Poetry Study Guides : Keats's Odes

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
frustration caused 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 will eventually 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.