B.A. (Hons.

) English – Semester IV Core Course

Paper IX : British Romantic Literature Study Material

Unit-3
(a) Lord George Gordon Noel Byron
(b) Percy Bysshe Shelley
(c) John Keats

Editor : Nalini Prabhakar

Department of English

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi
Paper IX – British Romantic Literature

Unit-3
(a) Lord George Gordon Noel Byron
(b) Percy Bysshe Shelley
(c) John Keats

Editor:
Nalini Prabhakar
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Paper IX – British Romantic Literature

Unit-3

Contents
S. No. Title Prepared by Pg. No.
(a) Lord George Gordon Noel Byron
Childe Harold-Canto-III (36-45); Canto-IV (178-86) K. Ojha 01
(b) Percy Bysshe Shelley 23
(i) Ode to the West Wind K. Ojha 23
(ii) Ozymandias Ankita Sethi 35
(c) John Keats–Odes 38
(i) Ode to a Nightingale Mary Samuel 41
(ii) Ode on a Grecian Urn Ankita Sethi 56
(iii) Ode to Autumn Mary Samuel 60

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Unit-3a

1. Childe Harold-Canto-III (36-45); Canto-IV (178-86)

George Gordon Noel Byron
K. Ojha

1. Introduction
Byron, the poet, born on January 22, 1788 at 16 Holies Street in London, was the son of the
former Scottish heiress, Catherine Gordon of Gight, and the improvident and impecunious
captain (“Mad Jack”) Byron, both families were aristocratic, and were known for deeds of
violence and their tangled fortunes. At the age of twenty- two in 1778 his father had created a
scandal. He fell in love with Lady Carmarthen, whose husband was to be the fifth Duke of
Leeds. The sandal was followed by a divorce by an Act of Parliament. Of the three children
of that marriage only one survived, Augusta (born in 1783), who became the future poet’s
beloved half-sister.
Having squandered £ 23,000 of his second wife Catherine in no time, Captain Byron (the
poet’s father) led a wandering life, dodging creditors and later he left his wife and his son in
financial hardship. The boy Byron had been born with a conventional clubbed foot, “the heel
being turned up and the sole of the foot being turned inwards.” The mother and the son went
to live in Aberdeen. There they lived with a nurse, Agnes, on the mother’s remaining annual
£150.
Young George’s formal education was conventional and rudimentary, but he read
whatever he could lay his hands on- travel histories, and novels and the Bible. He enjoyed
reading the Testament, which he read with his Calvinist nurse. This made him believe in
predestination, the possibility of being doomed by God to eternal punishment.
After the death of the grandson of the ‘Wicked Lord’ Byron in the battle in Corsica on
July 31, 1791, Byron became the ‘heir presumptive’ to the barony. The wicked Lord left “a
tangled mass of legal encumbrances, heavy debts, and ruinous estate for the new master.”
The mother and the son shifted to the gloomy and romantic abbey.
Byron’s life now expanded. He spent holidays in London with his lawyer’s family, the
Hansons, went to Harrow (April 1801 and stayed there until 1805. There he had to fight his
way through taunts at his lameness. He provoked his teachers, neglected his lessons and
became the leader of a faction which opposed the appointment of a new Head-master. His
school friendships were passionate and remained especially strong in memory.
He met his half-sister Augusta sometime in this period and wrote to her to unburden
himself of his growing and impassioned dislike of his mother. He played in the Eton and

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Harrow cricket match on August 2, 1805 and was extremely proud of his ability to play the
game despite his lameness and despite his having to have a runner for the match.
In October 1805 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He indulged himself, spent
lavishly was troubled by money lenders, and he involved himself deeply with other men and
generally amused himself. A homosexual tendency was exhibited throughout his life. He was
very ‘close’ to John Edlestone who died in 1 811. His death gave a sad blow to Byron and
profoundly disturbed him and convinced him that he was a doomed being bringing disaster to
all who came close to him “This violent (though pure) love and passion are expressed in
several verse items in Fugitive Pieces of December
He settled in London, made friends, wrote verse and led a dissipated life. He desired to
escape from London for a “view of the Peloponnesus and a voyage through the
Archipelago....“ (his letter to Dr. Bathe). His “Hours of Idleness was cut to atoms by the
“Edinburgh Review” wrote Byron, it “completely demolished my little fabric of fame. This is
rather scurvy treatment for a Whig review, but politics and poetry are different things, and 1
am no adept in either. 1, therefore, submit in silence” (Lord Byron’s Correspondence edited
by John Murray 1992, his letter to Hobhouse of Feb.27)
Byron could not bear the insult calmly. He wrote a satire which formed the nucleus of
the poem published in 1809 as English Bard and Scotch Reviewers. By 1809 he had more
enemies who became part of the collection. The revised version of Hours of Idleness
appeared as Poems Original and Translated. The collection had five new poems heightening
the nostalgic regret for the passing of boyhood. This collection was adversely criticized by
Clarke, a Cambridge man, in The Satirist. Clarke had always been a vehement critic of
Byron’s verse and when in June appeared a poem. Lord B. to his Bear (that summer Byron
was receiving his M.A. degree) Byron was enraged. He had indeed kept a bear in the college
and had taken it for its exercise on a lead, saying that it was sitting for a fellowship. He was
angry not merely at the ridicule that Clarke poured on him but also at his own failures, the
lack of achievement, because he had fallen in a deep depression and gloom at this time. The
problem was aggravated by his London excesses.
Byron spent almost two years abroad in Spain, Greece and the Near East. Byron
spent his Christmas in Athens and here he finished the first canto of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, which he had started on Oct. 31. He enjoyed his stay. He went to the farthest
point of Attica, and from there he had a clear sight of the ‘Isles of Greece” a vision of such
power and beauty that his imagination was haunted by it all his life. Byron left Athens, its
carnival, its friendly people and There as Merci (who becomes “The maid of Athens) and
went to Turkey.
Or his journey he swam across the Hellspont on May 3, (the feat that legendary Leander
achieved to reach his beloved.), Byron was proud of his success. He celebrated it in a verse.
The verse concludes thus:
But since he cross’d the rapid ride.
According to the doubtful story.
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 To woo - and—Lord knows what besides,
And swam for Love, as 1 for glory,
”Twere hard to say who fared the best.
Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you
He lost his labour, I my jest
For he was drown’d’ I ve the ague.
If we compare such a verse with the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(finished in March), we discover that the natural voice of the verse links it to Byron’s letters
and to the later Byron of Don Juan. Byron’s verses are characterized by his natural voice.
Byron was bored with the limited life in Turkey. In August he returned to Athens and
settled at a Capuchian monastery at the foot of Acropolis. He had a small library also. He
spent his time in Mow life’ studying Italian, writing Hints from Horace, a poem satirizing
contemporary authors. He stayed in Malta for a month, and was in a depressed mood. Mrs.
Spencer Smith’s presence made his life more miserable. He suffered from poor health, fever,
the oppressive heat, fear of creditors in London and the financial chaos.
He returned to England on July 11, a changed man, cosmopolitan, a man of varied
experiences and worldly wisdom, with sun in his bone. For Byron the Mediterranean was ‘the
greatest island’ of his imagination. England greeted him with bad news, Byron abandon Hints
from Horace and concentrate on Childe Harold. His mother had died, his friend Charles was
drowned, and the close friend Edlestone had also died.
With the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron became
a prominent personality in England. Fame and notoriety were his all through his, life. ‘He
became the paradoxical Childe Harold-half angel, half devil,’ and everyone wanted to meet
him.
Shelley’s death in 1821 disturbed Byron. To get over his gloom, he rapidly wrote three
more cantos of Don Juan. After a year at Genoa Byron left in July 1823 to help the Greeks in
their struggle for independence from Turkish rule. He died of a fever at Missolonghi, in
western Greece, on April 19, 1824. His body was returned to England. Refused burial in
West Minister Abbey, the remains were deposited in the ancestral vault at Hucknall Torkard
near Newstead Abbey.

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 2. The Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(Prescribed Text)
A. CANTO THE THIRD
XXXVI
There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,
Whose Spirit, antithetically mixed,
One moment of the mightiest, and again
On little objects with like firmness fixed;
Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt,
Thy throne had still been thine, or never been;
For Daring made thy rise as fall: thou seek’st
Even now to re-assume’ the imperial mien.
And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!
XXXVII
Conqueror and Captive of the Earth art thou!
She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name
Was ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now
That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame,
Who wooed thee once, thy Vassal, and became
The flatterer of the fierceness-till thou wert
A God unto thyself; nor less the same
To the astounded kingdoms all inert,
Who deemed thee for a time what’er thou didst assert.
XXVIII
Oh, more or less than man—in high or low—
Battling with nations, flying from the field;
Now making monarch’s necks thy footstool, now
More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield;
An Empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild.

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 But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor,
However deeply in men’s spirits skilled,
Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of War,
Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest Star.
XXXIX
Yet well thy soul hath brooked the turning tide
With that untaught innate philosophy,
Which, be it Wisdom, Coldness, or deep Pride,
Is gall and wormwood to an enemy.
When the whole host of hatred stood hard by,
To watch and mock thee shrinking, thou hast smiled
With a sedate and all-enduring eye;
When Fortune fled her spoiled and favourite child,
He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled.
XL
Sager than in thy fortunes; for in them
Ambition steeled thee on too far to show
That just habitual scorn, which could contemn
Men and their thoughts;’ twas wise to feel, not so
To wear it ever on thy lip and brow,
And spurn the instruments thou wert to use
Till they were turned unto thine overthrow:
’Tis but a worthless world to win or lose;
So hath it proved to thee, and all such lot who choose.
XLI
If, like a tower upon a headlong rock,
Thou hadst been made to stand or fail alone,
Such scorn of man had helped to brave the shock;
But men’s thoughts were the steps, which paved thy throne,
Their admiration thy best weapon shone;

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 The part of Philip’s son was thine-not then
(Unless aside thy purple had been thrown)
Like stern Diagenes to mock at men:
For sceptered Cynics Earth were far too wide a den.
XLII
But Quiet to quick bosoms is a Hell.
And there hath been thy bane: there is a fire
And motion of the Soul, which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire:
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore.
Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the core.
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.
XLIII
This makes the madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to those they fool:
Envied, yet how unenviable! What stings
Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school
Which would unteach Mankind the lust to shine or rule:
XLIV
Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last.
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife.
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast

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 With sorrow and supineness, and so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously
XLV
He who ascends to mountain tops, shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below.
Though high above the Sun of Glory glow,
And far beneath the Earth and Ocean spread,
Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils, which to those summits led.

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 B. CANTO : THE FOURTH

CLXXVIII
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society, where none intrudes.
By the deep Sea. and Music In its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be. or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express—yet cannot all conceal.
CLXXIX
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-Roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore: upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own.
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain.
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan
Without a grave-unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
CLXXX
His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields
Are not a spoil for him—thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For Earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies-
And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies

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 His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to Earth-there let him lay.
CLXXXI
The armaments which thunder strike the walls
Of rock-build cities, bidding nations quake,
And Monarchs tremble in their Capitals,
The oak Leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of Lord of thee, and Arbiter of War—
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoil of Trafalgar.
CLXXXII
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria-Greece-Rome-Carthage-what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play:
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as Creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.
CLXXXIII
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm—
Icing the Pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

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 The monsters of the deep are made—each Zone
Obeys thee—thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
CLXXXIV
And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: From a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-thy to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-’t was a pleasing fear,
For 1 was as it were a Child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy name-as I do here.
CLXXXV
My task is done-my song hath ceased-my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit
The spell should break of this protracted dream
The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit
My midnight lamp-and what is writ, is writ.-
Would it were worthier! But I am not now
That which I have been-and my visions flit
Less palpably before me-and the glow
Which in my Spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.
IX
Farewell! A word that must be, and hath been-
A sound which makes us linger:—yet farewell
Ye! Who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last—if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his—if on ye swell
A single recollection—not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell;

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 Farewell! With him alone may rest the pain
If such there were-with you. the Moral of his Strain.

3. Canto-III
3.1 Introduction
Stephen Coote in his Byron: The Making of a Myth writes:
The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are the records of Byron’s
Grand Tour. They express Byron’s radical views and their narrator and hero
are emotionally very interesting. The word Childe suggests his aristocratic
status. Childe Harold-the character-is a dissolute, satiated and melancholy
peer, a young man in need of the spiritual refreshment a pilgrimage might
provide. Byron’s deliberately archaic language derives from the 16th century
poet Spenser whose nine -line stanza he adopted.
In the first two cantos Byron has tried to project and develop the character of Childe
Harold and the narrator (I) and through their experiences he has described his own
experiences during the Grand Tour. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the narrator, the poet
and Childe Harold as individual characters since there is so much of similarities in their
character.
By temperament Byron was a rebel, was born for opposition. Consequently, he had
joined the Whigs party while he was in London; in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the
Whigs had defended the rights of the people (in reality their own aristocratic oligarchy)
against the might of the Crown. But by 1790 the Whigs were in decline. The French
Revolution led to a war in Europe and the Tories in England firmly kept Napoleon at bay.
The Whigs-being in opposition-projected themselves as the guardians of Liberty and true
patriots. Byron was impressed by them, because the Whigs, as men of education and
property, tried to befriend the people. To them the ideals of the French Revolution were still a
powerful force.
Apart from being a radical, Byron was also interested in the warfare going on in Europe
particularly in the Spain of the Peninsular war, he became a political poet, who depicted the
horrors of war
3.2 Analysis: Stanzas 36 to 45
Byron’s reactions to the Napoleonic war are recorded in his Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage and Don Juan,. Byron as a young boy admired Napoleon. Like other lovers of
liberty and people’s freedom he believed that Napoleon would destroy tyranny or despotism
from Europe. People may live in peace and breathe in a free atmosphere. But as he matured
in age. he began to suspect the intentions of Napoleon. Byron became aware of Napoleon’s
plan to control Western Europe as he (Napoleon) had given the throne of Europe to Joseph

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Bonaparte. But when the Spaniards took the initiative themselves, and developed the concept
of guerilla warfare, the French had to leave Sargossa to its rightful inhabitants. Byron was
pleased with the popular revolution and national independence.
Byron did not approve of Wellington, whom the Whigs tacitly supported, becoming the
saviour of Europe. He condemned Wellington in the ninth canto of Don Juan.
Byron started writing the third canto of Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, when he left England
in a state of despondency. His marriage had failed and his name and fame were at its lowest
because of this marriage and his own weaknesses .
His changed attitude to Napoleon is perceptible in Stanza 36-^-5 of the third canto of
Child Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron travelled across Europe in his leather-bound travelling
coach, modelled on Napoleon, it was filled out with a day-bed, a library and a plate-chest but
he was disheartened to find a Europe which the defeat of Napoleon had profoundly changed.
In the third canto a newly bitter Childe Harold emerges, defiant and sorrowful. He talks
about his pains and fate and comments on the sorrow of Europe, he is a spokesman of liberty.
His words are like lightning. He reflects on the fate of Napoleon. The Childe Harold is the
poet himself.
Byron’s evocation of Napoleon (Stanza 36-45) reveals his ambiguous feelings about his
college days’ hero. He admires Napoleon as the greatest genius of the age, but dislikes him
for his egotism and cruelty. According to Coote “Napoleon is a supreme example of the
Byronic hero a-man vast in many of his passions, a giant of conflicting emotions which drive
him to the edges of the world,” By the time these lines were written Napoleon was defeated,
captured and imprisoned in St. Helena.
In these stanzas Byron describes Napoleon’s “essential greatness with manifest reference
to his own personality, career, and attributes his final downfall to the peculiar constitution of
his genius and temper.”
In Stanza XXXVI (36) Byron pays homage to Napoleon. He considers him the greatest
man who has fallen and has been arrested. Napoleon’s character or spirit combined in itself
two diametrically opposing traits. He was the greatest man, for he fought for the liberation of
people from cruel rulers, defeated many nations (monarchs) and tried to bring liberty to the
common suffering oppressed human beings. But he was also the worst of man because he
was over-ambitious and a tyrant. ‘Extremes’ combined in his personality. He was the
mightiest-the most powerful for a moment, and at the other he indulged in ‘evils’. Both
goodness and evil were firmly fixed in him. It is because of these extremes he had to fall, to
sink.
If Napoleon had been a moderate in his views and action, he would not have been
defeated and captured by the despotic monarchs. He would have retained his throne or
position and the world would have praised and admired him forever.

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 Napoleon was bold and courageous, he was mighty and adventurous, he feared nothing.
He could rise because of his daring and his downfall is also the result of this extreme daring.
He created more enemies and less friends. Byron says that even after his defeat and arrest,
people (nations and rulers) are scared of him because he has not yet yielded and still he
would like to re-assume
The imperial mien
And shake the world
The indomitable spirit of Napoleon is both admired and detested. Byron describes him as
the Thunderer of the Scene.
The scene described (there) is that of Waterloo where Napoleon was defeated on 18-6-
1815
The stanza reveals that Byron’s own experiences had quickened his insight and he had
realised that ‘greatness and genius possess no charm against littleness and commonness and
that the “glory of the terrestrial meets with its own reward” ‘(EHC).
When Byron writes “Even now to re-assume the imperial mien”, he is perhaps alluding
to the complaints made by Napoleon that the British authorities did not pay him ‘the imperial
honours “which were paid to him by his own suite”. He expected to be treated with dignity.
Although Napoleon had been defeated by the Duke of Wellington at the battle of
Waterloo and was put under the guardianship of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Napoleon
remained a threat to the world. His spirit was still ‘free” and ‘daring’ and was ‘the Thunderer
of the scene’ (Waterloo).
Why does Byron use the metaphor the Thurderer of the scene for Napoleon? Byron
stresses the ‘might’ of Napoleon, like a thunder he defeated, crushed and tried to destroy
tyrannical rulers and went on conquering nations after nations, creating havoc and chaos.
The oxymoron continues in the next stanza, where Napoleon is both a conqueror and the
captive of the earth. The earth symbolizes nations and the universe also. The earth shakes
with fear even now when Napoleon is no more a free person. People have not forgotten how
he had “defeated and subdued most of Europe in the Revolutionary wars.” Napoleon’s wild
name still terrorizes nations. It is imprinted in their mind. They are apprehensive, one day he
might break free as he had done from Elba and ravage the world as he is the Thunderer of the
scene’. Note the use of the metaphor-. “Thunder of the scene”
People remember him all the more and ridicule him for this wild man (bold and
unconquerable man) has been imprisoned by the very forces whom he had once crushed
ruthlessly What a paradox!
What a predicament!
Byron’s lines remind us of Pope’s Essay on Man: “Thou art nothing, save the jest of
fame”.

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 Fame seems to mock Napoleon. Fame is personified. Once Fame had wooed him, had
become his slave (Vassal), flattered his ego and boosted his courage. He himself became the
master of all that he surveyed, cared for and listened to none. He considered himself a God,
he defeated nations and kingdoms which completely surrendered to him and people readily
accepted him as their liberator or emperor. The nations, which combined together and
brought about his downfall, were once under his absolute control. He was their God. But now
fame has deserted him. And the man who was once a conqueror is now a captive. Such is the
game of fortune.
Byron is astounded at the complex personality of Napoleon. “Is he more or less than
man” that is the dilemma. He fought nations everywhere on heights, in valleys, and on plains,
sometimes he had to retreat also, but he never yielded.. The relentless battles continued. The
bigger as well as smaller nations were conquered. He showed no respect for the defeated
monarchs or people, he ill-treated them. He was brutish in his behaviour, made ‘monarchs’
necks thy footstool’. Byron condemns Napoleon for his meanness and ruthlessness.
This powerful monarch (Napoleon) became the most detestable person. He could crush
empires, command and rebuild nations, but he could not control his own passions. What a
paradox it was. The most powerful Commander of the world could not control his passions.
He, who believed that he could understand human nature, could not understand himself. He
failed to curb his lust for war, lust for power. He did not realize that fate might be a flatterer
or a vassal only for a short duration of time. Try to tempt Fate, it will take you to great
heights, and then all of a sudden it will forsake you. The truth is that the ‘tempted Fate will
leave the loftiest star’.
Byron is bitter about Napoleon’s overwhelming ambition to become an emperor of the
world and his lust for power and war which made him a mean and cruel man. Napoleon who
emerged as a Liberator of suffering humanity turned out to be a Despot.
Byron appreciates the stoicism of Napoleon in Stanza 39. The soul of Napoleon readily
accepted the ‘turning tide’-the change of fate or Fortune. His innate philosophy has perhaps
enabled him to calmly endure the adverse times. Byron is perhaps thinking of his own fate.
Once he had become a famous poet as well as a well-known personality in England and then
he had to suffer separation from his wife and daughter and his reputation was lost.
The forbearance of Napoleon at the face of adversity is being praised. He is able to
endure every thing because of his inborn philosophy. His calm, which may be a product of
wisdom, coldness or deep prides, is ‘gall and wormwood’ to his enemies. His calmness in the
face of defeat and ridicule perplexes and frightens his enemies. They are unable to penetrate
his mind and thought. Is his calmness a forerunner of the approaching thunder?
When nations not only watched with contempt and jealousy the imprisoned Napoleon,
but also they showered curses and abuses on him, and expressed their elation at his fall,
Napoleon showed no signs of unhappiness or anger, rather, he smiled with “a sedate and all
enduring eye”. Even when Fortune, who had once loved and nourished him so tenderly,

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deserted him, he was left alone, unprotected, he patiently bore all the insults, humiliations and
remained unbowed.
The change of ‘fortune’ and ‘Fate’ made him a sager man. When he was riding the crust
of success and fortune favourably smiled on him, he was a ‘blind’ man-he could not see his
own weaknesses, and became an egoist, and a tyrant. Now when Fortune has forsaken him,
he has become a sager person. Ambition had steeled his heart-humane feelings were
completely crushed. And he did not realise that contempt for people recoils on the hater-it
contaminates human beings, and their thoughts. Even if Napoleon had just (right; proper)
contempt for some persons or nations, he ought not to have exhibited his feelings in words
and actions. He should have spurned the weapons which enabled him to defeat nations and
crush people. He should not have forgotten the maxim “You get back what you do to others”,
or “As you saw, so shall you reap”.
The weapons, which helped him to fulfil his ambition, were ultimately used against him.
The monarchs, who he had once defeated, later joined hands, and have captivated him now.
Byron exhorts Napoleon-this world is not worth conquering-it is a useless world. In this
world it hardly matters if he wins or loses. This truth was realized by those who in the past
like Napoleon had tried to vanquish nations and people and become monarchs of the
universe. Even Napoleon has learnt this bitter lesson.
Byron continues to address Napoleon in the next stanza. If today Napoleon has been
completely alienated from his supporters and has been compelled to stand or fall like a tower
on a headlong rock, he himself is responsible for his predicament. He had been contemptuous
of people who had once admired him and had great expectations from him. He betrayed those
people who craved for liberty and worshipped him as a liberator. It is these fighters for
freedom, whose respect, admiration and thoughts had paved his way to success and brought
fame to him.
Napoleon is compared with Alexander the great-the son of Philip of Macedon-Alexander
was very ambitious. He conquered Asia. Since Napoleon like Alexander, had become a king
and was on a conquering streak, he could not afford ‘to mock at all men’. It is unfortune that
those who wear the purple gown or sceptre are so much enamoured of power that they stop
caring for the other human beings and want to conquer the whole universe. They are so crazy
for power that to them the whole earth is a den. They become cruel and avaricious and treat
others with contempt.
So long as a man wears the royal dress, he can’t mock at all men-that is he cannot realise
that winning or losing has no meaning. Only when he gives up all ambition and authority he
can, like Diogenes, distrust human pretensions to nobility and honesty.
According to Byron “the great error of Napoleon,’ if we have writ our annals true’, was a
continued obtrusion on mankind of his want of all community feeling for or with them;
perhaps more offensive to human vanity than the active cruelty of more trembling and
suspicious tyranny.”
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 In this stanza Byron condemns Napoleon, for being over ambitious and ruthless. The
cause of his rise and fall was his lust for power and contempt for humanity but this contempt
was not that of stern philosopher Diogenes who ridiculed human pretensions to nobility or
honesty. Napoleon was a pretentious monarch and so he stood all alone like a tower on a
headlong rock and fell down, could not brave the shock-the hatred of people and nations.
Note the use of oxymoron here. Quietness, which Diogenes hinted at is not always good.
Calmness-peace-is at times counter productive-the human beings who are ambitious, who
have ‘fire’ within, can not live peacefully for to them peace is a hell-like existence-it is
stifling, it is death.
Note, Quiet is opposed to Hell but here quiet is also associated with quick bosom. Byron
links quiet with quick (calmness and living force) and thus associates it with life-me
oxymoronic relationship has been highlighted. Since quietness to a living soul is hellish and
so it is ‘a poison’s also. Napoleon could not live peacefully because-his was a quick bosom—
and so quietness was a poison for him-death for him.
Napoleon possessed ‘power of energetic life’-a fire lived in his soul, it was a moving
fire. According to Byron this living fire-can not be controlled ‘in a narrow cage-it aspires,
comes out in the form of ambition. Once the ambition or desire is aroused, the fire is kindled,
it goes on spreading, it can’t be controlled or extinguished. The ambitious man moves from
one adventure to another, unstopped, continually, does not get tired or exhausted in the sense
that he is always restless. And the ‘desire’ or ambition is also like a fever which is fatal to the
ambitious and adventurous being, in the past also ambitious people had seen their fall, and
now Napoleon is its victim.
The quick “bosom is consumed’ by the fire of his desire and consequently he is
associated with disease referred to as preys, fever and fated.
Napoleon is presented as a diseased person, burning with the fire of ambitious desire,
preying upon high adventure and suffering ‘from fever at the core Fatal to him’.
Metaphorically the fire (of ambition) consumes the ambitious person ultimately. In the, next
stanza he is declared to be a mad man. The quick bosom is one to whom quietness is hell and
bane. Those who have burning ambitions which impel than to prey upon others, and who
continuously and feverishly work to achieve their goals and can not rest, are mad men. They
have contagious influence on all those who come in contact with them. Others are incited and
excited by them and they madly follow these mad men. But ironically it is these mad men
with ambitious fire who are conquerors’ kings, founders of sects and systems (including
Sophists. Bards, statemen etc.). All these human beings are the unquiet things which can not
rest or relax or be quiet, rather the unquietness stirs the soul’s secret springs. The unquiet
bosoms change the face of the earth-they have followers, who blindly believe them. Byron is
critical of all sects, beliefs and all ambitious beings who force others to accept and believe
them. They try to befool their followers but later they are paid in their own coin. They are
ultimately duped by those who they had befooled. Such persons are envied by others since

16
others can’t reach their height and yet these successful people are unenviable. They deserve
their positions for they have worked hard for it. How do they breast others-how do they hurt
and harm others? They are crazy for power. It would have been a blessing if one honest
(person-who would have been on open school) could have taught human beings not to lust to
shine or rule. If one honest soul had been able to unteach human beings the lust for fame or
authority, the world would have become a better place to live in. ;
Byron is not condemning the men of fire for these men have also contributed to the
happiness of mankind. Napoleon may be a mad man who makes others mad but the mad men
of fire have a brighter side also-they not only cause ‘contagion’ but also stir’ (inspire,
stimulate) the soul’s secret springs.
Byron like Shelley was a radical and a believer in Prometheus who he considered the
creator of the world, man and civilization. In stanzas 42 to 45 he is talking about Prometheus-
like quick bosoms, who can reform the world.
It is noteworthy that in these stanzas the tiresome ‘rest’ (42st) of ‘life’ leads to madness
(43st) and becomes an agitation (44st.). The life of these Prometheuses is a storm and their
breath is an agitation. Here we are reminded of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The storm
in Shelley’s poem is a symbol of revolutionary changes leading to a Utopia. Like Prometheus
these ‘quick bosoms’ create agitation with their breath and their life is stormy. Like a storm
they rise, causing destruction of the unwanted, and ultimately they peter away like a storm,
they ‘sink’. Byron has skillfully used metaphors and similes in these stanzas.
These souls are nourished and nursed by ‘strife’ and are so much rebellious that if they
are able to survive perils and if calmness dawns upon them like a twilight, they can not feel
happy ‘They feel overcast/With sorrow and supineness, and so die’. ‘Calmness’ kills them.
The Promethean fire is described as ‘a flame unfed’-when this fire, in their soul does not get
an outlet to spread, it remains ‘unfed’ and “runs to waste/With its own flickerings.’ The
ambitious dreamers and persons are like the ‘unfed fire” and also like a sword which rusts if
it is not used. The Prometheus-like beings cannot rest-they must remain agitated and stormy,
if they are not able to prey on others, enlighten others and reach the Pinnacle of success, they
are wasted like an unfed fire and an unused sword. The Promethean man is not a free man-he
is ruled by his quick bosom.
What is the ultimate fate of Prometheus. Because of his unquenchable energy he is able
to ascend the mountain tops (reach the highest position) and is able to perceive or realise that
the top most peaks are surrounded by clouds and snow. It is again this energy which enables
him to surpass or subdue mankind-once he is able to conqueror them, reach the highest
position (emperor) he realizes, when he looks down on others, how deeply he is hated. The
man on the top of a mountain/ position has “Clouds’ and ‘snow’ as his friends, and
‘Contempt’ of humanity as his subjects. The sun of glory may shine up on his head but below
him are spread the earth and ocean; he himself is in a sad predicament-’round’ him are icy
rocks and ‘loudly’ blowing contending tempests-there is no crown on his head- he is a lonely

17
being who has to face the hatred of his enemies and contempt of human beings. This is the
reward of ambitious beings toils-they reach the summit but they remain ‘lonely’.
These stanzas discuss the achievements and failures of Napoleon, but in the last four or
five stanzas Byron seems to deviate from his basic theme and to contemplate on the fate of a
Promethean character in general. Prometheus the mythical character was a source of
inspiration to the radicals like Shelley and Byron.
A close reading of these stanzas reveals that when Byron refers to Napoleon he seems to
be indulging in ‘self analysis’. Napoleon breathed agitation, he incited people to fight, and
led a stormy life, he was “nursed” by strife, that is. he was trained to be always in ‘war’
which would ultimately lead to his ruin, to his death”. He was also ‘bigoted by strife,
implying that he was a thoughtless killer.
Byron has shown the consequences of ruthlessness in stanza 45.
The lines are remarkable for they present the paradoxical situation in the life of
Napoleon. Byron is not merely assessing the character and achievements of Napoleon, he is
also contemplating on the lot of ambitious, quick-bosomed human beings, who cannot live
peacefully. They are ‘thunderers’ ‘madmen’, burning with the fire of ambition and
consequently they cannot control the ‘fire’ and once this fire gets ventilation they go on
conquering nations, bringing about changes in the universe and ultimately they are consumed
by the bare of audition.
Their agitated breath breathes in new life in people, they simply follow them blindly,
accept what they are taught. But when these ambitious beings become blind to their own
follies, and are flattered by Fate or/and become “gods’ -then their doom approaches them.
They stand like a tower headlong on a steep mountain top, completely cut off from humanity
and beauties of nature, they are faced with their steep downfall. They themselves are
responsible for their fall. But then the truth is that very often these quick bosomed-men create
a new work! of joy.
Napoleon fell from a height of glory and success because his character was a
combination of extremes. Had he been able to see his weakness-lust for power and lust for
war-he may not have lost the love and admiration of people. Byron does not confound
Napoleon, he also appreciates his stoicism shown at the time of defeat not to yield to
humiliation. These stanzas emphasize the paradoxical existence of great men, who reach the
‘top of mountain’ because of their “ruthless ambition” and then they meet their end-fall
headlong down the pinnacle of success.

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4. Canto-IV
4.1 Introduction
In the Dedication to John Hobhouse (Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) Byron says
that Canto IV is “the longest, the most thoughtful and comprehensive of my compositions”.
“There is less of the Pilgrim”. The author speaks “in his own voice”. The Canto touches upon
“the present state” of Italy, “Italian literature and perhaps of manners’.
Byron concludes his Childe Harold with stanzas describing Nature and the Ocean. In
stanza 177 Byron yearns for the Desert which would be his dwelling place and in the
prescribed stanzas his loneliness is highlighted with the description of the “Power, loneliness
and changefulness of the Ocean”. The stanzas also hint at a change in the life of Byron-he
was now a different person, no more haunted by the bitter memories of his personal life.
4.2 Analysis: Stanzas 178-186
The speaker derives immense pleasure in meandering through the pathless woods (not
inhabited or trampled by man) and is filled with ecstatic joy ‘in the lonely shore’. In the first
four lines Byron very deftly establishes the loneliness and quietness of the sea-shore and
surrounding woods with the use of the words Pathless woods, lonely shore, where none
intrudes. In this lonely, uninhabited and natural surrounding, the speaker is filled with great
pleasure and rapture. The lonely shore, the pathless woods and the deep sea excite him and
his personal loneliness is completely forgotten for the deep sea is his society, he can hear
music in its roar. The Ocean is a friend, a companion to him. The lines remind us of
Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Arnold’s Dover Beach. Wordsworth hears the still music
of humanity in nature, Arnold finds a melancholic note in the music of the waves flinging
pebbles at the rocky beach and makes him think of the sad plight of human beings. Byron
does not associate man’s unhappy lot with the rhythmic music of the sea. He makes it clear
that he does not emphasize the solitude of the natural surrounding because he dislikes the
company of man. He loves Man but he loves Nature more. “This is a very unusual sentiment
for Byron” who was fond of human company.
He often retires to this secluded place to get away from the ‘interviews’ of human beings
and to have communion with nature, particular!}’ with the sea, and to listen to its music. He
loves ‘loneliness’ in Nature for it makes him forget himself and his bitter experiences and
provides him an opportunity ‘to mingle with the universe’. The lines remind us of his Epistle
to Augusta where he expresses his desire to mingle with the quiet of the sky. He. wants to
have a rapport with nature and the pleasure which he will have with this mingling with nature
cannot be concealed and yet it can not be described. The immense pleasure can be felt and
experienced but can not be expressed in words.
The speaker addresses the ocean and exhorts it to roll on. It is a deep and dark blue
ocean. The rolling of the ocean makes the speaker reflect on the cruelty of man. He contrasts
nature with man. Although ten thousand fleets (war ships) move over the ocean-float on the
ocean-sweep over it but the waves continue to move-roll on-without any hesitation or
obstruction. Man is not able to control or rule the movement of the ocean water. He is unable
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to make any dent in it. Man conquers or occupies the land and marks it with ruins, destroys
the beauty of the earth and covers it with all sorts of constructions, which the speaker refers
to as ruins. Man’s control stops with the shore, the Ocean is unconquerable. The wrecks
found in the water are caused by the Ocean itself. No remains of man’s destructiveness are to
be found. If any ruin is there, it is of man himself—when a man is drowned he drops in the
water of the Ocean like a drop of rain, he sinks into the deep sea covered with bubbling groan
of its water. He remains without a grave (tomb), no bells ring for him, he is not wrapped in a
coffin and remains unknown and unsung. Such a man remains unwept. Man can not make
way in the Ocean-he cannot walk on its waves nor can he destroy the fields of the Ocean. In
no way he can possess it.
Byron during his journey to the European countries observed the destruction caused by
wars (in those days man}’ European countries were engaged in war. In the prescribed stanza
he has beautifully presented man’s predicament. Man uses all his power to capture land on
the Earth. In this process of conquering The World (nations or pieces of land) he goes on
ruining ‘life’ on Earth is, transforming the shape and face of the natural surroundings. The
landscape is doited with the ruins caused by man’s lust for power. But what happens when
man tries to subdue the mighty ocean ? Is he able to establish his superiority over it ? Man
fails to step on the waters of the Ocean (Land is static but the Ocean is mobile, has its power)
Man can neither pave roads in the Ocean, nor can he spot its fields. The Ocean detests man’s
evil destructive power. When he tries to conquer if the waves of the Ocean contemptuous Ty
left him up from its bosom, toss him up in the sky (like a ball or toy). He shivers with fear
and screams loudly to him gods for protection and yearns to reach safely in some near by port
or bay. The vain man is dashed back to earth, on the shares of a bay and there he lies, shorn
off all his might and dignity. His identity and entity are completely annihilated. Man cannot
possess the Ocean.
Note Byron has asked “lay” for Tie’ to rhyme with bay. There is no deliberate
grammatical error. All through the stanzas the poet has addressed the Ocean as ‘thy’, ‘thou’.
The has is used personification.
If has already been mentioned that Byron ridicules man for his vanity (line 2 stanza 179)-
the fleets which move on the waters of the Ocean are easily destroyed. Man is filled with the
pride to sail warships-he believes that he has conquered nature that is the Ocean but Byron
exhibits the vanity of man in stanza 180. The battleships are used to conquer nations.
Camions are shot at cities and buildings from these ships. These cannons strike the walls of
the rock built cities (cities built on the rocks or surrounded by the rocks or made of rocks or it
may mean very strong palaces and powerful states) like thunder and their thunderous sound
shake nations (common people) as well as monarchs with fear. The monarchs living in their
capitals are terrified. The huge battle-ships are made of oak. (very strong wood) Byron
describes them as the oak Leviathans (seas beasts or monsters)—these huge ships with their
wooden planks (huge ribs) empower the caption of the fleet. He is designated as the Lord of
the Oceans and Arbiter of Man. (Clay creator, a Biblical reference that man is made of clay).
He navigates them and thus thinks that he is the Lord of the Seas Oceans. But the captain and
20
the crew and the fleets of ships are mere toys of the Oceans Byron is satirical here. The huge
powerful ships are made by man who himself is made of clay, created by god. The irony is
that this clay-created being prides himself thinking thank he is all powerful and can conquer
everything. With the help of a navy a nation may capture another nation. But naval officer
and his men are powerless before the might of the ocean. In seconds all these (the fleet with
the crew) are destroyed by the tempestuous Ocean. Like the snowy flake they are completely
destroyed and ‘melt’ into the yeast of waves, (the Spanish Armada attacking England in 1588
and the French Navy of Trafalgar in 1805 were both severely damaged by storms before they
could engage in battle.)
Byron takes us back to the past history of Europe. He raises a question what has
happened to the ancient Empires such as Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage situated on the
shores of the ocean. The waters of the ocean once washed these powerful empires, when were
free. Remember Byron is addressing the Mediterranean sea in these stanza, on its shores were
situated the great empires of the world-(the Assyrian the Persian, the Grecian and the
Roman). Later these empires were ruled by tyrants/enemies of liberty. Now these countries
are occupied by strangers, slaves or savages-the old civilizations have disappeared-the
empires have decayed, and they have lost all their glory and have become deserts. But the
Ocean/sea is still unchanged. The sea is both unconquerable and unchangeable-it looks
different only when the waves play the stormy game. During the tempests the sea looks
frightening and unusual.
Time brings about changes in the whole created world. Old age overpowers man. But no
change (wrinkles) occurs on the blue (azure) brow of the ocean. The Ocean remains young or
youthful for ever. Since the creation it has been continuously roiling on.
The ocean is the glorious mirror, it reflects the divine glory. The Almighty’s form or
shape is reflected or is present in the Ocean, where we can find the presence of the Eternity.
The sight of the Ocean soothes the agitated poet, makes him forget his bitter experiences
and thrills him. It also reminds him of the greed and vanity of man. Man who claims to be the
master of all that he surveys and who tries to dominate nature and the earth is ultimately
defeated by the mighty Ocean.
‘The Ocean is the glorious mirror’ which reflects the Almighty’s absolute power. This
power is visible in its multi-splendored form-in breeze (gentle and calm), gale (convulsing) or
storm. It freezes the poles (poles are covered with snow). The Almighty’s presence can be
felt in the torrid climate-where the sky and the ocean appear dark, the waves heave with
force-the ocean seems limitless and sublime. The ocean is the image of Eternity. It is
boundless, endless and sublime-it has no beginning and no end, has no limits-it is all
pervasive. In fact to Byron it is the throne of the invisible power (God) In the slimy surface of
the ocean live great monsters-the impact of the ocean is felt all around, in all directions-each
zone is compelled to obey this all powerful, ever present and all pervasive Ocean-the
incarnation of Divinity. It is frightening, and fathomless and it exerts its authority effortlessly.

21
 In the next stanza Byron/the speaker talks about himself. He is in a nostalgic mood. He
has been in love with ocean since his childhood. Often as a young boy Byron used to swim in
the ocean-he played on the L breast’ of the sea-and allowed the waves to carry him like the
bubbles in any direction. As a boy he played with its waves. And he was delighted to be with
the sea. In these stanzas the ocean has been personified. At that stage of his life the poet had
complete trust in the ocean. Sometimes he was terrified (perhaps when there was a tempest)
and yet he was confident that he would be protected and saved. His was a pleasing fear. Note
how Byron juxtaposes opposite ideas here. He thought that “he were a child of thee-there was
a complete faith in ocean (God)’. Perhaps there is a reference to Christ and his father God. As
a young boy Byron enjoyed swimming in the sea and completely surrendered himself to the
waves. Once again the speaker surrenders to the ocean-the Mediterranean sea. Remember
Byron is not talking about one particular sea or ocean. He is referring to the ocean (as one
unit), ocean is a God, an image of Eternity and the throne of the Almighty.
The ocean provides him contentment. He is able to forget all the bitter experiences of life
and accept the authority of the Almighty.
Then Byron concludes his work (the poem). The poet says that Childe Harold has
attained his goal, his. (The poet’s) task is done he has reached the Pilgrimage. After braving
the storm of life, the pilgrim has reached his God-has got enlightenment. And so the song has
stopped. The song has been like a dream-he was” spelled by it-now he is awake. The dream is
gone. He has worked hard to describe this dream-to describe his pilgrimage-Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage-journey of life. So there is no need to burn midnight light. Whatever has been
written has been written. None can change it whether life’s journey could have been worthier,
none can say. Byron believed in fate-what is decided, cannot be changed.
Life is like a lamp-it burns and then gradually the light is gone. There is an end. The
speaker has described his life’s journey-not merely his sea voyage but also his experiences in
life, his faults, his achievements, his visions etc. Now the lamp is dying. He has acquired a
new light. And the vision, he has described in this work is fleeting away. And the glow which
guided’ and enlightened his spirit is fluttering, is growing faint and low. Ami the pilgrimage
is over.
The description of the ocean is significant. Byron not merely describes a real ocean, but
also gives it a symbolic meaning. The ocean becomes an image of Eternity and before this
Almighty the mighty force of man is nothing. The mightiest souls (human beings) are easily
crushed and destroyed. If you surrender yourself to this Force, you will be happy and
protected but if you wish to go against the currents, you are complete!}’ destroyed.
Nature remains unchanged only man is changeable. Man is mortal. Time and Divine
laws are eternal.
The Ocean is also a symbol of the eternal time and of eternal law of nature and God.
Whatever happens to any human being is something destined. One must accept the dictates of
fate. Idealism is a-dream one must reciprocate to reality.

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 Unit-3b

(i) Ode to the West Wind

(ii) Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley

(i) Ode to the West Wind

K. Ojha

1. Shelley: Life and Works

P.B. Shelley was born on August 4,1792 at Horsham in Sussex. He was the eldest son of a
country squire. Sir Timothy Shelley, a man of ancient and distinguished race. John Drink
water in his The Outline of Literature writes:
From the first, the boy beautiful as an angel and as tender-hearted, trembling alive
in every fiber, strung like a wind-harp to the breath of every breeze, seemed like a
being from another sphere. The sight of pain or sorrow turned him sick with rage
and pity.
Shelley was the darling of his parents and his grand-father Sir Bysshe Shelley, a
fabulously rich landlord, and a gentleman. All of them had great expectations from the young
boy. His father started teaching him at an early age and his mother read poetry to him. He
also began to study Latin from the curate a Welshman named Evan Edwards. Shelley became
an exceedingly good scholar. His parents wanted him to follow his father’s footsteps as a
politician, as a man of time, as a landowner and also as a practical agriculturist in short, as a
capable Sussex squire.
Shelley wrote pamphlets in support of the Irish cause. He was tremendously influenced
by Godwin’s political thought. He read avidly and became a radical, who believed that all
religious, social, political and cultural institutions were redundant and corrupt. They crushed
man’s individuality and liberty. Society needed an overhauling. He continued to write
pamphlets against oppressive laws and suffocating social values. His ideas were not
acceptable to the conservative authorities, and created problems for the Shelleys. ‘Law-
Keepers’ were after him. He could not live in peace. His family life was made miserable by
his wife, the pretty, empty-headed Harriet, and dominating sister-in-law Eliza. Shelley and
Harriet separated. Harriet remarried but later became morbid and insane and committed
suicide. Shelley married Mary, Godwin’s daughter from his first wife. His children from
Harriet were taken away by law and were entrusted to Harriet’s father. Harriet’s death and
then the separation from his children were great blows to Shelley.
Shelley was utterly out of sympathy with the England of his days-he could not live
within the constraints laid down by the conventional thinkers and administrators in learning,

23
religion and morality. He wrote articles, pamphlets, and poems criiticizing and condemning
social and political laws, striving at reforming the society, creating a Utopian world, based on
liberty, fraternity, love and equality, a world where there will be no oppression, no exploiter,
no cares and no anxieties. His unorthodox views were not acceptable and he created hostility
everywhere. Before settling in Italy, Shelley visited Naples and travelled in the Italian lakes.
He described his journey in his letters to Peacock. These letters are ‘the most perfect
specimen of descriptive prose in the English language’. (Mr. Symonds) At Venice he met
Byron. In the splendid poem Julian and Maddalo (who are actually Shelley and Byron) he
threw a vivid light upon his brother-poet. The poem is remarkable for the poetical treatment
of ordinary things. Prometheus Unbound and his great tragedy The Cenci were published in
1819. “In sheer lyric power and splendour–Prometheus Unbound-has no parallel in any
language.” Before the publication of Prometheus Unbound a number of poems were written
by Shelley. They were Lines written among the Euganean Hills, The Mask of Anarchy. Peter
Bell the Third, Popular songs, Rosalind and Helen. “These poems directly or overtly redefine
and reassert Utopian ideals despite accumulating disappointments, personal and political’. In
Rosalind and Helen. Shelley uses ‘nature’ as an ethical standard to highlight the antagonism
between the town and the country and the corrupt urban world’; ‘nature’ in these poems is
presented as ‘regenerative power capable of healing the damaged spirit.’
In the year following 1821, Keats died and Shelley wrote the great elegy- Adonais.
Adonais not only mourns the death of Keats but also establishes the supremacy of death
which liberates human soul from chains of sufferings and humiliation. Adonais was followed
by Hellas which was inspired by the keen interest Shelley took in the then raging war of
Greek independence, and The Defence of Poetry an essay dealing with Shelley’s concept of
poetry and the role of the poets.
In 1822 the Shelleys, with their friends Mr. and Mrs. Williams, spent the summer at
Lerici, on the Gulf of Genoa. Shelly enjoyed yatching in his yatch Don Juan. He also began
writing The Triumph of Life and a tragedy, Charles I, which he could not complete.
Accompanied by Mr. Williams and a sailor Shelley set sail for Lerici. On his way back to
Leghorn, on July 7 a great storm arose and the yatch was capsized. After eleven days the
poet’s body was found near Via Reggio and later the bodies of his companions. After
cremation, the poet’s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, so beautifully
described by himself in Adonais as the burial place of Keats, and his own son, William.
Agnes Ramsey writes: though he was snatched from life “while his powers were yet in their
spring freshness, Shelley holds a very high place among English poets”. “His poetical
productiveness’”. says Mr. Stopford Brooke, “would have been admirable as the result of a
long life, as the work, in the main, of little more than five years it is one of the greatest
marvels of the human mind”. Not only is he, as Swinburne has said, “the master singer’ but
he stands unequalled in the 19th century in his great dramatic power, as in the exquisite
beauty and charm of his poems on familiar subjects.”He was not only the “most divine” of
our poets, living in an ethereal and spiritual world made real to him by the powerful grasp of
a most vivid imagination, but he was at the same time the true hearted philanthropist, deeply
24
interested in all that affected his fellow men, and in their interests of waging war on all
conventional shams that clouded truth.’
2. Ode to the West Wind (The Poem)
“In Shelley’s notebook, presented by Sir John Shelley-Rolls to the Bodleian Library, this Ode
begins under the simple heading ‘October 2’. His own published note on it amounts to an
instance of his success as a weather-prophet (and Mary She! ley thought him a good one)
with a word on marine botany. In the draft the much-quoted final line was in the form of an
assertion; as a question it is far superior. If any literary model was in Shelley’s mind as he
wrote, it will have been Coleridge’s Ode on the Departing Year, which ‘however’ is largely
inspired by the political upheavals of Europe. Shelley’s is so much of a personal ‘confession’
that even the withered leaves round him are compared with his own early grey hairs.”
O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o ‘er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven mid Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine: aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from me head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

25
Of the horizon to the Zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’ s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

26
 As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

2.1 Introduction
‘Ode To The West Wind’ is one of the best lyrics written by Shelley. It was written at
Florence in the autumn of 1819. According to Shelley’ s own notes the poem “was conceived
and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Anio, near Florence and on a day when that
tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once wild and animating, was collecting the
vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began as I foresaw, at sunset with a
violent tempest of hail and rain, and attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning
peculiar to the Cisapline regions”.
The poet addresses the wild west wind of autumn and identifies his spirit with its spirit.
Donald H. Reiman in his book Percy Bysshe Shelley (Twayne Publishers Inc. New York,
1969) writes “the ode embodies the conflicting themes of the poet’s personal despair and his
hopes for social renewal in the images drawn from the seasonal cycle”.
Ode to the West Wind consists of five stanzas. In the first three stanzas the speaker
invokes the spirit of the west wind, which is the ruler of the vegetation of the earth (stanza I)
27
of air (stanza II) and water (stanza III) and highlights its inevitability—its unconquerable
force. He appeals to this wild spirit-impetuous spirit- to use him as a lyre. Irene H.Chayes
points out that in the concluding stanza the speaker does not ask the wind to enable him to
merge his character with its own, and become its instrument, rather he wants the wind to
become him.
‘Be thou. Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me impetuous one’
He would like “Demogorgon to fight his battles (which are those of Prometheus) destroy
the old order, and carry (not seeds of the vegetation of earth, air, water, but) sparks of
spiritual fire. Though the fire of his individual thoughts may be dead and though his physical
life is dying, (stanza IV) he prays the wind to
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
“In the climactic position, however, stands a metaphor not of natural force but of artistic
inspiration” (Reiman)
If in stanza four the speaker draws the attention of the unconquerable wind to his
miserable plight and tries to convince it that he himself was once uncontrollable, the next
stanza he begins with an appeal to the wind to make the speaker its lyre. And immediately
after, true to the dramatic inversion of lines 61 -62 he demands that the wind should shape its
power to his will:
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy
The choice of words in the concluding lines is very significant. The question begins-if
winter comes, not when winter comes. The words imply that “the analogy between the
seasonal cycle and human affairs is not a perfect one. It is because the cycle of mortal
mutability can be stopped in its course. What Shelley intends to convey is that with the
conscious efforts the men of vision can re-tum ‘the wheel of past winter to spring’. In
Prometheus Unbound Shelley has exhibited that it is possible to maintain moral spring time
longer than has been customary in most of human history.”
What surprises critics at times is the poet’s indulging in self-pity in many lyrics,
particularly in Ode to the West Wind, The Sky Lark, and his elegiac poem Adonais. In stanza
four in this Ode the speaker (the poet) dwells on his weakness. He says, if he had retained the
enthusiasm and illusion of his boyhood, when ‘to outstrip thy skiey speed/Scarce seemed a
vision’, he would not have’ striven/As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.’
The lines (50-52) remind us of Dante. The poet here like Dante, is perhaps ‘lost in the
dark wood of our life’ and is ‘tangled in the vegetation governed by the force of necessity.
(Stanza 1-3). He has fallen ‘upon the thorns of life” and is bleeding. According to Reiman
“The fires of imagination sometimes consume thorns. but only (as Shelley was to declare in A

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Defence of Poetry) during a relatively few brief moments of inspiration. During the reflux of
imagination, a poet is, like other men, subject to mortal limitations, and it is the poet’s
realization of this condition that impels him to pray to the wind to stir his ashes and fading
coal of imagination.
“Shelley believed that only when revolutionary efforts are truly radical (striking at the
roots of human evil) by reorienting human drives from egotism to altruism and from hate and
pride to love and justice can there be meaningful progress.”
In Ode to the West Wind Shelley uses the West Wind as a vehicle of his message to the
suffering humanity, the destruction of obsolete, unwanted, dead institutions and beliefs are
required in order to regenerate the world. The poem ends on a note of hope.
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
2.2 A Detailed Analysis:
Harold Bloom describes Ode to the West Wind as a poem about ‘the process of mythmaking’.
Its subject is ‘the nature and function of the rabi’ and ‘his relation to his prophesies.’ The Ode
incorporates many conventions of prophetic literature and particularly in the Hebrew
tradition. Shelley focuses on himself as a poet-prophet at the end of the Ode.
Be thou, spirit-fierce,
The trumpet of my prophecy!
He dramatically presents himself as an unheeded prophet and the neglected poet.
M.H. Abrams in The Mirror and Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition writes
that the Ode ‘weaves around the central image of the destroying and preserving wind; the full
cycle of the myth is of death, and regeneration, vegetational, human and divine’.
Stanza I
Shelley invokes the Spirit of the Wild West Wind and treats nature as something “redundant
with life, and life has its individuality in man, beast and plant.”
“When in stanza-1, the poet addresses ‘the Wild West Wind; as the breath of Autumn’s
being’, the poet is doing what Job does in the Book of Job. The God of Job is not the God of
Whirlwind or in the Whirlwind but he is God of the Whirlwind also......’, Similarly the spirit
that moves in the west wind need not be a spirit that moves in the west wind only. One aspect
is revealed, but others are hinted at, and the treatment, precise but extraordinarily suggestive
can accommodate the beliefs of any one of us.” (Harold Bloom).
In Stanza one the west wind is a magician, an enchanter, he is unseen but his presence is
felt all through the poem. Like a magician/an enchanter he drives away the dead and dry
leaves the leaves fly away like ghosts. The wind is thus ‘a necromancer who also exorcises’.
The dead leaves are driven to destruction but the winged seeds (live seeds) are charioted with
full protection to their dark wintry bed. The wild west wind-the tempestuous powerful wind-
is not an indiscriminate destroyer. He is a protector, a preserver also.
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 The first five lines of the stanza one concentrate on the theme of destruction. The wind
destroys whatever is useless and dead. The leaves are dead, they are sapped of all life, they
are ‘yellow, black, pale and hectic red’ (the colours indicate they are dying) and they are also
compared to ‘the pestilence-stricken multitudes’ they are like diseased human beings who are
on the verge of death. The breath of autumnal tempestuous wind, with its thunder and
lightning frightens the decaying leaves (leaves dead) and they flee like ghosts-they are driven
to their death-beds. Very skillfully the poet introduces another theme-man and his
relationship with nature, by comparing the dying leaves with pestilence-stricken multitudes.
The same wind gently chariots the winged seeds to their wintry bed, in the bowels of the
earth. These seeds allow themselves to be carried. They have a full potentiality for more
abundant life so they are well-protected in the bowels of the earth. They sleep peacefully in
the earth-thus they escape ‘the grounding mutable death of everything taking place on the
surface of the earth during the autumn and winter season.’ Each seed lies like ‘a corpse’
within its grave - so long the seeds don’t germinate, they are almost dead. The west wind
protects them from sure death.
In the first five lines the wind’s awesomeness and wrath have been highlighted. But
when Shelley uses ‘chariotest’ the wind’s new aspect is revealed. The word ‘chariotest’
suggests ‘the divine impulsiveness of the force that drives the seeds, that moves the cycle of
life, that destroys and preserves, inexorably’ (H. Bloom)
The second part of the stanza (line six onwards) projects the image of the preserver and
the creator. The tempestuous wind preserves the seeds (which have full potentiality of life
encased within themselves) so that his azure sister, the harbinger of spring, may help them to
germinate. The useless, the dead, the unwanted, the diseased are completely destroyed, The
west wind’s azure sister will, then, usher in a new living world. She will blow her clarion. At
the call of the clarion the soundly sleeping winged seeds will wake up, will get out of their
earthly bed and appear on the surface to have fresh air and then the ‘frosty’ earth will be
covered with ‘living hues’ and ‘odors’. The lines suggest ‘a submerged image of human, of
quasi-Christian resurrection.’ The clarion here is not merely the clarion of judgement
(reference to The Day of Judgement), but also of a shepherdess (or a shepherd). The azure
sister (of the spring) is a shepherdess at whose call the seeds come out like the flocks of sheep
to feed in the air. The clarion will not only proclaim the end of temporal, annual winter but
also the end of the eternal winter, on the Day of Judgement, “The image is religious
pastoral”. When Shelley refers to the flocks he has perhaps Jesus Christ in mind. Jesus is the
harbinger of peace and love. ‘The sweet buds driven over the landscape prophesy a finally
redeemed nature (by implication the world) which will accompany the last change of season’.
The final couplet joins the two parts of the first stanza:, the wind is both the preserver
and the destroyer-the emphasis is on the present, the wind is moving ‘everywhere’ implying
the prophetic call to the individual to turn now. The second and third stanzas follow the
pattern of the first. Remember, ‘repetition is a binding and pointing device in prophetic

30
poetry’ (H.B.) Each stanza ends with an appeal “oh, hear! “-a prayer of the I of the poet to the
Thou, the wind.
The poet describes the impact of the wind on the earth, air and water with great
precision. But the focal point of the poem, according to Harold Bloom is Thou-I relationship-
the mythmaking and the prophetic voice.
Stanza 2
In the second stanza the sky is likened to a stream or an ocean (deep), thus the word deep
connects the stanza with the next one (3rd) and when the poet talks of “the tangled boughs’
the
1. Some critics interpret ‘flocks’ as the flocks of birds who soar high in the sky and feed on
insects, which are not visible to naked human eyes, so they (birds) seem to feed in air (Pirie)
stanza automatically gets linked with the first one. Deep also means that the sky looks like a
bowl. Exploiting the natural-phenomena of the evaporation, Shelley creates an image of
destruction and preservation. The water of the ocean evaporating, rising up, forming clouds in
the sky is skillfully presented. Shelley is describing natural phenomena through a poetic
imagery.
Thick water vapours are rising from the ocean, going up, higher and higher, and then
spreading in the sky, forming dense solid clouds. It appears that a tree has grown out of the
ocean and its boughs and leaves have spread in the sky. The wind blows fiercely and seems to
shake “the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean” consequently the clouds are scattered in the
deep sky from horizon to the zenith’s height like the ‘decaying leaves. But the clouds are not
dead sky leaves’ they are angels of rain and lightning. Why angels? They will revive life
(natural) and give sustenance to the earth, Angels thus are associated with the winged seeds;
destruction and regeneration occur simultaneously.
Commenting on the second stanza Pottle writes. “The second stanza presents the action
of the wind in the sky. The poet’s eye goes up, and he sees there something like the scene in
the forest. High up is the canopy of solid, relatively stationary clouds, below are smaller
‘loose’ clouds driven swiftly along by the wind. Shelley calls the upper stationary cloud
formations the ‘boughs of Heaven and Ocean, because it consists of condensed water vapour
drawn up from the ocean by the heat of the sun (The Case of Shelley)
The formation of the clouds from the’ dim verge of the horizon to the Zenith’s height’ is
presented through the image of frenzied Maenad’s scattered, uplifted hair. The dark clouds
with accompanying storms are as terrifying as the frightening appearance of Maenad with her
loose uplifted hair. Maenad symbolises the destructive force here. Shelley through the image
of Maenad is once again presenting the wind as a destroyer. The west wind here’ prophesies a
storm (a revolution) which tears down kingdoms human lives as well as trees and leaves’

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 The sound of the wind moving through the forest is dirge like, commemorating the death
of the year. ‘The year and all that lived are sepulchered by the blackening dome of the storm-
driven sky, the association being political mainly” (H. Bloom).
Stanza 3
The impact of the wind is felt both by the peaceful Mediterranean and the vast Atlantic, The
Mediterranean is lulled by the gentle waves and is dreaming of the glory of the ancient
Greece and Rome. ‘The calm of the Mediterranean idealizes the best of the past’. The
outward appearance of the sea is the reminder of’ a graciousness and peace that is Elysian
and that can be found in this life at its best movements.’ The reflection of old palaces and
towers in the crystal-clear calm water of the sea are his summer dreams. The old palaces and
towers are the emblems of once despotic power, but now they have been subdued and
mellowed, have become ‘that regret for what has passed and is passing’.
The Mediterranean is rudely awakened by the west wind from its dreams. Even the great
Atlantic is terrified. The waves of the Ocean cleave themselves into chasms to allow the wind
to move without any hindrance. The sapless foliage, plants, flowers and woods, growing
inside the ocean, on hearing the thunderous voice of the wind, grow gray and shake with fear
and drop themselves - they surrender to the might of the wind. The poet appeals to the wind
to hear him. But the wind is so much engrossed in its’ activities that the poet’s appeal goes
unheeded.
Reference to die summer is significant in this stanza. Summer is over, it is autumn which
will soon be followed by spring. The present is thus linked with the past as in the first stanza.
The present autumn also refers to the future spring when all the gloom will disappear and
there will be resurrection, rejuvenation of life.
By implication (in the first three stanzas) Shelley asserts that only a radical revolution
can destroy the values, ideas, institutions and beliefs which have, become useless and which
have chained human beings. This revolution will be a blessing for it will lay down the
foundations of a Utopian world. The wind-the uncontrollable, powerful and fierce wind -
becomes the symbol of the revolution, Shelley, the visionary, had always dreamt of it.
In these stanzas “Shelley has also established the supremacy of the wind over the earth,
the sky and the ocean and highlighted the ferocious and destructive nature of the wind as well
as its power of preserving life.” He concentrates on 7”hou-Irelationship and realizes that
Thou is both a destroyer (Rudra) and the preserver (Vishnu-Shiva). It is omnipresent and
omnipotent. Shelley’s I has been persistently appealing to the thou of the wind,’ Oh, hear!1 In
the next stanza-he has to make a choice-cither he should surrender himself to the wind as an
object for it to experience (like a leaf, a cloud or a wave) or to command the wind to be one
with him.

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Stanza 4
He realizes that his enthusiasm for a change in the world for the welfare of mankind has been
subdued by the adverse circumstances, yet he is not fully ‘dead’. The ‘spark’ is still there-it
only needs to be enkindled. The poet, the reformer, the dreamer in him is still alive.
He continues to address the wind as thou (in stanzas 4+5) and also recognizes his human
situation. He cannot be it like the leaf, the wave and the cloud to be carried away by the
wind-his ‘I’ needs the wind’s protection. The poet asserts that he is not an object - a thing
without emotions, feelings, intellect, understanding and imagination. If he were a dead leaf, a
swift cloud or a wave, he would have surrendered himself to the powerful wind and allowed
it to lift him up, throw him around and share its might. But he belongs to human species-
hence he has been an active participant in humanity’ s successes and failures. As a young boy
he has been as uncontrollable as the tempestuous wind and had always challenged it, tried to
outstrip it, but now he has fallen on the thorns of life and is bleeding. Is Shelley indulging in
self-pity here? Or is he drawing our attention to the failure of the French Revolution, to the
set back received by the freedom fighters in Europe and also the mass movement of the
workers of the Peterloo which ended in a massacre? Being a radical, a rebel, a visionary, and
a fighter for human liberty, he is upset at the sufferings of human beings at the hands of
anarchists, tyrants and tyrannical institutions (religious, political, social and educational). Out
of disgust and despair he appeals to the wind.
Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf and a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy chain of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee......
The tone of the stanza is a little bit subdued. Shelley the poet-who was “once like thee’-
uncontrollable-and who often competed with the ‘speed’ of the wind in his boyhood days has
been ‘chained’ and ‘bowed’ by hours, has fallen upon the thorns of life and is bleeding-the “
depth of the protagonist’s alienation ‘from the indomitable spirit of the wind is highlighted”.
When Shelley says that he has fallen upon the thorns of life and is bleeding, he is presenting
himself as a Prometheus, Orpheus and Jesus figure.
‘In this Ode the song that breaks in the fourth stanza has lost in timelessness, swiftness,
pride, when it rises again in the final stanza, but it has gained ‘a deep autumnal tone sweet
though in sadness’. (H. Bloom).
Shelley’s appeal to the wind is similar to the laments of Job. (The Bible) Job prays for
his natural destruction either in the same way as his own children who were swept away by
‘the great wind from across the wilderness or else to be again as he was in the days of his
youth....When the Almighty was yet with me’. Job is reconciled to the voice speaking out of
the wind. No voice consoles Shelley in the ‘’Ode”.

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Stanza 5
The myth-making (that is Thou-I relationship between the west wind and the poet) takes a
new-shape in the final stanza. In this stanza the wind is still thou for the poet, but the poet’s /
has almost changed into it and so in the concluding stanza he first identifies himself with the
forest trees. What Shelley implies here is that the dead thoughts (despondent thoughts) have
crippled him and symbolically he has become ‘useless’ or ‘dead’ like a leaf, a wave, and a
cloud. He desires the wind to destroy all that is not required, remove this despondency so that
his prophetic voice is not subdued.
Harold Bloom explains the stanza five thus: “The thoughts are dead only in that they
have also become it, they are poems already written. But the l (spirit) of the poet is not yet
dead, nor is it to be submerged in the wind... when the poet says ‘Let your spirit be my spirit’,
he implies that the impetuosity, and energy of the wind may be his, and ‘my message may be
your message’. As the Prophet needs God and God also needs the Prophet, the poet needs the
wind as the latter needs the Poet. No mystical merging into a larger Identity but mutual
confrontation of two realities is what is involved here”’. (H. Bloom)
Let the aeolian harp (lyre) of the forest be combined with the ‘mighty harmonies’ of the
wind’s spirit for producing ‘the deep autumnal tone’. Both the Poet’s spirit and the spirit of
the wind must join together to sound ‘the trumpet of prophecy,” before the clarion is blown
by the spring. What’s the prophecy?
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
And thus Shelley in his “Ode” has achieved his goal - he has made the thou of the wind, /
of the poet.
.......Be thou. spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one.
The Oneness has been achieved.
The visionary poet in Shelley has established a rapport with the Spirit of the Wild West
Wind/This coming togetherness will sound ‘the trumpet of the prophecy’, the poet’s words
will be scattered among mankind. The voice of the wind will be the voice of the poet himself
and the unawakeneed earth (not yet aware of its liberating power) will wake up and then
winter would disappear forever and spring-joy, happiness, liberty, love, equality and brother-
hood will reign the earth.

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 (ii) Ozymandias
Ankita Sethi

1. Learning Objectives
This lesson is will enable you to:
 Understand and appreciate Romantic poetry
 Critically engage with the genre, form, themes and literary devices used in the
Romantic era
 Comprehend the attitude of the poet towards the idea of decay and mortality
 Acknowledge the impermanence of power and glory
2. About the Poem
An unconventional sonnet in the iambic pentameter, Ozymandias deals with crucial themes
like role of art, the idea of decay and mortality. Like the poet who rejected religion and defied
social conventions, the poem also defies the set pattern of a sonnet. Shelley formed his own
rhyming scheme for the poem which was a radical innovation in his day. The poem follows
ABABACDCEDEFEF rhyming scheme which is a far cry from the traditional one. The poem
is also unconventional because sonnets are usually written by the men who profess their love
in the form of verse and the subject in such traditional sonnets is the beloved. This poem
takes Egyptian King/Pharaoh Ramses the Great, the Greeks knew him as Ozymandias. He
was considered as one of the most powerful and eminent ancient Egyptian King.
3. Analysis–Lines 1-8
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

The poem starts with narrator’s recollection of a memory of a traveler who came from an
ancient and exotic empire. The traveler told him a tale of desolation and ruined state of the
empire which used to be great. In the second line ‘two vast trunkless legs of stone’ vividly
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depicts the derelict and broken statue of a seemingly great man who is unknown to both the
narrator and the reader. Near by the statue, its head, ‘a shattered visage’ lay ‘Half sunk’ in the
sand. The narrator appreciates the sculptor who carved it out of the stone. The sculptor was
deft and perceptive enough to understand visage’s emotion and imprinted it with the same
passion. Shelley also comments on the romantic ideal of the timelessness of art. Here, the
poet/reader knows about the statue not because of the sculptor but because of the statue’s
symbol as an art that lasts forever.
Self- Check Questions
1: What does the title refer to?
2: Elaborate upon the kind of feelings that words like ‘frown’, ‘wrinkled lip’ and ‘sneer of
cold command’ induce?
4. Analysis- Lines 9-14
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The next verse or sestet informs the reader about the identity of the shattered and sunken
visage in the previous verse or octet. The noble language of the inscription instantaneously
reflects megalomania (obsession/delusion about one’s power) and vainglory. The treatment
could be seen in a way which inspires awe in the same way epic poetry does. The statement
by Satan in the great epic, Paradise Lost, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’
serves as an example of such psyche. The very next line immediately negates the idea with a
powerful irony. The king who so proudly boasted his achievements that others would despair
at his feet, was laid waste by time and history. Ozymandias’s once great empire was reduced
to nothing. The poet shows decay everywhere and the great statue of the ‘supreme Egyptian
emperor’ is now but a colossal wreck. Here Shelly comments upon the ephemeral nature of
civilizations where everything is bound to be lost into oblivion. The statue which was symbol
of strength and power is now humbled. The great civilization of Egypt is long gone and only
crumbling vestiges of the old empire remains.
The poem also acts like a double metaphor. The first one symbolizes political metaphor.
During Shelley’s time, King George III was the ruler of Great Britain. He ruled longer than
any monarch before him and was quite oppressive as the country was involved in many
militaristic conflicts around the world. Shelley abhorred the idea of such an oppressive
regime and thus the poem was written as a scathing criticism of unchecked power. Influenced

36
by the ideals of French Revolution, Shelley voiced his criticism against monarchy. Through
this poem, he comments upon human pride and the downfall of monarchy; no matter how
great it is, time and history will ultimately level it. The second metaphor acts on a general
level, for the didactic purpose of reader. The broken statue of Ozymandias also symbolizes
the pride of humanity. The proverb, “pride comes before fall” fits rightly as Shelly asserts
upon its short and glorious life followed by its decline and eventual ruin. Pride is also an
emotion which is manifested in violent ways. It must also be noted that Shelley believed in
peaceful protest as opposed to violent protests. Thus, the reader can understand his
disapproval of anything that incites violence.
Self- Check Questions
1: Comment on timelessness of art in context of this poem
2: Comment upon the poem as a metaphor.
3: ”My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
What do you understand by these lines?

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 Unit-3c

John Keats–Odes
Mary Samuel

Keats’s adopted ode form in place of narrative form for two reasons. One it gave him an
opportunity to invoke the spirit of the ‘object’ described and identify his I with the spirit.
‘Like prayer, lyric apostrophe addresses the other in the hope that the act of speech will lead
to communication between the “I” of the poet and the presence invoked...The Odes’ unforced
quality comes not just from the spontaneity with which they were composed, but Keats’s
discovery of a form which is built on tension between what is and what might be. The very
nature of the lyric ode assumes the subject and object are not one. Keats’s complex urges to
affirmation, questioning, and doubt are allowed full and unselfconscious play by the Odes’
clear distinction between speaker of object addressed and reader. The admitted subjectivity of
the genre is the basis of the Odes’ hard won objectivity.” (John Keats by John Barnard)
Keats’s famous Odes appeared in Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems
published in 1820. In this collection of poems Keats seems to concern himself with the
attitude of the Victorian public who were influenced by Bentham’s theory of Utilitarianism
towards poetry. The Benthamites ridiculed poetry because it had no utilitarian purpose, “it
deals with non-existent Truth. and Beauty, it creates fictitious world and propagates
unprofitable idealism.” In many of these poems Keats shows the conflict between the
visionary or imaginary world and the actual mundane life on this earth.” Paradoxically he
attempts to depict “how Imagination or Fancy can transport us from the world of sordid
reality to the world of Immortality, Beauty and Truth, yet Fancy cannot cheat us `forever’—
whatever we see ‘imaginatively’ is short-lived for the perplexed or retarded mind is forced to
come back to the actual existence.”
In order to write his Odes he made certain adjustments in the stanzaic forms. He
experimented with the sonnet. He invented a stanza which allowed thought-to be developed
across several stanzas without losing ‘the interwoven and complete’. (Keats’s words)
character of the sonnet. According to Barnard `Keats’s Odes strive for an interwoven
completeness, returning upon their own questions, each movement cutting in a.new direction,
yet seeking a resolution within the original poetic premise— “eve(r)y point of thought is the
centre of an intellectual world” (Keats, Letters, I, 243). As a body they question one another,
reformulate, and worry at closely related problems, forming a loose continued debate from
the “Ode to Psyche to that on “Indolence,” with “To Autumn” as a later and final return.
Broadly speaking the Odes are concerned with exclusion, with transience and loss, beauty
and pain, joy and sorrow, and the challenge which experienced reality presents to the
possibility of transcendence...each Ode is separate, a spider’s web growing from a specific
point...each poem feels its way .from its own beginnings and in some sense returns to that
beginning.’

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 Like Keats’s Endymion “Ode to Psyche” deals with pastoral setting, lovers (from
classical mythology) sleep in bowers and the speaker comes across a vision while wandering
through a forest. Here the similarity ends. The Ode is “a self-contained hymn to a goddess.”
“Psyche...the goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient
fervour—and perhaps never thought of in the old religion—I am more orthodox than to let
heathen Goddess be so neglected—“ (Keats’s Letters II 106)
`Ode to Psyche’ is an attempt by the self-conscious ‘modern’ imagination to create its
own myth. Psyche, the soul, needs the completion of love, and the poem’s final goal is a
dream of love as well as poetry. Both poetry and human love are creations of the sympathetic
imagination. “Ode to Psyche” differs from the two Odes—“Ode to A Nightingale” and “Ode
On a Grecian Urn”—because of its pattern of question is followed by affirmation,, it removes
all doubts.’ Middleton Murry and Earl Wasserman believe that the intention of Ode to
Grecian urn is to uphold art as the highest form of wisdom.” Symbolically urn may be taken
to be ‘a kind of truth proposed by art, more particularly by poetry and the imagination, but
one whose order of knowing is implicitly criticised by the speaker as a limited one which
denies humanity.’ (J. Barnard). The Urn is much more than a piece of art—the Ode is a
meditation upon an art object which offers a variety of challenges to the viewer. In the “Ode”
Keats subtly creates an imaginary urn which allows the viewer ‘to transpose a picture or art
objects into ‘words’. Keats not only brings out the contrast between life and time captured
and fossilised in art (inscribed pictures) and transitory life and time in the actual world but
also depicts that. Art makes life and time static and thus immortal but life and time go on
changing and so lead to impermanency and mutability.”
The order of Odes as published in 1820 volume—Nightingale, Grecian urn and Psyche—
indicates a movement from doubt to affirmation. All through the Ode the powerful
undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the ‘limitations’ of the Urn’s world does not permit the
speaker to accept the urn’s truth—`Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty’ for the urn is a cold
pastoral and it ‘teases’ the viewer.
Compared with “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the “Ode to A Nightingale” is a more mature
and complete poem. John Barnard writes, “Its tensions between flux and stasis, process and
annihilation, being and non-being, are integral to structure and meaning. Means and end
match perfectly. With consummate ease, the ‘Nightingale’ plays backwards and forwards
between the spontaneous song of an actual bird and the poet’s conscious and deepening
reflections. Neither a goddess nor an object, the nightingale allows for an unforced
meditation, an internal dialogue which is simultaneously an exchange between human and
non-human.”
Keats is always concerned with felt experience and common experience for he is a poet
of sight. His Odes deal with figures and people, and reveal how it feels to ‘be puzzled and
pained, yet joyful and ecstatic’. His ‘essential experience is the Oxymoronic realization that
the pain is indivisible from joy’.

39
 In his “Ode to Melancholy” beauty, joy and ‘aching pleasure’ exist in time.
Melancholy’s ‘sovran shrine’ is hidden in the ‘very temple of Delight.’ Keats is opposed to
suicide and tries to impress upon the reader that Melancholy is present all around us. We
must not shun it, rather we must experience it to the fullest. Melancholy is presented as a
mistress and a goddess. ‘The intensity of joy is dependent upon a sense of its passing’. The
moment we realise we are experiencing joy, it begins to decay. Sorrow and joy, melancholy
and pleasure are co-existent.
“Ode on Indolence” is an escapist poem. Keats considered his spring Odes as indulgent
self-deceptions.
The spring Odes were written during a spell of fine weather when Keats lived next door
to Fanny Brawne. In these Odes we find a very profound awareness of sufferings and of the
temporariness of beauty. They describe the experience of joy and sorrow, decay of beauty
and pleasure, life and death, immortality and mortality and meditate on how humanity can
cope with life’s contradictions.
Keats refashioned the sonnet form to suit his requirements in the Odes. The ten-lined
stanzas are formed with the combination of a quatrain (abab) and sestet (generally cdecde).
The quatrain gives an anchor to the verse and the sestet provides enough room to the verse to
expand. In ‘Ode to A Nightingale’ the line eight has been shortened while in `To Autumn’ a
septet has been used in place of a sestet.
The Odes are remarkable for ‘their fine description power and concentrated richness of
expression’. Word pictures are integral to the poem, there is nothing redundant.
“Compression, precision, compactness of expressions and images add beauty to the Odes.”
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees, meaning trees growing in the a cottage garden
is ‘ a highly original use of language”, ‘the coming musk rose, full of dewy wine’ (“Ode to a
Nightingale”) contains ideas of freshness, (dewy, coming) maturity (frill) and heady
intoxication (‘musk’, ‘wine’),
The figure of personification gives vitality to inanimate objects or abstractions. Autumn
is given a subtle personification—`conspiring with the sun,’ sitting careless on a granary
floor.’
`Keats has also used alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance
(repetition of vowel sounds) in these Odes. The musicality of the Odes is often dependent
upon the sound sequence and very often they reinforce in sound the sense which the words
express. The sound of insects is clearly present in the nasal on and n and in the s sounds of
“murmurous haunt of flies on the summer eves” as is the effervescence of wine in the
explosive bs of “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” (“Nightingale”). The knobbly bark of
the trees, the weight of the fruit and crispness of apples may all perhaps be felt in
ennunciating “moss’d Cottage—trees” (`Autumn’).’
Keats’s Spring Odes are concerned with ‘poetry as an art: its material, its images, the
moods of its creator and it claims to immortality’. Brian stone writes—“Ode to Psyche”
40
draws on Keats’s imaginative engagement with `the beautiful mythology of Greece’, to fancy
the elevation of the mortal lover of gold cupid to godhood herself.
Her temple, in the mind of the poet, will be dressed ‘With the wreathed trellis of a
working brain’, so that she will preside over, and participate in his acts of creation and love.
“Ode to A Nightingale” presents that familiar bird as a type of permanence in art, viewed in
the perspective of the poet’s own creative mood, the rise and decline of which constitute the
frame and determine the rhythm of the poem: his ecstasy in the half way state between wake
and asleep; his recognition of, and poetic profit form, the close relation between pain and
pleasure; and his understanding of the contrast between the imaginary world of poetic ecstasy
and the real world of suffering and death. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” pursues the idea of the
perfection and permanence of a fine work of art more selectively...“Ode on Melancholy
“...presents the mood of the title...as a rich state of mind in which intense feelings such as joy
and “aching pleasure” may be expressed more powerfully because of “the wakeful anguish of
the soul” in its melancholic state. ...There are three linked figures (“Ode on Indolence”)
which Keats treats as personifications of Love, Ambition and Poesy, they change as he moves
round the urn, and seem to be “Shadows”, “Ghosts” whom, in a mood of indolence, he
wishes to banish, that is, to cease being inspired by them”.

(i) Ode to a Nightingale

Mary Samuel

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
`Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

41
 Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night; 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d’around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

42
 Where with the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild: 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
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, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well

43
 As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? 80

A Study of the Poem

Introduction
The “Ode to A Nightingale” was written in May 1819. “The poem presents Keats’s
‘unappeased craving for permanence, his failure to escape the mutable world and die into a
higher life.’ The speaker (the poet) is overpowered by the spontaneous melodious song of a
Nightingale, he hopes to follow it into the forest dim, leaving behind the spectacle of human
death, suffering, fret and fever, and die so as to perpetuate the ecstatic moment. The poet on
the viewless wings of poesy moves into ‘the eternal realm of song’ and is able to feel the
charm of the embalmed beauty of nature and experience and visualise the magical effect of
the song of this immortal bird not only on himself but also in remote times on Ruth, Kings,
Clowns and the maidens imprisoned in the castles located on the shores of perilous sees. The
poet is transported to a world of eternal joy and immortality, his return to actuality is very
shattering. The nightingale impresses upon him the consciousness of his own mortality and
sharpens the contrast between sensation and thought. The poem also highlights the contrast
between the raptures of the bird’s song and consecutive reasoning of the perplexing and
retarding “dull brain.” Like the “Ode to Psyche” this ‘’Ode on a Nightingale” extols the
autonomous power of imagination which can create ‘beauty as a compensation of the life’s
losses’. The bird’s song also reveals how beauty consists of ‘the ecstasy’ (158) of fulfilment
as well as the “plaintive note” of disillusion. If Keats suspects the power of visionary
experience in the “Ode to Psyche”, in this Ode he is unable to sustain the ecstasy of that
experience till the end of the poem and he is forced to return to the actual world, from the
realm of fancy. The ending of the poem—Do I wake or sleep—undermines the poet’s song-
inspired visionary flight and casts doubt on the whole nightingale episode. Critics call the Ode
‘a reverie, inspite of the fact that Keats had actually heard a nightingale’s song from ‘their
Hamstead home and the bird’s song had inspired him to write this Ode.’ (Brown’s letter in
Keats’s Circle II, 65)

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The poem
Keats listens to the song of the nightingale. He feels extremely happy at its happiness. He
experiences an aching pleasure (pleasure felt as pain) on listening to it. He seems to have
forgotten his surroundings. The poet longs for a cup of wine to escape into the happy world of
the nightingale. He is then acutely reminded of the tragedy of human life -- the fever and fret
of life. Keats then seeks the help of poetic imagination. With Poesy, he finds himself
transported into the world of the nightingale which has all the beauty of early summer. His
happiness is intense and he is completely lost in that happy world. The pleasure that he feels
is so rich and true that he wants to make this luxurious moment a permanent one. So he yearns
for death. ‘It is rich to die’ in that temporary heaven. It would be a luxurious experience for
him because the nightingale is singing in ecstasy and he would die listening to it. Thus death
would become a boon, a positive, healthy experience for Keats now. Soon he realizes the
impossibility of the fulfilment of his desire. The idea of death reminds him strikingly of the
immortality of the bird (its song), nature’s music as contrasted with human mortality (change
and decay). The nightingale is immortal in the sense that its song knows no death. The beauty
and joy of the nightingale’s song do not change with the passage of time. Its song is the same
today as it was heard ages back, by kings and peasants, by Ruth, the Moabite woman in the
days of the old Testament and by princesses in forlorn fairy land in the middle ages of magic
and romance. So the song of the nightingale knows no historical or geographical limits. The
closing of the 7th stanza with the word ‘forlorn’ wakes him up from the world of poetry. He
realizes that he cannot escape from the realities of the world as easily as he had desired and
pretended to. He bids the bird good-bye and imagines the bird fading away into distant lands.
The poet returns to the realities of life, somewhat dazed. He is uncertain what is real—the
little happiness that he was lulled into or this dull life he was living. (M. Samuel)
Study Notes
Stanza I
Keats describes here the effect of the song of the nightingale upon his mind. As the poet
listens to the song of the nightingale, his heart aches, it is a feeling experienced due to
excessive joy at the bird’s song. That is so say, the happiness that he shares is so intense that it
becomes an aching pleasure, a pleasure felt as pain.
The poet feels that a numbness creeps over him—that his senses have been paralysed as
if he had taken some sleep inducing drink (narcotic) like hemlock or some sedative drink
made from opium. This again is due to excessive happiness at the bird’s song, the joy that he
feels overpowers his senses. In a minute the poet seems to forget his surroundings and is rapt
in the song of the nightingale. He feels as if he had sunk into Lethe (the river of forgetfulness
in Greek and Roman mythology, one of the rivers of the underworld or Hades).
The souls of the dead, according to ancient Greek belief, had to drink from Lethe before
they entered the Hades, the home of the dead.

45
 The aching pleasure that the poet feels is not because he is envious of the bird singing so
joyously but because he feels too happy in the happiness of the nightingale. The result is that
he is completely lost in it.
The poet loves the bird as it sings like a Dryad (wood nymph) who is supposed to be the
presiding deity of the forest in Greek mythology. The poet regards the bird as the spirit of joy
that is found in the woodland world. The poet imagines the nightingale to be a spirit of the
wood-land singing of the glories of summer so spontaneously in some “far off scene, of
woodland mystery and beauty”.
Melodious green: a green plot of ground, overgrown with beech trees and resounding
with the melody or music of the bird’s song.
Shadows numberless: light and shade falling upon the grassy plot as the light of the sun
filters through the foliage of trees.
Singest of summer: Probably it was due to the drugging effect that the poet felt so as the
poem was written in the spring season.
Full throated ease: a rich and condensed expression. Like an expert musician, the
nightingale is straining her throat to the fullest, yet the song is not strained but natural and
spontaneous.
Stanza II
The Poet shows an intense desire to escape or pass into the delightful world of the
nightingale, leaving the miserable world of the Man. He seeks the help of wine to affect this
escape.
Keats longs for a draught of the richest wine, rare old wine cooled in the deep cellars of
the earth for long years. It should be rich with the romantic spirit of the spring-season when
festivities are held in honour of Flora, the goddess of spring, by the grape gatherers in the
warmer regions of Southern France (Provence).
In other words, the wine that the poet would like to drink, should be rich with its
associations of the rustic and merry making activities like song and dance held in honour of
Flora in the country green (the village common) by the sunburnt Italian and French grape
gatherers.
Italy and Provence being in South of Europe are comparatively warm hence the natives
of these regions are ‘sunburnt’ as we Indians are. People in South regions of Europe are more
cheerful and romantic because the climate itself is inspiring these qualities.
Warm South: wine prepared in the warm regions of Italy and Provence. The poet does
not want ordinary wine, but one rich in contents and distilling all the romantic associations
and spirit of the warm southern regions especially of France and Italy. The greenness of the
happy earth, the sweetness of the flowers, the mirth and mystic of the sunburnt children of
Provence. All things should combine to add to its flavour, taste and delicacy.

46
 Blushful: red. Note that good wines are generally colourless. But the poet, to indulge his
taste for rich colours, must have it red.
Hippocrene: Greek word for the fountain, of Horse. A fountain on Mt. Helicon in
Greece, is said to have arisen, where Pegasus kicked Helicon. Its was sacred to the Muses
who preside over all arts and poetry. Its waters were said to be capable of imparting poetic
inspiration. Here it means stimulant of fancy or poetic inspiration.
Beaded bubbles: bead like bubbles.
Winking...brim: it is a graphic description of the idea of effervescence. As old, well-
fermented wine is poured into a glass or beaker, bead like bubbles rise to the brim of the glass
and then burst and disappear.
Purple stained mouth: the mouth of the glass or its brim is stained purple with the frothy
wine.
The poet desires for a beaker full of the wine of the fountain of Hippocrene with the
bubbles I shining at the surface and even the mouth of the beaker may be stained with the
purple or red colour of the wine.
Note: “The poet desired wine as a means of escape from the pain of his own thoughts
and of the world”. By drinking the wine Keats hopes to be absorbed wholly in the
nightingale’s song and thus be happy with the bird in the shady wood.
These lines bring out clearly one of the characteristics of Keats as a romantic poet—his
sensuousness.
We have an abundance of sensuous imagery in this stanza where the poet expresses a
passionate desire for some Provencal wine or wine from the fountain of muses. The original
and highly expressive phrases like “blushful Hippocrene,`beaded bubbles winking at the
brim’, ‘embalmed darkness’, ‘are highly pleasing to the sense of sight and sense of taste.
Matthew Arnold says, “Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous”.
Stanza III
Pain and misery of life is depicted. The stanza starts with the poet’s intense longing to escape
from the world of pain and misery and to become one with the bird and its happy woodland
life. In the very effort to forget his own misery or melancholy, Keats remembers only too
acutely, the universal tragedy of human destiny, the ills that assail life from all quarters
sparing neither age, nor sex nor beauty. Man suffers from boredom, disgust and despair, from
irritation and feverish excitement. Misery is widespread. People helplessly hear each other
groan. All those things which we value most—youth, beauty and’, love-are subject to disease
and decay. A thinking person is subject to grief and trouble. Keats feels bitterly that Love and
Beauty, -the two things that he desired most are short-lived. The thought of it fills him with
sadness.

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Stanza IV
Gloomy thoughts about human destiny are soon dismissed together with the possibility of
wine as an escape from them. Soon, the vehicle of flight is no longer wine but poetic fancy or
imagination. He is already with the nightingale among the branches of trees in a summer
garden hidden from the light of the moon who like a fairy queen holds her court in the sky
surrounded by her courtiers i.e. the stars. [Poetic imagination helps the poet to pass from the
real world to the ideal world.] Although the moon is shining in majestic glory in the sky, it is
only when the night breezes sway the branches and part the leaves that the gleams of
moonlight somewhat lessen the darkness under the trees full of green foliage and along the
zigzag moss-covered paths between them.
verdurous glooms — the green shadows of the forest
heaven — the (moonlit) sky
Note: Poetic fancy is a state of mental exaltation.
Stanza V
The poet is already with the bird in the forest in imagination. The place is dark but filled with
the perfume from the flowers growing on the bushes around his feet. Though he cannot see,
from the scent emanating from the flowers he can guess what flowers are at his feet or what
blossoms are above his head. He can feel more than the sensory eye can see. The atmosphere
is filled with the sweet fragrance of flowers. From the sweet smell he can name several
flowers and plants that bloom there. He calls the darkness ‘embalmed darkness.’ He guesses
that the white hawthorn, the egalantine, the violet, the wild fruit trees, the first flower of mid-
summer (middle of May) the musk rose which is soon to blossom and which is full of dew
and honey to which the buzzing bees are attracted by its fragrance, are around the place.
Soft incense: a delicate, soothing perfume (A reference to the sense of smell).
The seasonable month: the month which is favourable to the growth of season’s flowers
(Spring).
Pastoral. egalantine: .a kind of wild rose which grows in country places.
Fast fading violets: short lived violets.
musk: a substance with a very strong smell, obtained from the male musk deer and used
for making perfumes.
Mid-May’s eldest child: the first flower to bloom in the middle of May,
The coming musk rose: the musk rose with the fragrance of musk which is about to
bloom. This was most probably written in early May.
Dewy wine: full of dew and honey (dew drops in the cup of the flower are referred to as
wine by the poet).
Murmurous haunt: haunted by flies or bees with a murmuring or buzzing sound.
48
 embalmed darkness: The whole darkness of the garden has been made fragrant by the
flowers of the season (darkness filled with a balmy fragrance). Embalmed is also associated
with death.
Stanza V shows the delighted response to the sensuous beauty of the physical world. The
poet is not describing what he actually sees around him. He tells us explicitly that there is no
light for him to distinguish the flowers growing on the ground and the blossoms on the trees
and hedges. He can only guess what they are from their scents.
Notice that ‘soft incense’, ‘embalmed darkness’, ‘dewy wine’, ‘seasonable month’, are
word pictures. Only Keats who is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous can convert incense
and perfume into something virtually solid. In this stanza we can say he has woven round
scent, warmth, colour, taste and sound into a texture of unforgettable beauty.
Stanza VI
While listening to the song of the nightingale in the dark, the poet feels that it would be ‘a
luxurious experience’ to die at such a moment, to fade away from existence without suffering
any pain at the mystic hour of midnight while listening to the rapturous and ecstatic song of
the nightingale. In fact the poet wants to perpetuate this moment of enchantment, and ecstasy.
It is rich to die now for the nightingale’s song will be a funeral prayer for Keats and he will
die listening to it. The nightingale would go on singing even when he is dead and can no
longer hear it.
Note: By the end of this stanza human and nightingale’s worlds have been entirely separated.
Call’d...names: have addressed him by many endearing epithets.
Stanza VII
The idea of death gradually brings him back to reality. The process starts in stanza 7 and ends
in stanza 8.
The poet calls the nightingale an immortal bird. The nightingale has now been
transformed into a symbol of its race and the song of the nightingale heard by countless
generations over centuries is symbolised by its permanence. The- poet here means that the
song or voice of the nightingale carries the same freshness and music as it did in the past and
it will continue to do so in future (though this particular bird will die).
Generations of nightingales follow one another, and they remain immortal in their songs,
their song is as sweet and charming today as it was in ancient days, in the Bible-history or
even in .fairy romance.
Immortal bird: The epithet is justified if the nightingale is taken as the type and symbol
of its race.
No hungry...down: the bird is not crushed to death in a savage struggle for existence such
as is waged in human society.

49
 The song of the nightingale that the poet now hears is exactly the same song that was
heard in ancient times. It is this characteristic that makes the poet give the title of immortality
to the nightingale. The bird’s song opens. the flood-gates of the poet’s memory and takes him
into the far-off age of legendary romance. It is the same song that the nightingale has been
pouring out since the beginning of the world, the same song which in ancient days must have
been heard by king and peasant alike; the same song which Ruth heard when she stood sad
and lonely in the cornfield of a strange land; the same song to hear which maidens dwelling
in magic castles, must have opened their casement windows in desolate fairy lands. The
magical effect of the song has been highlighted.
These castles are built on rocks of stormy seas in forlorn fairy land. The song of the
nightingale must have cheered the heart of a disconsolate princess held in duress by her
demon lover.
this passing night: to-night.-
emperor and clown: the greatest and the humblest. Clown here means common person.
the sad heart of Ruth: A reference to the story of Ruth in the Old Testament.
Ruth, a woman of Moab, was married to a Jew in Moab whose father had come from
Bethlehem of Judea. After her husband died, she migrated with her mother-in-law Naomi to
the distant ancestral land of Judea i.e., Bethlehem. There she began to glean corns of barley
left by the reapers in the field of Boaz, a distant relation of her father-in-law. He treated her
kindly and afterwards married her.
The Bible story does not say that Ruth was homesick or sad, but this would be natural
even if the sense of duty to her mother-in-law had led her to leave her home.
sick: pining, longing.
alien corn: foreign fields as she migrated from Moab.
The poet explains why he considers the nightingale immortal.
In Romantic stories like Arabian Nights, we hear of enchanted castles in which
princesses are imprisoned in magic castles and their magic windows open on the stormy
waves of a wild sea; opening and shutting automatically by magic. As the nightingale passes
over the enchanted castle singing its magic song, windows open of themselves to allow some
imprisoned princess to hear its song.
fairy lands forlorn: some far off deserted uninhabited lands of the fairies or legendary
countries of romance as in the Arabian Nights.
forlorn: solitary or deserted.
“These two lines condense the whole world of romantic imagination and conjure up by
their suggestion, the very world of romance. In all poetry, there is no better expression of the
spirit of romance than these lines”.

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 We see the voice of the nightingale is made immune first to history then to geography; it
can establish a rapport with dead generations or fairy lands.
Stanza VIII
The mood of exaltation is over. The use or thought of the word `forlorn’ acts as a rude
reminder to the poet of his own forlorn or solitary condition (Mention of the world ‘forlorn’
has broken the spell of imagination). The word has brought him back to reality. It is just like
the tolling of a bell that reminds him of some forgotten work. It reminds the poet of the
realities of life which he had forgotten on account of the nightingale’s song.
The poet finds that after all the powers of fancy are exaggerated. Man cannot ignore the
sad realities of life even with the help of fancy or imagination. As the spell of imagination
breaks, the poet feels that the bird has flown away and he bids good-bye to the nightingale.
He is disappointed in man’s imaginative faculty, which is commonly believed to have great
powers of making people forget themselves and their surroundings. In his case, the spell of
imagination has been short lived, he is already awake to the sad realities of life.
The poet is not sure whether he had been seeing a vision in sleep or dreaming while
awake. “Was it a vision of a waking dream? Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?” There is
at least one clear change in the situation. He has ceased to hear the nightingale’s song. How is
he to explain this?
plaintive anthem: song full of complaint. It refers to the legendary story of the
nightingale. Her human name was Philomel. They were two sisters. Her elder sister married
and went off with her husband. But she loved her so much that she sent back her husband to
fetch Philomel. On the way, he raped her and to conceal his secret, he cut off her tongue. The
gods turned her into a nightingale, and she goes about pouring out her complaint against that
injustice.
Some Observations
Ode to a Nightingale contains the spirit of romance and it is extremely passionate and
sensuous in its descriptions and expressions. The sensuousness of Keats should not be
misunderstood for delight in cheap sensual pleasures. Keats’s sensuousness is in fact a higher
conception of beauty. He presents the details with such expressions that the reader’s eyes,
ears and other senses perceive and appreciate and feel what he describes.
The descriptions of the poet’s desire for a cup of cool Provencal wine tasting of flowers,
dance and sunburnt mirth and his longing for a beaker of the warm southern wine which
would inspire him like the water from the fountain sacred to the muses (Hippocrene) are
highly sensuous and appeal to the reader’s sense of sight, and smell. Equally pleasing to the
senses is the description of the flowers and plants in the embalmed darkness of the forest and
of the white hawthorn, fast fading violets, mask rose, mid-may’s eldest child etc. These are
concrete pictures which the reader can see easily with his inward eye and derive an aesthetic
satisfaction.

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 Allied to his sensuousness is the love of nature, again an aspect of romanticism revealed
in this poem. The Nightingale’s song is dear to the poet. Nothing can surpass the delicate
beauty of the heavenly light that falls when blown by the breezes, on the ‘verdurous glooms’
and ‘winding mossy ways’. In this ode as in several others, we find a note of sadness, in the
background of the music of Nature and Art. Melancholy is again a romantic quality. Stanza
III depicts the pain and misery of life and transitoriness of the things we value most—youth,
beauty and love. Keats sees this in contrast to the happiness of the nightingale’s world.
The last three lines of the Stanza VII, “The same that oft times hath/Charmed magic
casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn” breathe the spirit of
romance. Keats’s love of the sensuous luxury of the medieval atmosphere is also visible here.
It may also be noted that the poem is highly self revealing which is again a romantic
quality. With all these qualities, the poem finds a responsive echo in the hearts of the reader.
The poem is an expression of an intense personal mood of the poet, a sense of pity for
himself (presented obliquely) and sympathy for humanity, and as such it possesses much
human interest. It expresses a familiar mood, a desire for death, for release from this worldly
life of sorrow and struggle, from fever and fret of this life into the world of the nightingale
which to the poet is a world of lasting peace and happiness, of music, joy and beauty. Thus
we get a painful contrast between the world of Man and the world of the Nightingale. The
world of the Nightingale appeals to the poet for it is a world of richness and beauty, of deep
sensuousness and of natural loveliness.
The nightingale’s song becomes merely a peg on which to hang the varied wealth of the
poet’s mind, his sense of beauty, his sense of music and his sense of sadness arising out of the
transitoriness of human happiness and struggle of human life.
A critic says, ‘His mind is lifted out of the thought of pain by the song of the nightingale
which his imagination transmutes into the immortal voice of romance vibrating with all the
remembered melodies of the past. When the music is fled, his spirit turns for lonely back to
earth and seems to say to us, “Life with all its contradictions, pain and pleasure, beauty and
ugliness is still beautiful. It must be accepted or faced bravely.” (Mary Samuel)
A Critical Analysis of the “Ode”.
The poem consists of eight stanzas. In the first stanza we find the speaker ‘benumbed,
drained, as it were of all sensation through listening to the nightingale’s song’. Yet
paradoxically he experiences pain and heartache. Then he claims to share in the bird’s song.
The joy pain paradox, which he in his “Ode to Melancholy” asserts to be an essential
characteristic of human existence, has a deeper meaning in the context of the “Ode to a
Nightingale”. The poet’s (speaker’s) happiness in empathy with the bird is so intense and
profound that it verges on pain. Their painful happiness crosses all limits so he feels
exhausted and overcome by “drowsy numbness”. He is not envious of the bird’s ‘happy lot’,
he can imaginatively participate in it. He also realizes that his desire to join the nightingale
may be eventually thwarted; he cannot avoid ‘envy’ as he longs for ‘the unearthly felicity
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enjoyed by the “Dryad of the trees”. The happiness is caused by ‘the momentarily shared
ecstasy’, the pain is due to ‘the fore-knowledge of the ultimate frustration. Similarly
conscious cuts with pain across the drugged numbness of the opening lines before it
temporarily recedes to make room for the empathetic identification with the bird’s “full-
throated ease”.”
E.C. Pettet has demonstrated how the dull-half rhyming nasals of the opening quatrain,
interrupted by assonance of the a in aches and pains and modulating into clean ringing long e
and o sounds of trees, melodious beechen green and ‘full-throated ease” at the end of the
stanza, reflect the speaker’s pain and numbness in contrast with the bird’s happiness. The
Oxymoron of painful numbness and implied paradox of drugged happiness convey a peculiar
state completely cut off from reality, with the poet poised for the visionary flight.
The speaker in the next stanza explicitly mentions his impulse to journey into the happy
realm of the ‘nightingale and wine will be the vehicle. The poet’s throat wisher for a draught
of vintage”, which brings into play all the five senses. First we have ‘the complex
synaesthetic imagery which conjures up the warm mirthful song and dance of Provencal in
the cool taste and bubbling sound of the wine, and the seductive, sensual blushing of
Hippocrene. The imagery suggests that only through the life of senses one could journey into
transcendence. Note the blushful Hippocrene is the fountain of the everlasting Muses and
symbol of poetic inspiration. The speaker with the help of wine would like to journey the
realm of the immortals—the home of the Nightingale, away from the actual world.’
In the third stanza the speaker presents ‘the ode’s dialectic pattern by contrasting the
imagined ideal world with our temporal world of human wretchedness.’ Here in this world a
fatally ill youth like Torn Keats “with an exquisite love of life” falls into “a lingering state”.
(Keats’s Letters I, 293) and “grows pale and spectre thin and dies”. Some critics have
disparaged this stanza as “bad rhetoric” or attributed “weakness” to Keats for referring to his
brother’s death. But there is. nothing ‘wrong in depicting an incident for the object Of the
Ode is to present a symbolic conflict between the worlds of time and timelessness. In fact the
diction, imagery, symbolism, rhyme and “the prosaic matter of fact tone” of this “completely
disintoxicated and disenchanted stanza” (F.R. Leavis) dramatise the contrast between the
bird’s unself-conscious harmony with the natural surrounding (“among the leaves”) and
man’s awareness of transitoriness, disappointment, disease and death, which leads to his
alienation from his surroundings. The rhythmic flow of the line “what though amongst the
leaves hast never known” is disrupted with the cataloguing of human ills. “The weariness, the
fever, the fret” (Line reminds us of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” Lines 39-40, 52-53).
Here the word obstructs the fluent flow of the rhythm and diverts our attention to the human
transitoriness (“few sad, last grey hairs,” “pale and spectre thin and dies”). Why does the poet
desire to fade away, to dissolve, to forget? The poet would like to fade away into the
nightingale’s forest to overcome his “leaden eyed despair” his visionary flight would carry
him away from suffering mankind towards Dryad’s forest dim (1-20), the magic kingdom of

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Queen Moon and starry fays (36-37) or easeful Death (50). All these wishes are paradoxical
and futile quest for permanence and unconsciousness.
Keats from the very beginning of the Ode prepares the reader for his equivocal death-
wish. We have numbness, hemlock, letheward movement in stanza one, then the desire “to
dissolve and quite forget”(line 21) and “the embalmed darkness” (43) leaf-buried “fast fading
violets” of a landscape not seen but felt, a half-supernatural bower (Stanza 5). In this stanza
the poet penetrates into the essence of things with his imaginative power and gives us a
picture of transcendence as if the “happiness on Earth” experienced in the first stanza were
here “repeated in a finer tone” (Keats’s letters I 185).
The poet dreams of an easeful painless transition to a higher mode of existence—the
presentation of the easeful death differs from the description of the frightening palsy ridden
old age, or spectre thin youth or consumptive patients in the second stanza. Death would
“take into the air” the poet’s “quiet breath” while “the nightingale is pouring forth (its) soul
abroad/In such an ecstasy”. Death seems ‘rich’ for the poet would die into the eternal music.
Note death only seems ‘rich’. Although in line 35 the poet claims “Already with thee”, but he
had never left the earth, he has perhaps been entrancingly gazing at the direction of the song
for here his dull consecutively reasoning brain in a brutal truncating monosyllable tells him
that in death he would “become a sod”.
The recollection of the earth bound condition ending in the silence of death once again
stirs the speaker to contemplate on the music of the bird, which he is still hearing and he
describes the nightingale as ‘Immortal’. “Thou was not born for death, Immortal Bird”.
Critics have been debating why Keats has addressed the nightingale as Immortal bird Is the
nightingale immortal because “of its imperishable song” (Colvin), because it stands for its
species (Lowell) because it is a Dryad (Garrod), because it symbolises poetry (Muir) or art
(Hough) or because it lacks “man’s self consciousness” and is “in harmony with its world”
(Brooks and Warren). Andrew J. Kappel finds its immortality in its “native naturalness” and
its “obliviousness to transience”.
Ruth’s home sickness is not mentioned in the Bible. Many critics agree with Garrod who
suggests that the idea of a home sick gleaner is derived from Wordsworth’s The Solitary
Reaper. Victor J. Lams finds the influence of Milton’s nightingale on the lines. Ruth’s
homesickness and alienation underlines the natural feeling of estrangement one experiences
in an ‘alien’ land. “Just as the nightingale’s immortality fills the void left by Keats’s
recognition of his own mortality, so Ruth sick for home standing ‘in tears amid the alien
corn’ mirrors the poet’s need for perfect union with the ideal other, his yearning for the
nightingale’s harmony with its environment, and his estrangement from the natural world in
which the unconsciousness grain achieves fulfillment by being harvested.”
By presenting fancy as “a deceiving elf’ the speaker prepares himself to accept nature’s
cyclical process of death (fading violets) and birth (the coming musk rose) depicted in stanza
five. The recognition of the inevitability of change, of death does not stop his yearning for

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immortality. He ends the Ode with a question—was he dreaming or sleeping. In the “Ode to
A Nightingale” the speaker remains baffled by the burden of the mystery and the painful gulf
between eternity (immortality) and an impermanent realm in which old age wastes
generations hungry for permanence and perfection. Both in “La Belle” and “the Nightingale”
the protagonist is driven back from a transcendental world to sordid actuality. (adapted).

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 (ii) Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ankita Sethi

Learning Objectives
The objective of reading this lesson is to enable the student to:
 Understand and appreciate Romantic poetry
 Critically engage with the genre, form, themes and literary devices used in the
Romantic era
 Comprehend the attitude of the poet towards art
About the Poem
Written by John Keats in the year 1819, the poem Ode to a Grecian Urn describes the
curiosity and fascination of the speaker for the Grecian urn. The poets raises a number of
questions on themes like art, beauty and immortality. Inspired by his visits at the British
museum and witnessing the aesthetics of the Grecian urns, the poem idealizes beauty which
remains to be the highest and the eternal truth. The images on the urn and its depiction by the
poet, represent the complex nature of art and the innate contradictions.
Stanza 1
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

The poem begins with Keats addressing the Grecian urn as ‘the unravish’d bride of quietness’
which immediately establishes the urn as an object to whom poet’s reflections are directed. In
the first stanza, the poet is speaking to the urn and addresses it as an offspring of silence and
slow time. The urn is a result of an artist’s skill and creativity on a piece of stone. The aging
process of earth is much slower and in a way it projects the illusion of ageless continuity,
whereas art itself exists on a plane which is beyond the temporal. Thus, the poet sees it as an
eternal object of art unaffected by decay. The poet also addresses it as a Sylvan Historian, the
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etymology of this word comes from ‘Silvanus’ the Roman god of forests. It has been
addressed as a peaceful and pleasant historian who is recounting a tale of a distant past
through pictorial language on its body. Keats plays with the ambiguity of the narrative and
represents a mere ambiguous outline of men chasing women. It must be noted that ancient
Greece wine jars also called amphora, depict many mythological and legendary tales
including chase and seduction of women by men.
Self- Check Questions
Q1: What has the urn been referred to?
Q2: How does the urn became an object of poet’s reflections?
Stanza 2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

The theme of ambiguity develops further in this stanza. The writer does not define the images
in the strictest sense and reiterates his approach with the same subtlety. ‘Heard melodies are
sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’, connotes that anything that attracts our physical senses
is definitely beautiful and sensuous, but the ones that appeal to our soul or deeper
consciousness are invisible to the senses and are metaphysical in nature. The ode’s focus is
mainly on art, beauty, love, transcendence and eternity. These ideas are enumerated in the
second part of the second stanza when he addresses the bold lover who cannot kiss his
timeless beloved as she exists beyond the temporal plane, the same way the Grecian Urn
exists. However, the urn represents art as timeless, whereas the beloved represents love or
lover as eternal. Keats also subtly conveys paradox as a metanarrative; the lover cannot kiss
his beloved, thus unable to bring fruition or consummation of their love yet it stays eternal. In
the same way, in the first stanza, the pictures of men chasing women convey motion and yet
they never seem to get hold of any of them. Both are representations of objects/ideas frozen
in time.

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Self- Check Questions
Q1: What is the relevance of the phrase ‘those unheard are sweeter’ in context of the poem?
Q2: How has the beloved been compared to the urn?
Stanza 3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

The poet keeps addressing things and people so as to bring the wider themes to the reader. In
the third stanza Keats talks to a tree who doesn’t bid the Spring adieu by holding on to its
leaves. The imagery of frozen in time is maintained throughout and especially in three lines
which repeatedly use words ‘forever’ referring to the paradoxical and timeless idea of art,
beauty and love as symbolized in the ‘unheard melodies’. However, a novel paradox arises;
since everything is timeless, everything is youthful and motionless. This living-death
confounds Keats and he tries to reach a resolution in the next stanza by introducing a new
perspective.
Stanza 4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

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Keats now takes into account the idea of sacrifice as expressed in the paintings by Claude
Lorrain and Raphael. The poet imagines the crowd of citizens and speculates whether such a
place exists outside the realm of art. He now challenges art itself for its limiting beliefs but
arrives at a conclusion that one can never ascertain the credibility, location or existence of the
subject concerned. Thus the questions remain without any possibility of a definite answer.
Stanza 5
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Thus, Keats comes back to subject of his poem, the Grecian urn and declares it being a work
of timeless art. Since it is timeless, it is cold and distant from mortal and ageing human
beings. Its existence as an object of eternity is incomprehensible to the mortal beings. Despite
that, it was shaped with emotions by a human being and the urn will be able to instruct
humanity like a ‘historian’. It becomes an ambiguous task for the reader, to find whether in
the conclusion, the Grecian urn is a mouthpiece of the poet who explicates his philosophy or
is simply recounting romantic ideal ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. In fact, one doesn’t really
know if it is Keats interacting with the urn or if it is the reader interacting with the work of
art.
Self-Check Questions
Q1: What according to the poet is the function of art?
Q2: What did you understand by the concluding lines of this poem?
Q3: What do you understand by ageless continuity in context of the poem?

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 (iii) Ode to Autumn
Mary Samuel

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy. hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
—While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

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 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

A Study of the Poem

Introduction
In his spring Odes written in 1819 Keats deals with the themes of the inevitability of change
and death. He reveals that we can imaginatively create a world of permanent joy and beauty,
but this visionary world is not `eternal’, since imagination or poetic fancy is a deceiving elf.
We are soon transported to the real world of mutability, hardships and changeability. The
theme of inevitable change is once again taken up in the To Autumn. Keats gives a
naturalistic answer to the questions posed about the changeability in the spring Odes and the
Fall of Hyperion.
In a Letter of 21st September 1819, Keats writes: “How beautiful the scene 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—Any 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 a poem.” (Letter II,
167)
The pictures of warm autumn with its stubbles inspired Keats to write “To Autumn.”
Except in the letter Dian skies, there is no reference to classical myths in the poem. The poem
presents ‘a calmer response to beauty than the May Odes.’ In the May Odes (Spring Odes)
we are all the time aware of the ‘personal’ presence of the poet but in To Autumn the poet’s
personality is submerged in the evocation of the season. The poet graciously accepts the
beauty of Autumn without probing the meaning of its transcience.
`To Autumn” is considered to be a perfect poem because of its “flawless technique, its
richness of imagery and its breadth of gaze within the limits of its subject” (Deryun
Chatwin—Notes on Keats’s Poetry and Prose).
To Keats Autumn is ‘the time of fulfillment, plentitude and harvest. The whole poem is
structured in answer to the question posed at the beginning of the third stanza, “Where are the
songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” This powerful threat to the celebration of autumn calls
up the alternative image of autumn as the melancholy precursor of winter and death. The
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Ode’s reply is silently argued through its images and its plot. The annual cycle of the seasons,
the movement from rebirth to death, is as natural to man as it is to nature. Without autumn’s
movement into winter there could be no spring. Human and natural life are intrinsically tied
to the pattern of the change and renewal. Autumn’s beauty is particular, to itself, dependent
upon the fact that it is neither winter, spring, nor summer. Hence “thou hast thy music too”.
(John Bernard—John Keats)
The Poem
The poem consists of three stanzas, each depicting a particular aspect or picture of autumn—
its beginning to its end. The plot develops from the preharvest ripeness (stanza one) to the
contented country side human beings busy in ‘harvesting’ (stanza two) and concludes with
the poignant emptiness following the completion of the harvest. Each stanza shows one phase
of autumn and nature in a different relationship to mankind.
The opening line—“season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”—sums up the character of
autumn. Autumn is a ‘productive’ season, a season of ‘ripeness’ and `maturity’—
‘mellowness’. And its mists herald the approach of cold and damp winter season. The first
stanza is loaded with meanings. Autumn is “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”,
conspires with the “maturing sun” to fill “all the fruit with ripeness to the core.” The sun and
the Autumn are “close bosom friends” so they secretly conspire to fill the fruits to the core.
The maturing sun may be considered a male figure and “Autumn” a female—they
mysteriously conspire to overload fruit and flowers. There is no indication of the presence of
human beings although the thatch eves, the moss’d Cottage-trees, gourd and bees point to the
houses of the inhabitants who might have planted these trees earlier. But it is the mysterious
conspiracy of the sun and the autumn which loads and blesses with fruit the vines, bends the
cottage-trees with apples and fills all fruit with ripeness to the core. The poet has
predominantly used tactile imagery to highlight natures’ strange power to “plump” and
“swell” the vegetable world. Thus the first stanza is crammed with images suggesting
plentifulness and fullness of vegetation—“load”, “bend”, “swell”, “plumps”—we get an
insight into the fullness and ripeness to the core—of the hazel nuts. The seemingly endless
budding of flowers is also a result of the conspiracy. The bees are befooled. They think that
the summer will never end as if they pay no attention to the mist. “For summer has o’er
brimmed their clammy cells.”
The first stanza has skillfully presented the high autumn. Commenting on the first stanza
Brian Stone in his The Poetry of Keats observes. ‘It (the poem) begins with a a subdued
apostrophe to Autumn: subdued because the personification goes only as far as suggesting a
conspiracy with the sun to work for ripeness. And for the rest of the first stanza ripeness, as
conveyed chiefly by a succession of powerful and simple verbs, is all. The vines are loaded
with fruit the trees are bent by the weight of the apples, gourds are swelled, hazel shells
plumped, and late flowers budded for the bees, whose clammy cells are accordingly over
brimmed. The concentration on what happens inside small natural growths such as fruits,
nuts, and flowers impresses fullness, sweetness and warmth upon the mind, with an interior
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sense of nature’s plentitude. The human work of the season, the exterior physical scene, the
sky above, are yet to come.”
The scene of stanza one is a cottage garden. The intimacy of the setting is suggested by
“close-bosom friend” and by the image of the bees’ clammy cells. It appears to be “a small,
tightly knit world.”
There is mobility in time and space as we go from stanza to stanza “The poem moves
outwards in space and time” The first stanza also suggests morning in the reference to mists,
but in the next stanza we come across the langour of mid-day heat. From the cottage the
poem moves to the wider, yet limited’, span of space—to the fields, the granary, the cider
press etc. The second stanza concentrates on human activities associated with the ripeness
and abundance of the autumn. In the early hours of the day—nature has been actively
engaged in producing abundant fruits, flowers and warmth. Now it is noon time. Autumn is
presented ‘as four figures completing harvest tasks.’ They are apparently English farmers but
symbolically they stand for ‘the beneficent co-operation between natural and human activity
which leads to harvest’ (John Barnard). The picture of the four human figures creates the
poem’s “pastoral idyll”. There is some sort of ambiguity about these figures—whether they
are men or women or both. There is one characteristic common to at least three of them that
is, “a kind of beautiful lethargy, compounded of repletion and ecstatic acceptance of their
roles in the fulfilment of the season.” (Brian Stone).
The first figure is perhaps that of a woman, ‘sitting carelessly on the granary floor, Her
hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind’. ‘Soft’ is used to frame a compound world—soft-
lifted, once again we have soft in the third stanza “soft-dying day.” ‘Soft is a word of
harmonious warmth.’ The second figure is presumably that of a man who is asleep “on a half-
reaped furrow” “drowsed with the fume of the poppies.” He is so much drugged that he
cannot finish the job. If the two figures are pictures of the “blissful lethargy,” the third one—
a gleaner (apparently a woman for women and children usually did the gleaning when the
reaping was completed) is pictured walking on the bridge across a brook, trying to balance
herself so that the load on her head does not fall down. The last figure could be a man or a
woman. The figure is patiently and leisurely watching the oozings from a cyder press. ‘All
these figures are ordinary human beings at their autumn occupations.’
It is interesting that the reaper is depicted with a hook not with a scythe. This description
associates the figure with the eighteenth century portrayals of Autumn as a man with a sickle,
while the poppies in the cornfield `suggest the presence of Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn
and harvests.’ (John Barnard.) The reaper is sound asleep not because he is exhausted with
work but because he is drugged by poppies ‘is arrested in mid action and thus Autumn has
generously stopped the destruction of the beauty of “the next swath and all its twined flower.”
With the exception of the gleaner other figures are inactive and satiated.’ John Barnard).
‘The stanza two stresses the role of nature. The wind not only winnows. the grain, but
also idly lifts the sleeper’s hair, the poppies drug the reaper, the cider-press’s “last oozings

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hours by hours” seems to be ‘more accomplished by the fruits themselves than by any human
intervention. Human labour of harvesting is dependent on nature’s generosity for its
accomplishment the stanza abounds in visual imagery—pictorial presentation of activities.’
In the third stanza we move towards evening and setting sun and our attention is focused
on the distant land and the sky.’ The shift is from human beings to autumn’s music. The
stanza takes us to the evening when we observe the “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying
day/And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” It is not `a maturing sun’ of the morning it
is the soft-dying day—the time sequence runs from morning to evening, from early to late
autumn, from the maturity of the fruits on trees to the gathering and reaping of harvest, to the
evening when only stubbles are left in the fields—on the plains. The sounds of non-human life
could be heard. The music of autumn ranges from “the wailful choir of gnats” to the bleatings
of “the full-grown lambs”—the music includes ‘the sounds of natural life, beyond man’s
control and the animals reared by human beings. The robin whistling from a “garden croft” is
something between the wild and the tame. Swallows twittering away indicate the temporary
loss of something beautiful they build their nests in buildings to which they return annually,
but now they are flying away.’ If swallows remind us of the pattern of loss and return which
governs both human and non human life, the full grown lambs represent ‘the inevitable return
of spring and renewal of life.’ In the third stanza the auditory imagery has been used.
Commenting on the third stanza Brian Stone says “The poem lifts from the serenely swelling
and sweetening of the insides of fruits, nuts and flowers in the first stanza, to the human
efforts to store the autumnal plentitude made possible by nature in the second stanza. In the
third stanza it must lift again, not only to universalise and consolidate these two experiences,
but to take the reader into the acceptance of autumn’s essential farewell, with its suggestion
of death. It must do that by uniting the supernal—in the process of time, in the ineluctable
change of sky and earth, and in the threat of barrenness in the coming winter—with the
natural and physical—in the form of the cropped fields of stubble, the creatures now strong
and mature, which were born naked and feeble in the spring, the insects whose thriving
existence is due to the superabundance of autumnal warmth and food supply, and the birds,
some of which like the robins, will face out the coming winter, and others which, like the
swallows will leave for summery places in huge flocks, to return when winter is gone.
Keats’s device for this is two-fold: he opens out from the local human scene of the second
stanza to the natural perimeters of the English rural world, with its skies, clouds,, winds, hills
and rivers; and he does this largely, but not exclusively, by sound symphonies which
complement the visual symphonies of the second Stanza I.
In the first four lines of the stanza two or more senses have been synthesised. The “rosy”
reflection of sunlit evening clouds (the barred clouds) can be seen on the stubble-plains. Their
visual effect is described as `music’ associating it with the first, two lines. To this ‘imagined
music’ is added the music of mourning gnats, full grown bleating lambs, singing crickets,
whistling robins and twittering swallows. Twitter and whistle-the two onomatopoeic words
make the last lines more poignant with “the notion of departure and possibly death”. To
Autumn is a. profound lyric.
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 In To Autumn Keats has added a line to the ten-line of the Spring Odes and made a
couplet before the final line. The poem uses eleven-line regular iambic pentameter rhymes in
each stanza. The rhyme scheme is abab cd ed cce. The poet gives ‘a rounded power’ to the
rhythm of each stanza statement in the poem, the whole of which is unassailably tranquil.
“The first stanza is all direct maturing plentitude, the second personifies Autumn at work in
that plentitude; and the third is an evocation of the air and sky above the autumnal scene, in
which the sounds of birds and insects predominate, making a kind of sung elegy for the end
of the harvest.”
The language is simple, more mono-syllablic and Saxon, full of vowels and clusters of
consonants, so one has to go slowly. Beginning with the phrases such as “close bosom
friend,” “mossed cottage-trees”, with a sweet kernal to “until they think warm days,” we have
‘a meditative slowness of utterance’. The slowness of utterance is a characteristic of “La
Belle Dame Sans Merci” also.
The poem appeals to the senses, it is ‘made up of the sights, sounds, scents and particular
feel of things which Keats evokes.’ ‘Alliteration is used effectively. `P’ sound in stanza one
suggests ripeness to the core and fullness to bursting, ‘f” and ‘w’ sounds are used for the light
wind in the next and ‘z’ sound in ‘oozing’ brings before our eyes the picture of juice of the
apple dripping drop by drop slowly and leisurely into the vessel from the cider-press. Keats
deliberately ends a line with a little pause to stress the opening of the next line.
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook.
The-pause after ‘keep’ and the emphasis on “steady” make us feel the efforts of the
gleaner to balance herself and to save herself and her bundle from toppling into the water.
The rise and fall of the cloud of gnats synchronise with the rise and fall of the verse at the end
of one line and beginning of the next.
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
The poem uses concrete images and personification has been used with great subtlety
creating an intimate relationship between the season and the poet. Autumn, being a close
bosom friend of the conspiring sun, loads, blesses, bends, fills, plumps etc. It is a benevolent
deity blessing the earth with plentitude. In the next stanza Autumn appears as human beings
engaged in various activities. The poet addresses Autumn in the third stanza “think not” of
“the songs of springs “for” thou hast thou music too”. But by the time we reach the end of the
poem the Autumn flies away like the frittering swallows. “The nostalgic effect is created with
the description of the ‘soft dying day’ and the end of the season. But the note of hope for the
renewal is also implicit for the swallows will return in due course of time, the revolution of
the seasons is a continuing process.”

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Study Notes
Most critics consider “Ode to Autumn” as the most perfect of Keats’ Odes. The year 1819,
when Keats wrote his best poetry and all his great Odes, was a time of great stress and strain
and sorrows and suffering for him. In August of the same year, he moved to Winchester from
London in quest of some .peace and calm and found it in reading and writing and even more
in the beauty of Nature which was spread all around him. It was his custom to have long
walks around the fields and meadows after a morning’s intense compo.sition and reading and
writing. He describes the clean, unbroken autumn weather and the beautiful shapes and
scenes of nature he found in his walks, in a letter to his friend Reynolds:
“How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it...I
never liked the stubble fields so much as now. Aye, better than the chilly green of the spring.
Somehow a stubblefield looks warm in the same way as some pictures are warm...this struck
me so much in my Sunday walk that I composed upon it.
The Ode to Autumn was the poem that he had composed, which is much lovelier an echo
of his own above description of fine weather and the beauty of the Autumn morning. It was
the last great Ode and the last great poem that he was ever to write.
Stanza I
Autumn in northern climates is the harvest season. Instead of the clear days of spring, autumn
days are often misty. The opening line characterises the season. The line is an address to
Autumn, here thought of as a person. Note the alliteration in L.1, the ‘m’ in mists’ and
mellow’ links the soft, misty character of Autumn skies with the soft, juicy sweetness of ripe,
autumn fruit: the ‘n’ in the ‘season’ and ‘fruitfulness’ links the two words.
Lines 2-9 express the idea that the season i.e. Autumn and the warm sun help each other
to produce flowers and fruits in abundance.
bosom-friend: intimate friend.
Maturing: ripening, bringing to fruition or full growth.
conspiring: joining together.in a plot, used here playfully. The plot here is to bring about
a profusion of fruit and flower.
bless: the word indicates the beneficent quality of the sun and the season to endow vines
and trees with fruit and plants and creepers with flower.
vine: the creeper that bears grapes.
thatch-eves: over-hanging edges of the thatched roofs.
core: centre, inner-most part, the fruit is fully ripe, not half ripe.
L.7. Note the careful selection of the words, ‘swell’ to describe the round shape of the
gourd and ‘plump’ to suggest the softness and juiciness of the hazel nut.
plump: used here as a verb meaning to fatten.
hazel: hazel nuts.
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 kernal: Soft, edible part inside the hard shell of hazel-nut.
later-flowers: summer, the season of flowers is over, but early Autumn is still warm
enough for flowers to bloom.
clammy: sticky.
The first stanza gives a detailed description of the scene that Keats had seen in his walk. It
describes Autumn country-side. The next stanza depicts the activities during this season.
Stanza II
Here the activities characteristic of the country side in Autumn are described. Autumn has
been personified Autumn is depicted both as a man and a woman going through the various
processes of harvesting that a typical peasant would be carrying out.
careless: relaxed, free from cares.
L.15. Autumn is sitting at ease in her granary.
winnowing: it is the process by which grain is separated from the chaff after threshing,
that loosens the chaff from the grain.
soft-lifted: moved gently by the breeze.
LL 16-17. Autumn is seen in another aspect. Autumn is out in the field where the corn is
being cut.
half-reaped: half cut (corn) with a sickle.
drows’d: put to sleep. Poppies are often found growing with the wheat. Autumn half-way
through reaping is over-come with the fragrance of the poppy flowers, and falls asleep on the
furrow. Opium is extracted from the poppy flowers—here the fragrance of the poppies is
shown having a sleep producing effect.
Furrow: long, deep cut in the ground made by a plough.
hook: sickle for cutting the corn.
swath: ridge of grass, barley wheat etc. lying after being cut.
L-18. Half the corn is cut on the furrow, the rest with which the poppy flowers are twined
are spared for the moment while Autumn has fallen asleep.
LL.19-20. Another activity of harvesting is described here. Autumn has been busy
gleaning. Gleaning is the gathering of the ears of corn that are left behind after reaping is
complete. Peasant women gather for their own use what the reapers have left behind.
Autumn, seen as the gleaner here carefully walks with the bundle of corn on her head, over
the stepping stones or a narrow bridge across the little stream, on her way home. A lovely
picture of a woman balancing a load on her head.
L.21-22. Here the poet takes us where the ripe apples that have been gathered are being
squeezed in a machine to make cider (drink made from apples) Autumn is seen patiently
standing and waiting, watching the last drops to fall from the cider-press (machine for
pressing juice from apples) into the vats where they are collected.
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 L.22 Note the slow, lingering movement of the line: ‘Thou watchest, the last oozings
hours by hours.’ There are six long sounds here and only four short. You really get an idea of
the long and patient waiting of the Autumn standing by the cider press, watching the last
drops of the juice slowly falling one by one.
Stanza III
This stanza, like the second, opens with a question. But unlike the question opening the
second stanza, which is expressive of happy eagerness, here the question is suggestive of
sadness. The poet knows that the songs of spring are no more to be heard. Spring is a symbol
of new birth. Now the year is old, nearing its end. The cycle of birth (spring) growth
(summer) ripening (Autumn) is complete. The last ear of corn and the last fruit are gathered.
The dark and cold days of winter are drawing near when nothing grows, no flowers bloom
and no birds sing.
L.24 But the poet suppresses these questions and apprehensions. He cannot allow himself
to think beyond his bourn. Perhaps like Shelley he consoles himself with the thought that:
‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind’,
And after winter there is the spring again, and the cycle starts again. What is real now is
the present moment which he means to live in and enjoy without looking ‘before or after’.
For Autumn too has its own ‘beauty and music, though different from that of Spring or
Summer.
barred clouds: streaky clouds, clouds that gather at sunset in long lines or ‘bars’ above
the west. Clouds through which the sunrays pass.
bloom: touch with colour, a beautifully suggestive word evoking memories of flowers.
Soft-dying day: long twilight of northern climates is referred to here. The twilight lingers
and fades away slowly, not suddenly as in the tropical regions where the darkness descends
as soon as the sun sets.
the stubble plains: the fully reaped fields left with only the stumps of the wheat plants
sticking up after the harvest. Their yellow and brown colour is made rosy by the touch of the
soft rays of the setting sun, giving • them a beauty and a warmth Keats described in his letter
to Reynold.
wailful choir: the mournful orchestra of nature. The music i.e. the sounds of late Autumn
are described in clear and concrete terms. The sounds of the gnats, full-grown lambs, hedge
crickets and the red-breasts and swallows are not joyous but sad and low. Hence wailful
choir.
sallows: a kind of low-growing willow tree. The willow is a symbol of mourning and the
mournful sounds of gnats produce the effect of sadness.
Lines 28-29 the sound is carried by the breeze and comes to the ear by fits and starts.
Borne aloft: carried over.
sinking: fading out, becoming inaudible.

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 bourn: boundary The lambs are bleating in the distance where they are enclosed for the
night in their pens.
hedge crickets: insects like grass-hoppers that chirp in the hedges.
treble: high-pitched sound.
the red breast: Robin red breast, a common bird in England; brown all over except for a
red patch on the breast. It does not migrate.
garden croft: a small, enclosed garden adjoining a house.
Line 33. The line indicates that this is the end of Autumn. The approach of winter is
clearly shown by the swallows getting ready to migrate to the warmer southern climates for
the winter.
Note again the careful choice of words. The words ‘wailful’, ‘mourn’ denote the exact
sounds made by gnats and hedge-crickets. The words ‘bleat’, `treble”whistle, `twitter’, all
describe thin sounds and these are the sounds of late Autumn so different from the clamorous
birds in spring and the rich sounds heard in summer, whet the nightingale and the lark sing
and the bees murmur and other happy animal noises fill the English country side.
7.04 Detailed Study of the Poem
Stanza I
Autumn is a season of mists and fogs. The opening stanza emphasises “mellow fruitfullness”.
It is early Autumn and mists hang in the air and fruits and vegetables and corn are ripened
and matured. Here, the poet sees Autumn not as an inanimate, abstract thing but as a person
endowed with human qualities.
Autumn is an intimate friend of the Sun that brings mellowness and maturity to
everything. It appears as if Autumn and the Sun have entered into a conspiracy and are
considering ways and means to load and bless the vine and moss covered trees with fruits in
such abundance that their branches may bend to the ground with their weight. They are
plotting together to ripen the fruits fully and to fatten the gourd and fill the hazel shell with
sweet kernel at the centre. They plan that more and more buds may bloom and blossom into
flowers so that the bees may get an illusion that summer will never come to an end and
flowers will never cease to bloom here as it is, their honey combs are already overflowing
with the honey they had collected during the summer. There is a touch of mischief in the
mutual conspiracy of Autumn and the Sun because they are causing a little worry to the tiny
creatures by their too much benevolence.
Note that we find picturesque descriptions throughout the stanza. We can see with little
effort the vine passing round the house-wall and bearing clusters of ripe grapes, the apple
trees in the cottage garden their stems green with emerald moss and their boughs bending
beneath their abundant burden; the swollen gourd, the hazel nut, the all ripe fruits and even
honey combs.

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Stanza II
In the second stanza, the scene changes completely. Autumn is again personified here. The
poet shows Autumn in different attractive forms and attitudes and aspects. The familiar
aspects and activities of the season are presented in a series of pictures. Picture after picture
follows as if on a cinema screen and we see Autumn as a youthful, lovely, peasant
man/woman engaged in various activities of the harvesting time.
Autumn is frequently seen as sitting on the floor of her granary in a carefree and relaxed
mood as if resting after a hard day’s work. We can almost see a look of satisfaction on her
face as she looks at her fully stored granary and there is a charm in her careless manner. The
soft breeze that helps in winnowing the corn, is playing with her golden hair, moving them
this way and that way caressingly. Here the chaff and the straw flying in the air is beautifully
compared to the golden hair of Autumn.
The scene changes and we find Autumn (as a reaper) fast asleep intoxicated by the balmy
perfume of the poppy flowers which are growing in the field intertwining their tender stems
with those of the wheat plants. The corn of the furrow on which he is lying asleep like a
sweet, innocent child is only half cut by him and his sickle is lying beside him, waiting for
the master to wake up and cut the remaining swath of the grain.
Again, we see Autumn in the form of a gleaner. She has gathered the ears of corn left by
the reapers and has made a bundle of them which she has put on her head. She is crossing a
stream on her way home, slowly and carefully stepping from one stone to the other which are
lying in the shallow stream, trying to balance the heavy load on her head. On another
occasion Autumn might also be seen standing by a cider-press, watching patiently, hour by
hour, the last drops of the apple juice, falling drop by drop into the vessel.
Thus we observe, whereas the first stanza describes the beauty of Autumn, the second
stanza displays Autumn itself. The familiar figures of the season are passed before us in a
series of pictures. The season has been first personified as a harvester during the winnowing.
Next the season has been personified as a tired reaper. This is very realistic. We seem to see
the slumbering labourer fallen asleep in the midst of his toil. Then the season has been
represented as a gleaner going home in the evening carrying a sheaf of corn on her head.
Lastly, the season has been represented as a cider-maker.
Stanza III
In the midst of these lovely scenes and pictures of Autumn, the poet suddenly misses the
songs of the spring. But the spring with its songs has long passed away. There is a pang of
regret. Is there a fear that Autumn with its golden joys and rosy warmth will vanish too? But
then why look before and after and pine for what is not or will not be. The Autumn with all
its charms is there at the moment. It is better to embrace this moment and drink its joy to the
last drop. The Autumn has its own music. As the streaks of the clouds in the west are touched
by the golden beauty of the setting sun and they impart a glow to the softly dying day and
bathe the stubble-plains in a rosy light, the band of the little musicians of Nature begin their
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sad but sweet music. There is the mournful sound of the gnats among the willows on the river
bank which is carried far and high by the breeze when it rises and sinks low when it stops
blowing. There is the sound of the bleating of the lambs coming from the distant hills where
they are enclosed in their pens for the night. The hedge crickets are singing and the soft sharp
whistling of the robin red-breast rises from a garden adjoining a house. There are swallows
which are filling the air with the sound of their twittering and are gathering in the sky to say
good-bye to Autumn and to England, to migrate to some far-off country for the coming
winter.
Thus we see in the third stanza, the music of Autumn is introduced in a scene of sun set
glory. The little birds, the small insects, the gurgling brook, the whistling winds, the gentle
breeze, the bleating lambs, in short small and big things of Nature are instruments of music
and contribute their share in Autumn also. So there is no need to regret about the spring with
its music that is gone.
7.05 An Analysis of the Poem
To Autumn, the last of the great Odes of Keats, is one of the most nearly perfect poems in
English. “In it now his disciplined powers of observation, imagination and craftsmanship
combine to immortalise in enduring beauty a mood of the poet as he responded to the
beauties of an Autumn day”. Ode to a Nightingale is less `perfect’ though a greater poem. In
it he cries out against the impermanence of beauty and happiness whereas in ‘To Autumn’ he
accepts this passing of beauty and joy and transitoriness of life bravely for the reason that
Keats is able to see it as part of a larger and richer permanence. This greater permanence is
the continuity of life itself. The rotation of the seasons offers this symbol of continuity that is
immediately satisfying.
The poem appears to be a superb specimen of analysis. In the three stanzas Keats
describes three stages of the season. Early, mid and late Autumn is described with a wealth of
details and with rich imagery. In the first stanza he presents before us a wealth of details of
the objects seen in Autumn with great clarity and concreteness. Here is earth’s glowing
abundance of fruits which are in the process of ripeness and fruition.
The rich imagery in the poem which is luxuriantly descriptive presents the moss covered
apple trees with their branches bending under the weight of fruit, the vines hanging tensely
under the heavy weight of grapes. Note that the words are chosen with great care to convey
the exact quality of the objects described. For example, if `swell and plump’ give the outward
signs of fatness and sweetness, sweet kernal vividly makes us feel the lusciousness within. In
other words one could almost see and touch the juicy, plump and soft fruit. Again the loaded
abundance is suggested by the heavy oozing of the honey in the last line ‘over brimmed
clammy cells’. There is so much oozing sweetness here that the honey-combs are insufficient
to hold it all.
The second stanza is the greatest example of personification in English poetry. The
element of personification that we find in the second stanza is really an influence of
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Hellenism. Keats’s ‘Hellenism’ consists in respect for form and classical grace, simplicity
and directness of expression and passion for beauty. All these qualities are perceptible in the
poem. Autumn is seen assuming the shape of people in various scenes typical of the season—
winnowing, reaping, gleaning, cider-making. With that intimacy and concreteness of detail
Keats presents Autumn! The last four lines of the 2nd stanza are fine instances of enactment.
Autumn now figures as a gleaner who is seen stepping across a small stream with a bundle of
corn on her head. The very movement of the gleaner can be visualised in the words, ‘keep’
and steady’.
The third stanza opens briefly by recalling the past. Despite Keats being under the spell
of the season of ripeness and fulfillment, the consciousness of its transience does not
altogether leave him. There is, in the midst of the joys of Autumn, a sudden pang of regret for
the lost beauties and music of the spring:
“Where are the songs of spring? Ay where are they?”
Yet quietly and firmly Keats dismisses his regrets for the departed spring as merely vain:
“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—“
So he shall enjoy the present beauty and the joy it gives.
Autumn also has its rich source of music and beauty. The dull, yellow and brown stubble
plain is lighted by the rays of the setting sun, making it beautiful. Then follows a concrete
description of the different sounds of Nature: the gnats mourn in a wailful choir, the lambs
bleat, the hedge crickets sing, the red-breast whistles and the gathering swallows twitter in the
skies. Note that Keats selects words which are highly suggestive e.g. ‘the barred clouds’, and
‘soft-dying day, etc.
All this indicates that Autumn is about to end and winter is fast approaching. But the
poet realises that there is nothing to regret as life goes on; the individual year may be drawing
to its end but there will be a new year to take its place. In other words, by now, Keats has
learnt to accept life as it is—a perpetual process of ripening, decay and death. He perceives
that reality in its totality despite its disagreeables, is beautiful. So with philosophical
resignation, Keats contents himself to the happiness of the moment momentary as is, and the
poem ends as Graham Hough puts it “with the quiet relapse of consciousness into the soft
natural loveliness that surrounds it”. Douglas Bush says, ‘In To Autumn Keats does not evade
or challenge actuality; he achieves by implication, ‘the top of sovereignty’, the will to neither
strive nor cry, the power to see and accept life as it is, a perpetual process of ripening, decay
and death”. The Odes of Keats are in fact supreme examples of Negative .capability, “when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason”.
You will notice that Keats looks at nature in a way different from Wordsworth.
Wordsworth (e.g. in the “Lines written above Tintern Abbey”) is more interested in recording
how the poet feels about Nature, what thoughts and emotions are roused in his mind by the

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beauty of Nature. Wordsworth is more subjective. Keats in To Autumn’ presents the scene
and its objects as he sees them, with great clarity and vividness. Unlike in Wordsworth, in
Keats, all the five senses are important and all five operate everywhere in and across his
poetry. This gives rise to that concreteness of imageryl which is associated with Keat’s
works.

4. Some Critical Views

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”
(Cleanth Brooks)
This poem is essentially a reverie induced by the poet’s listening to the song of the
nightingale. In the first stanza the poet is just sinking into the reverie; in the last stanza, he
comes out of the reverie and back to a consciousness of the actual world in which he and all
other human beings live. The first lines of the poem and the last, therefore, constitute a sort of
frame for the reverie proper.
The poet has chosen to present his reverie largely in terms of imagery—imagery drawn
from nature—the flowers and leaves, etc., associated with the bird actually, or imaginatively
in myth and story. The images are elaborate and decorative and the poet dwells upon them
lovingly and leisurely, developing them in some detail as pictures. It is not the sort of method
that would suit a poem exhibiting a rapid and dramatic play of thought; but one remembers
the general character of the poem. The loving elaboration and slowed movement resemble the
slowed movement of meditative trance, or dream, and therefore is appropriate to the general
mood of this poem. The imagery, then, in its elaboration is not merely beautifully decorative,
but has a relation to the general temper of the whole poem.
The poet, with his desire to escape from the world of actuality, calls for a drink of wine
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen
but the wish for the draught of wine is half fancy. The poet lingers over the description of the
wine, making it an idealised and lovingly elaborated thing, too. We know that it is not a
serious and compelling request. The grammar of the passage itself tells us this: after “O, for a
draught of vintage!” the poet interposes seven lines of rich description identifying the wine
with the spirit of summer and pastoral joys and with the romantic associations of Provence,
and finally gives a concrete picture of a bubbling glass of the wine itself before he goes on to
tell us why he wishes the draught of wine.
The third stanza amplifies the desire to get away from the world of actuality. The word
fade in the last line of the second stanza is echoed in the next stanza in “Fade far away,
dissolve...“ The implication is that the poet wishes for a dissolution of himself; a wish that
later in the poem becomes an explicit pondering on death as something attractive and
desirable. The principal aspects of the actual world the poet would like to escape are just
those aspects of it that seem opposed to the world conjured up by the bird’s song: its feverish

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hurry, the fact that in it youth dies and beauty fades. The world that the nightingale seems to
inhabit is one of deathless youth and beauty. This idea, too, is to be developed explicitly by
the poet in the seventh stanza.
In the fourth stanza the poet apparently makes a sudden decision to attempt to leave
actual life and penetrate to the world of the imagination. The apparent suddenness of the
decision is reflected in the movement of the first line of the stanza,
Away! Away! For I will fly to thee
But he will fly to it by exciting his mind not with wine but with poetry. And in line 35
the poet. has apparently been successful: “already with thee,” he says. There follows down to
the opening of the sixth stanza a very rich description of the flowery, darkened thicket in
which the nightingale is singing.
The poet’s wish for dissolution, which he expresses in the third stanza, becomes in the
sixth a wish for death itself, an utter dissolution. But the idea as repeated receives an
additional twist. Earlier, his wish to fade away was a desire to escape the sorrow and
sordidness of the real world. Now even death itself seems to the poet an easy and attractive
thing; and, more than that, it seems even a sort of positive fulfillment to die to the sound of
the nightingale’s high requiem.
But the nightingale at the height of its singing does not seem to be subject to death. The
poet describes the effect of the nightingale’s song by two incidents drawn from the remote
past—as if he believed that the nightingale he now ‘hears had literally lived forever. The two
incidents are chosen also to illustrate two different aspects of the bird’s song. The first, the
song as heard by Ruth, is an incident taken from biblical literature, and gives the effect of
the song as it reminded the homesick girl of her native land. The second hinting at some
unnamed romance of the Middle Ages, gives the unearthly Magic of the song.
With the first word of the last stanza, the poet breaks out of his reverie. He catches up
the word “forlorn,” ‘which he has just used in ‘describing one of the imagined scenes
induced by his reverie, and suddenly realizes that it applies all too• accurately to himself.
The effect is almost that of an abrupt stumbling: the chance .employment of a particular
word in one of the richly imaginative scenes induced by the bird’s song suddenly comes
home to him—with altered weight and tone, of course—to remind him that it is he who is
forlorn, whose plight is hopeless. With the new and chilling meaning of “forlorn” the song
of the nightingale itself alters: what had a moment before been an ecstatic “high requiem”
becomes a “plaintive anthem.” The song becomes fainter: what had had power to make the
sorrowing man “fade...away” (lines 20, 21) from a harsh and bitter world, now itself
“fades” (line 75), and the speaker is left alone in the silence.
The vitality of the poem, of course, lies in its imagery. The imagery is so rich and
resonant, taken line by line. that it is a temptation to treat it as a amazingly rich decoration.
Consider, for example, the description of the wine in the second stanza. The poet uses the
term vintage rather than wine because of the associations of vintage with age and excellence.
It tastes of Flora (goddess of flowers) and the country green (a land predominantly fruitful
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 and rich) and of dance and Provencal song (associations with the merry country of the
troubadours and sunburnt mirth. Mirth cannot, of course,’ be literally sunburnt, but the
sensitive reader will not be troubled by this. The phrase is a condensation of the fuller
phrase: mirth of hearty folk who- live close to nature and to the earth and whose sunburnt
faces and arms indicate that they live in to nature. These associations of the wine with
Provence and with all that Provence implies are caught up and corroborated by another bold
and condensed phrase: “full of the warm South.” For the word South carries not only his
associations of warmth but also of the particular South that the poet has just been the south
of France.
This, for a rather inadequate account of only one item of the sort of description that fills
the poem. One who examines other of the poem’s passages in this way will notice that Keats
does not sacrifice sharpness of perception to mere pettiness. Again and again it is the sharp
and accurate observation that gives the richness a validity. For example,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
The passage is not merely beautiful and rich: it embodies acute observation. We feel that
the poet knows what he is talking about. A poorer poet would try only for the decorative
effect and would fail. Moreover, much of the suggestiveness resides, also in the choice of
precise details. Many a poet feels that, because the stimulus to the imagination makes for an
indefinite richness of association, this indefiniteness is aroused by vague, general description.
On the contrary, the force of association is greatest when it is aroused by precise detail. For
example; consider the passage most famous for its suggestiveness.
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
After all, these lines present a scene that is precisely visualized: If the casements
opening on the seas and framing the scene were omitted, the general, vague words, perilous,
faery, and forlorn, would not be sufficient to give the effect actually transmitted.
One may, however, read the “Ode to a Nightingale” at a deeper level. Indeed, if we are
to do full justice to the general architecture of the poem and to the intensity of many of the
individual passages, one must read it at this deeper level.
A basic problem—already hinted at in earlier paragraphs of this analysis—has to do
with the speaker’s attitude toward death. If he wishes to escape from a world overshadowed
by death, why then does he go on to conceive of that escape as a kind of death? The
nightingale’s song makes him yearn to leave a world where “youth grows pale...and dies.”
yet, as we remember, the highest rapture that he can conceive of is to die—“to cease upon
the midnight with no pain.” The last phrase, “with no pain,” offers only a superficial
resolution of our problem. We shall not find our answer in distinguishing between the

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 “easeful Death” of line 52 and some agonizing death. The speaker in this poem is not saying
merely that he would like to die if he could be sure that his death would be painless.
The death with which he falls “half in love” is not a negative thing, but is conceived of
as a rich and positive experience. To see how Keats brings this about will require a re-
examination of the whole poem. We might well begin with the beginning of the poem, for the
ambiguous relationship between life and death, joy and pain, intensity of feeling and numb
lack of feeling, runs through the poem, and is to he found even in the opening lines.
The song of the nightingale has a curious double effect. The speaker’s “heart aches”
through the very intensity of pleasure—by “being too happy in thy happiness.” But the song
also acts as an opiate, making the listener feel drowsy and numbed. Now, an opiate is used to
deaden pain, and the song of the bird does deaden (see stanzas three and four) the pain of the
mortal world in which “to think is to be full of sorrow.” A reader may be tempted therefore to
say that the nightingale’s song gives to the sorrowing man a little surcease from his
unhappiness. But the experience is more complex than this: the song itself causes the pain.
Thus, though the song means to the hearer life, freedom, and ease, its effect is to deaden him
and render him drowsy.
Are we to say, then, that the poet is confused in this first stanza? No, because the
apparent contradictions are meaningful and justified in terms of the poem as a whole. First, as
to the realistic basis of the opiate metaphor: the initial effect of a heavy opiate may be
painfully numbing. Second, as to the psychological basis: what is pleasurable, if carried to an
extreme degree, becomes painful. The nightingale’s song, which suggests a world beyond
mortality, gives the hearer happiness, but by reminding him of his own mortal state, gives
him pain. But the full implications of this paradox of pleasure-pain, life-death, immortal-
mortal require the whole of the poem for their full development.
We have commented upon what the speaker wishes to escape from; he has himself made
clear the primary obstacle to his escape. It is the “dull brain” that “perplexes and retards.”
The opiate, the draught of vintage for which the speaker has called, the free play of the
imagination—all have this in common: they release one from the tyranny of the “dull brain.”
The brain insists upon clarity and rigid order; it is an order that must be “dissolved” if the
speaker is to escape into, and merge with, the richer world for which he longs.
But the word that the speaker uses to describe this process is “fade,” and his entry into
this world of the imagination is symbolised by a fading into the rich darkness out of which
the nightingale sings. We associate darkness with death, but this darkness is instinct with the
most intense life. How is the darkness insisted upon—and thus defined? The nightingale
sings in a plot of “shadows numberless”; the speaker would leave the world “unseen” and
join the bird in “the forest dim”; he would “fade far away”—would “dissolve”; and when he
feels that he is actually with the nightingale, he is in a place of “verdurous glooms.”
Having attained to that place, he “cannot see.” Though the poem abounds in sensuous
detail, and appeals so powerfully to all the senses, most of the images of sight are fancied by

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the speaker. He does not actually see the Queen-Moon or the stars. He guesses at what
flowers are at his feet. He has found his way into a warm “embalmed darkness.” The last
adjective means primarily “filled with incense,” “sweet with balm,” but it must also have
suggested, death—in Keats’s day as well as in ours. In finding his way imaginatively into the
dark covert from which the bird is singing, the speaker has approached death. He has wished
to fade far away, “dissolve, and quite forget”; but the final dissolution and the ultimate
forgetting are death. True, death here is apprehended in a quite different fashion from the
death depicted in stanza three: here the balm is the natural perfume of growing flowers and
the gloom is “verdurous,” with suggestions of rich organic growth. But the fading has been
complete—he is completely encompassed with darkness.
It is worth remarking that Keats has described the flowery covert with full honesty. If his
primary emphasis is on fertility and growth, still he recognises that death and change have
their place here too: the violets, for instance, are thought of as “fast-fading.” But the
atmosphere of this world of nature is very different, to be sure, from that of the human world
haunted by death, where “men sit and hear each other groan.” The world of nature is a world
of cyclic change (the “seasonable month,” “the coming musk-rose,” etc.) and consequently
can seem fresh and immortal, like the bird whose song seems to be its spirit.
The poem, then, is not only about death and deathlessness, or about the actual and the
ideal; it is also about alienation and wholeness. It is man’s necessary alienation from nature
that invests death with its characteristic horror. To “dissolve”—to “fade”—into the warm
darkness is to merge into the eternal pattern of nature. Death itself becomes something
positive—a flowering—a fulfillment. Keats has underlined this suggestion very cunningly in
the sixth stanza. The ancients thought that at death, a man’s soul was breathed out with his
last breath. Here the nightingale is pouring forth its “soul” and at this high moment the man
listening in the darkness would be glad to die. Soul and breath become interchangeable. The
most intense expression of life (the Nightingale’s ecstatic sang) invites the listener to breathe
forth his soul (death).
The foregoing paragraphs may suggest the sense in which the speaker calls the
nightingale immortal. The nightingale symbolises the immortality of nature, which,
harmonious with itself remains through all its myriad changes unwearied and beautiful. We
need not suppose that the speaker, even in his tranced reverie, thinks of the particular
biological mechanism of flesh and bone and feathers as deathless—any more than he thinks
of the “fast-fading violets” and the “coming musk-rose” as unwithering. Keats has clearly
specified the sense in which the bird is immortal: it is in harmony with its world—not, as man
is, in competition with his (“No hungry generations tread thee down”); and the bird cannot
even conceive of its separation from the world which it knows and expresses and of which it
is a part (“Thou hast not born for death”). Man knows that he was born to die—“What thou
among the leaves hast never known”—and that knowledge overshadows man’s life, and
necessarily all his songs.

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 That knowledge overshadows this song, and gives it its special poignance. As the poem
ends, the speaker’s attempt to enter the world of the nightingale breaks down. The music by
means of which he hoped to flee from his mortal world has itself fled—“is that music.” The
music that almost succeeded in making him “fade far away” now itself “fades/Past the nearer
meadows” and in a moment is “buried deep/In the next valley-glades.” The word “buried”
here suggests a view of death very different from that conjured up by “embalmed darkness”
in the fifth stanza. Death here is bleak and negative. The poem has come full circle.
A Note
This essay on “Ode to A Nightingale” by Cleanth Brooks will enable you to understand (a)
the “Ode” as a “reverie” (b) its imagery and (c) its deeper meaning that is its themes—death
and deathlessness; the actual and the ideal; alienation and wholeness.

Critical Views on “To Autumn”

“To Autumn”—The poem opens with an apostrophe to the season, and with a description of
natural objects at their richest and ripest stage.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun,
…………………………………………….
For summer her o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.
(Quote* stanza 1)
The details about the fruit the flowers and the bees constitute a lush and colourful picture
of autumn and the effect of the “maturing sun.” In the final lines of the first stanza, however,
slight implications about the passage of time begin to operate. The flowers are called “later”,
the bees are assumed to think that “warm days will never cease and there is a reference to the
summer which has already past.
In the second stanza, an imaginative element enters the description, and we get a
personification of the season in several appropriate postures and settings.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
………………………………………………
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by home”.
(Quote* stanza 2)
As this stanza proceeds, the implication of the descriptive details become increasingly
strong. For example, autumn is now seen, not as setting the flowers to budding, but as already
bringing some of them to an end, although it “Spares the next swath”. Autumn has become a
“gleaner”. The whole stanza presents the paradoxical qualities of autumn, its aspects both of
lingering and passing. This is especially true of the final image, Autumn is the season of
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dying as well as of fulfilling. Hence it is with “patient look” that she (or he?) watches “the
last oozings hours by hours”. Oozing, or a steady dripping, is, of course, not unfamiliar as a
symbol of the passage of time.
It is in the last stanza that the theme appears most conspicuously.
“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
………………………………………………………..
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies”
(Quote stanza 3)
The opening question implies that the season of youth and rebirth, with its beauties of
sight and sound, has passed and that the season of autumn is passing but autumn, too, while it
lasts—“While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day”—has its beauties, its music, as
Keats’s poem demonstrates. The imagery of the last stanza contrasts significantly with that of
the first, and the final development of the poem adds meaning to its earlier portions. The
slight implications are confirmed. We may recall that “maturing” means aging and ending as
well as ripening. The earlier imagery is, of course, that of ripeness. But the final imagery is
more truly autumnal. The first words used to describe the music of autumn are “wailful” and
“mourn”. The opening stanza suggests the height of the day when the sun is strong and the
bees, are gathering honey from the blooming flower. But in the last stanza, after the passing
of “hours and hours”, we have “the soft-dying day,” the imagery of sunset and deepening
twilight, when the clouds impart their glow to the day and the plains. The transitive,
somewhat rare use of the verb “bloom,” with its spring like associations, is perhaps
surprising, and certainly appropriate and effective in , suggesting the tension of the theme in
picturing a beauty that is lingering, but only lingering. The conjunction of “rosy hue” and
“stubble-plains” has the same significant incongruity although the image is wholly
convincing and actual in its, reference. While the poem is more descriptive and suggestive
than dramatic, its latent theme of transitoriness and mortality is symbolically dramatised by
the passing course of the day. All these characteristics of the poem are to be found in the final
image. “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Here we have the music of autumn.
And our attention is directed toward the darkening skies. Birds habitually gather in flocks
toward nightfall, particularly when they are preparing to fly south at the approach of winter.
But they are still gathering. The day, the season are “soft dying” and are both the reality and
the symbol of life as most intensely and poignantly beautiful when viewed from this
melancholy perspective.
This reading of “To Autumn” is obviously slanted in the direction of a theme which is
also found in other Odes. The theme is, of course, only a part of the poem, a kind of
dimension, or extension, which is almost concealed by other features of the poem,
particularly by the wealth of concrete descriptive detail...in “To Autumn” the season is the
subject and the details which describe and thus present the subject are also the medium by

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which the theme is explored...In “To Autumn” the theme inheres in the subject, and is at no
point stated in other terms. That is why we could say, in our reading of the poem, that the
subject “is both the reality and the symbol,” and to say now that the development of the
subject is, in a respect, the exploration of a theme.
The poem has an obvious structure in so far as it is a coherent description. Its structure,
however, is not simple in the sense of being merely continuous. For example, the course of
the day parallels the development of the poem. And an awareness of the theme gives even
greater significance to the structure, for the theme emerges with increasing clarity and
fullness throughout the poem until the very last line. Because the theme is always in the
process of merging without ever shaking off the medium in which it is developed, the several
parts of the poem have a relationship to each other beyond their progression in a single
direction. The gathering swallows return some borrowed meaning to the soft-dying day with
substantial interest, and the whole last stanza negotiates with the first in a similar
relationship.
...“To Autumn” shares a feature of development with the Odes “on the Nightingale” and
“the Grecian Urn”. Each of these poems begins with the presentation of realistic
circumstances, then moves into an imagined realm, and ends with a return to the realistic. In
“Ode to a Nightingale”, the most, clearly dramatic of the poems, the speaker, hearing the
song of the nightingale, wishes to fade with it “into the forest dim” and to forget the painful
realities of life. This wish is fulfilled in the fourth stanza—the speaker exclaims. “Already
with thee!” As the poem proceeds and while the imagined realm is maintained, the unpleasant
realities come back into view. From the transition that begins with the desire for “easeful
Death” and through the references to “hungry generation” and “the sad heart of Ruth”, the
imagined and the real, the beautiful and the melancholy, are held balanced against each other.
Then, on the word “forlorn”, the speaker turns away from the imagined, back to the real and
his “sole self’.
In the structural imaginative arc of the poem, (“Ode to A Nightingale”) the speaker is
returned to the “drowsy numbness” wherein he is awake to his own mortal lot and no longer
awake to the vision of beauty. Yet he knows that it is the same human melancholy which is in
the beauty of the bird’s “plaintive anthem” and in the truth of his renewed depression. His
way of stating this knowledge is to ask the question.
...The lush and realistic description of the first stanza (“To Autumn”) is followed by the
imagined picture of the autumn as a person, who, while a lovely part of a lively scene, is also
intent upon destroying it. The personification is dropped in the final stanza, and there is again
a realistic description, still beautiful but no longer lush, and suggesting an approaching
bleakness.
The imaginative aspect of structure which the three Odes (“Ode to A Nightingale”, “Ode
as A Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn”) have in common illustrates opinions which are in
accord with the thought of Keats’s times and which he occasionally expressed in his poetry.
The romantic poets’s pre-occupation with nature is proverbial, and there are a number of

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studies (e.g. Caldwell’s On Keats) relating their work and thought to the associationist
psychology which was current in their times. According to this psychology, all complex ideas
and all products of the imagination were, by the association of remembered sensations,
evolved from sensory experiences. Keats found their doctrine interesting and important not
because it led back to the mechanical functioning of the brain and the nervous system, but
because sensations led to the imagination and finally to myth and poetry, and the beauty of
nature was thus allied with the beauty of art. In the early poem, which begins,”
I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”, Keats suggests that the legends of classical mythology
were created by poets responding to the beauties of nature. ...Conspicuous throughout Keats’s
work, blended and adjusted according to his own temperament and for his own purposes, are
these donnees of his time: a theory of the imagination, the Romantic preoccupation with
nature, and the refreshed literary tradition of classical mythology. These are reflected by the
structure of his most successful poems, and are an element in their inter relatedness.
“To Autumn” is shorter than the other Odes, and simpler on the surface in several
respects. The nightingale sings of summer “in full-throated ease”, and the boughs in the
flowery tale on the Urn cannot shed their leaves “nor ever bid the spring adieu”. The world in
which the longer Odes have their setting is either young or in its prime, spring or summer.
Consequently, in these poems some directness of statement and a greater complexity are
necessary in order to develop the paradoxical theme, in order to penetrate deeply enough the
temple of delight and arrive at the sovran shrine of Melancholy. The Urn’s “happy melodist”
plays a song of spring, and the “self-same song” of the nightingale is of summer. One of
these songs has “no tone”, and the other is in either “a vision or a waking dream” for the
voice of the “immortal Bird” is “finally symbolised beyond the “sensual ear”. But the music
of autumn, the twittering of the swallows, remain realistic and literal, because the tensions of
Keats’s’ theme are implicit in the actual conditions of autumn, when beauty and melancholy
are merging on the very surface of reality. Keats’s genius was away from statement and
toward description, and in autumn he had the natural symbol for his meanings. It “To
Autumn” is shorter than the other Odes and less complex in its materials, it has the peculiar
distinction of great compression achiever in simple Urns. (An, extract from Leonard
Unger’s essay: Keats and the Music of Autumn)
(Source: The Man in the Name: Essay on the Experience of Poetry, Minneapolis, 1956)

Select Bibliography
1. The Romantic Poets: Graham Hough
2. The College Survey of English Literature: M. Wither Spoon.
3. A Preface to Keats—Cedric Watts.
4. Twentieth Century Views—Keats, A Collection of Critical Essays—edited by Walter
Jackson Bate.
5. John Keats: The Odes edited by A.R. Weekes.

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6. Keats: Odes Case book Series—Editor A.E. Dyson.
7. The Romantic Imagination: Maurice Bowra.
8. On the Poetry of Keats: E.C. Pettet.
9. Introduction to Keats: William Walsh.
10. Keats: H.W. Garrod.
11. John Keats: W.J. Bate.
12. Keats: John Barnard
13. The Poetry of Keats: Brian Stone

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Notes

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Notes