Poetry_Study_Guides - Keats’s Odes.doc

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Context

In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring

poems in the English language. Among his greatest achievements is hissequence of six lyric odes, written between March and September 1819—

astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keats’s poetic

achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which it ended:

He died barely a year after finishing the ode “To Autumn,” in February 1821.

Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he

was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to

tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he was

fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually he went

to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty, he abandoned his

medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book

of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential

magazine, and his second book attracted comparatively little notice when it

appeared the next year. Keats’s brother Tom died of tuberculosis in

December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in Hampstead.

In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During

this time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that

enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he

died. His health and his finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in

the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer climate might restore his health. He

never returned home. His death brought to an untimely end one of the most

extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century—indeed, one of the

most extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved

widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his

tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”), but he was

sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his

death, he remarked that he believed he would be among “the English poets”when he had died.

Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century

Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and

imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas

and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic

concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and

creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the

transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which

the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their



expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations—

though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats’s.

Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story—there is no unifying “plot”and no recurring characters—and there is little evidence that Keats intended

them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary

number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The

odes explore and develop the same themes, partake of many of the same

approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way, exhibit an

unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do

not stand on their own—they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of

the sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed wholly or partially

from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to read. There has

been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat the voices that speak the

poems—are they meant to be read as though a single person speaks them

all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode?

There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question

itself is wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is unmistakably

Keats’s own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it is

unlikely that all the events really happened to Keats), but given their sincerityand their shared frame of thematic reference, there is no reason to think that

they do not come from the same part of Keats’s mind—that is to say, that they

are not all told by the same part of Keats’s reflected self. In that sense, there

is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same

voice. The psychological progress from “Ode on Indolence” to “To Autumn” is

intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to

imagine that the odes are spoken by a sequence of fictional characters. When

you think of “the speaker” of these poems, think of Keats as he would have

imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speaker’s trajectory

from the numb drowsiness of “Indolence” to the quiet wisdom of “Autumn,” try

to hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of Keats’s

extraordinary language.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

The Inevitability of Death



Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death

and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred

every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a

lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of

great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing

the Elgin Marbles” (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long

enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great as Shakespeare or

John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic

achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to

understand—and surpass—the work of his predecessors. Hovering near this

dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and

terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the

mournful1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”

The Contemplation of Beauty

In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of

delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can

choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects

and landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian

Urn”), books (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting

Down to Read King Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a

Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”

[1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep

demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first

book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” envies

the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel

because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed

their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they

shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful.The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having

experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker

changes, grows old, and eventually dies.

Motifs

Departures and Reveries

In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a

transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the

speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a



new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful

object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to

depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility

or rationality, is part of Keats’s concept of negative capability. In “Bright star,would I were stedfast as thou art,” the speaker imagines a state of “sweet

unrest” (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his lover’s breast

forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have

experiences and insights that they can then impart into poetry once they’ve

returned to conscious life. Keats explored the relationship between visions

and poetry in “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”

The Five Senses and Art

Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connectedwith various types of art. The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes

the pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another,

musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the

figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the

sides of the urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can

touch them by holding the vessel. Although the poem associates sight and

sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear the music.

Similarly, the speaker in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” compares

hearing Homer’s words to “pure serene” (7) air so that reading, or seeing,

becomes associating with breathing, or smelling. In “Ode to a Nightingale,”

the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that he might

adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five

senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the

production of worthwhile art.

The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker

In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the work—

that is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader

recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention

or explanation of the poet. Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an

object that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of

that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and

indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas

until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in

quotation marks. Since the poem’s publication in1820

, critics have theorized



about who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one

or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the poet is so

complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and troubling.

Symbols

Music and Musicians

Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry

and poets. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes

musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by

using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of

“To Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to

sing. Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as

spring, the season of flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses

the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art.

Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of

using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music

represents the ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings

who will eventually die, we can delay death through the timelessness of

music, poetry, and other types of art.

Nature

Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of

poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care.

Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and

Shelley, among others, to create extended meditations and thoughtful odes

about aspects of the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,”

hearing the bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of

art and the mortality of humans. The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy”

compares a bout of depression to a “weeping cloud” (12), then goes on to list

specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In “Ode to Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky

to find ways to worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star

becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and the moon rests amid a

background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from

which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes, symbols,

and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe.

The Ancient World



Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer

poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a

mythical world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from

ancient mythology to populate poems, such as “Ode to Psyche” and “ToHomer” (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the

Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting,

temporary nature of life. In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of

permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several

centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from

Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death

of Keats or another writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keats’s

great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats quietly

prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

Ode on Indolence

Summary

In the first stanza, Keats’s speaker describes a vision he had one morning of

three strange figures wearing white robes and “placid sandals.” The figures

passed by in profile, and the speaker describes their passing by comparing

them to figures carved into the side of a marble urn, or vase. When the last

figure passed by, the first figure reappeared, just as would happen if one

turned a vase carved with figures before one’s eyes.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the figures directly, asking them

how it was that he did not recognize them and how they managed to sneak up

on him. He suspects them of trying to “steal away, and leave without a task”

his “idle days,” and goes on to describe how he passed the morning before

their arrival: by lazily enjoying the summer day in a sort of sublime numbness.

He asks the figures why they did not disappear and leave him to this indolent

nothingness.

In the third stanza, the figures pass by for a third time. The speaker feels a

powerful urge to rise up and follow them, because he now recognizes them:

the first is a “fair maid,” Love; the second is pale-cheeked Ambition; and the

third, whom the speaker seems to love despite himself, is the unmeek

maiden, the demon Poesy, or poetry. When the figures disappear in the fourth

stanza, the speaker again aches to follow them, but he says that the urge is



folly: Love is fleeting, Ambition is mortal, and Poesy has nothing to offer that

compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by “busy common-sense.”

In the fifth stanza, the speaker laments again the figures’ third passing,describing his morning before their arrival, when his soul seemed a green

lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows, and sunbeams. There were clouds in

the sky but no rain fell, and the open window let in the warmth of the day and

the music of birdsong. The speaker tells the figures they were right to leave,

for they had failed to rouse him. In the sixth stanza, he bids them adieu and

asserts again that Love, Ambition, and Poesy are not enough to make him

raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He bids them farewell and tells

them he has an ample supply of visions; then he orders them to vanish and

never return.

Form

Like all the other odes but “To Autumn” and “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on

Indolence” is written in ten-line stanzas, in a relatively precise iambic

pentameter. Like the others (again, with the exception of “Ode to Psyche”), its

stanzas are composed of two parts: an opening four-line sequence of

alternating rhymed lines (ABAB), and a six-line sequence with a variable

rhyme scheme (in stanzas one through four, CDECDE; in stanza five,

CDEDCE; in stanza six, CDECED).

Themes

Chronologically, the “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode. It was

composed in the spring of 1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few

months before “To Autumn.” However, when the odes are grouped together

as a sequence, “Indolence” is often placed first in the group—an arrangement

that makes sense, considering that “Indolence” raises the glimmerings of

themes explored more fully in the other five poems, and seems to portray the

speaker’s first struggle with the problems and ideas of the other odes. The

story of “Indolence” is extraordinarily simple—a young man spends a drowsy

summer morning lazing about, until he is startled by a vision of Love,

Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow

the figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning

outweigh the temptations of love, ambition, and poetry.



So the principal theme of “Ode on Indolence” holds that the pleasant

numbness of the speaker’s indolence is a preferable state to the more

excitable states of love, ambition, and poetry. One of the great themes of

Keats’s odes is that of the anguish of mortality—the pain and frustrationcaused by the changes and endings inevitable in human life, which are

contrasted throughout the poems with the permanence of art. In this ode, the

speaker’s indolence seems in many ways an attempt to blur forgetfully the

lines of the world, so that the “short fever-fit” of life no longer seems so

agonizing. The speaker rejects love and ambition simply because they require

him to experience his own life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of

ending (of love, the speaker wonders what and where it is; of ambition, he

notes the pale cheek and “fatigued eye,” and observes that it “springs” directly

from human mortality). He longs never to know “how change the moons” and

to be “sheltered from annoy.” This is why Poesy offers the most seductive,

and also most hateful, challenge to indolence. Poetry is not mortal and

changeable (Poesy, in fact, is a “demon”), but it is anathema to indolence and

would require the speaker to feel his life too acutely—thus it has “not a joy” for

him as sweet as the drowsy nothingness of indolence.

Though the poem ends on a note of rejection, the persistence of the figures

and the speaker’s impassioned response to them indicate that he willeventually have to raise his head from the grass and confront Love, Ambition,

and Poesy more directly—a confrontation embodied in the other five odes,

where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality,

imagination, and art. Many of the ideas and images in “Ode on Indolence”

anticipate more developed ideas and images in the later odes. Each ode finds

Keats confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in

“Indolence,” he confronts three. The lushly described summer landscape, with

its “stirring shades / and baffled beams,” anticipates the imaginary landscape

the speaker creates in “Ode to Psyche”; the experience of numbness

anticipates the aesthetic numbness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the

anguished numbness of “Ode on Melancholy”; the birdsong of the “throstle’s

lay” anticipates the nightingale and the swallows of “To Autumn.” The Grecian

dress of the figures and their urn-like procession anticipate the “Ode on a

Grecian Urn” and also cast back to an earlier poem, “On Seeing the Elgin

Marbles,” in which the speaker’s confrontation with some ancient Greek

sculptures makes him feel overwhelmed by his own mortality. (The “Phidian



lore” the speaker refers to at the end of the first stanza is a direct reference to

the earlier poem: Phidias was the sculptor who made the Elgin marbles.)

In this way, the “Ode on Indolence” makes a sort of preface to the other odes.It does not enter into a dramatic exploration of love, ambition, or art, but rather

raises the possibility of such a confrontation in a way that casts light on the

speaker’s behavior in the other odes. Its lush, sensuous language, and its

speaker’s oscillation between temptation and rejection in the face of the

figures’ persistent processional, indicate a fuller, deeper, and more acutely felt

poetic exploration to come. But for now, the speaker is content to let the

figures fade and to give himself wholly to the numb dreaminess of his

indolence.

Ode to Psyche

Summary

Keats’s speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess Psyche,

urging her to hear his words, and asking that she forgive him for singing to her

her own secrets. He says that while wandering through the forest that very

day, he stumbled upon “two fair creatures” lying side by side in the grass,

beneath a “whisp’ring roof” of leaves, surrounded by flowers. They embraced

one another with both their arms and wings, and though their lips did not

touch, they were close to one another and ready “past kisses to outnumber.”

The speaker says he knew the winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He

answers his own question: She was Psyche.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses Psyche again, describing her as

the youngest and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods and goddesses. He

believes this, he says, despite the fact that, unlike other divinities, Psyche has

none of the trappings of worship: She has no temples, no altars, no choir to

sing for her, and so on. In the third stanza, the speaker attributes this lack to

Psyche’s youth; she has come into the world too late for “antique vows” and

the “fond believing lyre.” But the speaker says that even in the fallen days of

his own time, he would like to pay homage to Psyche and become her choir,

her music, and her oracle. In the fourth stanza, he continues with these

declarations, saying he will become Psyche’s priest and build her a temple in

an “untrodden region” of his own mind, a region surrounded by thought that

resemble the beauty of nature and tended by “the gardener Fancy,” or



imagination. He promises Psyche “all soft delight” and says that the window of

her new abode will be left open at night, so that her winged boy—”the warm

Love”—can come in.

Form

The four stanzas of “Ode to Psyche” are written in the loosest form of any of

Keats’s odes. The stanzas vary in number of lines, rhyme scheme, and

metrical scheme, and convey the effect of spontaneous rhapsody rather than

considered form. Lines are iambic, but vary from dimeter to pentameter; the

most common rhymes are in alternating lines (ABAB), but there are abundant

exceptions, and there are even unrhymed lines. (“Hours,” at the end of line

ten in the third stanza, is an example.) The number of lines in a stanza issimply organic and irregular; stanza one has 23 lines, stanza two has 12,

stanza three has 14, and stanza four has 18.

In the first stanza, every line is written in iambic pentameter except

lines 12, 21, and 23 (the first two are trimeter, the last dimeter). The full

rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFGEEGH IIJJ KIKI. It can essentially be

broken into five parts: two pairs of four-line, alternating rhymes (ABAB

CDCD), a looser seven-line sequence that includes rhythmic irregularity and

two unrhymed words (EFGEEGH, with the trimeter in line 12 and the

unrhymed words “roof” at the end of line 10 and “grass” at the end of

line 15), two couplets (IIJJ), and a final four-line section with alternating

rhymes (KIKI), differing from the first in that the “I” rhyme-lines (which match

the rhymes of the first couplet above) are shorter than the “K” lines, with the

trimeter of line 21 and the dimeter of line 23. (This sounds far more

complicated than it is; penciling in the letters at the end of each line will make

the scheme much easier to follow.)

The second stanza is shorter and much simpler. It follows a strictly alternating

rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF, and the only irregularities are metrical,with two trimeters, lines 6and 8. The result is that the CDCD section of this

stanza differs slightly from the others; the D-lines are shorter. The third stanza

has trimeters in lines 10, 12, and 14; other than that, the stanza is written in

iambic pentameter. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB CDDCEF GHGH. This is

relatively self-explanatory, except that “moan” and “hours,” the E- and F-lines

(lines 9and 10) do not have precise matches; “moan” rhymes roughly with

“fans” and “Olympians,” and “hours” rhymes roughly with “vows” and

“boughs,” but neither of these matches is as precise as the other rhymes in



the stanza. If those rhymes “count,” the rhyme scheme of the stanza should

be written as ABAB CDDCDA EFEF.

The final stanza has trimeters in lines 16 and 18, and follows a relatively

simple and natural rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EE FGFG HIHI. In other words, each section is four lines long and alternates rhyming lines, except for

the EE couplet in lines 9and 10.

It is very important to note that the large number of irregularities and long

algebraic rhyme schemes in this ode should not be taken as signs of great

formal complexity. “Ode to Psyche” is much more freely and loosely written

than any of Keats’s other odes, and the fact that it is difficult to schematize

testifies to this spontaneity and freedom rather than to an elaborate

preconceived formal scheme. The other odes, though their stanzas and

rhyme schemes are easier to describe in terms of form, are much more strictly

ordered and make much deeper use of strict form than does the “Ode to

Psyche.” In fact, there is little to gain from long formal analysis of the Psyche

ode; its form is better understood in the loose and general terms in which it

seems to have been planned.

Themes

With its loose, rhapsodic formal structure and its extremely lush sensual

imagery, the “Ode to Psyche” finds the speaker turning from the delights of

numbness (in “Ode on Indolence”) to the delights of the creative imagination

—even if that imagination is not yet projected outward into art.

The basis for the story of “Ode to Psyche” is a famous myth. Psyche was the

youngest and most beautiful daughter of a king. She was so beautiful that

Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was jealous of her; she

dispatched her son, Eros, the god of love (the Cupid of Roman mythology and

the “winged boy” of Keats’s poem) to punish Psyche for being so beautiful.But Eros was so startled by Psyche’s beauty that he pricked himself with his

own arrow and fell in love with her. Eros summoned Psyche to his palace, but

he remained invisible to her, coming to her only and night and ordering her

never to try to see his face. One night, Psyche lit a lamp in order to catch a

glimpse of her lover; but Eros was so angry with her for breaking his trust that

he left her. Psyche was forced to perform a number of difficult tasks to placate

Venus and win back Eros as her husband. The word “psyche” is Greek for

“soul,” and it is not difficult to imagine why Keats would have found the story

attractive—the story of the woman so beautiful that Love fell in love with her.



Additionally, as Keats observed, the myth of Psyche was first recorded by

Apuleius in the second century A.D., and is thus much more recent than most

myths (this is why Keats refers to Psyche as the “latest born” of “Olympus’s

faded hierarchy”). It is so recent, in fact, that Psyche was never worshippedas a real goddess. That slight is what compels Keats’s speaker to dedicate

himself to becoming her temple, her priest, and her prophet, all in one. So he

has found a way to move beyond the numbness of indolence and has

discovered a goddess to worship. To worship Psyche, Keats summons all the

resources of his imagination. He will give to Psyche a region of his mind,

where his thoughts will transform into the sumptuous natural beauties Keats

imagines will attract Psyche to her bower in his mind. Taken by itself, “Ode to

Psyche” is simply a song to love and the creative imagination; in the full

context of the odes, it represents a crucial step between “Ode on Indolence”

and “Ode to a Nightingale”: the speaker has become preoccupied with

creativity, but his imagination is still directed toward wholly internal ends. He

wants to partake of divine permanence by taking his goddess into himself; he

has not yet become interested in the outward imaginative expression of art.

Ode to a Nightingale

Summary

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb,

as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a

nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his

“drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather

from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the

music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.

In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing

his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and

like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into

the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire

to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has

never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its

consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale,

and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”



In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will

follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but

through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already

with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlightis hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes

blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the

flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white

hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of

flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to

the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of

dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the

nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than

ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the

nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale

would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no

longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that

it was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has

always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he

even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the

word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with

the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away

from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can

no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking

dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he

himself is awake or asleep.

Form

Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line

stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—

though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of

each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is

written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five.

“Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the

same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final

three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all



the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s

most basic scheme throughout the odes.

Themes

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest

exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human

life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy

shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-

thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid

music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises

the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in

“Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in“Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine

happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the

nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His

first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza,

he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his

meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of

being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of

wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards)

and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow

the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the

nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven,

imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even

encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly

succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never

experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditationcauses him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing

his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable (“Adieu! the

fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the

nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him

shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was

willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal

pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of outward



expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world,

and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless

wings” at last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and

renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. Asbefits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though

it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He

can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”; he knows he is

surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This

suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is in many

ways a companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the later poem, the

speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the

limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative expression and

has placed his faith in it, but that expression—the nightingale’s song—is

spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and

addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It

is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow

time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He

wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they

depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a

group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could

be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels?

What wild ecstasy?”

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this

time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of

trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than

mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that,

though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not

grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the

trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their

leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,”

and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal



love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes,

leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, thisone of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where

they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where

they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and

tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it,

frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again

addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of

thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain,

telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it

needs to know.

Form

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on

Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of

each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long,

metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part

rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines

of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second

occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one,

lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas

three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in

other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the two-part rhyme

scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes)

creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines

of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last sixroughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule,

true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not

connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the

fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his

attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn,



passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing,

exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die,

and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this

creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of theurn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They

do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but

neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the

figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn;

each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the

picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the

picture: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” Of course, the

urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it

depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing

to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the

experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them.

He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal

newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passion,

which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity—

when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful

heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these

conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to

them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn

as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their

procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green altar”).

But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people

have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts

head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos

and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know

the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive

attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives



way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the

speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely

on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling.

But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simplybecause there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts the silence

and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art;

on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three

attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside

of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth

eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry generations,” as the speaker

suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It

can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind

of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately

insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its

message to mankind—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the

most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic

phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure who “speaks”the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It

could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing

mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate

his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything

beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life

make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express

sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn

addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important

lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human

beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same.

It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

Ode on Melancholy

Summary

The three stanzas of the “Ode on Melancholy” address the subject of how to

cope with sadness. The first stanza tells what not to do: The sufferer should

not “go to Lethe,” or forget their sadness (Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in



Greek mythology); should not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of

Prosperpine,” is a poison; Prosperpine is the mythological queen of the

underworld); and should not become obsessed with objects of death and

misery (the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl). For, the speaker says, thatwill make the anguish of the soul drowsy, and the sufferer should do

everything he can to remain aware of and alert to the depths of his suffering.

In the second stanza, the speaker tells the sufferer what to do in place of the

things he forbade in the first stanza. When afflicted with “the melancholy fit,”

the sufferer should instead overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty, glutting

it on the morning rose, “on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,” or in the eyes

of his beloved. In the third stanza, the speaker explains these injunctions,

saying that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked: Beauty must die, joy is

fleeting, and the flower of pleasure is forever “turning to poison while the bee-

mouth sips.” The speaker says that the shrine of melancholy is inside the

“temple of Delight,” but that it is only visible if one can overwhelm oneself with

joy until it reveals its center of sadness, by “burst[ing] Joy’s grape against his

palate fine.” The man who can do this shall “taste the sadness” of

melancholy’s might and “be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

Form

“Ode on Melancholy,” the shortest of Keats’s odes, is written in a very regular

form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza is

ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. The first

two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme,

ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending

slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the

eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas. As

in some other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Grecian Urn”), the two-partrhyme scheme of each stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes)

creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well, in which the first

four lines of each stanza define the stanza’s subject, and the latter six develop

it. (This is true especially of the second two stanzas.)

Themes

If the “Ode to Psyche” is different from the other odes primarily because of its

form, the “Ode on Melancholy” is different primarily because of its style. The



only ode not to be written in the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker

admonishing or advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode;

presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In many

ways, “Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the beautiful descriptions of

nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of “Nightingale,” and the

philosophy of “Urn,” all find expression in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy”

is more than simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at

last explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain

in a way that lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of

“Urn” and achieve the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”

For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy” urges action rather

than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the eagerly embraced drowsiness

of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy numbness” of “Nightingale,” the

speaker declares that he must remain alert and open to “wakeful anguish,”

and rather than flee from sadness, he will instead glut it on the pleasures of

beauty. Instead of numbing himself to the knowledge that his mistress will

grow old and die (that “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,” as he said in

“Nightingale”), he uses that knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely.

Because she dwells with “beauty that must die,” he will “feed deep, deep uponher peerless eyes.”

In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing synthesis of

melancholy and joy, in a way that takes in the tragic mortality of life but lets

him remain connected to his own experience. It is precisely the fact that joy

will come to an end that makes the experience of joy such a ravishing one;

the fact that beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more

thrilling. The key, he writes, is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at the

heart of all pleasure—to “burst joy’s grape” and gain admission to the inner

temple of melancholy. Though the “Ode on Melancholy” is not explicitly about

art, it is clear that this synthetic understanding of joy and suffering is what has

been missing from the speaker’s earlier attempts to experience art.

“Ode on Melancholy” originally began with a stanza Keats later crossed out,

which described a questing hero in a grotesque mythological ship sailing into

the underworld in search of the goddess Melancholy. Though Keats removed

this stanza from his poem (the resulting work is subtler and less overwrought),



the story’s questing hero still provides perhaps the best framework in which to

read this poem. The speaker has fully rejected his earlier indolence and set

out to engage actively with the ideas and themes that preoccupy him, but his

action in this poem is still fantastical, imaginative, and strenuous. He can onlyfind what he seeks in mythical regions and imaginary temples in the sky; he

has not yet learned how to find it in his own immediate surroundings. That

understanding and the final presentation of the odes’ deepest themes will

occur in “To Autumn.”

To Autumn

Summary

Keats’s speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its

abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and

causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes

the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary

floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or

watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza,

the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone,

but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the “small gnats” hum

among the "the river sallows," or willow trees, lifted and dropped by the wind,

and “full-grown lambs” bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from

the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the

skies.

Form

Like the “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza

structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as

opposed to ten in “Melancholy”, and each is metered in a relatively precise

iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and rhyme scheme,

each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is

made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of

the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme

scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and the second line rhyming with

the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme

scheme: The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third

stanzas are arranged CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza

serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second part offers room for



musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic

division is only very general.)

Themes

In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of

Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean to the

season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its

swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem

lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes

without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where

“Ode on Melancholy” presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn”

is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation andappreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find

their fullest and most beautiful expression.

“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it

shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case,

the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up

the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in

Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of

winter’s desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered

from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line

of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated

sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving

moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining

summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s

speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings inthe first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the

locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to experience

these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he

has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer

committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”), no longer attempting to

escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in “Nightingale”), no

longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal

beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of



pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in

“Melancholy”).

In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes(the swallows recall the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s grape; the goddess

drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but

it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of

Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly

about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of

harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his sonnet “When I

have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection directly:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactry,

Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the

pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting

“grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is developed further; the sense of

coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the

season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the

swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies

empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the

edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again,

and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in “Melancholy,” abundance

and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the

twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To Autumn” beautiful is that it brings

an engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and

fantasy and into the everyday world. The development the speaker sostrongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has learned that an

acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has

gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.

Study Questions

1. What are some of the recurring motifs that appear throughout the six odes?

Given the chronological problems with the usual ordering of the odes

(“Indolence,” often placed first in the sequence, was one of the last odes to be



written), to what extent do you think the odes should be grouped as a unified

sequence?

2. Taken together, do the odes tell a “story,” or do they simply develop a

theme? Do you think the speaker is the same in each ode?3. How does the “Ode on Indolence” anticipate the themes and images of the

other five poems? Given the speaker’s later confrontations with Love,

Ambition, and Beauty—as well as with such themes as mortality and the

creative imagination—does the conclusion of the Indolence ode seem ironic?

4. In what ways is “Ode to Psyche” different from the other odes? How do

these differences affect the poem’s attempt to describe the creative

imagination? Why might the speaker want to use his imagination for Psyche’s

worship?

5. From Psyche’s bower to the nightingale’s glade to the warm luxury of

Autumn, the odes contain some of the most beautiful sensory language in

English poetry. But many of the odes intentionally limit the senses they

inhabit. With particular reference to “Nightingale” (which suppresses sight)

and “Grecian Urn” (which suppresses every sense but sight), how do the

odes create an abundance of believable sensation even as they limit it?

6. The odes are full of paradoxical and self-contradictory ideas—the

attribution of human experience to the frozen figures on the urn, for instance.

But the “Ode on Melancholy” builds its entire theme on an apparent paradox—that pleasure and pain are intimately connected and that sadness rests at

the core of joy. How does the language of “Melancholy” strengthen that sense

of paradox? What does it mean for trophies to be cloudy, pleasure to be

aching, a lover’s anger to be soothing, and “wakeful anguish” a thing to be

desired?

7. On its surface, the ode “To Autumn” seems to be little more than

description, an illustration of a season. But underneath its descriptive surface,

“To Autumn” is one of the most thematically rich of all the odes. How does

Keats manage to embody complex themes in such an apparently simple

poem?

Bibliography

The best single work on Keats’s odes is Helen Vendler’s study The Odes of

John Keats. Many of the ideas in this summary were first and best expressed

in that book, and anyone wishing to learn more about the odes will want to

read it.

Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 1983.



How to Cite This SparkNote

Full Bibliographic Citation

MLA

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Keats’s Odes.” SparkNotes.com.

SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 6 May 2013.

The Chicago Manual of Style

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Keats’s Odes.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/ (accessed May 6, 2013).

APA

SparkNotes Editors. (2002). SparkNote on Keats’s Odes. Retrieved May 6,

2013, from http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/

In Text Citation

MLA

“Their conversation is awkward, especially when she mentions Wickham, asubject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors).

APA

“Their conversation is awkward, especially when she mentions Wickham, a

subject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors, 2002).

Footnote

The Chicago Manual of Style

Chicago requires the use of footnotes, rather than parenthetical citations, in

conjunction with a list of works cited when dealing with literature.

1 SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Keats’s Odes.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/ (accessed May 6, 2013).



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