In the last great year of his productivity, Keats was to write not only the great odes ("Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn") but "Lamia" and the fragmentary The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, an attempt at recasting the original version. The February-April journal letter to the George Keatses, which preceded the writing of this poetry, culminated in the inclusion of the first of the odes, "To Psyche." It is important to remember that it is in this letter that the "vale of Soul-making" passage occurs (II, 102-04), that Keats had been speculating on the place of man in the universe, and that it is perhaps in this passage that he comes to a kind of acceptance or working through of problems which had plagued him throughout the short years of his maturity. He was trying to resolve the difficulties in discovering the nature of his own identity.¹ The doctrine of the soul-making letter might be called, after Finney, the expression of Keats's "empirical humanism."² That is, he had come to accept the idea of the identity as created by the response of individual people to the "sensuous and emotional experience"³ which life presents. A belief in immortality would not be a necessary part of his thought but could well be an accepted one not expressed (although Keats was poignantly to wish on his deathbed that he could at least have the solace of being able to accept the traditional answers to death). Even his mature, selfprovided answers to difficulties are firmly a part of his binding to the earth. To the end, Keats was to view all experience as it was related to human beings in their life on earth.

After the journal letter mentioned above, no letters survive until May, after the completion of the odes. By the time his correspondence picks up again, the odes, with the exception of "To Autumn," had been written. These odes constitute a literary phenomenon which would be difficult to match with that of any other poet.

Critics have often treated the odes as though they were written deliberately as a sequence, although Robert Gleckner points out the difficulties of such an approach if one examines all the evidence, including other poems written during this same period.⁴ H. W. Garrod, for example, in 1926 wrote that the odes were "a sequence … not of time but of mood."⁵ A more recent critic has suggested that these poems "are not only products of what Keats himself called 'Negative Capability,' but taken together are a uniquely full account of what it is like and how it develops."⁶

It is not necessary to treat the odes as a sequence, but certainly there are basic themes that tie them one to another. Bate, for example, sees only "To Psyche" as not illustrating a meditation on "process, and either the acceptance of it, or the hope to escape from it, or both in dramatic interplay with each other…."⁷ The reader may find in all of the odes the union of opposites and the recognition that man must accept the differing kinds of human experience. They can be seen as "explorations of the soul-making doctrine,"⁸ examining "the tremendous discovery that the limits upon human experience have been placed generously far."⁹

A traditional view is the one expressed by De Selincourt: "They are the expression in varying keys of emotion of a mind which has loved the principle of beauty in all things, and seeks in a world of change and decay, among the fleeting forms of loveliness, for something permanent and eternal."¹⁰ Through all of these interpretations of the odes as a group there runs an agreement that they represent some kind of high point in Keats's career. Although critics continue to argue their particular biases, sensitive readers of all kinds continue to find in the odes something which touches the chords of their common humanity.

In the light of this particular study, the odes can be seen as the coming to fruition of Keats's myth of the poet.… In the odes the reader finds represented and bound together the major themes of Keats's myth: identity, soul-making, the visionary nature of the poet's quest, the imagination, and the linking of beauty and truth. Each poem can be admired individually—indeed, the odes have been some of the favorite poems of the New Critics because they can be read without reference to outside sources. But the poems also fit the Keatsian canon from whatever viewpoint it is being examined. Even the form employed is relevant to a great portion of his work, being linked to the sonnet form which he used throughout his career and to earlier ode forms such as the "Hymn to Pan" and "Ode to Sorrow" in Endymion. In each poem there is an idea which ties it to the myth of the poet, sometimes by the use of a direct "I" as in the "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Psyche" and sometimes through situation as in "Ode on Melancholy."

"Ode to Psyche"

The "Ode to Psyche," which has received less critical attention than any of the other odes (except perhaps the "Ode on Indolence") is the first to appear, being included in the journal letter under the April 30 date along with the following remarks:

The following Poem—the last I have written is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains—I have for the most part dash'd of [sic] my lines in a hurry—This I have done leisurely—I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage me to write other thing[s] in even a more peacable and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apulieus the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervor—and perhaps never thought of in the old religion—I am more orthodox that [sic] to let a hethen Goddess be so neglected" (II, 105-6).

It must also be noted that the poem appears immediately after the soul-making passage, a juxtaposition which has led one critic to believe that Psyche "serves as the emblem of the soul and … was granted immortality only after she endured the realities of human experience."¹¹ The poem in one way, then, can be read as a partial answer to a recurring question in Keats's myth of the poet: how does an individual person achieve his identity? For Psyche the identity becomes real through the imagination of the poet who will be her "priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region" (49-50) of his mind. She achieves her identity in a kind of roundabout way: the poet does the responding to the world for her and then creates a live goddess who has become literally what her name suggests—a soul.

Of what significance is the choice of Psyche for Keats's vehicle in the ode? Kenneth Allott has insisted on the importance of the reader's

need to be aware how closely ideas on the meaning and function of myth were bound up with Keats's attempt to make sense of the human situation…. Figures drawn from religious myths—and to Keats Christianity was simply the last of the great mythologies—may be understood sympathetically … as personifications of certain kinds of human need or self-knowledge…. This is Keats's personal extension of a mode of mythological explanation which was then a commonplace.¹²

Perhaps Keats was intrigued by the possibility of actually entering into the process of creating a goddess, much as the Greek poets did whose spirit he admired. However, the poem is not the same substance as the story of Apuleius, which he had read, although he took details for his description from that story and probably from Mary Tighe's Psyche.¹³

The first stanza of the poem contains references to the dream or the vision which appear throughout Keats's major poetry: "Surely I dream to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?" (5-6). The odes following "To Psyche" refer to the same phenomenon, most notably the "Ode to a Nightingale": "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). There is at least an implied questioning of the poet's experience in each of the odes. Has his fancy cheated him, or is his vision a valid insight into reality? Perhaps the central problem of the poem is, as Ward suggests, the meaning and the functions of the imagination.¹⁴

The following lines describe what the poet has seen: alone, he "wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly" (7) and inadvertently came upon the secret meeting place of Cupid and Psyche, where they are seen

side by side
In deepest grass, beaneath the whisp'ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there
A brooklet, scarce espied:
(9-12)

In contrast to the lovers on the Grecian urn, these two do embrace and are "ready still past kisses to outnumber" (19) because they do not become cloyed by the intensity of the experience. There is here no "breathing human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead and a parching tongue" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn," III).

Like the "Eve of St. Agnes," "To Psyche" is a celebration of love as one means of approach to imaginative experience. It is the poet's vision of the lovers in stanzas one and two which results in the imaginative rhapsody of the poet's thoughts in the last three stanzas. Realizing that Psyche is the "latest born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!" (24-25), the poet is sad in the realization that Psyche has not had the worship she deserves, no altars or choirs or priests to do her service. Keats introduces here the religious terminology which recurs through the poem.

Perhaps here again is Keats's appreciation of human love, although it is expressed in this poem as a love between immortals. However, Psyche had been mortal before her transformation. It is a possibility that Keats thought of the fruit of human love as one way to achieve immortality. In his own life, he knew that he probably would not have children of his own and was afraid that he had not created any work great enough to make him immortal in the eye of the public. He might have seen in the love of George and Georgiana and the fruit of their union a means for a part of him to live on. All this is speculation, of course, but the element of love is a strong one in "To Psyche" and in his letters to and about his brother and sister-in-law.

The poet's recognition of his dependence upon his own imagination is expressed when he says, "I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd" (43). The possibility begins to emerge that he as the poet can give Psyche the immortality she deserves, even though she was born

too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
(36-9)

His work as a poet will take the place of traditional religious trappings: "So let me be thy choir, and make a moan / Upon the midnight hours" (44-45).

The transition to religious terminology is now complete; in the last stanza the poet will be her "priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region" (50-51) of his mind. The pairing of thought with extreme emotional commitment in this stanza is interesting. Thë altar for Psyche is in a part of the poet's brain that has not been touched before, and it is here that "branched thoughts" are "new grown with pleasant pain" (52-53). Here again is the union of pain with pleasure which has been evident in several poems of Keats's maturity, such as "La Belle Dame" and "The Eve of St. Agnes." The sanctuary dedicated to Psyche will be decorated "With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain" (60), a statement bearing out Keats's awareness for the necessity of the development of the mind.

Perhaps the poet's references to the past as a time when "holy were the haunted forest boughs, / Holy the air, the water, and the fire" (38-39) stress the idea of the importance of the imagination and his feeling that his own time was deficient in a community sense of awe in human experience. It certainly calls up the Wordsworthian description of the origin of Greek myth in the fourth book of The Excursion. There was, in primitive times, a free play of imagination; man saw no barrier between himself and the natural world. There was an I-Thou relationship between man and his world, not an I-It relationship.¹⁵ Man was intended to be a creature of the imagination, not to be "so far retir'd / From happy pieties" (40-41) as he had become in Keats's time. Thus the creation of a special place of worship for Psyche (or the soul, or by extension, the imagination) will be a rich place, covered "With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, / Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same" (62-63). As a priest of the soul, the poet promises to her "a rich indolence which will safeguard its natural gift for delight and restore to wholeness whatever the world beyond the mountains has broken down."¹⁶

The "Ode to Psyche," then, takes its place in Keats's myth of the poet because it is concerned with the imagination, the dream or vision, and human love. The poem itself describes a highly imaginative experience; but, if it is to have a meaning as a work of art, it must be more than simply fanciful. It should, in Keatsian terms, be a friend to man. It is in its statement that the creative imagination can be re-established as supreme and that it can not only see but create in living form what it sees just as the poet is able to create Psyche and give her a place in which to dwell. Even if her deification takes place in the poet's mind, she becomes real to him, and through his experience she can become real for other human beings. The goddess Psyche was a fortunate choice for the imagination because she as a goddess is half way between the mortal and the immortal.¹⁷

"Ode to a Nightingale"

If the "Ode to Psyche" embodies a concept of the imagination, so does the "Ode to a Nightingale," in a different way and with a different kind of understanding. The "Ode to Psyche" seems to be a poem in praise of the imagination and its powers; the nightingale ode brings the reader back again to earth, to the midst of Experience, and, in a sense, indicates that at times "the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf" (VIII).¹⁸ "To a Nightingale" represents the questioning, unsatisfied imagination in Keats's myth of the poet, in which the persona, the "I" as poet, is disillusioned with the answers that he is able to provide for himself through his imagination. Like several of the odes, the poem arises from the interaction of the imagination of the poet with something outside himself: a bird, an urn, autumn personified, or melancholy represented as a figure. In this poem it is a bird which calls the imagination into play, singing "In some melodious plot / Of beechen green" and singing "of summer in fullthroated ease" (I).

A temporary union of the poet and the bird through the visionary imagination exists in stanza I, but it begins to fade; the poet has entered into the bird's happiness of song, yet his "heart aches" and "a drowsy numbness pains" his senses. Why should his heart ache when he has been able to enter into the song of the bird, to become in a sense the sparrow picking about in the gravel? (I, 186). From the beginning of the ode there is the implicit union of melancholy and happiness, pleasure and pain, that occurs throughout Keats's poetry and letters. The poet's aching heart recalls another important concept in Keats's mythic understanding of human life, that any kind of intensity in the limited mortal world (except perhaps the intensity of art), even when it is pleasurable, ends in some kind of pain because it cannot last or it becomes cloying to the senses. The passion of Psyche and Cupid is immortal and thus continues unabated for eternity; the union of the poet and the bird can be only temporary, and the knowledge of the fleeting nature of the transcending of mortality and the moments of the attainment of a Higher Innocence winds throughout the thought of the entire poem.

In stanza II, for example, the poet in his cry for "a draught of vintage! that hath been / Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth" is longing for some "supporting intoxication"¹⁹ to prolong the experience of his imaginative fusion with the bird. The song of the bird is of summer, that time of ripeness before the maturity of autumn and the frosts of winter which complete the cycle of life and death. In the nightingale's song the poet finds himself able to go beyond human experience, yet he realizes that the nightingale itself, despite its song, cannot actually know the experience of man. Thus, although the nightingale will never know "The weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan" (III), there is a kind of sadness in the knowledge that it has lacked the kinds of Experience necessary to bring man through the "vale of Soul-making." Through the song of the bird the poet is able to forget his human weariness and escape for a short time into another realm "beyond the bourn of care" ("Lines Written in the Highlands," 29), but he eventually comes back to the real world, to the bonds which tie him to the earth. Another significance of the poet's desire for wine may be symbolic of his longing to believe that he can move through Experience without pain and that he hopes to enter into "the inwardness of the sensory in such a way as to be at ease in empathy… . "²⁰ But there is always the knowledge of the impossibility of a permanent state of being "at ease," because the empathy of the poet makes him experience not only his own sorrows but those of the people who surround him.

Thus the poet's desire to "drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim" (II) only takes him back to the real world that the bird has never experienced. The third stanza recalls his 1818 poem "To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.":

It is a flaw
In happiness, to see beyond our bourn,—
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the Nightingale
(82-85)

The picture of human experience which the poet gives in the third stanza is pure Experience, unredeemed by any imaginative or religious act of grace: there are groans of pain, the palsy of age, the death of young men (a phrase which surely recalls the death of his brother Tom in the past December), the quick fading of beauty, and the changing of a love which cannot remain new and unchanging. Even the process of thought makes one "full of sorrow"—not the sorrow that leads to wisdom, but the sorrow coming from "The thought that we are mortal makes us groan" (I, 179). The knowledge here is a knowledge of despair because man is helpless to elude his mortality. It remains for the "Ode on Melancholy" to stress the union of joy and sorrow.

Stanza IV returns to the longing to escape, but this time by a different means, "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy." The response to the poet's plea for escape does not come in the form that he had originally wished for it but through the acceptance of the situation in which he finds himself alone on earth, separate from the bird, with no light to guide him in a growing darkness.²¹ In the fifth stanza the darkness is complete; he cannot see around him but he can use his other senses to experience what is there:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
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.

The imagery of these lines requires special attention. The references to natural growth suggest the "flowery band" from Endymion (1. 7) that unites the poet with the earth. But also associated with the natural world is the notion of the movement of process, because the violets are "fast-fading" and the musk-rose is "mid-May's eldest child," which is already past its prime and on the way towards death. Thus the suggestion of death which has been present from the beginning of the poem in connotative words like "opiate," "Hemlock," and "Lethe-wards" becomes explicit. The darkness is "embalmed," the "soft incense" calls to mind the watchful state of tapers burning around a corpse, and the violets are "cover'd up in leaves" instead of showing their blooms for all the world to see and enjoy. The natural things which are mentioned all have short lives.

It is in the sixth stanza that Keats "approaches that supreme act of the Romantic Imagination … , the fluid dissolve or fadeout in which the limitations of time and space flee away and the border between being and non-being, life and death, seems to crumble… . "²² Indeed, because of the fifth and sixth stanzas, critics such as Pettet have felt that the "Ode to a Nightingale" is principally about a "basic contradiction, the loving and loathing of death… . "²³ The reader must keep in mind, however, that Keats is separate from the bird, musing on the many times he has been "half in love with easeful Death." The "half in love" and the word "easeful" should be noted. In the past the poet's treating Death as a lover, calling "him soft names in many a mused rhyme" has been a means of escape. However, in the sixth stanza his attitude seems to have changed: "Now," he muses, "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!" This is an idea that Keats touches on in his letters, especially to Fanny Brawne, that of death as the most intense experience possible and therefore one of the most desirable. He wrote to her, for example, "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute" (II, 133). The desire for intensity of experience, even if it is unpleasant, is a Romantic characteristic: "I wish for death … to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing" (II, 345). Keats had written in "Why did I laugh tonight?" the lines "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, / But Death intenser—Death is Life's high meed." Somehow it seems to the poet that being able to experience death at the moment of intensity of union with the bird's song would be to capture and hold the intensity, to make it like the love of Endymion and Cynthia or of Cupid and Psyche, intense throughout eternity instead of limited by the human world.

But there is an odd change here from the previously mentioned sonnet; the last lines of the stanza point in a different direction: "Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/ To thy high requiem become a sod." Now it suddenly seems impossible to repeat in a "finer tone" the intensity of experience. Perhaps the bird will go on forever, but death would simply bring oblivion rather than the longed-for escape or eternal participation in the infinite. Wasserman rightly points out that the nightingale becomes immortal to the poet only at the point when Keats begins to emphasize his own limited condition.

It is the suggestion of the bird's immortality through his song that has been heard throughout man's history, like the poems of poets who have "souls on earth" and "souls in heaven too" ("Bards of Passion," 38-39) that takes Keats beyond himself. In this stanza, Blackstone believes, the poet "achieves a universal vision"²⁴ because he looks away from his own condition and includes himself in all "hungry generations" from the past, both high and low and sees in the figure of Ruth "all mortals who have had the spiritual aspiration for the meaning of life and have realized that in this alien world they cannot attain the full purpose of their being."²⁵ Human beings are linked in many ways, one of them being their sorrows, represented by "the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn," and another being their dreams, represented by the "Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." Thus, in the seventh stanza, although the poet recognizes that he is not immortal and that his momentary intensity of union with the nightingale cannot last forever, he links himself through Experience with the rest of humanity.

The poet begins in stanza VIII the "journey homeward to habitual self (Endymion II. 276). The ecstasy of the bird's song becomes a "plaintive anthem" which fades away from his hearing. The poet must leave his dream-world and come back to the earth that is his home. Indeed, the poet accuses the fancy here of a kind of unfaithfulness of promise when he says "the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf." The poem can only end with a question instead of an affirmation: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?" In this poem Keats is in the midst of Experience and cannot be sure that the imagination will deliver her promise. Has his vision really given him an insight into truth, or is he only "a dreaming thing" who "venoms all his days" (The Fall of Hyperion, 168 and 175)? This ode toys with the question which is to become a main theme of The Fall of Hyperion, the meaning of the visionary imagination. In Keats's own life, by May of 1819 he

had uttered his Everlasting No. In the previous month he had written "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," his Center of Indifference. But late in May, 1819, Keats was strong-spirited enough to elicit from these shattering visions the Everlasting Yea of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn."²⁶

This ode, like the one to Psyche, is a part of Keats's myth of the poet. Here he looks at the world of Experience and asks how it can be transcended. Tentatively, he suggests that it is transcended by the imagination, but he is not absolutely certain at this point that he is right. He questions the imagination here, as he does in "Lamia," but in both poems the evidence seems to suggest that man's life is the richer for having had the imaginative experience, even if he feels that it has cheated him in some way. There is the grasping for the ideal which is a theme in a great deal of his poetry, the empathic response to objects in the world, and the linking of death and beauty as beauty and truth are to be linked in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Keats tries to see human experience as a whole in this poem, as a mythic poet must do in order to give significant shape to his experience.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn "

In beginning a discussion of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," that most widely treated of the odes, it is well to bear in mind Philip Hobsbaum's remarks:

The variations of reading are not so bewildering as they have been made out to be. It is true that any one … may seem to be different from any other. But such variation is one that testifies to the impossibility of interpreting, once for all, so complex a work of art as a great poem. Rather, we must be content to isolate those aspects which seem most relevant to our needs … and, in directing attention towards them, hope that they will prove a way into the poem which will produce a response to it as a whole. Such variations, indeed, may be a timely reminder that the critic's work is, of its nature, a mode of discussion.²⁷

It is also well to recall that this ode in many ways is a culmination of ideas that Keats has expressed in various forms throughout his career, because it is in this poem more than any other that the reader finds "the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts" ("Sleep and Poetry," 124-25) reconciled with eternity. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a concrete representation of the "vast idea" which Keats sensed as early as "Sleep and Poetry" and certainly is an example of what Keats believed one purpose of poetry to be, "that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" ("Sleep and Poetry," 246-47). Even in Endymion Keats had indicated something of what he was to say in the later poem:

No, there are throned seats unscalable,
But by a patient wing, a constant spell,
Or by ethereal things that, unconfin'd,
Can make a ladder of the eternal wind,

… . .

And, silent as a consecrated urn,
Hold sphery sessions for a season due.
(23-33)

Once again in this poem, the imagination is a theme. In the epistle "To J. H. Reynolds, Esq." Keats had spoken of the "imagination brought / Beyond its proper bound" (78-79). In that poem the imagination led the poet into a kind of "Purgatory blind" (80); in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the imagination comes close to its "proper bound" and is able to become something of a stabilizing force instead of a cheating fancy.

The reader must also keep in mind Keats's statements about beauty and truth and their necessary linking with the imagination: "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not" (I, 184). The last lines of the poem do not give as much difficulty if they are read within the context of the poem and of Keats's work as a whole as they do if they are read in isolation.²⁸

A comparison of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with the "Ode to a Nightingale" offers the reader two different approaches to the myth of the poet. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" represents, it would seem, one of the best examples in Keats's own writing of his doctrine of Negative Capability and his distinction of himself as a "camelion Poet" (I, 387) rather than an egotistical one. In the nightingale poem Keats is present as the "I"; however, in the poem about the urn, he is detached and is only to become a part of the urn's experience as he empathically experiences what the urn offers to him. Keats does ask questions in the first stanza:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe 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?

These questions, however, are not an "irritable reaching after fact & reason" (I, 193) but simply curiosity in the presence of a pictorial scene on a vase. The same curiosity is true for the questions in the fourth stanza. Certainly in this poem, as perhaps in no other, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration" (I, 194), at least for the space of the poem. The poet allows himself to be projected into the urn and what it has to say through its existence as a work of art that is "a friend to man." Still, the irony is present; although there is an empathic sharing between the poet and the urn, they remain two separate entities.

Because the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" has undercurrents of questionings along with some acceptances, it truly fits into Keats's myth of the poet, indicating something of the religious nature of the myth or the substitution of myth in his poetry for traditional religious beliefs. As noted in the first chapter, there was a tendency in Romantic poetry to assume a religious function, and the urn takes its place as a part of Keats's credo, just as the soul-making letter does. As Bate points out, "This commitment to remain honest to human reactions—to explore the heart with its questionings and doubts—sustains the second voice that interplays with that of the odal hymn; and it is one of the several considerations we forget when we concentrate on the two closing lines of the poem… . "²⁹

In an urn, the poet finds a microcosm of humanity, captured for all time in frozen attitudes. In this microcosm the poet discovers "a portrayal of a tiny portion of the verities of the ages which it is art's business to perceive, interpret, and preserve."³⁰ The paradox of the "unravish'd bride of quietness" is prefigurative of the paradoxes throughout the poem and suggestive of the nature of human existence as a whole. The urn is captured in a moment of readiness to give itself, as a bride is ready to give herself to her husband and as the lovers pictured on the urn are shown just at the height of ecstasy about to be enjoyed. The "unravishing" of the urn may refer to the message it has to convey; perhaps no one yet has accurately understood what the urn has to offer. It is quiet because it literally cannot speak; indeed, works of art are created with the hope that there will be someone who will bring them to fruition by a "greeting of the Spirit which will … make them wholly exist" (I, 243). As a "sylvan historian," the urn is able to give man what straightforward narrative history cannot always provide: "the validity of myth—not myth as a pretty but irrelevant make-belief [sic], an idle fancy, but myth as a valid perception into reality."³¹ Also, in the first stanza there is the paradox of frozen movement; the figures on the urn are caught in the midst of an activity which will never be completed but which can be studied precisely because it is arrested for the mind and eye to take in.

Stanza two develops the paradox, this time that "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter." There is a suggestion of this same idea in a December 1818 letter to the George Keatses, when Keats is speaking of their separation and believes "That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other—when they will completely understand each other—while we in this world merely comp[r]ehend each other in different degrees—the higher the degree of good so higher is our Love and friendship" (II, 5). Perhaps this is the kind of unheard melodies the poet writes of in the poem, those which the imagination can treasure up from its experience and can recreate to produce something entirely new. The musical sound of the pipes is not necessary for the poet's appreciation of the urn, just as the physical presence of his brother and sister-in-law is not required for their feeling of family closeness. The lines also suggest those previously quoted from Endymion, that the "seats unscalable" can be mounted "by ethereal things" such as the "ditties of no tone" in the urn and can make possible the "sphery sessions" which open the possibility of seeing beyond man's mortality. The artist can be enabled to achieve a vision of Higher Innocence even though he must return to the mortal world. But the urn, because of its content, like that of a poem, can "tease us out of thought" (V) by calling the imagination into play. The imagined tunes which are heard coming from the "pipes and timbrels" (I) have no jarring notes and can be perfect to the hearing as it would be impossible for the real music to be.

Yet there is in the next lines a note of irony along with the appreciation:

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!

There has been a concern with the transcience of life and its processes since the earliest of Keats's poetry; the "Hymn to Pan" in Endymion is an example. In the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the processes of life leading to death are assumed, but they exist in a negative form of not coming to fruition. For Keats, lacking the intensity of the physical would have been a tragic state although he longed at the same time for the ideal. Indeed, Charles Patterson argues that passion and permanence occur throughout the poem and that the poet never indicates directly that permanence is better than passion but balances the two rather consistently.³² The reader is tempted to accept the view that there is no question about the superiority of the vision of art over real life until the end of the poem.

Stanza three carries out the same kind of imagery in the boughs of trees "that cannot shed / Your leaves," the "piping songs for ever new," and the "happy love! / For ever panting, and for ever young." Human passion does cloy: the instances in Keats's poetry when it does not occur usually in the union of a mortal and an immortal or two immortals. But the artist who creates an object which is man's friend must first realize and experience the "breathing human passion" that "leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd / A burning forehead and a parching tongue." Part of the nature of being human is this kind of experience. Even Apollo in Hyperion had to become fully human before he could become a god. And for Keats the experience of love was one of the heights of human experience. The world of art can paradoxically portray the experience, but in the urn it is in its perfect form from which it will never change. Yet, is there something of a sorrowful tone here? Although the experience is painful, man's life would be the poorer for having missed it. Keats had said that "Wisdom is sorrow," and perhaps an ideal existence would not allow the experiences which constitute the "vale of soul-Making."

Stanza four continues the note of sadness introduced in the previous lines, making it more explicit than it was previously. The figures on the urn are going to a sacrifice of some kind; there is a priest leading a heifer, and the town is empty because everyone has gone to the festival. In ordinary life there would be no necessary sadness in the procession away from the town, but when the desolation becomes eternal, a sadness of tone enters:

And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

The tone is more poignant than that of the second stanza. If art is permanent, then there will never be a chance of explanation of why the town is emptied forever. In miniature, the post sees the desolation through which human beings must pass as they leave their Innocence and enter the world of Experience. One critic has suggested that the people going to the sacrifice are "dynamically static figures … frozen between heaven and earth in a mythic journey of life."³³ It is not possible for them to complete the journey even though man can learn from having their various attitudes caught for him in the shape of the urn. There is a sense of reality in the procession, representing "the intrusion of disenchantment, another breath of reality blowing against the dream… . "³⁴ The urn is beautiful, but it speaks of and to the sadness of the mortal condition.

Thus in the last stanza the poet finally describes the figures as a "brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought," instead of stressing the ecstasy and the pleasure present in the first stanza. The urn is once again addressed as a "silent form"; it has been silent all through the poem, but the poet has caused the reader to feel that the urn is speaking to him. Its scenes in the last stanza "tease us out of thought / As doth eternity." At the beginning of the poem the viewer, with the poet, is ready to accept the urn as the perfection of beauty. By the end of the poem, however, the poet has allowed his thought to intrude upon his empathic response to beauty. That is why, perhaps, the urn is addressed as a "Cold Pastoral!" in the last stanza. The love here is not described as "For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd"; instead, one has the feeling that the poet is remembering the possibility of joy available to man and feeling the lack of warmth in the urn as an art object. It still remains, however, "in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man"—fulfilling one of the functions of art:

Life, alas! is not as we would have it; but it ought to be, and, with the aid of the Grecian urn, can be felt for a moment to be: imagination, concentrating on the beauty of the urn and ignoring the discordant and indocile facts, attains a higher reality, compared with which actual life seems thin and unreal… . it remains there, a permanent incitement to warm imaginings of an ideal life, a purely beautiful reality.³⁵

The last two lines of the poem have occasioned probably more discussion than any other two lines of English poetry:

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.

The problem seems partly to stem from bibliographical details: there is no holograph manuscript form of the poem, and the transcripts surviving have differing marks of punctuation.³⁶ The other difficulty is in deciding precisely who speaks which part of the lines. There seem to be three possibilities: the urn speaks the "Beauty is truth …" and the poet the rest, addressed to man; the urn speaks all of it, addressed to man; and the urn the first part, then the poet the second, addressed to the urn. Each of the three possibilities can be absorbed into the purposes of this study, because each indicates something about the nature of human experience and art and the relationship of these two.

Earl Wasserman holds the first interpretation, suggesting that the poet has gradually come into the poem as poet and that the demonstrative pronoun that refers to the entire clause containing the "Beauty is truth" statement. According to him, the poet is saying that man's most important knowledge is that there is something which can go beyond his mortal world; in this poem it happens to be a Grecian urn which remains as a friend:

Only this meaning can be consistent with the dramatic action of the poem, for it not only does not deny that in the world beauty is not truth, but also assimilates that fact into a greater verity. The sum of earthly wisdom is that in this world of pain and decay … art remains, immutable in its essence… .³⁷

Bate is representative of those who believe the last two lines are to be read as the word of the urn to man. He bases his contention on bibliographical evidence and the fact that Keats in his letters and other writings does not often baldly equate abstractions such as beauty and truth:

Aloof from the brevity and sharp claims of human life, the urn is not only freer but also more limited: freer to advance the message it does in a way that no human being could confidently do, and yet, as a work of art, limited to the realm in which its message applies. The message is like itself: "teasing," perpetually available for certain valuable human experiences, and altogether oblivious of others… . But it is not all that man knows or needs to know… .³⁸

A third possibility is that the poet speaks the last lines but addresses them to the urn.³⁹ The urn, perfect though it is, "is lacking in the warmth of reality."⁴⁰ In the realm of the ideal, perhaps the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is all that it is necessary to know, but for man it is not. The readings of Wasserman and Bate would accord with this idea even though they identify the speakers differently.

Others have offered varying interpretations of the lines: " … beauty is the truth of things here in this world; beauty lies in the phenomenon itself, not in the counterfeit representation of it in art alone".⁴¹ Truth can also be read as "reality"⁴² in this poem, "total reality properly understood … and the true significance of things in our world and in the ideal one… . "⁴³

Nearly all interpretations point toward one idea: art can offer man some kind of hope and knowledge beyond his physical world, even though his own mortality is limited. Art can be a friend to man, as Keats said that it should be, and that is one message of the Grecian urn. In fact, the poem can be read as a kind of move in miniature from Innocence through Experience and into a fleeting glimpse of a Reorganized Innocence which the world of art provides. There is a comfort to be offered to man, if he will but take it. Essentially, the movement of the poet within the poem is in this way: he begins with pure admiration, begins to question by implication that the urn is perfect in form but lacks human warmth, and ends by realizing that the urn can be a comforting force by its beauty and its calm while human life goes on as it always has. Art offers the possibility of reconciling our humanity and its imperfections with the ideal world "beyond the bourn of care."

"Ode on Melancholy"

The "Ode on Melancholy" takes a form unusual for Keats, in which he directly addresses an unknown listener to the lyric, but its subject matter is in a long tradition well-known to him through Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. However, instead of regarding melancholy as a disease which should be treated and cured, Keats takes a different approach: savor the melancholy, he suggests, by entering into it and enjoying it as much as possible. In writing a poem about melancholy, Keats is also embodying a principle of his mythic concept of the poet, that the writer sensitive enough to write good poetry is the one most likely to be aware of the nature of sorrow and joy. As he does in the other odes, Keats turns to moments that by their nature cannot last and yet must be captured in order to be understood.

A reader unfamiliar with the poem would recognize the subject in the first stanza only from the title, because the word "melancholy" does not appear there. He would simply know that he is being exhorted not to do certain things: not to look for forgetfulness, not to seek out poisons, not to let death emblems be symbolic of his soul, and not to let the "downy owl" be "A partner in your sorrow's mysteries." All of these are suggestive as symbols of sadness and perhaps death. The last two lines of the stanza introduce the paradoxes that are maintained throughout the poem: "For shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul."

Now it is apparent that the poet is going to celebrate some of the characteristics of melancholy rather than to treat it in the conventional manner as something undesirable. Sleep and waking are contrasted here. Whereas sleep has been regarded in poems such as "Sleep and Poetry" and "To Sleep" as beneficial, in this ode the importance of being "wakeful" is stressed, even in the midst of pain and sorrow, the "anguish of the soul." The true poet can know the real nature of anguish only if he remains awake to participate in it. The poet sees two possibilities in the state of melancholy; he can either dull his awareness of the state by resort to a pain-killer or make it a part of his heightened sensitivity stimulated by the experience of melancholy. As a poet, he chooses the second approach and advises his listener to do the same in order to have a completely full human experience.

Stanza two gives specific suggestions of the procedure to follow in order to prolong this "wakeful anguish of the soul." The poet describes the "melancholy fit" as coming

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud.

The imagery in these lines, like that in the last stanza, is suggestive of the letter he wrote in March of 1819:

This is the world—thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure—Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into … the wide arable land of events—while we are laughing it sprouts is [sic] grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck. (II, 79)

In a world like this, human beings can expect a "melancholy fit" often.

Critics note the use of phrases like "April shroud," in which the paradox of the poem is contained in a few words. The rain brings life, but the very act of bringing life means that death will follow as part of the normal process.⁴⁴ As with the other odes, the items which the poet chooses for his catalogue all come from the realm of the transient: the listener is urged to "glut" his "sorrow" on a "morning rose," the "rainbow of the salt sand-wave," "the wealth of globed peonies," and the "rich anger" of his mistress. The last-mentioned phrase is reminiscent of one from the letters: "Gorge the honey of life. I pity you as much that it cannot last for ever, as I do myself now drinking bitters" (I, 370).

The third stanza brings the paradox to fruition in the alignment and union of Beauty, Joy, and Melancholy. Once again, each item enumerated is short-lived:

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:
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 shall taste the sadness of her might
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

The appreciation of things which must be lost is deepened by the very sense of loss, as Keats was to write to Rice in 1820: "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us" (II, 260). Joy seems always to be in the process of leaving, and pleasure is described paradoxically as "aching Pleasure," emphasizing the idea that the very knowledge of brevity makes experiences more full of joy. One critic has seen this ode as the completion of the nightingale and the urn odes, because it "explores the thought that not only are joy and sorrow inextricable, but the deepest joys also hold the deepest sorrows."⁴⁵ Thus, only those who have extreme sensitivity, like the poet, will ever find it possible to understand what melancholy really is. And note that finding melancholy is an active process; the sensitive person must have a "strenuous tongue" in order to "burst Joy's grape against his palate fine." Only this kind of man can enter empathically into the life around him. These images underline the importance of the physical world to Keats and his binding to the earth. But, as always, his concrete images lead away from themselves, teasing us out of thought as did the Grecian urn:

Joy's grape—the sour-sweet fruit—is the final taste of life and the conclusive image of the odes: a poignant beauty achieved through a palpable act of possession, in which taste and touch, the most intimate of the means of sensuous discovery, unite in the final conquest. Yet at this moment of symbolic achievement the flush of exultation chills, and the poet finds himself face to face with a mysterious veiled figure waiting at the center of his experience. Like the young Apollo at Mnemosyne's approach, he does not recognize her at first; he knows only that there is "purport in her looks for him," of a revelation still to come, some final experience of her might. And so the odes, like the month which produced them, end on a note of troubled foreboding.⁴⁶

There is in the last stanza an implicit assumption that beauty and truth are involved with one another through the imagination. Beauty is seen most intensely through sadness; wisdom emerges from suffering, and in this process man comes to truth. A part of wisdom is the knowledge of the "impossibility of keeping joy and pain distinct in the imaginative man… . "⁴⁷ Thus is introduced a theme that is carried out in The Fall of Hyperion.

"Ode on Indolence"

The "Ode on Indolence," generally regarded as being the last composed of the group of odes and the least important from a literary and critical standpoint, describes a mood which Keats has mentioned in his letters from the beginning of those which survive.⁴⁸ This mood ranged in Keats's life from a "sterile and unhappy torpor" to a "passive, sensuous receptivity"⁴⁹ which nourished his creativity. In fact, a letter in March of 1819 contains the seed of the ode written some months later: "Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness 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" (II, 79).

The poem in essence describes a desire to escape by means of an indolence in which

Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.

The indolence spoken of here is almost a kind of sleep or death; it becomes a "soft embalmer," which is capable of closing "the hushed Casket of my Soul" ("To Sleep"). The poet, in fact, does wonder why the figures did not go away and leave him "Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness" (II). He is in such a state of indolence that he does not recognize the three figures until they have passed by for the third time, when he recognizes them as Love, Ambition, and his "demon Poesy" (IV).

The tone of stanzas five and six changes from that of the previous ones, which emphasize by their language a kind of languor and lack of interest and care. In the final stanzas the poet's torpor has been invaded by the figures, who intrude upon his consciousness and force him to recognize them. His recognition is bitter, for he finds no pleasure in any of the three:

O folly! What is love! and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man's little heart's short fever-fit
For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

It is as though Keats wants to escape into the kind of world he created in his innocent view of life in Endymion, but the difference is that here he knows that he cannot re-enter the imaginary world forever but will have to return and take up his life where he left it. Poesy has no appeal for him in this state because it means hard work, facing the "strife / Of human hearts ("Sleep and Poetry" 124-25), which he would rather forget at this time.

This ode has less to do specifically with Keats's mythopoeia than any of the others and has its main interest for the reader in biographical material: "The interest of the poem lies in the unexpected confessions that emerge in the last two stanzas. What had started as a mere rendering of a mood of passivity begins to betray a divided attitude crossed by inconsistent attempts at self-persuasion."⁵⁰

The summer months following the rapid completion of the odes were another time of lying fallow for Keats. He wrote in July to Reynolds, "I have of late been moulting: not for fresh feathers & wings: they are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs. I have altered, not from a Chrysalis into a butterfly, but the Contrary, having two little loopholes, whence I may look out into the stage of the world …" (II, 128). It was difficult for him to write when he felt the pull and distraction of financial worries. He even wrote to his sister that he might "be forced to take a voyage or two" (II, 111) in order to earn money as a ship's surgeon. However, he was able to write to Sarah Jeffrey with some determination, "My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world—Now I find I must buffet it—I must choose between despair & Energy—I choose the latter—though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once thought was impossible—" (II, 113). By August he could write to Benjamin Bailey, "I am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher) a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World—Shakespeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me—I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover" (II, 139).

During these months Keats was writing "Lamia" and beginning to recast Hyperion. In addition he collaborated with Charles Brown on the writing of Otho the Great, which they hoped to see produced with Edmund Kean as the principal actor, in order to provide some financial relief.

"Lamia "

"Lamia" seems to have pleased Keats, perhaps because he hoped it would please the public: "… I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way—give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation. What they want is sensation of some sort" (II, 189). His judgment seemed satisfied, because the poem occupies the first place in the Poems of 1820; of "Isabella" he had written to Woodhouse that it had "too much inexperience of live [sic], and simplicity of knowledge in it," but he felt "there is no objection of this kind to Lamia" (II, 174).

However, many readers have not been entirely satisfied with the poem, although they have been given "either pleasant or unpleasant sensation." One difficulty is that critics cannot agree on a single interpretation of the poem. Some, such as John Roberts,⁵¹ have seized on the lines from Part II as embodying the entire meaning of the poem.

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things,
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
(229-34)

Others, represented by Middleton Murry, have leaned toward an entirely biographical interpretation, seeing Lamia as Fanny Brawne and Lycius as Keats.⁵² Finney reads the two halves of the poem as separate pieces.⁵³ Each seems to pursue his own argument.

It is true that on first reading the poem may seem to be something of a misfit in the Keatsian canon. The tone is different in that there is the element of the satirical, which Keats used in a sustained fashion only in the unfinished "Cap and Bells." His attitude has even been called one of "defiant egotism."⁵⁴ The use of myth, too, is different because it is "brisk, objective, detached" and has "at least some elements of the comic"⁵⁵ instead of his earlier projection of self into the creatures of mythology, such as Pan in Endymion and Thea in Hyperion.

However, a close study of the poem reveals its essential kinship with others of the major poems, although the technique may differ from most and the resolution of the poem does not have the same kind of reconciliation that may be found in poems such as the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Lamia" does move close to the themes of The Fall, which was to follow, although it remains fragmentary and "Lamia" is a finished poem. "Lamia" may be said, like the "Ode to a Nightingale," to represent the questioning side of Keats's myth of the poet. There is a bitterness of tone in parts of the poem, yet there still remains the idea that Lycius would have been the poorer without his experience with Lamia, even though he eventually dies as a result of it.

This poem is concerned primarily with the imagination but is written in a dramatic narrative style which tempts readers to assume that various parts can contain the full meaning of the whole poem. However, dramatic statements must be considered in their contexts before one comes to any kind of conclusion as to their meanings. The imagination in this poem has gone "beyond its proper bound" ("To J. H. R.," 79), and the poem demonstrates some of the results of this kind of journeying of the imagination. One treatment that sets this poem apart from the others which deal with the imagination, as the odes do, is that the reader sees imagination and reality in two different lights which seem contradictory. The imagination in Keats's myth is supposed to tell man something of himself; in this poem the imagination is divorced from the real world and remains entirely visionary, although Lamia does try ironically to enter the real world by sending her spirit out into it. But Lycius wants the entirely imaginary world, and to him reality is harsh and cold. Yet it must be recognized that it is the reality which prevails at the end when Lamia and Lycius die and Apollonius, the sage and philosopher, lives.

If Lycius represents in any way the poet, he does so as an example of what the poet should not be. He tries to escape Experience through imaginary means rather than to use the imagination to transcend the human condition, as it does in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It is important to note that Lycius has remained aloof from the world before the lamia appears to him; he is usually alone: "Over the solitary hills he fared" (I. 233), and Lamia sees him as "he pass'd, shut up in mysteries, / His mind wrapped like his mantle" (I. 241-42). It is he who responds to her, as the knight responded to La Belle Dame. The only knowledge which he has obtained up to this point has come from Apollonius, his teacher, who can be said to represent human experience only in one aspect. Consequently, after Lycius removes himself even further from reality by retreating into the enchanted palace with Lamia, his return to the real world, the move into Experience, kills him rather than leading to a Higher Innocence. His imagination does not function as it should; he allows himself to remain too long "beyond the bourn of care, / Beyond the sweet and bitter world,—beyond it unaware!" ("Lines Written in the Highlands," 28-29). He has lost "the sight of well remember'd face" ("Lines," 33), and when reality is thrust upon him in the shape of Apollonius, it is too late for him to adjust. Thus, "Lamia" takes its place in the myth of the poet by expressing negatively the meaning of the poet, the imagination, the identity, and love.

Part I of the poem begins with a pairing of two immortals, Hermes and a nymph. However, the treatment of the figures gives a light tone to the opening section of the poem, which differs from the bitterness which is noticeable in much of the rest of the poem. The description of Hermes is humorous; he is "ever-smitten: (I. 7), "bent warm on amorous theft" (I. 8), burning with "a celestial heat / … from his winged heels to either ear" (I. 22-23), and is "full of painful jealousies / Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees" (I. 33-34). He appears to be a love-sick young boy in search of a nymph, reminiscent of the whitehanded nymph of the early poems. There is even some "cheerful mockery."⁵⁶ The whole of the relationship between Hermes and the nymph is one of a sensuous, physical nature. When the long-hidden nymph is made to appear by the magic of Lamia, authorial comment informs the reader that

It was no dream; or say a dream it was,
Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
Their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
(I. 126-28)

These lines suggest a foreboding of what is to happen in the remainder of the poem. The gods can afford to live in a dream-world, where every dream becomes truth; human beings in their limited mortal condition must be satisfied with considerably less, and when they give themselves up to this dream-world and refuse to leave it, tragedy can be the only outcome.

If the dream is to survive, as it did with Madeline and Porphyro, it must be as a result of commitment to each other rather than to a desire to live in a dreamworld. Recall that the mortal lovers, Madeline and Porphyro, left the castle and went out into the storm. Hermes and his lover, however, at the close of the first section enter into their eternal relationship:

But the God fostering her chilled hand,
She felt the warmth, her eyelids open'd bland,

And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,
Bloom'd and gave up her honey to the lees.
Into the green-recessed woods they flew;
Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do.
(I. 140-45)

All the imagery suggests physical fulfillment without cloying: the warmth of blood pulsing through veins and giving up "honey to the less," like emptying the cup of pleasure. The immortal lovers disappear into the green woods, suggestive of verdure and life unending. They never grow pale as did the knight after his encounter with La Belle Dame or as the lovers on the Grecian urn would have done had they consummated their love.

It is perhaps because of the mingling of the humorous and the serious in the opening section that many have seen no relationship of it to the rest of the poem. Wasserman suggests that the first section might have been "a guess at heaven," with the rest meant to be "the perceptible reality seen from the perspective of that guess."⁵⁷ There are certainly parallels and contrasts, whether or not they are as strong as they could be. Edward Norris is surely wrong when he describes Hermes as the representative of Keats's "more ambitious side—the seeker after knowledge."⁵⁸ There is nothing ambitious about Hermes except his determination to satisfy his physical needs. He is not concerned with the meaning of his experiences. It is enough for him to satisfy the senses without having to interpret, for he never has to return to the mortal world.

Lamia, however, is a complex creature. Keats would have known her story from Burton's Anatomy, and the Hermes episode is an addition to his sources. Keats makes Lamia into a sympathetic character, although she is an illusion and remains one. From her first appearance, when she asks the help of Hermes to make her into a woman, the reader learns that she is "touch'd with miseries" (I. 54) and that physically she is a combination of snake and woman:

Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

… . .

Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love's sake,
(I. 59-65)

She is compassionate; it is Lamia who has made the nymph invisible to keep her pursuers from her. Her transformation is painful: "She writh'd about, convuls'd with scarlet pain" (I. 154).

Also, from the beginning, Lamia must be seen as a paradoxical character. Indeed, all three of the major characters must be recognized as paradoxical, for not one of them is to be approved in every way.⁵⁹ Their natures may be the result of the fact that Keats, through the poem, "looked at life, and not merely at the limited area of his own life, as a whole, with all its essential contradictions."⁶⁰

Although Lamia is a beautiful woman, the reader must keep in mind that she is still basically a serpent in disguise and that she combines opposites within herself by being

A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore
Of love deep learned to the red heart's core:
Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain
To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
(I. 189-92)

The last line should lead a reader familiar with Keats's other work to suspect her. It is always one of the functions of the genuine imagination and the true poet to see the union of contraries, to experience pain and bliss together, not to try to separate them from one another. Thus Lamia can offer only the pleasant by her magic powers; she is able to divide two things which must go together in completely meaningful human experience. Part of the loss of Innocence is the recognition that pleasure and pain both exist. An attempt to recover Innocence without concomitant experience and pain is doomed to failure. Lamia, therefore, can never be human, even though she might desire to be.

This desire of Lamia to be human is tragically ironical, for it is her non-human powers that Lycius actually loves, through all the trappings which she provides for their physical pleasures by her magic abilities. The reader is told that Lamia before her transformation, was able, like Shelley's Witch of Atlas, to send her spirit abroad to populated places: "And sometimes into cities she would send / Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend" (I. 213-14). In fact, it is during one of these journeys that she has fallen in love with Lycius.

Lycius, on the other hand, has given most of his life to study. He has not been a devotee of the senses. Lamia says, '"Thou art a scholar, Lycius" (I. 279) and suggests that his attitude toward life cannot provide '"serener palaces, / 'Where I may all my senses please'" (I. 283-84). But once Lycius turns to the senses, his dedication is complete. He is then described as "from one trance … wakening / Into another" (I. 296-97) and is enthralled by the magic at once. He is not even aware of being transported from one place to another; he is "blinded Lycius" (I. 347) and so remains until his death. As long as he is content to remain in his blinded state, the dream-world can survive, but once he tries to force reality into the mold of his illusion, his chances for life as a whole human being are banished.

By the conclusion of Part I, Apollonius has been introduced. At his first appearance, Lycius draws close to Lamia, as though for protection, and tells her that Apollonius has been '"my trusty guide / 'And good instructor; but tonight he seems / 'The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams'" (I. 375-77). The foreboding of ill appears here; it is as though Lycius knows but does not want to admit that Apollonius may be able to see through the illusion that Lamia is creating. He does not want anything to intrude on his happiness, just as the poet in the "Ode on Indolence" does not want to "hear the voice of busy common-sense" Apollonius can be seen as a part of Lycius himself, that is, his rational aspect, which works beautifully in the ordinary world of human experience, but which may act as a block to the visionary imagination.

When Lycius enters the palace which Lamia has erected through conjuration, he fully accepts the illusion. For a time they are satisfied, having drunk the "pure wine / Of happiness" (Endymion III. 801-02). Each evening they recline on a couch

Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed,
Saving a tythe which love still open kept,
That they might see each other while they almost slept;
(ll. 23-25)

Theirs approaches the immortality of passion of Hermes and the nymph, Venus and Adonis, and Cupid and Psyche in the "Ode to Psyche":

They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber….
("Psyche" II)

Yet, "For all this came a ruin" (ll. 16). Love himself is jealous of their seeming completeness of happiness. Lycius is recalled to the human world of Corinth by "a thrill / Of trumpets (ll. 27-28). Then, in a parallel to the first book, it is the spirit of Lycius instead of Lamia that "pass'd beyond its golden bourn / Into the noisy world almost forsworn" (ll. 32-33). From this point in Book II, Lycius is not content to accept Lamia on her own terms; rather, he feels impelled "to reclaim / Her wild and timid nature to his aim" (ll. 70-71). He begins to ask mortal questions which are out of the realm to which Lamia belongs:

'How to entangle, trammel up and snare
'Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
'Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?'
(ll. 52-54)

He wants to have Lamia on mortal terms rather than her own and proposes a wedding feast in order to exhibit her and thus to arouse the jealousy of his friends. Perhaps his desire is a reflection of untold parts of the story. Because Lycius has been a solitary figure, he probably has not been a part of the society of Corinth. Now he has a chance to enter that society with a great flash.

The dream now begins to fade. Lamia agrees to submit to the wedding festivities even though she probably senses that something evil will come from it, requiring only that Lycius not invite Apollonius to the feast. For the first time she shrinks from Lycius, an indication perhaps of her realization that their dream will not be able to survive the harsh reality of the world. Nevertheless, she bids her "viewless servants" (ll. 136) to make the splendid palace ready for the celebration.

Here the author comments as narrator:

O senseless Lycius! Madman! Wherefore flout
The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours,
And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain,
Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain,
And enter'd marveling; for they knew the street….

… . .

Save one, who look'd thereon with eye severe,
And with calm-planted steps walk'd in austere;
'Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh'd,
As though some knotty problem, that had daft
His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,
And solve and melt:—'twas just as he foresaw.
(ll. 147-62)

The attitude of Lycius toward the people is one of scorn, indicated by the words "herd" and "busy brain." These are men of no imagination; they are trying to remember why it is that the street is familiar to them although they cannot remember the house. Apollonius, on the other hand, acts as though he finally understands the implications of the earlier behavior of Lycius in passing him by. If he has taught his pupil to use his mind, to forego the use of the imagination, then he would be displeased at this evidence that Lycius is not heeding all that he has been taught as a pupil of Apollonius. The philosopher acts as he must in the light of his training: '"yet must I do this wrong, / 'And you forgive me'" (ll. 168-69).

After a description of the festivities, the narrator begins a lament for Lamia and Lycius, in lines which have caused a great deal of comment:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
(ll. 229-38)

These lines must not, however, as some have read them, be forced to bear the entire meaning of the whole poem. Instead, they represent extreme views of both the imagination and philosophy. They indicate a misuse of the two forces, which should be complementary to one another. It is not necessary to accept M. H. Abrams' judgment that "Keats accedes to the fallacy … that, when a perceptual phenomenon is explained by correlating it with something more elementary than itself, the explanation discredits and replaces the perception—that only the explanation is real, and the perception illusory."⁶¹ His statement must be weighed against the context of the poem and Keats's comments in his mature letters, such as his reference to "the human friend philosopher" (II, 139). The difficulty in the modern world is one which Keats sensed in writing these lines and one which is implied in Abrams' comment: science sometimes would make the poet seem to have to reject the imagination, but he is not required to do so. In fact, Philip Freund has made it a point to demonstrate in his last chapter that science has its own mythology.⁶²

A philosopher who knows nothing of dreams would want to "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line"; a dreamer who refuses to accept anything from philosophy and science would desire to accept the "awful rainbow" without understanding what makes it up. A healthy imagination could absorb both, but Lycius and Apollonius do not represent either the healthy philosopher or the healthy poet. Rather, Lycius is a dreamer, whom Keats condemns bitterly in The Fall of Hyperion, and Apollonius is "the dull brain that perplexes and retards" ("Ode to a Nightingale") and refuses to accept any part of the fancy or the imagination.

When Apollonius fixes his eye "without a twinkle or stir / Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride" (ll. 246-47), Lamia dies. Ironically, it is Lycius who cries, '"Begone, foul dream!'" (ll. 271) as he realizes what is happening. His is the cry of "the bewildered indignation of the disappointed romanticist, who has learned nothing from his experience except perhaps to despise it."⁶³ Lycius cannot realize that he has been a dreamer rather than a poet. The reader must remember, however, that the description of Apollonius given by Lycius occurs after Lamia's death and that his view does not necessarily reflect that of the poet or narrator:

'Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
'Turn them aside, wretch!

… . .

'Corinthians! look upon that grey-beard wretch!
'Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch
'Around his demon eyes!'
(ll. 277-89)

Lycius is striking out at the man who has deprived him of his happiness and his dream. His sustenance taken from him, Lycius dies, unfit to live in the mortal world again. Yet, the reader is likely to feel with Bloom that "if death awaited Lycius in Lamia's folds, it would have been a death better worth the dying, and better worth the poet's imaginings."⁶⁴

"Lamia" has threads of themes from other poems, especially the concern with the nature of the poet. Lycius represents a negative value and misplacement of the imagination. He is committed to a delusion rather than a vision, and thus his path can lead only to unhappiness and destruction. The poet must concern himself with humanity in order "to bring us sustaining visions of a beauty often lacking in our lives… . "⁶⁵ The evidence of "Lamia" is the evidence of a false move through Experience and a deluded attempt to believe that a Higher Innocence has been reached when, in fact, it is not Innocence at all but an evasion of life. One critic has suggested that the evil in Lamia is that she, by the use of her powers, has taken Lycius away from the mortal world which must sustain a man on his journey through life.⁶⁶ Douglas Bush's comments are a useful summary of attitudes toward the poem:

Since most of Keats's chief poems are concerned with the nature of poetry and the poet, we may assume that Lycius represents not merely a lover but a poet, although a projection of only one part, and not the strongest part, of Keats himself. Like Endymion, Lycius is captured by what he takes to be an ideal and immortal love; luxuriating in his bower of bliss, he does not heed either the trumpets of action or the wisdom of philosophy. He is a mortal dreamer who gladly retreats from reality into a world of fantasy. In demanding marriage he is not, as the poet's later ironical comment puts it, profaning secret joys (ll. 146 f.), but is trying to make a dream substantial and lasting. Unlike Endymion, he does not grow into devotion to the real; unlike Apollo, he does not attain comprehension of the world of suffering. Rather, Lycius is—somewhat like Tennyson's innocent Lady of Shalott—a cloistered artist who lives on illusions and is killed by the shock of reality—that is, in "Lamia," by philosophic truth. Yet Apollonius is a coldhearted realist who can only see through everything—a very imperfect symbol of what Keats meant by philosophy. Thus none of the three chief figures represents an ideal; they are all more or less fatally flawed parts of an ideal.⁶⁷

"To Autumn" and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, the last two major poems that Keats was to write, are also the two poems which perhaps more than any other single poems embody Keats's mythopoeia. Each, in its own way, is about the journey of the soul of Everyman from an untested Innocence, through the crucible of Experience, and into a Higher Innocence from which man is able not only to grasp his own experience but to exist with it and prevail. One of the most nearly unique qualities of Keats's major poems is their subject matter. Although Keats often treats the problem of the artist, he is at the same time writing of the human condition. His poetry, therefore, can be read on an aesthetic level, but there is a consistent binding to the earth and an acknowledgement of the poet's kinship with total humanity, not with just those who, like himself, are devoted to art.

"To Autumn"

"To Autumn," which on a surface reading would seem to be a poem of serenity, is on a closer reading quite close to the theme of the first Hyperion, that "a new good is purchased only at the price of the loss of a former good."⁶⁸ Like the other odes, this one has its parallel in a letter: "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" (II, 167). This poem, with the others of Keats's maturity, reflects themes and concerns which have been with him since the beginning, particularly the idea of the processes of nature and of life. In this poem there is a "mature understanding"⁶⁹ of nature instead of "Nature's gentle doings" ("I Stood Tip-Toe," 63). And, although autumn is personified and arrested in a kind of stasis, it is seen only as a part of the continuing organic process of all life. The stasis can be appreciated only when it is contrasted with the awareness of time's constant movement.⁷⁰ The season itself "is a boundary, a space between two opposite conditions, a moment of poise when one movement culminates and the succeeding movement has scarcely begun."⁷¹

"To Autumn" is also an excellent example of Keats's myth-making, in which what begins as a personification ripens into a sense of beauty, harmony, and mystery at the heart of existence, all captured in a mythic way. In the first stanza autumn is addressed as the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun" which has acted in a conspiracy to bring growing things to a fullness not reached before by spring or summer. Yet even in the beginning, along with the appreciation of the season's ability "to load and bless / With fruit the vines," there is a sense that the fulness will end in decay, in order to begin the processes of life all over again.

Surely the second stanza asserts Keats's kinship with the spirit of the Greeks whose mythology he admired, because it captures their sense of the life projected into their gods:

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
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.

Here autumn is seen almost as a goddess who rules over the changing season. Captured by its beauty and plenty, she drowses, in a sense wishing to spare what she knows must come to pass. There is also the implication of a desire on the part of the poet to arrest the season at its peak, as he had wished to prolong his intensified state in the "Ode to a Nightingale." The last line emphasizes the understanding of time as organic process, as autumn watches "the last oozings hours by hours." Always there is the sense that autumn is both the ending and the beginning of something.

The third stanza is touched with poignant beauty:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
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.

Although there is "a harmony at the heart of things, apparent at no other moment of the year,"⁷² there is also a sadness in the knowledge of that harmony, which has been won by the labor of Experience. It is only the abandonment of Innocence and the conscious choice to move into the "dark passages" (I, 281) of Experience that can result in a serenity of vision.⁷³ It seems significant that the last stanza closes with images of sound and movement; nothing in the final lines is static.

This short lyric does beautifully what Keats said a poem should do, "surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance" (I, 238). "To Autumn" illustrates this principle of poetry for many readers, perhaps because of "the familiar archetypal relevance of the association to our feelings of sequence in our own lives."⁷⁴ Bate has summarized the major preoccupation of Keats's poetry which are found in the last important lyric that he wrote: the "ideal of energy caught in repose," "the association of expectance, of waiting, with autumn," and "his inability to conceive fulfillment without a spring of promise still implicit within it."⁷⁵

The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

The last of Keats's major poems, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, unfortunately remains only as a fragment. In attempting to recast the original Hyperion, Keats wrote an entirely different poem. It has been of great interest to students in the twentieth century because it uses the creation of a poem as the subject of a poem. Of course, Keats is in the tradition of Wordsworth and Coleridge in The Prelude and Kubla Khan, a tradition continued in this century by, among others, Wallace Stevens, Archibald MacLeish, and Marianne Moore.

Keats is also concerned with man and his looking at "the self as it tries to come to terms with reality."⁷⁶ Twentieth-century poets, too, have struggled with the identity of man and artist: Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Robinson's The Man Against the Sky are example of this theme. As Robert Wagner points out, Keats is both the subject and the writer of his poem.⁷⁷ In anticipating some of what was to be done in later years, Keats differed from his contemporaries in that he wrote subjective poetry but was able to transfer the meaning sometimes into a more detached and objective form.⁷⁸ Read in the context of the Romantic tradition, The Fall "must be regarded as one of the major attempts within European romanticism to reconcile the imagination with a realistic and humane awareness of the suffering of mankind."⁷⁹ Indeed, it can be seen as "very nearly the archetypal Romantic poem" because it contains "the great Romantic theme of the poet relating himself to the content of his own vision."⁸⁰ Perhaps one of the major interests of the poem for later generations has been the fact that it is within the Romantic tradition but in some ways goes beyond that tradition.

Like the ode "To Autumn," The Fall indicates a kind of Higher Innocence, but the reader is also able to witness within the poem the actual movement from Innocence to Experience and the struggle, symbolized by the poet's climb up the steps, into a Higher Innocence. It is also clear that there is great pain and joy in the movement. Too, there is in the course of the poem the final condemnation of the purely visionary poet. There is in this last poem a fitting resolution, though fragmentary, of the difficulties of being a poet and of the realization that the myth of the poet can be a myth which is true for man. Part of the means of embodying this myth is the concern with vision, dream, and sleep, that have been noted since "Sleep and Poetry" and "Calidore."

From the opening lines of the poem, the reader encounters the concern with dream and vision:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven …
'But' Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment.
(I. 1-11)

Keats seems here to be indicating that dreams occur to all mankind and can be the means of understanding "Heaven." All men must make "Guesses at Heaven"; only the real poet, not the visionary poet, is able to tell the dreams in such a way that they can become like Adam's dream, truth in the real world. Then he states one major theme of the poem:

Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.
(I. 16-18)

The first person is introduced here; the reader is not to have a kind of impersonal statement but the personal encounter of the "I" found in the "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale."

Casting the poem in the shape of a dream-vision is of importance, although Keats "writes less a poetry of vision than a poetry about the human need and use of it."⁸¹ It is as though he is saying that there must be vision and dream before there can be truth, but the poet who is to speak to man's heart must have more than just a vision or a dream. The poem certainly has kinship with the genre of the dream-vision, which Keats would have known through Chaucer and Dante; the form is especially important in stressing "the difference between everyday reality and the special reality of art" and in suggesting that "the latter can be approached only when the ordinary controls of will and consciousness are relaxed."⁸² Keats must still feel that a dream can reveal truth.⁸³

The second paragraph of the poem relates the beginning of the vision, in which the poet finds himself in the midst of a lovely, garden-like atmosphere, where he sees

a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal
By angel tasted or our Mother Eve.
(I. 29-31)

In lines which recall the Nightingale ode, the poet drinks from "a cool vessel of transparent juice" (I. 40). The difference here, however, is that he drinks, "pledging all the mortals of the world, / And all the dead whose names are in our lips" (I. 45-46) and then falls into a deep swoon, which follows "the familiar pattern of a feast, a sleep, and an awakeneing to some new mode of being…. "⁸⁴

Awakening within the dream which he is telling, the poet sees "the carved sides / Of an old sanctuary with roof august" (I. 61-62), older than anything he can remember having seen upon the earth. The appeal of the sanctuary is perhaps the same kind of appeal which Greek myth had for him: "fresh through all the generations, it comes to him charged with an emotion old beyond memory and yet his own."⁸⁵

The poet next sees an altar, which is

To be approach'd on either side by steps,
And marble balustrade, and patient travail
To count with toil the innumerable degrees.
(I. 90-92)

Thus the idea of purgation and the imagery from traditional Christianity appears from the beginning.⁸⁶ The first words that he hears from Moneta, with whom he will have a confrontation shortly, are '"If thou canst not ascend / 'These steps, die on that marble where thou art'" (I. 107-8).

The next lines ring with a similarity to the changing of Apollo in the first Hyperion:

Prodigious seem'd the toil; the leaves were yet
Burning—when suddenly a palsied chill
Struck from the paved level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat:
I shriek'd, and the sharp anguish of my shriek
Stung my own ears—I strove hard to escape
The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step.
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasp'd my hands I felt them not.
One minute before death, my iced foot touch'd
The lowest stair; and as it touch'd, life seem'd
To pour in at the toes: I mounted up,
As once fair angels flew
From the green turf to Heaven—
(I. 121-36)

As with the first Hyperion, there is a dying into life. The innocent self must die in order for the mature self to take its place. Perkins is correct in assuming that this scene more broadly suggests that the poet moves slowly into an awareness of human predicaments than just in moving back to life from death.⁸⁷ It is only through moving up the steps that the poet is able to purge himself with a "healing despair" which "is a part of the allegory of life, a process in the making of a soul."⁸⁸ The poet here raises the eternal question and cry of man endeavoring to find out who he is and what his purpose is: '"What am I that should so be saved from death?'" (I. 138).

The debate between the poet and Moneta which follows has occasioned more critical commentary than any other single part of the poem. Perhaps distinguishing who Moneta is and what she might represent is wise before looking specifically at the words exchanged by the pair. She can be seen as a representation of "the archaic way of thought—imaginative rather than discursive … , undissociated, mythopoeic."⁸⁹ Therefore, she has a kind of knowledge which has faded from the world and which only the sensibility of the poet is able to intuit and pass on to other human beings. Thus she lives in the most ancient of temples. Images of light and sorrow are associated with her, indicating that she can be "a bringer of truth through conscience, or through sympathy with the suffering which is as old as the world."⁹⁰ Or perhaps she is "the embodiment of the collective memory of tradition"⁹¹ which remains present in her mind as scenes which are perennially available to those sensitive enough to participate in them. One of her functions is to act as a kind of scourge, to enable the poet to see himself as he must be.

Moneta's first speech warns the poet of the dangers of being a visionary who has no ties to the earth or to his fellow human beings:

'Those whom thou spak'st of are no vision'ries,'
Rejoined that voice—'They are no dreamers weak,
'They seek no wonder but the human face;
'No music but a happy-noted voice—
'They come not here, they have no thought to come—
'And thou art here, for thou art less than they—
'What benefit canst thou, or all thy tribe,
'To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
'A fever of thyself—think of the Earth;
'What bliss even in hope is there for thee?
'What haven? every creature hath its home;
'Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
'Whether his labours be sublime or low—
"The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
'Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
'Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.'
(I. 161-77)

There are echoes of other poems. When the poet questions his being there, he exclaims that there must be others '"Who feel the giant agony of the world'" (I. 157), which reminds readers of the lines from "Sleep and Poetry." Keats had then expressed a desire to write poetry that would speak of "a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts (123-25). There is always the possibility that art will be treacherous and not fulfill what it promises.⁹² Some of the most telling lines are those in which Moneta suggests that pain and joy are distinct, as Lamia could "unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain" (192). It is a mark of Keats's poetry that for the poet no such separation can be possible.

The poet's attempt to justify his work is contained in these lines:

' … sure not all
'Those melodies sung into the World's ear
'Are useless: sure a poet is a sage;
'A humanist, physician to all men.
'That I am none I feel, as vultures feel
'They are no birds when eagles are abroad.'
(I. 187-92)

Here is evidence once again of the kind of religious function which poetry can have. In addition, there may be a significance in the comparison of the physician and the humanist to the poet: " … in The Fall illness is used not simply as a metaphor for various emotional states but as a symbol of the poet's own consciousness… . The self-cured physician here becomes Keats's image of redemption through poetry."⁹³

Moneta distinguishes even more clearly between the poet and the dreamer in the following lines:

'Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
'The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
'Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
'The one pours out a balm upon the World,
'The other vexes it.'
(I. 198-202)

At the poet's request, Moneta begins to tell her story, and he can tell by her voice that she is crying, shedding "Long-treasured tears" (I. 221). She has been waiting through the ages for someone to come to her for the help and knowledge that she can offer. She cannot force her knowledge on anyone, and only those who are worthy can be permitted to see the visions which play and replay themselves within her brain. Her very power is a curse to her, but it can be a wonder to the poet because he will see her visions "with those dull mortal eyes … , / 'Free from all pain, if wonder pain thee not'" (I. 247-48). The irony is, of course, that if he is a poet instead of a dreamer, the wonder will become pain because he will empathically share in the drama which unfolds before him through Moneta's brain. In Keats's last poetry as well as in his early writing, there is emphasis on the idea that truth must be experiential to have validity. If the poet simply watched the scenes in Moneta's brain, he would remain a visionary and could never hope to become a "physician to all men."

The lines which follow are the poet's description of Moneta's face and his desire to experience what she feels as pain:

Then saw I a wan face,
Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it has past
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face—
But for her eyes I should have fled away.

… . .

I ach'd to see what things the hollow brain
Behind enwombed: what high tragedy
In the dark secret chambers of her skull
Was acting, that could give so dread a stress
To her cold lips, and fill with such a light
Her planetary eyes; and touch her voice
With such a sorrow.
(I. 256-82)

In Moneta's face there is captured something that has not been seen in Keats's poetry before, a process that does not have an end. Yet in the arrest of stasis, there is still change. Her sickness is more than human because she is more than human. It is for this reason that some have compared her to a kind of Christ figure who takes the suffering of the world upon herself. But she does not die a physical death; she simply dies in spirit over and over because of the suffering she endures with her knowledge.

The poet is granted by Moneta the "power … of enormous ken / To see as a god sees" (I. 303-04), which enables him to enter into her brain and actually participate in the scenes which remain constant there. Those scenes are represented by the inclusion of some passages from the first Hyperion, those in which Saturn and Thea appear. It is possible that these scenes are meant to represent a whole reservoir of material for poetry which has not been used in recent years.⁹⁴ The burden of what the poet sees is so great that he often prays "Intense, that Death would take me from the Vale / And all its burthens" (I. 396-98).

Since the poem is only a fragment, there is no way to ascertain what Keats would have done with it if it had been continued. The short and fragmentary Canto II consists of Moneta's telling of the coming of Hyperion, which was recorded in the earlier poem. But it is evident in what does remain of the poem that Keats was trying to ascertain what the role of the poet could be for his time and for those times to follow. In the first version, Keats was writing about a kind of progress, that of beauty in the world. Here, Wilkie contends, Keats writes of man's progress as he grows; "… the two poems are doctrinal to man but not to an age or nation."⁹⁵ Keats is concerned with poetry as a human object rather than an abstract one.⁹⁶

The Fall can be read as a miniature working out of the myth of the poet. The poet in the vision loses the Innocence that he presumably has when he enters the garden at the beginning. Climbing the purgatorial steps represents the agony of moving through Experience. It is important to note, however, that although the abandoning of earlier views is necessary, there still is an aura of sadness at the loss of Innocence.⁹⁷ But the glimpse of Higher Innocence that the poet receives through Moneta's vision is worth the loss. If the poem had an ending, the poet would very likely return to the real world from his dream. Then the test would be whether he could embody his vision into a poem that had real reaming for human beings who would read it in the hope of seeing into the heart of their humanity.

The imagination in this poem is tempered with restraint. Although the reader is in the midst of agony, the language is almost austere. Here too truth becomes real as it is experienced through participation in Moneta's vision and through the use of the imagination within its proper limits. The intensities of life are here in this poem, as they are in others; here the intensity is that of death, which Keats has previously called "life's high meed" ("Why did I laugh tonight?") and the intensity of the sorrow in Moneta's face. The pain of her face also illustrates the idea that intensities can make disagreeables evaporate. The poet of The Fall is also the poet of Negative Capability. At first he questions, but then he is content to be shown and to let himself absorb what is offered to him. And certainly this poem is a "vale of Soul-making," in which pain and suffering are clearly the means by which the poet is enabled to ascend the steps and emerge in a higher state, to reorganize his functions in preparation for returning to the earth.

The mythopoeic poet views his universe and interprets it as an organic whole; in a culture where there is no predominantly accepted myth to give his experience a shape, he is forced to create his own. Sometimes the mythmaking is startlingly original, as in Blake's poetry. Sometimes traditional Greek and Roman mythology or Christian symbolism is put to new uses. Keats is related in this way to both the tradition of mythopoeia as it runs through English poetry and to his own literary period, during which poets as well as other artists found it necessary to shape their own mythologies and to replace the older cosmological frames that were disintegrating under the forces of the modern world.

Why is it that generations have continued to respond to the poetry and the letters of John Keats? Perhaps it is that he is both of his own time and transcendent to it. He was involved with humanity, as others of his time were; yet he reflects the theme of the artist's isolation and suffering which was to become prominent in the twentieth century.

In the poetry and the letters of Keats, then, the reader finds a touchstone of experiences that are common to all humanity shaped into Keats's central myth of the poet, which embodies his interpretation of experience. The reader finds a concern with birth, death, and rebirth—the initiatory nature of human experience—embodied in the major poetry, especially the two Hyperions. These two poems speak to man as man and to man as artist. In "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "Lamia" the reader participates in that miring in Experience and that failure to learn which haunts man throughout his life. He wants to transcend his experience and move on to that calm which can come through a Higher Innocence, but he often learns that although the moments of vision are few, they are yet worth the trouble and pain, as portrayed in the vision of Moneta's face in The Fall of Hyperion and in the reconciliation of opposites in "To Autumn." Man's sensitive response to the natural world appears, especially in "To Autumn," "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket," and in the "Hymn to Pan" from Endymion. Finally, the major theme which has such appeal for modern man, that of the artist as alienated and set apart for a special task, comes through with a power and poignancy rarely matched by other poetry in The Fall of Hyperion.

Keats saw in traditional myth and in the mythic vision of life an embodiment of the legacy of the past and a way to know himself as man. Thus the myth that he created comes alive for others, because man tends to respond to myth when it reveals something that touches his experience as a human being. Keats was willing to take the risk as an artist and to make the leap of faith that ordinary men are frequently not willing to make. He was unafraid to trust his intuitive perceptions, although he also appreciated the knowledge which man is able to glean from books. His knowledge of beauty and truth is always linked to man's experience on earth, firmly bound to mankind, because he tested his intuitions on his pulses. Thus he was able to gain "for himself vision and possession of the experience engendered between his own soul and the life around him, and to communicate that experience, at once individual and collective, to others… . "⁹⁸ Although Keats died young, he possessed the poetic power

To see as a god sees, and take the depth
Of things as nimbly as the outward eye
Can size and shape pervade.
(The Fall I. 303-05)

Keats left the testament of that power in his major poems and in some of the most sensitive letters ever written by a poet.

Notes

¹ Aileen Ward, John Keats (New York, 1967), p. 278.

² Claude Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Cambridge, 1936), II, 581.

³ Ibid., p. 603.

⁴ Robert Gleckner, "Keats's Odes: The Problem of the Limited Canon," Studies in English Literature, 5 (1965), 577-85.

⁵ H. W. Garrod, Keats (Oxford, 1926), p. 97.

⁶ John Holloway, "The Odes of Keats," Cambridge Journal, 17 (1952), 425.

⁷ Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York, 1966), p. 512.

⁸ Robert Gittings, John Keats (Boston, 1968), p. 314.

⁹ Charles I. Patterson, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (Urbana, 1970), p. 167.

¹⁰ E. De Selincourt, ed. The Poems of John Keats, by John Keats (1905; rpt. New York 1961), p. 1x.

¹¹ Robert D. Wagner, "Keats: 'Ode to Psyche' and the Second 'Hyperion,'" Keats-Shelley Journal, 13 (1964), 30.

¹² Kenneth Allott, "Keats's 'Ode to Psyche,'" Essays in Criticism, 6 (1956), 271.

¹³ Finney, II, 615.

¹⁴ Ward, p. 279. Another interpretation of the ode, based on Freudian psychology, is that the ode can represent the expression of a death-wish, that there is "a conflict between the life and death wishes and, on a deeper, more truly Romantic and Keatsian plane, a commingling of the forces of love, beauty, and creativity and those of melancholy, despair and death—with the latter emerging as dominant." See Lloyd N. Jeffrey, "A Freudian Reading of Keats's Ode to Psyche," The Psychoanalytic Review, 55, No. 2 (1968), 289-306.

¹⁵ There is an echo here of Buber's terminology, but the idea is from Chapter I of Before Philosophy (New York, 1951), pp. 11-36.

¹⁶ Allott, p. 300.

¹⁷ Leonidas Jones, "The 'Ode to Psyche'": an Allegorical Introduction to Keats's Great Odes," Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 9 (1958), 23. Hereafter abbreviated as KSMB.

¹⁸ Bate's order of the poems will be used because there is no definite way to date the composition of the poems. He discusses them in the following order: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence," and "To Autumn," (Chapter XIX, pp. 486-524.)

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 504.

²⁰ Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone (Baltimore, 1953), p. 191.

²¹ Bate, p. 506.

²² Bloom, Visionary Company, p. 400.

²³ E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (Cambridge, 1957), p. 273.

²⁴ Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn (London, 1959), p. 328.

²⁵ Wasserman, p. 217.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 223.

²⁷ Philip Hobsbaum, "The Philosophy of the Grecian Urn: A Concensus of Readings," KSMB, 15 (1964), 6-7.

²⁸ For a summary of critical opinion about the poem in general, see Hobsbaum's article. A useful collection of excerpted comments about the poem is that of Harvey T. Lyon, Keats' Well-Read Urn: An Introduction to Literary Method (New York, 1958). Particularly stimulating discussions of the poem are Bate's on pp. 516-520, Wasserman's on pp. 58-62 of The Finer Tone, and Blackstone's on pp. 330 ff. of The Consecrated Urn.

²⁹ Bate, p. 511.

³⁰ Clarence Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats (New York, 1926), p. 135.

³¹ Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), p. 152.

³² Charles Patterson, "Passion and Permanence in Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,'" ELH, 21 (1954), 212.

³³ Peter Skutches, "Keats's Grecian Urn and Myth," Iowa English Yearbook, 8 (1963), 49.

³⁴ Pettet, p. 325.

³⁵ F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (1936; rpt. New York: George W. Stewart), p. 254.

³⁶ Articles dealing with the bibliographical questions are Alvin Whitley, "The Message of the Grecian Urn," KSMB, 5 (1953), 1-3, and Jack C. Stillinger, "Keats's Grecian Urn and the Evidence of the Transcripts," PMLA, 73 (1958), 447-8.

³⁷ Wasserman, p. 60.

³⁸ Bate, pp. 518-519.

³⁹ G. St. Quintin, "The Grecian Urn," Times Literary Supplement, 5 Feb. 1938, p. 92.

⁴⁰ Kenneth Allott, "The Meaning of the Odes," in Kenneth Muir, ed., John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool, 1958), p. 70.

⁴¹ Charles Patterson, "The Keats-Hazlitt-Hunt Copy of Palmerin of England in Relation to Keats's Poetry, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 40.

⁴² Cecil Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (Cambridge, 1949), p. 146.

⁴³ Patterson, "Passion and Permanence," p. 219.

⁴⁴ Bate, p. 522.

⁴⁵ Ward, p. 286.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 287.

⁴⁷ Murry, Keats, p. 248.

⁴⁸ See, for example, I, 133, 233, 287, 344 and II, 5, 51, 84, 116, 134, and 239 for samples of comments.

⁴⁹ Bush, Keats, p. 149.

⁵⁰ Bate, p. 528.

⁵¹ John Hawley Roberts, "The Significance of Lamia," PMLA, 50 (1935), 550-61.

⁵² John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare (London: Humphrey Milford, 1926), p. 159.

⁵³ Finney, II, 667 ff.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 704.

⁵⁵ Bate, p. 544.

⁵⁶ Georgia S. Dunbar, "The Significance of the Humor in 'Lamia,'" KSJ, 8 (1959), 18. She goes on to state that Lycius and Lamia take love too seriously and thus are a contrast to Hermes and the Nymph.

⁵⁷ Wasserman, The Finer Tone, p. 163.

⁵⁸ Edward Norris, "Hermes and the Nymph in Lamia" ELH, 2 (1935), 323.

⁵⁹ Perkins, p. 265.

⁶⁰ Gittings, Keats, p. 337.

⁶¹ M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: 1954), p. 307.

⁶² Philip Freund, Myths of Creation (New York, 1965), pp. 271-94.

⁶³ Robert D. Wagner, "Keats: 'Ode to Psyche' and the Second 'Hyperion,'" KSJ, 13 (1964), 38.

⁶⁴ Bloom, Visionary Company, p. 381.

⁶⁵ Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, p. 286.

⁶⁶ Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln, 1958), p. 147.

⁶⁷ Bush, John Keats, p. 161.

⁶⁸ Arnold Davenport, "A Note on 'To Autumn,'" in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, 1958), p. 101.

⁶⁹ Jack Stillinger, "Introduction: Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats," in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jack Stillinger (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), p. 9.

⁷⁰ B. C. Southam, "The Ode 'To Autumn,'" KSJ, 9 (1960), 97.

⁷¹ Davenport, p. 96.

⁷² Sherwood, p. 264.

⁷³ F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (New York, 1936), p. 272.

⁷⁴ Bate, p. 583.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 584.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 587.

⁷⁷ "Wagner, p. 35.

⁷⁸ G. R. Elliott, "The Real Tragedy of Keats," PMLA, 36 (1921), 320.

⁷⁹ Stuart M. Sperry, "Keats, Milton, and 'The Fall of Hyperion,'" PMLA, 77 (1962), 83.

⁸⁰ Bloom, Visionary Company, p. 389.

⁸¹ Perkins, p. 219.

⁸² Irene Chayes, "Dreamer, Poet, and Poem in 'The Fall of Hyperion,'" Philological Quarterly, 46 (1967), 501. She also notes the similarities between this kind of thinking and eighteenth-century aesthetic theories which Keats seems to have known.

⁸³ D'Avanzo, p. 66.

⁸⁴ Gittings, p. 337.

⁸⁵ Annie Edwards Dodds, The Romantic Theory of Poetry (London, 1926), p. 238.

⁸⁶ Bate also notes the Christian symbolism and parallels.

⁸⁷ Perkins, p. 281.

⁸⁸ Dorothy Hewlett, "Some Thoughts on 'The Fall of Hyperion,'" Aryan Path, 34 (1963), 466.

⁸⁹ Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1961), pp. 8-9.

⁹⁰ Evert, p. 293.

⁹¹ Chayes, p. 505.

⁹² Bate, p. 598.

⁹³ Ward, p. 328.

⁹⁴ Chayes, p. 505.

⁹⁵ Wilkie, p. 186.

⁹⁶ John Rosenberg, "Keats and Milton: The Paradox of Rejection," KSJ, 6 (1957), 91.

⁹⁷ Sperry, p. 80.

⁹⁸ Bodkin, p. 8.