Aesthetic Debate in Keats's Odes.pdf

8/14/2019 Aesthetic Debate in Keats's Odes.pdf

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Aesthetic Debate in Keats's OdesAuthor(s): Gillian BeerReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Oct., 1969), pp. 742-748Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3723915.

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AESTHETIC DEBATE IN KEATS'S ODESThe Odes of Keats are inexhaustible. By their presence they suggest a satisfyingthough intermittent resolution of the dilemma they express. 'The poet seeks truth,not abstract truth, but a kind of reality which satisfies the whole being', as Yeatswrote to his father in 19I4. Nightingale, urn, poem-- each variously survives tobe enjoyed by the transient human psyche. The dilemma implicit in each of theOdes has been formulated into a variety of contraries: between permanence andevanescence; between the responsivepsyche and the object apprehended; betweenthe poet's sense material and the intellectual instrument of words; between truthand beauty; life and art. WalterJackson Bate has written that in each of the odes'we are dealing with a miniature drama'.1 The method of dialectic, of dialogue,which this suggests, is an illuminating metaphor for the relationship between thepoet's identity and his chosen symbol - and, taking it a stage further, for thetension between the art of poetry and the other artsof music, sculpture,representa-tion, as they are explored in the Odes, and particularly in the odes 'To Psyche','To a Nightingale', and 'On a Grecian Urn'. Bate's remarkrecognizes the varietyof the poems (various symbols suggest diverse questions) and it reminds us of theineluctable separateness of poet and symbol as well as of the poem's impulsetowards fusion.For a writer like Pater, the validity of the method of dialectic lay, as he wrote in'Plato and Platonism', 'in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's self'. ForKeats, who wrote that the poet has 'no self', dialogue is the process bywhich identity is evolved and accepted, as we see again in The Fall of Hyperion.But in the process, everything, including the psyche, becomes objectified and thefinal object is the poem: dialogue gives place to the single voice; the nightingale orurn is transmuted into the 'unageing intellect' of poetry. The process, however,moves in two directions.The poem also strivesto become hat it describes:the extentto which the poem has 'become' nightingale or urn castslight upon the relationshipbetween poetry and the other arts.The struggle in the Odes is frequently and properly seen in terms of the tragicdiscontinuity between the possibilitiesof man's life and of his art. But life and artboth ultimately depend on the same material: that of the senses. No single art, itseems, can encompass the whole range of this sense material. Each of them mustorder it differently in an attempt to render as richly as may be 'a kind of realitywhich satisfies the whole being'. The Odes are intimately concerned with theinterplay between art and art, between poetry and music, poetry and plastic formor representation. They are sprung on Keats's complex perception that each arthas not only its own mode f expressionbut its own untranslatable areaof expressive-ness. Keats, in his pursuit of 'fellowship with essence' discovers not the One butthe many, concluding, like Wallace Stevens in 'The Idea of Order at Key West',with 'ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds'.The parallels between the differentOdes, and particularlybetween the 'Ode to aNightingale' and the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', are clearly essential to the nature of

1 In 'Keats's Style', The Major EnglishRomanticPoets: A Symposiumn Reappraisal, dited by C. D.Thorpe, C. Baker, and B. Weaver (Carbondale, I957), pp. 217-30.


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GILLIAN BEER 743Keats's experience. Those two poems, unlike the Odes 'To Psyche', 'On Melan-choly', and 'To Autumn', share an underlying emotional pattern which recursinsistently throughout his work from SleepandPoetry o Lamia: the emergence froma state of passivity,which leads on to ecstasy, until 'The visions all are fled' and 'Asense of real things comes doubly strong' (SleepandPoetry,11.I55, I57; p. 55).1John Holloway has analysed this 'singleness of experience', the sense in which (inhis words) the sequence of Odes offers 'a complex and detailed poetic revelationof what Keats knew himself as the creative mood'.2 Such a recognition is sym-pathetically pertinent to the total experience of the poems and, I hope, not con-tradicted by the reading I here suggest. But this organic likeness is not my presentconcern: the poems were written out of one man's experience but they exploredifferent reaches of that experience. The unique quality of each is significantlygenerated and controlled by the various artistic natures of the symbols Keatsaddresses.In the 'Ode to Psyche' Keats explores the relationship between the poeticimagination and myth; in the Nightingale Ode he expresses the relationshipbetween poetry and music and in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' that between poetryand visual art - both plastic form and representation.The Odes are triumphantlycentred in the human psyche, with its power to receive and express,but the tensionand interplay between different arts opens up a larger and more complex area ofexperience than is attainable in any single mode. Stress and ecstasy result.The 'Ode to Psyche' celebrates the nature of poetry and poetic creativity; the'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' press beyond the bounds ofpoetic language to become a kind of concrete poetry whose form enacts what itdescribes: the song of the nightingale, the shape of the urn.In Keats's aesthetic thought no sharp difference in quality is made between theworld of the artsand the external world of natural life. In the early 'Ode to Apollo'he celebrates the poets who now sing in Apollo's 'western halls of gold'; the laststanza praises the songs of Apollo himself:

But when Thouoinestwiththe Nine,Andall the powersof songcombine,We listenhere on earth:The dyingtones that fill theair,And charm he ear of evening air,Fromthee,greatGod of Bards,receive heirheavenlybirth.

Apollo is immanent in all the evening sounds of earth. Music's art may be as fullyexpressedby the natural song of the nightingale as by lyre or harp. In the last ode,'To Autumn', the natural world provides the shape of the poem; in its presencethe writer can compose himself without the need to seek any pattern other thanthat of the turning seasons- absolved from any irritable seekingafter certaintiesor after symbols which can assume the form of certainties.In the 'Ode to Psyche' poetic object and poetic method easily resolve. Theinternal world is given form, but a form evolved by the poet in his own chosenterms. The forest which at the beginning is described as in narrative ('I wander'd

1 The edition used is that by H. W. Garrod, second edition (Oxford, I958).2 'The Odes of Keats', in TheChartedMirror(I960), pp. 40-52.


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744 AestheticDebate n Keats'sOdesin a forest thoughtlessly') has by the end of the poem become adjectival ('someuntrodden region of my mind'):

Yes,I willbe thy priest,and build a faneIn someuntrodden egionof my mindWherebranched houghts,newgrownwithpleasantpain,Insteadof pinesshall murmurn thewind:Far,fararound hallthosedark-cluster'dreesFledgethewild-ridgedmountains teep by steep;Andthereby zephyrs, treams,andbirds,andbees,The moss-lainDryads hallbe lull'd to sleep;Andin the midstof this widequietnessA rosysanctuarywill I dressWith the wreath'd rellisof a workingbrain,With budsandbells,andstarswithouta name,With all the gardenerFancye'ercouldfeign,Whobreedinglowers,will neverbreedthe same:And thereshallbe for thee all softdelightThatshadowy houghtcanwin,A bright orch,anda casementope at night,To let the warm Love inThis final stanza is the realized celebration of Psyche because it is also the actionofthe psyche: 'the dark-cluster'd trees' are 'branched thoughts' - the fertility isthat of the imagination. The movement of the poem is inwards, into the warmfastnessesof the mind where the gardenerFancy 'feigns'without satiety. In the 'Odeto Psyche' the poet composes a perfect world of introspectionwhich can endlesslyand satisfyingly generate its ideal, because the creative principle, the psyche, iswithin and has no existence outside the poet. The poet through words creates theevidence of the senses: he makes a picture; he suggests the warmth of love, thelimpid pastoral world. The symbolism is not so much derived from the mythitself (which is used pictorially) but from the relationship between the poet and themyth. The goddess has been too late for 'antique vows', for any of the formalizedritual which recognizes and representsa whole society. The poet endows her withmeaning. Psyche is myth without ritual: the act of imaginative creation. The 'Odeto Psyche' is in one sense 'pure' poetry in that it uses only the material of theimagination which is primarily rendered into words. To put it at its simplest, thepoem is based on a story- on language.In the 'Ode to a Nightingale' and the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', however, theobjects worshipped are outside the poet's self, each inhabiting a world imperviousto his psyche: the nightingale a world of organic non-human life, the urn a worldof inanimate artistic form. In each of the three odes the generative symbol has adouble aspect: in the 'Ode to Psyche' it is both imagined goddess and the act ofimagining; in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' both bird and song, and in the 'Ode on aGrecian Urn' both plastic form and figured decoration. The 'Ode to Psyche' isself-delighting- there the fancy 'feigns'; but at the end of the NightingaleOde the fancy 'cheats'- the activity of the imagination is debased from creativeartifice to deceit. Keats exploresthe limits of the poetic imagination by setting it inrelation to the other worlds of music and visual art. The poet seeks to escapefrom his 'sole self' and from the ultimately inward nature of poetry into a world ofexpressedsense objects. The nightingale's song has some equivalence to the actionof the imagination: it seems to occur within the darknessof the mind. The urn isutterly external, approachable only through sight.


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GILLIAN BEER 745Keats, however, is writing poetry: his material is words, words which areessentially symbolic, metaphoric, interpretative, in contrast to the pure being ofthe nightingale's song or the urn's presence. Whereas in 'The Idea of Order at

Key West'- a poem with many affinities to the Nightingale Ode -Stevens'ssinger is a human woman and 'what she sang was uttered word by word', thenightingale's song contains no narrative, nothing to link it to the human exceptthe responsivenessof humanity to its song. It is the poet who imagines that the birdis 'singing of summer'. At the height of his transport- which is also the momentof richest calm - Keats expressesthe song of the nightingale in the language ofpoetry and suggests again the coming summer:And mid-May's eldest child,The coming musk-rose,full of dewy wine,The murmuroushaunt of flies on summer eves.The nightingale itself is utterly apart from humanity but the essence of its songmay be approached through poetry. The poem is concerned with the attempt toescape from the conditions of human life and to reach an experience unlimited bymortality. The bird is immortal because its song is repeated down the generations,endlessly spontaneous. Human beings are diverse, each living in his solitary andunique, his 'sole' self. The individual self of man is seen finally as rooted in hissenses; the essence of his value is bounded by his mortality.Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -To thy high requiem become a sod.Keats creates out of his experience a poem which will have power to occur inother consciousnesses: not with the permanence of artifact, but with the recurrenceof song. In its evanescence the nightingale's song approximates more closely to thequality of human experience than does the urn. The urn permanently occupiesspace, free of time between making and breaking. Music exists only while it istaking place, but it may recur, intermittently and in perpetuity. The nightingale'ssong and the poem are co-existent in time: as one ebbs, so the other ceases. Thenightingale's song is not simply the starting point of the poem--it is heardthroughout and in a real sense the poem becomes he song as it never can become theurn. Poetry elides into song (at least in poetic metaphor) and in its use of rhythms,its representation of experience by sounds, its internal action, it has some quiteprecise kinships with music. In this poem exploration of this kinship works in twodirections: by argument the poem discovers, all unwillingly, the impossibility ofescape from the conditions of human experience, but by expression, it reachesanother kind of truth. In stanza five the poet momentarily inhabits both theimagined world of the nightingale and the actual world of the garden, and,because vision's defining presence is removed, the reader's experience also cancoalesce with nightingale and poet:I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,But, in embalmed darkness,guess each sweetWherewith the seasonablemonth endowsThe 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.


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AestheticDebate n Keats'sOdesKeats creates the equivalent in poetic terms of the nightingale's song: theexperience is momentary. By eschewing vision and permanence the poem acquires

the nature of the song it celebrates. The parallel span of poem and song in timemeans that the poem is the song for listener or reader. The often repeated anecdoteof the poem's spontaneous composition in the garden as Keats listened to the birdand of his carelessnesswith the fragmentswhen he returned to the house is a truemetaphor for the interfusion felt by readers between the song and the poem.As Keats wrote the previous spring, in the fragmentary 'Ode to May':Roundedby thee,my songshoulddie awayContentas theirs,Richin thesimpleworshipof a day.Some of the distinctions between music, art, and poetry as Keats seems to have

apprehended them were illuminatingly formulated a generation later in thesecond volume of Either-Or.Kierkegaard there speaks of the relationship of thesethree arts to time:Musichastimeas its element,but it gainsno permanentplacein it; its significanceies inits constantvanishing n time; it emitssounds n time,but at onceit vanishesand has nopermanence.Finally,poetry s the highestof all arts and is therefore he art which knowsbesthow to set off to advantage he significance f time. It does not need to confine tselfto the moment the way paintingdoes,neitherdoes it vanish as musicdoes, but never-theless t is compelled,as we have seen,to concentraten the moment.. .

Writing in the AnnalsofFineArt in July 1819 just after the composition of all theOdes except the 'Ode to Autumn', Keats's friend, the painter Haydon, argued forthe essential differences between poetry and painting.2 This number of the maga-zine also published the 'Ode to theNightingale' (as it was first called). The 'Odeon a Grecian Urn' was published in the samejournal, number 15, six months later.Simply to look at these two great Odes in their original context in the Annalssharpensone's senseof the element of aesthetic debate in the poems. The magazinewas almost exclusively concerned with the practicalities and aesthetics of thevisualarts - as were the poems published in it. The 'Ode to a Nightingale' seemsto have strayedin from anotherworld. Ian Jack has pointed out in his recent book3that the debate between the visual arts and poetry was being vigorouslycarried onat the time that Keats was writing. Haydon's essay was 'On the Cartoon of theSacrifice at Lystra'- by 'Rafael', which had been on exhibition in Londonduring the preceding months, and his analysis includes a detailed discussion of allthose questions of ritual and observance which Keats deliberately leavesgeneral and unanswered in the fourth stanza: 'Who are these coming to thesacrifice?'Haydon proceeds to a comparison between what he calls 'the languages'of painting and poetry.Of course, helanguages redifferentn theiressence; helanguageofpoets,with referenceto visibleobjects, s an artificialassemblage f wordsagreedon by the respectivenationto whicheachpoet belongs, o mean the thingsto whichtheyare applied,although heyhaveveryfew naturalclaimsto suchassociations...; whileourlanguage s the imitationof the thingsthemselves, nd the mostimperfect epresentationf the thingintended s atonce comprehended... (p. 238)1 In 'The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage', translated by W. Lowrie (I944), pp. I 14-15.2 Volumeiv, numberI3, 'On the Cartoonof the Sacrificeat Lystra'.3 Keats and the Mirrorof Art (Oxford, I967).

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GILLIAN BEER 747In the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' Keats seeks to represent in words not only thelanguage of representation- the figures on the urn - but 'the thing itself':the urn, which is utterly unconcerned. A little later in the essay, Haydon returnsto the debate:Poets can make their charactersspeak their thoughts; painters can only make them look.Abstracted reflections, or subtle conclusions in morality, can never be looked, thoughthey may be inferred from the subjects painted... (p. 24I)Haydon brings out the disjunction between the language of the visual arts and thelanguage of poetry. How can the poet express the nature of the urn in words ?-and even more, through what means can he express the urn's significance?All is dark in the Nightingale Ode; light - that light of the moon which Keatsso often associated with the power of Cynthia and poetry - is suggested bynegation:

But here there is no light,Save what from heaven is with the breezes blownThrough verdurousglooms and winding mossy ways.

In the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', in contrast, the whole is presented through sight(the poet does not touch the urn). Music now is an unheard melody. Experienceenters through images. If, as Keats discovered, poetry is akin to music in its aspectof rhythm, sound, song, it is akin also to sight in that it works through images.The blind man, in Coleridge's poem, thinks that 'the eye may have thoughts ofits own | And to see is only a language'. But the languages of poetry and of art, asHaydon suggests, are barely translatable. The urn is not only image but plasticity,an object which cannot be drawn into the poet's self, or - more important forKeats - which rebuffs the poet's attempt to enter its nature. Vision in the 'Odeto a Nightingale' is an aspect of the imagination ('I cannot see what flowers areat my feet'); vision in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' becomes sight, not under-standing ('what leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape'). In the NightingaleOde the bird's song and the poem at times seem to emit a single tone; here the urntells 'a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme' because it uses representation,not language.There can be no equivalence between poetry and the urn. Whereas in theNightingale Ode the song and the poem co-exist in time, the one and then theother ebbing, here the poet as man approaches and leaves the urn which continuestranquilly to exist - the 'still unravish'd bride of quietness'. There is a contrastbetween the poem's duration in time and that of the urn which is in itself a repre-sentation of the frailty of the human questioner. The urn is stable, physical, per-fected, impenetrable; poetry is intellectual, working through metaphor to thesenses, linked to the human poet, subject to the stress and flux of language and itsshifting values. (Keats's own use of the word 'Happy', which sounds slack to somemodern ears, shows how a crucial word can lose its energy.) The poem cannotmerge with the urn: but the urn has two aspects. Its form is outside time, beyondlanguage, but the decorative figures upon it are captured in a moment of time.Time is suspended and insistent. Keats concentrates upon the decoration: upon therepresentation of a remote human life in a pastoral classical world.

Suspended in the moment before action, there is neither fulfilment nor blood.Neither sacrifice nor consummation takes place because pictorial art removes


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748 AestheticDebate n Keats's Odesaction; the narrative element of poetry, the sequence of music, is absent - orcannot be interpreted by the poet. Present participles replace verbs. The poem iscomposed of apostrophe, exclamation, questioning: if a dialogue, a balked dia-logue. The method is description,not, as in the Nightingale Ode, enactment. Thepoem plays about the object, the silent form of the urn, stable at the centre, itsoutline defined by the volley of questions unanswered, exclamations falling intosilence. The questions that the poem addresses to the urn become increasinglyspeculative, humane, outside the terms answerable by form or representation,though not utterly beyond the terms of poetic art. The poet, if he cares to, caninvent answersto such questions - and Keats begins to construct a human worldfrom the cold pastoral:What little townby riverorseashore,Or mountain-builtwithpeacefulcitadel,Is emptiedof thisfolk,thispiousmorn?And,littletown,thy streets orevermoreWillsilentbe; andnot a soul to tellWhythouartdesolate,can e'erreturn.The poet draws away from the urn back into the world of human experience withits past and future: the urn is an 'Attic shape Fair Attitude 'Thou,silentform,dost teaseus out of thoughtAs dotheternity: ColdPastoralYet Keats, having recognized that the urn teases us out of thought, attempts toformulate its message- to force an answer from it. To do this he is obliged totranslate the urn into words. Ian Jack (p. 223) comments on the daring of thisdecision: even more daring is the form Keats gives the message: 'Beauty is truth,truth beauty'. The urn speaks. The poem makes it clear that it is the urn itself, notthe figuresrepresentedon it, which speaksthus. The speech repeats the form of theurn. Readerspersistentlyhave felt its messageto be as teasing as its silence. Eternityis representedin the form of the oxymoron- a paradox which may be synthesis.The statement loses its nature if it is analysed out. It is sustained by the stress ofcontraries; it revolves; it can, so to speak, be walked round. It is a riddle: it is theurn. It has baffled analysis because, like the urn, it is both meaningful and notsusceptible to resolution. Keats's poetic imagination finally succeeds in expressingthe form of the urn: and this is as far as meaning can go in transferringthe termsof one art into another.

'Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced', wrote Keats. These poemsstretch and test the nature of poetry in an attempt to experience the reality ofmusic, of the visual arts, to undergo the different realities they offer. The poemslive in the stress between the arts; the drama is in the richly various relationshipsthese bear to the human psyche. GILLIANBEERCAMBRIDGE

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Aesthetic Debate in Keats's Odes.pdf