A Study of John Keats's Odes
205M049 S. T.
Keats wrote a lot of great poems during his short lifetime. Especially, his consecutive odes, successively written in 1819, are recognized as great achievement among his works. They represent his poetic sensibility in a dazzlingly rich manner, and the appreciation of it is an important clue to looking into the peculiarity of his poetical realm. The odes which I discussed in this thesis are Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy and To Autumn.
In Chapter 1, where I treated Ode to Psyche, I concluded that this ode, which was written based on Apuleius's well-known story of Eros and Psyche, is a kind of poet's manifesto to explore the new possibility of his poetical world. In the ode Keats seems to have succeeded in discovering what he should write about and his own procedure of how he enters into a new elevated state.
In Chapter 2 on Ode to a Nightingale, it is argued that the poet used a nightingale as a symbol of immortality. His fanciful imagination sublimeates the nightingale into a strong symbol of immortality like other Romantics. It is an invisible guide which brings him into the crest of ecstasy, but it is also represented as an indifferent messenger who makes him realize his own mortality. It means that Keats have created the ode out of his consciousness of mortality and his deep-rooted yearning for immortality and eternal world of beauty. We could regard the ode as something which reflects his intense world of poesy.
In Chapter 3 that discussed Ode on a Grecian Urn, I analyzed the similairities and differences between the symbol of Nightingale and that of a Greek urn. Like the nightingale, the urn is used here as a symbol that sets the poet on an imaginative journey and also pushes him away into "out of thought".
In Chapter 4 in which I focused on Ode on Melancholy, I tried to make clear Keats's idea on melancholy. Keats thinks that melancholy is never with death or oblivion, but with "Beauty", "Joy" and "Pleasure". Keats says in the ode that the only man who "can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine" can taste true melancholy. This ode is a kind of product of his ecstasy and pain, the mixture of which is very often found in his great poems.
In the last chapter devoted to the analysis of To Autumn, I treated this descriptive ode as what is called ut pictura poesis. In this ode Keats turns himself into an apparently selfless mirror and reflects the immanent atmosphere of autumn with his pictorial and auditory imagination, suppressing his own inner problem of what the poetry should be like. This kind of self-effacement, I believe, could make this ode more concrete, vivid and evocative.