilize
Love, Poesy, and Ambition, in Freudian explanation, may help the poet to recognize
the reality that he can never achieve in regaining his lost indolence. For in "Ode on
Indolence," the poet relates the three figures to an urn:
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side; (1-6)
Vendler suggests that the urn here is the poet's doppelganger (24), and the poet wants
the figures to fade away and be once more the figures on the urn ("Indolence" 55-56).
In other words, the poet expects to see a "himself" (he or his doppelganger) which
owns or internalizes Love, Poesy, and Ambition; furthermore, by immobilizing the
three figures, the poet may regain his serene indolence and be like the urn, as he
praises the Grecian urn to be a "still unravish'd bride of quietness" and "foster-child of
Silence and slow Time" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn" 1-2). Hence the poet's inability to
internalize the three figures not only suggests the failure of the poet's fantasy that the
urn is his imaginary doppelganger, but also reveals the reality that the poet has
already lost his indolence.
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The poet spends three odes to recognize that he cannot deal with the three figures.
From the never-coming Love in "Ode to Psyche," the unachievable perfect Poesy in
"Ode to a Nightingale," to the Ambition of perfection in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the
poet suffers from a series of painful reality that he is far away from his indolence.
However, in the Spring Odes, the poet is still not detached from his beloved indolence.
Though fails to re-associate himself with the lost indolence through the three figures,
the poet still refuses to acknowledge his loss. In the last stanza of "Ode on Indolence,"
the poet states:
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return! (55-60)
The poet here demands the figures to fade away, but indeed there are two different
locations that the poet wants the figures to go: onto the urn and into the clouds. Since
the urn is Keats's imaginary doppelganger, the poet's attitude towards the figures
remains unclear: whether does he still demand to be the perfect "urn-Keats" which the
figures are integrated to, or does he finally decide to cast the figures away and accept
the loss of his indolence? It seems that the poet here is still hesitating, or at least the
poet is swayed by the reality that he can never reach his lost indolence. If the Spring
Odes really serve as the Freudian reality test, then they have, in a certain degree,
helped the poet to realize his loss.
Nevertheless, Keats may have really accepted the truth that his indolence is
forever lost in the last. In all of the Spring Odes, the poet has always praised spring;
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while in the letter to Reynolds the poet can finally express his dislikes against spring
in autumn:
How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness
about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik'd
stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring.
Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look
warm—this stuck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon
it. (Poetry and Prose 359)
Written on September, this letter suggests the poet's attitudes towards the two
seasons—the spring and the autumn in 1819. For the poet, the "chilly green" spring in
1819 has passed, and the autumn is rather warm. Moreover, in "To Autumn," he gives
the following statements:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
(23-24)
Although the spring is still in his mind, the poet finally accepts that it has already
gone, so as his lost indolence, and he must "[let] go what must go" (Dupre 63). The
spring, as well as the poet's struggles for regaining his lost indolence, has totally gone
in the autumn, and the poet has finally let go of the beloved lost indolence.
Hence "To Autumn," which is composed just after his walk mentioned in the
letter to Reynolds, does not serve as a reality test or deal with the poet's loss anymore;
instead, the ode is but a declaration through which the poet claims his rebirth. But
Keats in "To Autumn" still applies the metaphorical language that he develops from
"Ode on Melancholy." Since such a language may arouse a melancholic mood as in
"Ode on Melancholy." As long as it persists, the poet might again plunges into a
melancholic mood. However, metaphorical language may also serve as the key to the
resolution to melancholy. Though, for Freud, melancholy is occurred when a beloved
83
object—in Keats's case, his indolence—is lost, for Kristeva, such a loss is but a
fantasy. What is really lost is not the beloved object, but rather the "Thing" as "the
real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat
of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated" (13). Unable
to speak of or reach the "Thing," the subject grows a feeling of sadness and further
attaches to the feeling, hence develops melancholy. Therefore, the beloved object is
but a stimulus: it serves not as the object of love, but rather for the generation of a
sadness. Even though the beloved object can be given up in a Freudian way, as long
as the subject is still attached to the sad mood, melancholy may persist. To resolve
melancholy, therefore, it requires more than Freudian detachment, or "going through."
Kristeva, indeed, suggests "transposition," which "corresponds to the Greek
metaphorein, to transport." (41) According to her, transposition is "a true
reconstitution that retroactively gives form and meaning to the mirage of the primal
Thing" (41). In other words, transposition helps the subject to associate himself with
the lost Thing and may detach the subject from the melancholic mood.
For transposition, Kristeva further points out:
That critical task of transposition consists of two facets: the mourning gone
through for the object (and in its shadow the mourning for the archaic Thing),
and the subject's acceptance of a set of signs (signifying precisely because of the
absence of object) only thus open to serial organization. (41)
For Kristeva, the Freudian method is still required, but it only offers the link between
the lost object and the Thing so that the subject may mourn for the Thing when he
mourns for the lost object. The whole process of transposition, then, is carried out by
language, for language is "a translation" that translates between a level and the one
where affective loss, renunciation, or the break takes place (41). In this light, Keats's
metaphorical language should function as the language that carries out the process of
84
transposition. In the signifying process of the poet's language, the form and meaning
of the Thing should have been retroactively revealed bits by bits, and the poet in the
end might finalize the mourning for the Thing; in the Spring Odes, the mourning for
the Thing fails because that the poet refuses to generate any meaning from his
metaphors in both "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode on Indolence." Since the poet is
unable to accept the truth that the object—the indolence—is lost, the signifying
process of the metaphorical language does not function, and hence the poet cannot
really mourn for the loss of the Thing.
Since the language in "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode on Indolence"
malfunctions, there are two steps for the poet to resolve his melancholic mood: the
first is to acknowledge the loss of his indolence, and the second is to develop a new
language that is functional. In "To Autumn," still applying the metaphorical structure,
the poet chooses a new discursive method for his new language: personification.
Although Jacques Khaplip claims that the personification is just an "indicator of
emotional mood, seasonal change, or allegorical wisdom" (901), by personifying the
season in "To Autumn," the poet indeed changes the language and the
addresser-addressee structure that he has applied in the Spring Odes before. Treating
Autumn as a human being in an anthropomorphic way, the poet avoids reducing his
addressee to an object of his worships. Also, since the poet raises the season up from
the object to his praises to a status which is equal to his, nothing of the poet, from the
poet's language to the poet's mind, is to be dedicated to the addressee in the ode. In
other words, the personification strategy itself grants the season the feature to be
"unknown." As in the second stanza:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
85
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 cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. (13-22)
Without depicting Autumn in detail, the poet just gives several images of the
personified season and leaves many features of the season unknown: for example, the
gender of the season, or what the poet is looking at while it leans across a brook. Not
grasping the whole picture or depicting Autumn with a certain perspective, the poet
further shows no intention to be attached to the season or even any feature of the
season. Instead, the poet—the addressor—steps out of the ode, maintaining a critical
distance to observe, record, and even create for Autumn. Hence, in "To Autumn," the
poet hardly presents himself and only appears when he can talk to the season equally,
for example, to ask questions like "Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?" (12).
Besides the creation of a new language, the personification of the season also
indicates the revival of the poet's desire. Though does not directly mention the
resolution to melancholy, Slavoj Žižek may have hinted at it:
As the saying goes, desire is an infinite metonymy, it slides from one object to
another. In so far as desire's "natural" state is thus that of melancholy—the
awareness that no positive object is "it," its proper object, that no positive object
can ever fill out its constitutive lack—the ultimate enigma of desire is: how can
it be "set in motion" after all? (The Plague of Fantasies 81)
86
Žižek suggests that melancholy is structurally the same as desire: both are
metonymical, seeking to fill out the ultimate lack in the structure. The very critical
feature of desire, as well as the key to the resolution to melancholy, is indeed the
answer to Žižek's last question: the cause of desire. For the relation between
melancholy and the cause of desire, Žižek explains:
One has to introduce here the Lacanian distinction between the object and the
(object-) cause of desire: while the object of desire is simply the desired object,
the cause of desire is the feature on account of which we desire the desired
object (some detail or tic, which we are usually unaware of and sometimes even
misperceive as the obstacle, as that in spite of which we desire the object). From
this perspective, the melancholic is not primarily the subject fixated on the lost
object, unable to perform the work of mourning, but rather the subject who
possesses the object but has lost his desire for it because the cause that made
him desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficiency. Far from accentuating
to the extreme the situation of the frustrated desire, of the desire deprived of its
object, melancholy rather stands for the presence of the object itself deprived of
the desire for itself. Melancholy occurs when we finally get the desired object,
but are disappointed in it. ("Melancholy and the Act" 662)
For Žižek, what is lost in melancholy is not the object of desire, but rather the cause
of desire; the object of desire is even present or possessed by the subject, hence the
desire fails to continue desiring for the object. On the other hand, to resolve
melancholy, the subject must regain the cause of desire.
The cause of desire, then, plays a key role in the resolution to melancholy.
According to Sean Homer, the cause of desire is indeed the Lacanian objet petit a, or
objet a:
87
Desire, strictly speaking, has no object. Desire is always the desire for
something that is missing and thus involves a constant search for the missing
object. Through the rupture between subject and Other a gap is opened up
between the desire of the child and that of the mother. It is this gap that
inaugurates the movement of desire and the advent of the objet petit a. Through
fantasy, the subject attempts to sustain the illusion of unity with the Other and
ignore his or her own division. Although the desire of the Other always exceeds
or escapes the subject, there nevertheless remains something that the subject can
recover and thus sustains him or herself. This something is the objet a. (87)
In other words, objet petit a is generated when the subject confronts the desire of the
Other. Though the subject may still fantacize that he is in unity with the Other, the
subject can never fully grasp the desire of the Other. The objet petit a is thus the lack
or the excess itself, which mobilizes the subject's desire to move. On the other hand,
the objet petit a is rather the "constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is
lacking or missing from our lives" (87).
Since in melancholy the feeling of lack is lost, to regain it indeed means to
rebuild the relationship between the subject and the desire of the Other. Keats, by
personifies Autumn in "To Autumn," may also re-establish the melancholic poet's
relation to the desire of the Other. Personified, the season is treated as the other
subject opposing to the poet himself in the ode. Unlike the poet in the Spring Odes,
Keats here in "To Autumn" does not establish a subject-object relationship with the
season; instead, the poet maintains a distance from the season, enabling the season to
act and to give away its own music. In other words, Autumn, for Keats, serves as the
Other in "To Autumn." Rather than just "pouring forth [his] soul abroad"
("Nightingale" 57) and arbitrarily assigns features to his addressee according to his
subjective perspectives and imaginations, the poet in "To Autumn" approaches the
88
season with a series of metaphorical sketches that seemingly only to be the poet's
records of Autumn's images. In the poet's depictions of Autumn, there are still many
features of the season that remain unknown; however, the season in the ode also
exceeds the poet's text. The metaphorical depictions in parallel with each other start to
generate new meanings in relation to but out of the season itself, for instance, the
second stanza of "To Autumn" not only draws out the personified Autumn but also
indicates the agricultural activities according to their chronicle order in the season.
Hence, the personified season is no long in the poet's control in "To Autumn."
The poet in the ode may never totally know his personified addressee. The
metaphorical language that the poet applies to depict the season allows too many
"unknowns," and therefore many details of Autumn may remain untouched by the
language. And since Autumn is personified as one of the subjects in the ode, the poet,
in a subject-to-subject relationship to the season, now should face the "unknowns" in
Autumn. Besides, even the poet's own depictions of the season may betray him, for
new meanings are generated through the signifying process of metaphors. The season
suddenly turns out to be a series of enigma to Keats in "To Autumn." Although the
poet has extended his metaphorical language to refer to the season in multiple aspects,
there are always something more about the season than the poet's descriptions.
Unlike in "Ode on Melancholy" that the poet resists the coming of meanings by
developing an infinite metaphorical sliding, in "To Autumn," the enigmas or the
otherness of Autumn remind the poet of his inability to fully understand the season
and exist as the lack, or the cause of desire, that continually stimulates the poet's
desire for something missing. The poet recovers the cause of desire and, being able to
desire again, turns into a desiring subject in "To Autumn."
The poet's resolution to melancholy, then, relies mostly on personification.
Serving as one of the key strategies that lead to the resolution of the poet's
89
melancholic mood, personification is influential in two aspects: language and desire.
In the aspect of language, personifying the season urges a new language to emerge.
Since the poet refuses to acknowledge the reality of his loss, the poet's language in the
Spring Odes, in the end, becomes the locus where the poet resists the reality of his lost
indolence and the signifying process, and hence fails to "translate" (Kristeva 41) the
poet's effort of going through the loss of indolence to the morning of the primal lost.
Comparing to the old one, the new language based on the subject-to-subject discourse
of "To Autumn" prevents the Autumn from being oppressed by the arbitrary poet,
allowing the season to have features other than the poet's observations or imaginations,
and further prevents the poet from overly attaching to the personified season.
With such a new language, personification, in the aspect of desire, further
resolves the poet's melancholic stasis. While the structure of melancholy and desire
are both metonymic, Slavoj Žižek suggests that melancholy is occurred when the
cause of desire, rather than the object of desire, is lost ("Melancholy and the Act" 662).
To recover the cause of desire, it requires to re-establish the poet's relation to the
Other. The personification of Autumn actually offers the chance for the poet to
confront an enigmatic Other. Losing the language to arbitrarily assign his subjective
observations and imaginations to the addressee, the poet's depictions of the
personified season may not precisely refer to the season: there are always features of
the season that the poet fails to grasp, or the poet's text may generate new meanings
that are related to but indeed exceed the season itself. The objet petit a, which is
indeed the cause of desire, just hides in these lacks and excesses. Personifying
Autumn, the poet will then confronts the impossibility to fully understand the season;
and since Keats does not retreat into his language as he in the Spring Odes, but
instead try to depict the season with his words, the sense of lack, or the objet petit a,
should again support the movement of his desire.
90
Personification, then, with the new metaphorical language developed from the
Spring Odes, is the main factor for resolving the poet's melancholy. In spite of
personification, there is still another factor that is rather fundamental but doubtful to
the resolution to melancholy—the process of detachment, or going through. The
whole sequence of the Spring Odes, as well as the poet's struggles, may serve as the
Freudian reality tests, during which the poet realizes that truth that his beloved
indolence has been lost. The consequence of the process, however, remains unclear.
Although the poet seems to have swayed by the reality, there is still no distinctive
evidence that the poet has gone through his loss and turned to mourn for the lost
object.
The poet's long journey of melancholy finally meets its end in "To Autumn." The
poet, disturbed by his strange dream-like vision and the three figures—Love, Poesy,
and Ambition in the vision, has begun his trip for the lost indolence. In "Ode to
Psyche," the poet deals with Love, but he soon realizes that he does not have the
language to speak of Love. Later in "Ode to a Nightingale," he intends to find the
perfect language as well as to catch his flying Poesy, but in vain. In "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," the poet imagines an urn to be his advocate. With the shapes on the urn,
the poet wants the urn to embody Poesy and Love and his Ambition, but he then
notices that the urn, being his doppelganger, may exist as a better "Keats" than him
once it embodies the three figures. Unable to deal with the urn, the poet develops a
metaphorical language structure to defend himself against death with a series of
infinite metaphors in "Ode on Melancholy." The structure, however, overwhelms the
poet instead and drowns him in the illusional promise of eternal life that melancholy
can offer. And thus in "Ode on Indolence," the poet fails to escape from the three
figures, for they are his only connection to the lost indolence, and only by the three
figures that the poet may continue to stay in the easeful melancholic mood.
91
However, in "To Autumn," the poet frees himself from the melancholic mood.
Throughout the ode, the poet avoids all factors that may trap him in melancholy again.
The poet's sufferings in the Spring Odes may suggest that the poet is going through
the loss of indolence. But it is the strategy of anthropomorphism in "To Autumn" that
finally relieves the poet of his melancholic mood. By personifying his addressee,
Autumn, the poet is able to modify the metaphorical language structure in the Spring
Odes to prevent the poet from being arrested by the metaphors again. Also, with the
new language, the poet may confront Autumn as the enigmatic Other and recover his
lost cause of desire while depicting the Autumn with the new language. In the end, the
poet finally recovers from his melancholic mood, as both his language and his desire
may function well in "To Autumn" rather than in a melancholic stasis as in the Spring
Odes.
92
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