Prepared by:-krupali k lewade
Roll no:-12
Sub:-Romantic literature
Topic: various themes in john
keats’s ode
Guided by :-Heenaba zala
Submitted to :-Maharaja krishnakumarsinhi M.A English Department
Various
Themes in john keats poem
Introduction:
Ode On A Grecian Urn, Ode to
Nightingale, Ode To psyche was written by one of prominent figure of romantic
era John keats. He is main figure of the
poets along with Lord Byron and P.B.Shelly. He had a significant influence on a
diverse range range of poets and writers. The poetry of keats is characterized
by sensual imagery most notably in series of odes. Before we discuss about various themes of john keats ode, it is
necessary to have look upon general characteristic of keats poetry. So, it
gives an idea about his major themes
General characteristic of keats poem:
The pursuit of knowledge:-
Beauty
overcome every other consideration. The poetry of keats is an unending pursuit
of beauty. He pursued truth indeed, but truth for him was beauty. He never
intellectualized his poetry. He was gift with extraordinary e and had an ardent passion for the beauty of the visible world. He therefore cried,
“o for a life of sensation rather than
of thought”
His entire being was thrilled by
the beauty of the world; nothing gave him greater delight than excitement of
his sense, produced by “a thing beauty”
All his poetry is full of the
sensuous appeal of beautiful things. To wordsworth the nature is a living being
with power to influence the human mind, and carrying a spiritual message.
Shelly, though not a moralist, is an idealist
“ the poet of sky and sea and the
cloud- the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.’’
The
world that depicts and makes symbolic human passion is rarely the world that we
know, but it is a world that has intensely imagined. His grand description, of
a great poetry
O wild west wind, thou breath of
autumn’s being.
But than the beauty and grandeur of
the west wind goes beyond our actual experience. When we turn to keats’s Ode to
Autumn we are brought into imaginative contact with beauty that we know. Autumn
is represented by keats by its familiar qualities: “mist and mellow
fruitfulness”. Realism and truth inform every detail of the poem. Keats neither
attributes moral life to nature, nor attempts to pass beyond her familiar manifestations.
He, the pure poet that he is, sees and presents
nature, as she is, and his presentation has that magic quality with which his
imagination has supremely endowed him.
Another characteristic is….
Keats
was a pure poet in the sense that in his poetry he was a poetry he was a poet
and nothing else- not a teacher, not a preacher, not a conscious carrier of any
humanitarian or spiritual message. His ambition was to become a poet, pure and
simple and his ambition was fulfilled. Poetry came naturally to him, as leaves
come to a tree: it was the spontaneous utterance of his powerful feeling. The
poetry of keats was based on his actual experience of life, and therefore i t
is marked by spontaneity and intensity.
What is experienced and felt
upon his pulse he expressed. He actually listened to the song of a nightingale,
and music of the song actually transported him to the world of imagination. He
attained the realization of eternity and truth in the beauty of the song and he
wrote the famous line, “thou was not born for death, immortal bird”. Much has
been written about the logical fallacy of the line, but what did the poet in
keats care? What he felt the thought that beautiful thing also pleases, and so
he wrote, it carries an instant convention and is in itself a joy forever. In
fact, the power of keats’s poetry is due to intense con-cent ration of thought
and feeling.
Keats
possessed what Breadly calls “the Shakespeare on strain”, and submitted to the
truth of life. He knew that the cold wind and the hot sun were as essential as
the fresh blown rose. The poetry of Shakespeare reveals the beauty of life;
truth is beauty, it says. It accept the world of men and women and accepts them
as they are. He accepted life as it is joy and sorrow, happiness and
melancholy- both exists side by side. A pure poet always submits to life, keats
submitted himself .
Keats’s
aestheticism was not only sensuous- it had an intellectual element. He was
constantly endeavouring to reach truth through beauty; he had a conviction that for his progress towards
truth, thought, knowledge and philosophy were indispen-sable. But he felt also
that a poet will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasoning, which do not
also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also truth.
Keats
has an impulse to interest himself in any thing he saw or heard. He accepted it
and identified himself with it “if a sparrow comes before my wndow,” says
keats, “I take part in its existence and pick about gavel. A poet, he says, has
no identity. He continually in, for and filling some other body.
In one of his letter he says: “I
have
loved
the principle of beauty in all things. But his passion for the beautiful”. Was
not that of the sensuous or sentimental man, it was an intellectual and
spiritual passion. There was a deep melancholy about him, too; pain and beauty
were the two experience oh his mind. “Do you not see”, he writes, ho necessary
a world of pains and troubles is to school are intelligence and make it a soul?
Keats studied the Elizabethans, mid “caught their turn of thought, and really
saw things with their sovereign eye. He wonder that delight and wonder that lay
enchanted in a dictionary. “There is
something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he wrote.
-:Ode to
psyche
This
is the first stanza of this poem. In
this stanza the word psyche is the goddess according to Greek Mythology.
The
central them of the poem is
Psyche the Goddess, she
seeks her pardon for exposing her love secrets. He saw in a garden pshyche and
cupid lying together clasped in h in a garden psyche and cupid assigned any
temple though she is prettier than many other goddess in the Greek mythology.
She was never worshiped. Keats promise to psyche that he will make a temple for
her in the deep place of his mind. His thought and feelings will serve as incense
flowers, and other objects required for
worship. Psyche will find a fitting sanctuary in no way inferior than
that of other Gods and Goddess. He will keep a torch burning under and a window open in the temple of his mind so that
psych may enter the sacred temple to meet her
cupid.
With its
loose, rhapsodic formal structure and its extremely lush sensual imagery, the
“ode to psyche” finds the speaker turning from delights of numberless to
delights of the creative imagination-even if that imagination is not yet projected outward into art. with help of this
ode keats wants to partake of divine permanence by taking his goddess in to
himself; he has not yet become interested in the outward imaginative expression
of a
-:Next poem is ode to Nightingale
Ode to Nightingale,
keats’s begins his fullest and deepest exploration of themes of creative
expression and the morality of human life. in this ode he transience of life
and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the
nightingale’s f fluid music. The speaker
reprise the “drowsy numbness” he experienced
in
“ode on indolence,” that numbness was sign of disconnection
from experience, in “Nightingale”. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the
speaker longs to flee the human world
and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through
alcohol-in the second stanza, he longs for a “Draught of vintage” to transport
him out of himself. But after is meditation in the third stanza on the on the
transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchu and his pards” and chooses instead to
embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figure in
“indolence”, “the viewless wings of poesy.”
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative
rapture of nightingale’s music and lets the speaker to embrace the idea of
dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s
music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his
meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn, “he comes back to himself
recognizing his fancy for what is- an imagined escape from the inescapable. As
the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left
him shaken, unale to remember whether he is awake or asleep.
In “indolence, “the speaker rejected all artistic effort. On
“psyche”, he was willing to embrace the creative imagination but only for its
own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of
outward expression that translate the work of the imagination into outside
world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace poesy’s “viewless
wings” at last. The “art of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and
renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As
befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich thought
it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight to favor of the other senses. He
can imagine the light of the moon, “but there is no light at all”, he knows he
is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet.
This suppression will find its match in “Ode On Gracian urn”, which is in many
way companion to poem to “Ode To Nightingale”. In the later poem, the speaker
will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any “Nightingale,” he
has achieved creative expression-the nightingale’s song-is spontaneous and
without physical manifestation.
The last poem is…..
Ode On a Grecian Urn
“Ode On
A Gracian urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of
sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time
of the speakers viewing. Here are some lines from the poem
The theme engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The
Grecian urn, passed down through
countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of
time in the human sense-it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is
alien to all such concepts. in the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures craved into the side of the urn: they are
free from time, but they simultaneously
frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death but neither
can they have experience.
The
speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each
time has asks different questions of it. In the first stanza he examines the
picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the
picture: what men or gods are these? What maidens loth ?” o f course, the urn
can never tell him the whose, what, and where of the stories depicts, and
speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.
In the
second and third stanza, he examines the picture of piper playing to his lover
beneath the tree speaker tries to imagine what experience of the figure on the urn must be
like: he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from
temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of piper’s unheard song and
the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far
above” all transient human, which in its sexual expression, inevitabaly leads to an abatement of intensity-when
passion is satisfied, all that remains is wearied physicality: sorrowful heart,
a “burning forhead”, his collection of these conditions seems to remind the
speaker that he is incapably subject
them, and he abandons his attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were
experiencing human time.
Imagining
that their procession has an origin and a destination. But all he can think is
that the town will forever be deserted: if these people have left their origin,
they will never in return to it. In this sense he confronts head on the limits
of static art.
Conclusion
By concluding
we can say that the poetry of keats focused on death and its inevitability in
his work. The example of great art and beauty. He always appreciate the beauty.
