The Ode’s of Keats

The Odes of Keats

Of John Keats

John Keats is known as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century. It’s how powerfully he is able to evoke the beauty in things that are so ordinary to the normal viewer. He gives a lot more in-depth meaning to the words in his poems that capture all of the reader’s senses. Keats uses this beauty to create a central theme in three of his poems, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. It is the beauty that he sees in the world which makes it apparent that society is destined to perish and die. The beauty in “Ode to a Nightingale” is that of the Nightingale’s song, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, it’s the beauty that Keats sees in art, and in “Ode to Autumn”, it’s the beauty he sees in the seasons and how immortal they are because they are part of an earthly cycle.

Keats shows the deepest expression of human mortality in his poem “Ode to a Nightingale”. In this Ode, Keats discusses the relationship to Old age and how it compares to the fluid song of the Nightingale. The man in the poem longs to flee from the world he lives and join the bird in its world. However, in the third stanza, after thinking about it, he chooses against the idea of going to the bird’s world. In the fourth stanza he says he will “Fly to thee, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but on the viewless wings…”. This is where he embraces those “viewless wings”(Keats 1097).

In “Ode to a Nightingale”, the central figure of beauty is this nightingale. The song of the nightingale is reminding the poet of his own mortality by singing to his senses. The poem begins with “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains…” (Keats 1097). In this first line, Keats is showing that he is mortal and the “drowsy numbness” is him sinking into the world of the nightingale. He is opening himself to the song of the bird. The nightingale is singing “of summer in full-throated ease” (Keats 1097) even though the poet later says that it is Mid-May. This expresses a beauty of nature that can’t be seen from man’s perspective. It also shows that the world which the bird lives in is timeless because summer exists for it regardless of it being mid-May. Whenever Keats describes the bird he uses words like “Immortal” and that it lives outside of the human world where “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes”. (Keats 1097). “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” (Keats 1099) shows that Keats is left in a state of wonder at the end of the poem.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Paul D. Sheats writes that the “speakers desire to escape the self and its human condition drives the first half of his ode.” He would argue that the troubles experienced by humans are necessary to human growth(Sheats 91).It seems that the troubles are the cause of human decay. The speaker indeed does desire to escape the world he is living in because that world is decaying and dying. In a sense there really is no human growth and it is finally realized by the speaker when he hears this song of the nightingale.

Keats uses something a bit different to idealize beauty in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Instead of using something natural, he uses human art to depict beauty. This art is another way of showing the viewer the grief of the world. He uses the picture on the side of the urn to serve the same purpose as the Nightingale had served in “Ode to a Nightingale”. Keats uses the first stanza to give the literal idea of what the art on the side of the Grecian Urn can represent, “What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?” (Keats 1099). These things he asks about are the literal things, things seen, that the Greeks had put on the side of the urn. He also suggests that the urn can make a better impression on the viewer than a rhyme can for the reader, “A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:” (Keats 1099). Keats uses the next stanza to impose the idea that the meanings derived by the viewer and aren’t physically apparent, leave a more lasting impression on the viewer. This is because these impressions aren’t inhibited but our “sensual ear”. He also uses this idea of a “Bold Lover, never, never canst though kiss,” (Keats 1099). If the lover never kisses, she can never experience the grief that can come with it in this world. This lover is eternally trapped in the moment before it which represents the eternal beauty that Keats sees. She is not destined to feel the bad with the good as mortal humans are.

John Holloway is another critic who presented an idea on the connection between beauty and what it represents to the world. He stated in Critics on Keats that “the Grecian urn presents the world of beauty and human passions” (Holloway 65). This statement is somewhat contradictory, however. Human passions