The Experiential Beginnings of Keats's Odes

Author(s): Helen Vendler

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer, 1973), pp. 591-606
Published by: Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25599889
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 STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM_
VOLUME 12 SUMMER 197 3 NUMBER 3

The Experiential Beginnings of Keats's Odes

HELEN VENDLER

MANY of the usual commentaries on Keats's great odes seem

to me unsatisfactory in what they presume about poetic
composition: namely, that in writing a poem a poet thinks
first of stanza one, next of stanza two, and so on.1 We know of cour
from manuscripts and other testimony that writers compose in an
number of ways, and that writing a poem down is often a late stage
the process of composition. Stanza one may indeed be the fir
written, but may have been the last conceived; while stanza four, fo
instance, may be the one first conceived, the one from which the
poem springs, the gist of the whole. We can see in the notebooks o
writers like Hawthorne and James glimpses of what might make a
striking tale; and then when we find the completed story, we disco
that the original nugget is now, perhaps, section five, with fou
anticipatory sections prefacing it and three subsequent sections re
solving its problems. For a critic really to begin at the experientia
beginning would mean in such cases beginning with the fifth sectio
recognizing it as the fount and origin from which sprang all the res
I am assuming, in Keats's greater odes, such a "hidden beginning" fo
two reasons. First, Keats suggested that at least one of his odes bega
with its ending; and second, I have found that the course of events i
the odes is clarified by such an assumption, their "shape" made mor
evident.
Let me begin with the one factual instance. We know that in
September of 1819, Keats wrote to Reynolds,
How beautiful the season is now?How fine the air. A temperate sharpness
about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather?Dian skies?I never liked
stubble-fields so much as now?Aye better than the chilly green of the Spring.
Somehow a stubble-plain looks warm?in the same way that some pictures look
warm?This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.

1. The assumption of sequence arises tacidy from the way in which com
mentaries generally begin at the beginning and continue on to the end, using
such connectives as "Next Yeats notices X" or "Keats then reflects," etc., thereby
assuming that the sequence presented in the poem is immutably coextensive with
the psychological sequence generating the poem.

591

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 592 HELEN VENDLER

Keats composed, we might think, a poem about stubble-plains, abou

late autumn, about a sharpness in the air. But when we look at the
poem that resulted from that walk near Winchester, the ode T
Autumn, we find that we must wait for twenty-six lines before th
stubble-plains appear. The long overture to their presence, we a
surprised to see, is full of fruitfulness and warmth. Could we hav
guessed, lacking the evidence of the letter, that the germ of the poem
its experiential beginning, lay in the image of the mutilated stubbl
fields divested of their "fruit"? We like to think that even withou
Keats's words we could have divined the true origin of the poem
perhaps from the central question, "Where are the songs of spring
which can only be voiced by a soul in the stubble-fields.2 And if w
are bold enough to imagine that we could have conjectured th
starting point of the poem even without Keats's words, given
certain sympathy with the scope and course and conduct of th
poem, then we can perhaps put that boldness to the test by asking
ourselves where the experiential beginnings of some of the other od
may lie. I believe that this is worth doing, even though the results
remain conjectural, since it seems to me that To Autumn becomes
very different poem when it is seen to radiate out from the stubb
fields at sunset instead of only reaching them after a leisurely progress
through a season and a day. I shall return later to that ode, but for t
time being I will glance briefly at the other great odes that intere
me in this way, saying first that the Ode to Psyche and the Ode on
Indolence, beginning as they do not with an experience undergone
but with self-induced visions, do not seem illuminated by the ques
tions I ask here.
I will begin with the other ode whose experiential beginning we
may know. The Ode to a Nightingale was written, Charles Brow
tells us,3 after Keats had sat in their Hampstead garden for two o
three hours one morning listening to a nightingale. Nothing in the first
stanza of the ode contradicts this origin, as Keats listens to the bi
"in some melodious plot/Of beechen green and shadows numberles
singing "of summer in full-throated ease." Eventually Keats "joins

2. John Jones, in his original and rewarding book John Keats's Dream of
Truth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), says righdy that "without tho
stubble-fields there would have been no ode To Autumn" (p. 225).
3. Robert Gittings, in The Odes of Keats (Kent, Ohio: Kent State U. Press
1970), p. 6s, believes that Brown's story of the composition of the Ode to
Nightingale really concerns the composition of the Ode to Indolence; he bas
his skepticism on Dilke's. Other manuscript critics, M. R. Ridley among them
have argued persuasively for the essential verity of Brown's account.

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 KEATS'S ODES 593

the bird in its plot, but he requires for the purposes of the poem
midnight scene, lit indirectly by the moon. Since the external
experiential (the morning, the garden, shadows and greenery) wou
not suffice, the psychologically necessary (a moonlit forest at mid
night) supervened. We are left, then, to seek the true experientia
origins of the poem, which must have demanded the expunging of
the morning scene and the substitution of a more appropriate tim
and place for the nightingale.
It is true that Milton's nightingale "sings darkling," like Coleridge
and it is also true that both were in Keats's mind; but surely it is tr
as well that the poem centers round death, and that Keats cou
scarcely, in the decorum of a requiem, find it rich to die while sitt
in the sunlight under a plum-tree. The proper surrounding had to
"embalmed darkness," where Keats could wish "to cease upon th
midnight with no pain." We might say, then, that the psychologic
beginning of the poem was a profound desire to die,4 which w
interrupted, so to speak, by the ecstatic song of the nightingale,
song which came as a shocking contrast to Keats's mood. If the son
at first stands for the sunlit world of love, spring, mating, and ha
ness so apparently unattainable for Keats, we can understand his fir
two responses?a wish to obliterate the bird by obliterating his ow
consciousness in Lethe, hemlock, numbness, opiates; and an immedia
self-reproach, prompted by the usual Keatsian generosity, for
grudging the bird his happiness. And so Keats tries to feel with th
bird, as Wordsworth tried in his Ode to feel with the bounding lambs.
Keats even imagines joining the summer bird via a sunlit path, the
wine "full of the warm South," full of "dance and Provengal song,
and sunburnt mirth." No way could be more false, and the stanza is
forced, a divagation,5 as Keats himself recognizes some lines later:
I will fly to thee
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

4. By "a desire to die" I do not mean a conscious wish to commit suicide. "To
cease" into "easeful death" rather implies a happy coincidence of the desire for
death and a natural death itself, rather than (as in the Ode on Melancholy) an
explicit wish to take violent means. An unconscious suicidal intent would seem
to appear in the similes referring to hemlock and Lethe.
5. William Michael Rossetti, in his Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott,
1887), p. 201, saw the falsity of these lines: "Surely nobody wants wine as a
preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music. . . . Taken in detail, to call wine
'the true, the blushful Hippocrene'?the veritable fount of poetic inspiration
seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase 'with beaded bubbles winking at
the brim' is (though picturesque) trivial."

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 594 HELEN VENDLER

It is important, I think, to see Keats's first responses to the night

ingale ("I will share your happiness, I too will be warm and sun
burnt") as a struggle against avowing his true psychological state, a
state of despair and desire for death. Though death obtrudes in the
third stanza, it is safely distanced from Keats's immediate concerns?
"physical decay and the disease that had carried off his brother in
youth and might strike down himself, the brief transience of sexual
love and things of beauty" 6?by being externalized, allegorized, and
deceptively broadened (from Keats's pressing sorrow at the death of
the young) to include gray hairs and palsy.7 Not yet, in the poem, has
Keats admitted that the question is a personal one. Finally, when we
come to the great center of the poem, where Death reigns like the
goddess Melancholy in the Temple of Delight, we hear the true voice
of feeling:
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath,
Now more than ever seems it rich to die. . . .

If one reads the poem as if it radiated from that center, as if these

lines were the true index of Keats's feelings from the beginning, the
poem is, I think, far more justly seen. Its earlier evasions are seen for
what they are?delusive fantasies of Bacchus and beakers and dancing
?and, I think, the later resolutions are seen for what they are?an
admission that man is born to die. uThou wast not born for death,
immortal Bird!" But?the judgment is implicit?/ was, I was born to
die.8 To be born for death makes it idle to wish to die?as though

6. E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press,

1957), p. 262.
7. Keats's lapse into eighteenth-century personification was reproved as long
ago as 1948, in Allen Tate's essay "A Reading of Keats" in On the Limits of
Poetry (New York: Swallow Press, 1948), p. 174: "It gives us ... a 'picture' of
common reality, in which the life of man is all mutability and frustration. But
here if anywhere in the poem the necessity to dramatize time or the pressure of
actuality, is paramount. Keats has no language of his own for this realm of
experience." The last sentence seems gratuitous, since no poet has had better
language for "mutability and frustration" than Keats, if we except Shakespeare.
I think rather that the reason for Keats's sententious platitudes here is an un
willingness to admit personal preoccupation and a corresponding substitution of
empty generalizations.
8. Yeats, in a line often read with wrong emphasis, borrows Keats's contrast in
"The Wild Swans at Coole": "Their hearts have not grown old" (as mine has).
Readers tend to ignore the implied comparison in this line as in Keats's "Thou

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 KEATS'S ODES 595

there were a choice in the matter. And though Keats's bitterness and
plaintiveness preclude any truce or compact between himself and the
nightingale proper, he does make a compact of fellowship with the
other listeners to the bird: "The voice I hear this passing night was
heard" by countless others. There is the true connection and link,
although necessarily in exile with Ruth or in the heartless land of
faery, where no one stands at the casement, the seas imperil the
quester, and the awakening on the hillside is forlorn.
In the end, everything in the poem has finally harmonized with
Keats's original sadness?the past listeners (in Ruth's tears), the
landscape (in its midnight darkness), faeryland (in its emptiness),
and, astonishingly, the bird's song, which from "ecstasy" has become
a "plaintive anthem." Such an attuning of context to feeling, though
it may not resolve anything, at least assures us that Keats is no longer
fretfully and strenuously attempting a false sunlit vision. But unless
one recognizes the wish to die as the experiential base of the poem,
one risks being taken in by the sunlit protests, and one finds it hard to
explain the metamorphosis from sunshine and ecstasy and Bacchus
into darkness, plaintiveness, and yearnings for death. Of course
Keats's metaphors in the opening lines reveal the original sadness and
wish to die, and yet their being cast into similes ("as though of hem
lock I had drunk") has led to their not being taken very seriously.
Critics in general have seemed to believe Keats when he avers that he
is "too happy" in the nightingale's happiness. Rather, if we see the
wish to die (a subliminal one becoming gradually visible as it surface
to full consciousness) as the center of the poem, we can see that at
no point, not even in his fevered fantasy of Bacchic intoxication, is
Keats happy at all.9
The Ode to a Nightingale shows, then, the way in which a psy
chological beginning can so condition a poem that the verse must
change its landscape and its attitudes. In the Ode on Melancholy,
which follows the poem on the nightingale, Keats encountered
greater problems. He plays in the poem the role of the physician

wast not born for death." In each case the reference to the poet's own case must
be grasped for a proper reading of the poem.
9. I cannot therefore agree with Albert Gerard, who writes: "It is typical of
Keats's mature integrity that he makes no attempt to evade reality by seeking to
prolong the dream and stay in that blessed spot. . . . On the contrary, the sheer
intensity of the scene recalls to his mind the heartbreak of actual life" (emphasi
added), English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), pp. 226-227.

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 596 HELEN VENDLER

attempting to cure himself ("No, no, go not to Lethe") and he

borrows his persona and tone from Hamlet. We might imagine the
poem as a late-composed soliloquy of Hamlet, offering as a reason
" 'gainst self-slaughter" not the canon of the Almighty or the dreams
which might come after we have shufHed off this mortal coil, but
rather a more modern reason, that experience is in itself a good not
to be annihilated. In melancholy, Keats is tempted to turn inward,
away from the cause of melancholy, to avert the eye from the object.
He recoils from this aversion, as we might have supposed he would,
and urges himself to forego opiates, lest "shade to shade will come
too drowsily,/And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul." Now
Keats's melancholy is so far unexplained; the mystery of his sorrow
is, so far in this poem, a given. But we find, I think, in the middle of
the poem both the cause of Keats's melancholy and an explanation
for the distinctly sexual imagery of the earlier injunctions against
opiates. In lieu of opiates, Keats tells us, we should "glut" our sorrow
on the beautiful?a rose, a wave-rainbow, peonies,?and the verse
expands beyond instance to incident,
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep, upon her peerless eyes.

Now the language of this entire stanza, of glutting, raving, and

feeding on eyes, is clearly overwrought and hysterical, and can
hardly be taken as the language of sage advice: it is rather the out
pouring of a distracted spirit, himself raving.10 We have come upon,
finally, the experience around which the poem, we may conjecture,
was secreted: Keats's "mistress" has shown anger toward him, and
he has fallen into a melancholy so severe that he has wished to take
poison and die. The retreat inward, away from her into melancholy,
has taken place before the poem begins; by the time the poem opens,
he is castigating that withdrawal into melancholy as unmanly,

io. The critical reaction to this language has been an embarrassed one. Not
recognizing Keats's own subsequent abandonment in the poem of such language,
and therefore the implied criticism by Keats himself of the spirit which expresses
itself in such hysterical language, some critics have seen fit to view the whole
poem as hysterical. Robert Bridges noticed the awkwardness in the mistress*
appearance as an appendage to other sensations: "Among the objects on which
a sensitive mind is recommended to indulge its melancholy fit, the anger of his
mistress is enumerated with roses, peonies and rainbows, as a beautiful phe
nomenon plainly without respect to its cause, meaning or effect" (quoted in
TLS [Friday, 2 April 1971], p. 1). See also the remarks of Douglas Bush in
John Keats (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. i45ff.

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 KEATS'S ODES 597

amounting in fact to a sexual betrayal of his beloved. Had he yielded

to opiates, he would have been allowing his forehead "to be kiss'd/
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine"; he would have been
letting "the death-moth be/[His] mournful Psyche," admitting the
downy owl as the "partner" in his "sorrow's mysteries"?all of these
the proper functions, rather, of his mistress. Instead of the cult of
love, he would have chosen the cult of death. The temptation to these
quasi-sexual betrayals is more than powerful; as Empson once re
marked, there is an immense wish to die when it takes four negatives
in the first line to mount a resistance.

Given the strong undertow toward death, the reaction is, not
surprisingly, equally immoderate. Instead of withdrawal, immersion:
when your mistress raves, glut your sorrow by feeding on her eyes.
We have been given, so far in the poem, only two alternatives:
withdrawal or a forced masochistic aestheticism. Both responses are
sexual ones. The frustrated sexual desire which is the basis of the
poem is nowhere clearer, incidentally, than in the cancelled first
stanza, where the rudder to a Petrarchan bark distractedly seeking
Melancholy is "a dragon's tail,/Long sever'd, yet still hard with
agony." The hatred of woman, too, is clear in the same stanza, when
Keats confects the ropes for his bark from "large uprootings from
the skull/Of bald Medusa." (Neither the dragon's tumescent tail
nor the plucked and impotent phallic Medusa appears in Keats's
source in Burton.)
How then, faced with his two equally unsatisfactory responses to
his mistress' anger, was Keats to resolve the poem? He had evoked
first one stratagem and then another?and they were wholly incom
patible (oblivion and glutting) and both, finally, unworthy. He
solved the dilemma by focussing not on his mistress' anger but on
her beauty, at first in the forced exercise he recommends to himself
in destructive language ("feed deep, deep") but next in genuine
contemplation. As the almost petulant exercise becomes gradually
real, Keats's tone becomes grave, and he sees his two previous al
ternatives, drugged melancholy or a hectic absorption in beauty, no
longer as opposites but as a continuum: Joy's hand is ever at his lips
breathing adieu, and life, by a terrible metabolism, makes the nectar
of Pleasure metamorphose into the venom of Passion. If Melancholy,
then, is intrinsic in life, it takes no mistress' anger to evoke it: her
being alone, her beauty alone, should provoke the divinest Melan
choly. To undergo depression only from a coarse external impetus
like a mistress' anger is to mistake accident for essence.

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 598 HELEN VENDLER

The widening of Melancholy, enacted by those eternal essenc

Beauty, Joy, Pleasure, and Poison, has taken us into the stable wo
where those eternal allegorical figures live and where we may find
"fellowship with essence." This widening "solves" the local an
incidental problem of the mistress' anger and allows depress
and hysteria alike to subside into a grave acknowledgment:
Ay, in the very temple of delight
VeiTd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, (emphasis added)

From drowsily tasting the lethal wine of wolf's-bane or the ru

grape of Proserpine, from the glutting and falsity of the hysteri
second option, Keats has passed to the normal action of the strenuo
tongue. The initiate bursts Joy's grape against his palate fine a
tastes the sadness of the might of Melancholy. Once again, Kea
seeks a return to the human norm. The lover passes from the cult
love, not to betrayals with inferior goddesses of death but to a high
service to the goddess Melancholy. It is no accident that the swoll
dragon-tail, hard in agony, finds its release in the climax when th
strenuous tongue bursts Joy's grape; the frustrated sexuality of a lo
which can be thwarted by a mistress' anger can only be alleviated
a plane entirely more metaphysical. Having burst Joy's grape t
lover can, metaphysically speaking, die to both pure sexual satisfa
tion and pure sexual frustration and know instead the hoverin
middle state of metaphysical, not existential, melancholy. He b
comes, then, in a strange apotheosis, one of Melancholy's clou
trophies, one of those huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, hi
self the trophy of a "buried love," placed higher than the usu
cycle of anger, frustration, and despair will allow. Without a sens
of the sexual base of the poem, of the poem's attempt to disguise t
base by the casual mention of the mistress' anger almost as an aft
thought, the poem becomes simply an exercise in definition. Criti
who see it so n give, absurdly, utter credence to the fevered a
overwrought second stanza as though it, like the delusive beaker o
Bacchus, were a valid alternative, to be taken soberly and judiously
on the same plane with all other statements in the poem.
The third great ode, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, has also, I think, a

ii. See, e.g., Jack Stillinger, "Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keat
in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs, N.
Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 8-9: "The first stage tells what not to do 'when th
melancholy fit shall fall.' . . . The second stanza advises what to do instead. .
The third stanza gives the rationale for these prescriptions." A similar view
expressed by David Perkins in the same volume, p. 89.

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 KEATS'S ODES 599

erotic base.12 How extraordinary, we might think (if we could loo

at the poem freshly), that Keats should, figuratively speaking, wa
into a museum, see an urn, and address it in sexual terms: "Thou st
unravish'd bride." How even odder, since he is inventing this urn,
that the first scene should be a sexual pursuit, the second, a scene o
courtship. What, we might ask, is the source of all this preoccupati
with the erotic? We find it, if I may anticipate, in what I consider
the "psychological" or "experiential" basis of the ode, phrased for
in two bitter lines. The urn, Keats tells us, is "far above" "all breath
ing human passion" (emphasis added) which leaves "a heart hig
sorrowful and cloy'd/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue."
If we assume, as I think we must, that Keats brought these charact
istics of human passion?the burning forehead and the parchin
tongue?to his visit to the museum without walls, then we understan
his fevered relief at the releasing coolness of the urn. It makes no
demands, it urges no action, it offers no reproach; it proffers inste
its marble coolness to Keats's burning forehead. The ode begins on
regressive wish for a pre-sexual state, in which the female is a sti
unravished bride. This rejection of the sensual accounts for t
persistent comparing, to the urn's advantage, of the urn with
earthly capacities; it has sweeter melodies, it can express a flowery
tale more sweetly than our rhyme, its melodist is unwearied, its lo
is more happy. These over-protestations must be taken as such, lik
the over-protesting glutting of the Ode on Melancholy, and again
seems to me a failure in the usual apprehension of the ode that thes
remarks, for all their unearthly beauty, are not taken as profoundl
defensive. The insistent comparatives of the first three stanzas exist
disparage the human, and so are doomed to defeat ultimately, give
Keats's sense of the human norm.
I think only Keats's momentary distaste for the sensual, and his
concomitant praise for the unconsummated can explain the sudden
appearance of the fourth stanza of the ode. Keats has invented two
scenes so far for his urn, one representing we may say lust, the second,
we may say, love. Both are unconsummated; one a struggle, one
yearning. What, then, provokes him to abandon the erotic motif an
turn to a representation of townsfolk coming to a sacrifice? What h
the scene of sacrifice, invented, like the other scenes, for the purpos

12. John Jones (p. 220) truthfully remarks about this ode: "Nowhere, except
in the dream-consummation of St. Agnes, does Keats's mature verse place
heavy a burden on sex. Sex sustains the private metaphysic of intenseness in bo
poems."

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 600 HELEN VENDLER

of the poem, to do with the predominantly erotic motif so far evident

in the ode?13
It is clear from the manner of expression of the third stanza that the
stasis of the urn is uneasy. The boughs cannot shed their leaves nor
bid the spring adieu, but on the other hand the lovers cannot kiss. On
further inspection, even the good seems evil; we want the tree to
have the freedom of its nature. The sacrifice imposed by the urn
seems, in the end, too great; to sacrifice the consummation of the
erotic is, in the last analysis, to sacrifice life itself. Keats, it is not too
much to say, is the sacrificial heifer, the processional townsfolk, the
mysterious priest, and the desolate town, all at once. To make an urn
is to sacrifice a town. The rapacity of art towards life has rarely been
more unequivocally faced. To make an urn is to be sacrificed; it is
to sacrifice life itself, not only sexuality and the deceptive artistic
alternative to human sexuality; the unravished virginity of the urn
turns out to be not hfe but death.14 No harsher judgment could be
passed, and the sacrificed now moves into the ascendant. The delicate

13. The "unity" of the Ode on a Grecian Urn has been a mare's nest for
critics. A critical hybris has resulted by which critics rewrite or re-order the
poem to their own specifications. Thus W. J. Bate: "The second and especially
the third stanzas have been a digression. We have only to apply the simple test
of omitting them both, or else the third alone, and we find that what remains
will still make a complete poem, though admittedly less rich," John Keats
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1963), p. 514. In this grand disposal
of two-fifths of the ode via a "simple test," Bate differs from another dis
tinguished Harvard Keatsian, Douglas Bush, who tells us that "The fourth
stanza ... is a total digression from the line pursued so far" {John Keats,
p. 140). Adding the two critics together, we find that only the beginning and
end of the poem are not, by these canons, "digressions." F. W. Bateson, too,
seems able to dismiss the whole middle of the ode: "Stanzas in and iv draw
certain pathetic and whimsical corollaries, and Stanza v sums up the paradox
of poetry. . . . Stanza iv had been a relapse into Romanticism. The 'green
altar,' the 'mysterious priest' and the 'litde town' were alluring invitations to
reverie. But Keats was too honest to leave it at that," English Poetry: A Critical
Introduction (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1950), pp. 218, 220. The
problems with stanzaic sequence and decorum have perplexed critical accounts
of Keats's feelings in the poem. Just as Gerard (n. 9 above) thought that the
nightingale recalled to Keats's mind "the heartbreak of actual life," so Bush
here says, of the third stanza, "But the erotic theme brings in frustration and
negation" (p. 139, emphasis added). I would argue, on the contrary, that
"heartbreak" and "frustration" preceded both poems and are the motivation for
the initial feelings in each case: the wish to join the nightingale and the wish to
be immortal like the urn-figures. Bush, as his phrasing implies, is thinking of
"Dover Beach," but in that poem as well, the sea "brings in" "the eternal note of
sadness" only because that note is already present in Arnold's mind.
14. John Jones suggests a similar notion in his fine description of the urn:
"It counters warm immortal love with the desolation of aesthetic experience,"

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 KEATS'S ODES 601

fulcrum of the poem occurs in the famous succession of negativ

the second and third stanzas, where undoubtedly the weigh
feeling is positive ("Ah, happy, happy boughs!") but the sacr
necessary to the happiness is plain; never, never can one kiss. W
the final bitter antithesis of the urn's "more happy love" and "b
ing human passion" the poem has reached an impasse. An unbri
able gulf, it seems, exists between art and life. But within the t
oppositions of the second stanza the bridge exists: Keats tells us
the relation between life and art is a sacrificial one. "She cannot f
though thou hast not thy bliss." Give up bliss, and you can
eternity; give up ends, and you can have a ceaseless procession.
brilliant vision, Keats sees that if goals are sacrificed, so to
departures; the urn has only middles, no beginnings, no ends. A
this insight, together with the sense of the sacrifice of life to
creates the third scene on the urn, the procession with no term
a quo, no terminus ad quern, only the endless intent to sacrifice,
incapable of execution, since that too is a goal. In the Epistle to
Reynolds we had seen the goal:
The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife
Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows,
The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows.

But here we are always on the way, never at the green altar, nev
the little town.
It remains for us to explain Keats's rapidly successive views of
urn in the last stanza. No longer the incarnation of erotic perfec
forever warm, the urn is now frigidly addressed as nothing mo
than a visual shape, a gesture and a pose, cold and marmoreal. In
imagining of the green altar and the little town the imagination
speculative poet has gone beyond the imagination of the p
urnmaker, and the bourne proper to the urn has been proved in
ficient to contain the ranging Fancy. 15 The urn has become noth
more than the shell of a fledge soul left behind, to use Herb

and in his opposition of "feel" and "watch" in "Bright Star" (p. 230). How
I think that in the ode "the desolation of aesthetic experience" is essent
being opposed to warm mortal love?to what exists off the Urn, not on
Yeats will continue the theme in a number of poems including the
Byzantium poems and "Among School Children."
15. The source of Keats's sadness here, it has been suggested to me by
student Catherine Slater, is the incapacity of his own invented urn to b
sufficient. The mind necessarily extrapolates beyond its own image of perfe
(the urn) to the images of extension (in time and space) beyond its lim
(to the altar and town).

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 602 HELEN VENDLER

phrase. Nevertheless, almost instantly, Keats relents, and pauses ove

the mystery of art, its baffling silence that teases us out of though
Then, equally rapidly, he passes?via his own generosity?to the bene
olence, the kindness, of the urn in being a friend to man. Finally h
tells us explicitly, for the first time, what his state of mind was wh
he encountered the urn and was befriended by it: he was in a state
what he names "woe." That "woe," the "high-sorrow" following
human passion, caused Keats, entering his "museum" with his cloy
heart, his burning forehead, and his parching tongue, to find the u
an oasis of the cool, the bridal-yet-virginal, the unravished, t
childlike, the remote, the flowery. But the erotic motive exacerbati
him was too strong to be set aside, and his obsession made him peop
the urn with erotic objects, until he had resurrected, on the urn, h
concerns in life. But by that re-enactment his woe was, even if on
temporarily, assuaged; and therefore, in providing that brief respit
from woe, the urn can justly be called a friend to man. The purit
of the urn's being makes its final statement both true and false: tr
in the moment and the object, false in the long run and in life. B
without the convincing delusion of the perfect, which may equally
well be called the respite given by images of perfection, we cou
never know that the imperfect is our paradise (one of Stevens' ma
glosses on this ode). The poet must choose speech, not silence; h
flawed words and stubborn sounds may not express a flowery tale
sweetly as the urn, but the silence of the urn is the silence of th
sacrificed dead, if it is embraced as more than a temporary solace.
Before returning to the ode To Autumn, we may stop to ask wh
the conduct of these odes has told us about Keats's poetic practice, a
least within these great life-consuming poems. We have seen th
Keats is unlikely to begin with any narrative account of an experien
in life which gave rise to his poetry; the thoughts themselves, befo
he begins to compose, take pre-eminence over the events wh
provoked them. Keats's exclamation, "O for a life of sensations rath
than of thoughts!" could have come only from a mind oppressed b
thoughts, a mind, in Wordsworth's terms, "beset by images, a
haunted by itself." When Keats begins with narration, as he does i
the odes on Psyche and Indolence, it is a visionary narrative, not a
experiential one. Keats will not begin by saying, "My mistress was
angry with me and caused me to be melancholy," or "I dreamed of
dying by choice because I had seen my brother die by Fate," or
never saw stubble-fields look so warm." Explicit opening statemen
he reserved for his frank narrative letters; poetry for him more oft

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 KEATS'S ODES 603

meant a supervening of the impersonal on the quotidian. The disguise

of the self are many. The "thou" in the Ode on Melancholy is Keats
himself; the woeful "we" of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is Keats him
self; the impersonal narrator of To Autumn is Keats himself. If we
do not recognize the personal in the odes, we cannot recognize the
heroism of its transmutation into the lofty.
We have seen, too, that not only does Keats suppress the narrative
and the personal in favor of the lyric and the metaphysical, but that
he also tends to postpone in his poems the revealing of the experientia
base. Why this is so I am not entirely sure. It is a technique he coul
have absorbed from Wordsworth (from Tintern Abbey, for in
stance). I incline to think that ultimately for Keats the thought
and perplexities arising from an experience became more absorbing
than the event itself, so that when the mistress' anger or the eroti
disappointment or the wish to die or the sight of stubble-fields enter
the poem late it is not out of disingenuousness; these bases have
become, if not afterthoughts, only items in the entire complex of
event and response. Keats does not, like Yeats, forsake the even
entirely; Keats could never say that events brought forth a dream an
soon enough the dream itself had all his thought and love. No, the
event remains, though sometimes inconspicuously, present in a corne
of the poem. In Keats the event does not even claim the pre-eminen
place Wordsworth gives his original event when he ultimately reaches
it in the course of his poem, saying "I cannot paint what then I was."
Keats will not say, "I cannot paint how cloyed I then felt with
passion": his tact is absolute.
That tact is most absolute in the ode To Autumn, a poem which
says all that Keats had to say about a poet's life and death. Keats had
once represented himself as cornfield, gleaner, and granary all at once:
... I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain.

He had also written, two years before the ode, that in a season of calm
weather,
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding?fruit ripening in stillness?Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves?. . .
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs?
A woodland rivulet?a Poet's death.
("After dark vapors")

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 604 HELEN VENDLER

And he had reminded us that man's soul has "quiet coves ... in i
Autumn":
. . . when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness?to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
("The Human Seasons")

That stillness which, on the urn, finally horrified Keats because it

betokened death, seemed to him, in his calmer moments, the stillne
in which all things most intimately sense themselves. And so it is
group of stillnesses, not of actions, which lead to the stubble-field
The ripenings and swellings of fruit, the bending of the trees, the
buddings of the later flowers, are happier sands in the hourglass, bu
their process too measures gradual time. When the sand has ru
through and the sheaves are gathered in, the sun can smile still as i
did on the ripening grain. In the ode, of course, Keats removes eve
the sheaves, and lets the sun touch the stubble-plains alone?but ev
then the calm prevails. If the stubble-fields represent visual silenc
and if they are the generative image of the poem, we may ask wh
Keats does not impose auditory silence as well, especially since t
active ripening "silence" of the first stanza has been followed b
the passive arrested visual "silence" of the second stanza. How,
silence, do we summon song?
For we cannot doubt that it was the stubble-fields which provok
the elegiac question prefacing their appearance: "Where are th
songs of spring?" In the context of harvest, we should rather have
expected "Where are the flowers of spring?" But instead, the stubbl
fields cause Keats to ask where the spring birds have gone. It is clear
only one sort of bird he has in mind, since the swallows and robin
are still present, as he is about to tell us; I think the bird he regrets
the nightingale, and that the link between the stubble-fields and th
nightingale is the "sad heart of Ruth," the gleaner in the fields. W
have seen Ruth, though not so named, earlier in the poem:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook.

The gleaner, not (as would be more logical) the thresher, is the last
figure seen in the mythologized pathos of the grain harvest. Keats
sensed himself an exile already, like Ruth, and through the sad hear
of Ruth his own sad heart recalled the spring song of the nightingal
pouring its soul abroad in ecstasy. The minimal music which Autum

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 KEATS'S ODES 605

provides, as Keats allows his humane deity to be reabsorbed in the

minute particulars whence she sprang, is well known.16 It must be
said, though, that the powerful elegiac feeling waked in Keats by th
song of the nightingale is not present here: "think not of them" w
a self-in junction that Keats obeyed. Acknowledging death, he pre
scinded for a moment from anguish, and took on a truth of dirge
rather than a truth of repining, a sobriety of sadness rather than
fever of envy. It may be that he had in mind, because of its corre
sponding sunset, Wordsworth's great apology for mortality: that th
thought of death humanizes and allegorizes the natural world for u
rendering the visual experience a moral one:
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

It seems, in view of Keats's earlier metaphors of his mind as

cornfield and his books as a granary, that to see the harvest done an
the stubble-fields looking warm meant to him that he was no longe
at the mercy of fears that he might cease to be before his pen had
gleaned his teeming brain. The grain had ripened, the barns were ful
the stubble-fields looked warm and the poetry of earth was not dea
Though the bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit was to turn to
gall in Keats's final illness, there must have been, for him, in t
writing of such a flawless poem as To Autumn, a sense that he had
reached what Whitman calls "the music beyond which philosoph
cannot go." In one last autumnal experience he resumed the "beauty
that must die" of Melancholy, the silence of the urn, and the harve
Ruth of the Nightingale, now listening to a new oscillatory an
lightly-scored polyphony.
But once more we are struck by how Keats, in his rich nucleus o
gleaned field, silence, minimal song, end of process?the quintessenti
cluster of powerful images of growth, exile, nature, and death?can

16. Harold Bloom asserts about the passage from the visual to the aural
"The allocation of the senses is crucial: the late-harvest art is plastic and
graphic; the art of millenium. The art past ripeness and harvest is the art of th
ear, apocalyptic, the final harmonies of music and poetry," The Visionary
Company (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1961), p. 422. I am not at all sure
that Keats is being "apocalyptic" here, any more than Milton was in ending
"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" with music. Keats is still, at the ending of th
poem, speaking of the poetry of earth which is never dead, and not, I think, o
any conception of time or the end of time which might support the wor
"apocalyptic."

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 606 HELEN VENDLER

construct around his nucleus a leisurely and beautiful poem broaden

ing out in time and space until, in Herbert's words, it "makes one
place everywhere." The walk at Winchester seems finally only a
catalyst for an entire world ringing the stubble-fields.
There are of course many more truths to be voiced about these
inexhaustibly beautiful poems, especially about the agency of man in
each of them, since man is the sufferer and the perceiver who is
in each case pursuing "solitary thinkings/Such as dodge/Conception
to the very bourne of heaven." I have wished here only to say that
reflection on the experiences from which the odes may have origin
ated, and on the residual presence of those experiences in the poems,
can help define the shape and course of each ode as it completes itself
to wholeness.

Boston University

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