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.

        ''It has no self; it is every thing and nothing.

              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.

             So these are the general characteristic of john keats’s poem. Now I am going to discuss themes in john keats’s poem.

                

                                                       -: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.