Keats and the Cinematic Time-Image: Temporal Existence in Ode
on a Grecian Urn
Key Words: John Keats; Temporality; Gilles Deleuze; Film Theory; Images
Abstract:
The theme of time and its passage in engaged in many forms and to various ends in
the poetic work of John Keats. This essay explores the way in which Keats articulates
time and temporal structure through the evocation of images in his poetry, and it uses
the film theory of Gilles Deleuze to carry out this exploration.
Deleuze argues for the philosophical importance of cinema as an art form through
which time and temporality can be investigated and articulated. His “time-image”
compound theory describes the specific relationship between time and image that is
created in film. This essay deconstructs the concepts at the heart of the “time-image”
and sets them in the context of Keats’s poetry. Repeatedly in Keats’s work, the
conjured image – whole and absolute, yet of a necessarily time-conditioned existence
– is made the focus of the poetic voice’s persistent interrogation. A perfect example of
this can be found in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn, wherein the image of the urn
comes to house the mysteries of the passage of time, immutable and impenetrable. It
is this poem in particular that is here addressed and decoded using Deleuze’s theories.
Ultimately, in setting the conventions of modern cinema up against a nineteenth
century poem, an argument is made for the possibilities of cross-media and
retrospective analysis in literature. This essay uses the language of film to shed new
light on the work of Keats, and in doing so, sets up cinema as a tool for literary analysis
in its own right.
In his 1985 publication, Cinéma II: L’Image-temps, French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze makes the assertion that “cinema is still at the beginning of its investigations:
making visible these relationships of time which can only appear in a creation of the
image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii). Cinema is here presented as a
philosophical tool; an inherently conceptual medium which, even on its most basic
operational levels, engages with complex existential questions. In particular, Deleuze
points to cinema’s unique capacity for the philosophical articulation of time, stating as
the intention of his text, “to release [the temporal structures] that the cinematographic
image has been able to grasp and reveal, and which can echo the teachings of
science, what the other arts uncover for us, or what philosophy makes understandable
for us, each in their respective ways” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii). In this
way, Deleuze sets up cinematic theory as a potential interrogative device for the
philosophical understanding of temporal structure. Cinema uses moving images – that
is to say, creates the illusion of moving images – as a means of creating and engaging
with temporal space. Of course, this impulse to use ‘the image’ as a site of
investigation for time and temporality did not simply arise for the first time alongside
the relatively young medium that is cinema. It is with this in mind that this essay
proposes to take Deleuze at his word, so to speak, and harness what “the
cinematographic image has been able to grasp and reveal”, in order to determine what
retrospective light cinematic theory in general, and “time-image” theory in particular
can shed on previous artistic explorations of time and temporality. The specific subject
of these investigations will be the work of Romantic poet John Keats, and his poem
Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats 1466-1468) in particular. Of course, Keats’s poetic
dealings with, and renderings of, time and the inevitability of its passage extend far
beyond this one composition. Though his writing life was astonishingly short – no more
than six years – his work displays ample engagement with concepts of time through
the themes of the seasons and oncoming death, for example, in poems such as To
Autumn, When I have Fears that I may cease to be, and Bright Star. However, it is in
Grecian Urn that Keats utilises the ‘image’, and the various layers of complexity
inherent to the way in which it functions as a signifier, in order to explore the at once
vast and intricate terrain of the immutable phenomenon that is time and its movement.
It is for this reason that this essay will focus solely on this work. In so doing, the aim is
to demonstrate the ways in which Deleuze’s theory can aid an exploration of Keats’s
poem, and by extension, the value of retrospective and cross-media thinking for
opening up new avenues for artistic analysis.
Deleuze’s theory of the “time-image” comes as a continuation of sorts of his
previous work on what he called the “movement-image” (Deleuze, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image), in Cinema I: L’image-mouvement. Taking up the theories of Henri
Bergson, Deleuze here asserts the idea of movement, in cinema, as the central
descriptive tool. That is to say that despite the fact of its technical reliance on a system
of successive still images, in terms of artistic expression and philosophical
actualisation it is in fact the movement on the screen, and the fact of its continuity, that
constitutes cinematic expression. Cinema “does not give us a figure described in a
unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure”
(Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 5). It is the disruption of this unity of image
and movement, in the aftermath of the Second World War that Deleuze explores in
Cinema 2. He asserts that “the movement-image of the so-called classical era gave
way, in the post-war period, to a direct time-image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage xi). The psychological trauma caused by the war finds expression in a
disturbance of the cohesion that characterised the films of the time before. Looking at
the revolutionary new cinematic techniques of the French New Wave and Italian
Neorealism in particular, such as “false continuity and irrational cuts”, Deleuze
highlights how “[t]ime ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself and
itself gives rise to false movements” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xi). In this
sense, it is no longer movement which constitutes the essence of cinematic
expression, but rather, time which “rises to the surface of the screen” (Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image xi). From here, Deleuze embarks on an exploration of the
different forms in which the “time-image” can be found, and what, in terms of
philosophy, this new articulation of time, through image, can tell us. It is the latter that
is the principal concern of this essay. Deleuze’s exploration takes as its base-point, so
to speak, the assertion that “[t]he image itself is the system of the relationships of time
from which the variable present only flows” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii).
From here, he unfurls a detailed analysis of the many layers of time and temporal
existence that constitute the infinite present that the ‘image’ presents. As a rigorous
account of the minute inter-workings of temporality and semiotics, there is much that
even a basic application of the text’s main theses could offer any work.
John Keats’s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, is a suitable candidate for the
application of Deleuze’s cinematic theory because, this essay would propose, it follows
a similar thread in relation to the way in which it conceives of and articulates the
passage of time. In a way, it presents its own “time-image”, its own articulation of a
moment of expectant awareness within the forward trajectory of narrative art. A fully
realised, self-aware stillness. The poem consists of a single voice, musing on the still
silence of the loaded historian that a Grecian urn constitutes:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian,
The poetic voice addresses the urn, relentlessly questioning, but to no avail. It is an
altercation between the poetic voice and inscribed marble. There is no response, the
voice and its inquisition are all that can be heard. However, this marble urn, inscribed
as it is with the four distinct images described by the poem, is not entirely without
expression. At the point where the poetic voice encounters these still images,
something further is conjured: an imaginary activation of each of the four scenes as
they are brought to life in an enclosed, circuitous, temporal existence. The images
represent an eternal present. They are a happening that does not quite happen, a
single unit of time, retrieved from its original place in time’s relentless forward
movement, and condensed into the only utterance that can really express something
that is at once so solid and so fleeting; an image. This is the “time-image” that is here
produced. In the sense that Deleuze’s “time-image” arises as the result of the
dislocation of time from continuous, cohesive movement in film, it here arises from a
similar act of temporal disruption. In both cases, there is a sense of multiplicity and
layering in the expression of time that is brought to the fore. Deleuze states that:
what we call temporal structure, or direct time-image, clearly goes beyond the
purely empirical succession of time – past-present-future. It is, for example, a
coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can
belong to several levels: sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order.
(Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii)
This assertion provides an interesting articulation of not only the sense of time that
emerges from Keats’s frozen-in-time images, but also of the way in which they
resonate with and give meaning to their bearer, the urn itself. As an object – a literal
vessel - filled with the past, which was absorbed as the present, as it passed in its
time, and will accordingly be carried forward into the future, it constitutes a dense figure
in any discussion of time. More detailed elucidation of this will emerge from more
precise applications of Deleuze’s theories, which are to follow.
An important part of Deleuze’s “time-image” is the dislocation between visual
and audio that it effects. He states that “[t]he relations and disjunctions between visual
and sound, between what is seen and what is said, revitalize the problem and endow
cinema with new powers for capturing time and the image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The
Time-Image xiii). This refers, of course, to the ways in which cinema can separate
sound from image, causing the emergence of a “direct time-image” from the disjointed
space in-between. However, there is evidence of Keats engaging in a similar process
in Ode on a Grecian Urn. The first of the four images depicted on the side of the urn
that he focuses on is that of a piper. He is portrayed to be in the middle of playing a
tune on his pipe, and so Keats muses on the fact that he and his music, caught in the
eternal present of the image, will exist in that state forever:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
More importantly, however, this state of preserved silence renders him separate from
the music that he makes, which cannot be carried forward with his image. While he is
a piper in the midst of a tune, the tune is absent, or rather, elsewhere. The first four
lines of the second stanza testify to this:
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:
The unheard melody that the piper plays is a sort of paradox, a discontinuity which
allows for a glimpse of time to emerge. From the space where the past is distilled as
a present, between an action and its consequence, comes a “time-image”. This idea
takes even more productive forms in the third and fourth stanzas. While the piper is
“[f]or ever piping songs for ever new;” the young lovers in the next image, poised in
the act of being about to kiss, are “[f]or ever panting and for ever young”. Their actions
are given not just an aural effect but one that is connected with their breathing, and
accordingly, with their very ‘being’. Sound is here connected with the ultimate act of
continuous, uninterrupted living. Indeed, this very mechanism is referred to explicitly
in the next line: “All breathing human passion far above”. Breathing is something that
happens within time, in that it is a continuous act. It is also the very thing that
constitutes life. However, their “panting”, or “breathing” cannot be heard here; it is
interrupted, caught and preserved before it even happens. This is perhaps what is
ultimately expressed by this sense of a preserved present; rather than a death, it
constitutes a lack of life. The following image, at the beginning of the fourth stanza,
exemplifies this. A “heifer lowing at the skies” is being led to its death at a ceremony
of sacrifice. Yet, though on the brink of death, it will never quite get there, the scene
having been preserved en-route. Caught between life and death, never moving closer
to either one, nor fully realising its own position – in that the heifer’s “lowing” is
unsounded, like the lovers’ “panting” – this image, like all the images described by
Keats, constitutes a sort of “time-image” in the way that it appears as a fragment of
temporal existence. The complexities of Ode on a Grecian Urn are based primarily in
the intricate conception of time that it presents, but these complexities in turn generate
further lines of enquiry for an analysis of the poem.
Deleuze’s theory offers more than simply an explanation of where the “timeimage” can be found. There is a definite sense of the active life of the image, its
distinction from the “time-image” which it facilitates and of the working relationship
between the two. He states that:
What is specific to the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible,
to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented
object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.
(Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii)
This assertion makes two particular inferences: firstly, that the basic image has an
active, “creative” role in the production of a “time-image”. This is important in the sense
that it sets the two at a distance from each other, while at the same time establishing
that the latter is indeed dependent of the former. Secondly, the above statement infers
that the “time-image” - that is to say the “mak[ing] visible” of the “relationships of time
which cannot be seen” – is dependent on the act of representation that the image
constitutes. Inasmuch as the subject that the image displays contributes to the “timeimage” that is produced, so too does the very fact of its display, perhaps even more
so. There is a deliberation in the act of representation that gives a meaning to the
image that the original object does not have. That this, in essence, constitutes a split
between an original and its representative, is relevant to this discussion in that is
serves as a pre-cursor to another assertion of splitting later in Deleuze’s text. He states
that, as part of the development of a “time-image” from an image “[t]here is a formation
of an image with two sides, actual and virtual” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
68). These two acts of splitting, between original and image, and then between image
and “time-image” create what Deleuze later refers to as a “circuit” of reality, memory
and thought, wherein the image “both absorbs and creates its own object” (Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image 68). This idea of a “circuit” of existence relates in an
interesting way to the depiction of the urn that Keats’s poem offers. Returning once
again to the object itself “on” which the ode was composed, there are several things
which are important to note. Firstly, the urn which Keats describes does not actually
exist. While it is known that Keats visited the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, and
it is generally assumed that it was this experience, which poet and critic Edward Hirsch
describes as having been “an overpowering encounter”, which inspired his ode, it is
understood that there is no known “Grecian Urn” which fits Keats’s description (Hirsch
xxiii). And so, the figure of the urn presents a circuit of existence the beginning of which
is imaginary. The images which Keats describes have been conjured completely by
him, and in this way the poem itself, and not just the urn it presents, “both absorbs and
creates its own image”. In sum, the relationship between the poem, the urn, the images
that it depicts and the “time-image” that they produce is presented as a layered circuit
of shadowy existence, or even not-quite-existence. They “continually follow[ed] each
other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of
indiscernibility” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 68). This idea finds expression
in the poem itself, in the way in which Keats relentlessly questions the urn, asking
“[w]hat leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape”, and receiving no answer. Perhaps
this is because what the urn houses is exactly that; a haunting indiscernibility, and
nothing more, or at least, nothing more penetrable. Teased “out of thought” by the
impenetrable circuit of creation in representation that the poem perpetuates, Keats
concludes with a similar, logically circular riddle:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Not only does the heart of the poem remain somewhat indiscernible, but there is a
sense that the poem’s heart, or centre, is not the point; that it is the circuits of images
in their various temporal and existential states that constitute the poem’s true subject
matter.
Having thus exemplified the ways in which Deleuze’s theory of the cinematic
image seems to echo mechanisms that were used by Keats in his poetry more than a
century before, and having followed the arising suggestions for understanding one of
his poems, this discussion will now take a step back from the theoretical application
itself. The idea that Keats seems to have pre-figured certain elements of modern,
cinematic philosophy is worth some pursuit in its own right. While the notion, thus
stated, may seem like a tenuous one, it does, when viewed in the wider, historical
framework of intellectual currents, seem a good deal more plausible. In the preface to
their English translation of Deleuze’s text, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta tap into
this notion somewhat, stating that:
Modern cinema recreates the concepts of modern philosophy, but in a new way.
In particular, the cinematic reversal of the subordination of time to movement
repeats a philosophical revolution which took place over several centuries.
Deleuze [begins his analysis with] the break up of the classical notion of the
image which was defined in relation to external world and self-aware subject.
(Tomlinson and Galeta xvi)
It is interesting to consider these sentiments in the context of Keats’s own poetic theory
of “Negative Capability”, which, as he himself explains in a letter to his brothers, refers
to a situation in which “man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1404-1405). This
essentially amounts to a wilful loss of the self, a complete negation of ego, in the
course of artistic pursuit. It is this that Keats strove for in his poetry; for the lines to blur
between poet and subject, and for him to be able to embody his subject rather than
consider it from a distance. There is certainly a parallel between this newly asserted
way of envisioning the relationship between artist and subject, and Deleuze’s
identification of a new relationship between image as subject, and the external world.
Further to this, it is worth pointing out that both theories emerged from landmark period
of upheaval in the western world. As a poet of the Romantic era, Keats was writing in
the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, and all of the political strife that
accompanied them in England. Similarly, Deleuze, pinpoints the emergence of the
“time-image” in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, it is not the business
of this discussion to draw speculative conclusions from the fact that these parallels
exist, but rather to contextualise the comparisons that this essay has proposed in
some sort of historical and theoretical framework.
Indeed, it has not been the object of this essay to establish an exclusive and
inexplicable link between Keats’s poetry and modern film theory. It is the shared
threads of philosophical thought and expression that have emerged between the two,
regardless of historical context or artistic medium, that are worth identifying and
warrent recognition. That Deleuze’s “time-image” theory can offer a framework through
which the complexities of Keats’s rendering of time and the ‘image’ in Ode on a
Grecian Urn can be articulated, proves that this is the case.
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986.
—. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Hirsch, Edward. "Introduction." Keats, John. The Complete Poems and selected letters
of John Keats. Random House LLC, 2009.
Keats, John. "Letter from John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817
(extract)." ed. Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology Fourth Edition. WileyBlackwell, 2012. 1404-1405.
Tomlinson, Hugh and Robert Galeta. "Translator's Introduction." Deleuze, Gilles.
Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
xv-xviii.