John Keats (1795-1821)
III. Charles E. Gould, Truth, Beauty, and Keats
In an address last May to the Kent School Chapter of the Cum Laude Society, I offered to a learned and scholarly group the perhaps shocking thesis that there is a great measure of hocus-pocus, legerdemain, and—to use the technical, scholarly term—bull-roar in all literary criticism, which after all is a game; and one test of the great literary artist is that he and his art can sustain it. What follows is meant as an example in support of that thesis, concerning specifically one of the best known and most marvelous poems in English, Keats’s “Ode on A Grecian Urn.”
With astonishing boldness, the poet begins by diminishing his own art by telling a marble Grecian urn that it is more expressive than his verse:
Thou still unravished 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.
Alert readers we will wonder how a “still unravished bride” might feel, not to mention her husband; we may see ambivalence in the “foster-child,” on the one hand rejected somehow but on the other particularly chosen and loved; and we must see the double-meaning of the silence and motionlessness attributed to the urn that, of course, are antitheses to the poem about them, the poem that speaks and moves. In this plethora of oxymoron and ambivalence, Keats in his first stanza tells us how to read his poem, to look for ambivalence—contradictory values harmoniously co-existing, or simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an image or idea. In describing what’s actually engraved on the urn—eternal greenery and lovers eternally just about to kiss—he maintains the ambivalence. The lovers will never kiss, but they will never stop anticipating the kiss. It’s the great romantic paradox: anticipated joys are fulfilled at the sacrifice of the anticipation. These are paradoxical ideas, or at least ambivalent ones, but they’re pretty straightforward once you catch on to what Keats is doing, and he hints that in the very first line. No reader of your aptitude is puzzled by them, and many of us, especially the youthful, are pleased by them, for they are just what we want to hear.
But the concluding lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have puzzled as many as they have pleased:
When Old Age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Here the poet does something truly amazing: he puts words into the mouth of the very inanimate object he is apostrophizing and questioning. A great deal of ink has been spilled and, I surmise, a lot of cyber-space filled, over these lines. They are puzzling indeed. For the sake of this exercise, I am now suggesting a reading of them that, as far as I know, is new; and, even more exciting than that, it is specifically a departure from Cleanth Brooks’s reading in Chapter 8 of The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Harold Bloom’s in Chapter 6 of The Visionary Company (1971). At first glance you may think that my scholarship is hopelessly out of date, or that I am; but in truth these are monumental works by towering monumental scholars (however controversial and even disliked in some quarters they may be), both Yale professors without whose corner-stone work no study of Keats, however fresh and new, would be conceivable. Disagreeing with them both, in the presence of this visionary company, is great fun.
Professor Brooks begins his essay saying that it is remarkable that the Ode “[d]iffers from Keats’s other odes by culminating in a statement—a statement even of some sententiousness in which the urn is made to say that beauty is truth, and—more sententious still—that this bit of wisdom sums up the whole of mortal knowledge.” Well…in a word, No. You can check for yourselves: every Keats ode culminates in a statement. The Ode to A Nightingale ends with a rhetorical question—“Do I wake or sleep?”—but that itself is a statement to the effect that it doesn’t matter whether the speaker wakes or sleeps. The statement in question is no more the Urn’s than Keats’s, not what the Urn would say if it could speak but the idea the Urn represents to the poet by its very existence. Secondly, in context the lines are not sententious at all: they don’t express an easy, epigrammatic opinion: they express an irony, specific enough to disallow Professor Brooks’s claim of sententious generality. “The urn is beautiful,” he says, “and yet its beauty is based … on an imaginative perception of essentials.” It offers us, he claims, “insight into essential truth.” If, indeed it does, its message is sententious in the extreme, as any message so vast and vague must be. Keats is better than that. His Urn offers not a grand insight into essential truth, but a specific insight into a truth of which it is its own example.
Professor Bloom suggests an attitude similar to Professor Brooks’s, reaffirming the lines as sententious: “The urn’s beauty is truth because age cannot waste it; our woes cannot consume it.” Both of these critics work from the beginning of the poem to the end, emphasizing its paradoxes; and then, perhaps hotter for certainties than they should be, they oddly renounce paradox altogether and read the last lines straight, as an intelligible statement of a general truth, confessing themselves on the one hand a little concerned that the lines seem sententious or, on the other hand, satisfied, as Professor Bloom says, “that the sum of our knowledge is the identity of beauty and truth, when beauty is defined as what gives joy forever, and truth as what joy seizes upon as beauty.” This, to me, is palpable nonsense; and if your heads are spinning like mine, you’re right on track.
For Keats does not invariably define beauty that way. Professor Bloom presumably is remembering the first lines of Keats’s “Endymion”: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/ It’s loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness,” and Keats’s oft-cited letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817) asserting, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” But it needs only a cursory rereading of the Ode on Melancholy—composed in the same month as the Ode on the Urn—to persuade us that “Endymion” is not Keats’s last word on truth and beauty. Melancholy, the poem tells us, “dwells with beauty, beauty that must die.” Professor Bloom himself, discussing the Ode on Melancholy, admits that “Only beauty that must die” is beauty at all. The context of the lines from “Endymion,” wholly devoid of the ironic ambivalences of the later odes, makes them far less suitable as a hint of Keats’s meaning in the Urn ode than is the Ode on Melancholy. The subject of both odes is the nature of truth and beauty and the relationship between them, and ultimately they say the same thing: the greatest truth is that everything beautiful is mutable: “the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,” “the wealth of globed peonies,” the “peerless eyes” of the richly angered mistress. Keats’s imagination is best equipped to see as beauty images of things that will fade. In both of these odes, beauty is mutable, and mutability is the source, ironically, of beauty; and that, as Keats says in the letter to Bailey, must be truth. All we need to know, Keats suggests repeatedly, is that everything cuts two ways. That the world and our perception of it are ambivalent is at once the most fundamental realization—“all ye know on earth”—and also the most lofty and comprehensive knowledge—“all ye need to know.”
Professor Brooks, however, sees the harmonious coexistence of beauty and truth as a paradox: “The urn is beautiful,” he says, “and yet its beauty is based on an imaginative perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful, but it is also true.” With these concessives (“and yet” and “but”) Professor Brooks makes a concession that in Keats’s language is not a concession at all. In his letter to George and Georgiana (16 December 1918) Keats says, “I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty.” Keats is much more practical—romantically realistic, a stupendous fore-runner of the stupendous romantic—realist John Updike of our time—than Professor Brooks would have him, when he implies a conflict between Beauty—imaginative vision—and truth—historical fact—a conflict that Keats would not have suffered gladly. Professor Brooks turns Keats’s ambivalence into a simple contradiction. Bad mistake!
Keats begins by apostrophizing the Urn, but he soon moves on to apostrophizing the figures on it:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
In lines of great lyric beauty, Keats here sets forth a truth he takes for granted: unheard is a synonym for imagined : our physical senses, if not altogether inadequate, are incapable of affording to us the heights of sweetness. “We see not with the eye,” as Blake said; and here Keats suggests that we do not do our best hearing with the ear. He urges the pipes, “soft” in the sense that literally we cannot hear them, to pipe their toneless ditties (songs) into the spirit, the imagination—the only place they can be heard, where they are sweeter than the actual sounds we hear on the Boardwalk … or even at Carnegie Hall or the Met. The pipes are engraved in marble: the only way they can be heard is through the spirit, the imagination. Hence, Keats says, they are sweeter than real ones. Then addressing the piper, Keats provides an image of sight to complement the image of sound: “Thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.” The pastoral perfection is permanent; and the Lover, too, has no cause to grieve that his desire must remain unfulfilled, because “Though thou hast not thy bliss/ Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” The poet slyly implies that the state of intransience is blessed, that the state of permanent anticipation is blessed, sweeter than fulfillment; heard melodies are not so sweet as those we have not yet heard.
He doesn’t mean it for a heart-beat; for “In the very temple of delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,” he tells us in the Ode on Melancholy; and the marbled figures on the urn will never know that. Without any experience of that “burning human passion…That leaves a heart high—sorrowful and cloyed,/ A burning forehead and a parching tongue,” (what nowadays we call “sex”), even the most virginal reader would agree that the Bold Lover on the urn is not enviable at all.
To assert a paradox fundamental to our lives, the genius Keats (as Blake does in his Sunflower poem) establishes a false paradise to be gripped only tentatively—mutably—by the reader, a sylvan scene which we momentarily accept as ideal and then are taught to reject. It is only because his readers are breathing human beings that he can rely on them. Had we no real experience of the passing of Springs and the cloying of passion and the faithlessness of women and the relentlessness of men, the idyll of the urn would not interest us in the slightest. Its truth is palpably untrue: life as we live it is unlike the life on the Urn.
Keats hints at his conclusion (as here I hint at mine) by mentioning the sacrificial procession from a ghost-town, somewhere not on the Urn. The reality of the Urn itself suggests, in Tennyson’s phrase, “the touch of a vanished hand.” The “little town,” like the sculptor of the urn, is out of the picture, and “for evermore/ Will silent be.” The Urn, after all, is only a sculpture: as a “cold pastoral” it is not in itself the image of Beauty and Truth that Professors Brooks and Bloom want to make it. The Urn’s own beauty is no more Beauty than its figures’ lives are life. Keats emphasizes its power to survive—which itself is not true, since it must crumble eventually if it hasn’t already; and its truest beauty, as Keats tells us over and over, is its transience.
Hence the urn itself is a paradoxical figure. It will survive, Keats promises, to remind us of the truth more explicit in the Ode on Melancholy: only what does not survive in this world is truly beautiful, and what is beautiful does not survive. When it is gone, as I suppose it is, though I remember seeing one presumably like it in the British Library, the Urn’s message will be the same: transience is more beautiful than intransience, and there is no eternal beauty. Having begun the poem by addressing the urn as a bride and a child—images of life and of life to come—Keats ends the poem by addressing the urn thus: “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” and we suddenly understand that the urn is no more than that, a shape, an attitude, a pose—static and lifeless, even though “with brede of men and maidens overwrought,” which—literally—is just embroidery. It is not the image of abstract truth and beauty that he entices readers (among them those two formidable Yale Professors!) to make it. It poses momentarily as an abstract; but, for all its being perhaps the best known image of the whole Romantic Period, its statement to the world is strangely realistic: immutability is a fraud, and its kind of beauty is cold, lifeless, inhuman, permanent—in short, not real beauty at all.
I don’t know that Keats’s stunning achievement here is unique, but surely to a higher degree than does any of his other great odes, the Ode on a Grecian Urn works by inverse example: it proves its truth by denying the truth it pretends to prove, and therein lies the essence of its romanticism. The statement, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not—as professors Brooks and Bloom have it—a sententious synthesis of the meaning of the urn’s portrayals, but rather a statement of what they do not portray. Read as a commentary on the urn’s own nature, the statement is of course sententious; but it is not such a commentary at all: by example the urn shows us what truth and beauty are not; it stands—and here again is its quintessential romanticism—as an affirmation by negation. Its beauty, and its truth, must be that it depicts what is neither beautiful nor true, not beautiful because not true. The urn is truth because it shows how untrue its own scenery is; it is beauty because, despite Keats’s flattery, it is itself transient and mutable and impermanent.
To conclude with a corrective paraphrase of Professor Brooks [I fear, Mr. Grant, to the demolishment of your late learned friend’s treatment of this admittedly tricky poem]: the urn is beautiful, and yet its beauty to Keats is derived from the premise that such things as urns are not beautiful, really; its vision is true, but its truth is that its portraits are not. Hence Keats’s quite amazing vision of his urn is ironic, paradoxical, ambivalent, and quintessentially romantic: its truth is to expose itself as a falsehood; its beauty is that its beauty is not true.
If, as you go out into the evening in this green and lovely place, you think something of the same about what you have just heard, I have done my work well; but, in any case, you go with all my compliments and blessings. Tomorrow to fresh woods, fresh words, and pastures new. Thank you, very much.
IV. Matt Smaus, "Ode to Psyche": The Freshly-made Soul
Abstract
John Keats led a short, tormented life marked by great despair, obsessive and unconsummated love, and apparent poetic failure. Nonetheless and perhaps on account of this, he has since become possibly the most memorable and resounding poet of the Romantic period. "Ode to Psyche" followed upon a tumultuous period of internal conflicts and resolutions within the poet in which relatively few actual poems were produced. Its remarkable emergence heralded in the more famous odes that are considered now some of his finest work. "Psyche" is important as a stepping-stone piece, as the poem that squared away all his conflicting emotions and rose victoriously out of disillusionment and desperation to make sense of his pain. It tied up the loose ends of a very dark stage of his life, an amazing feat of finding peace among paradox, and cleared the slate for the rebirth of inspiration, with a vengeance.
Publication and Pre-Productive History
"Ode to Psyche" is the first of John Keats' great odes, written among a smattering of sonnets between April 21 and 30, 1819. He was living at the time in Wentworth Place, the house of Charles Brown at Hampstead, and was just coming out of a two-month period in which his poetry had been scarce and often uninspired. He had also undergone several profound realizations including his new philosophy of life as "a vale of soul-making": an acceptance of grief and pain as necessary to the creation of a unique individual. This is particularly relevant to the poem, for the 'psyche' signifies the soul. He had read William Adlington's translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass, the ancient source of the myth of Psyche and Cupid, as well as Mary Tighe's Psyche, from which Keats borrowed much of his wording and several of his images.
The first draft of the poem is lost, but in a letter to his brother George dated April 31, Keats transcribed the earliest existing version. The paragraph immediately preceding the poem is quoted in every work that mentions "Ode to Psyche", and is vitally informative for its illustration of the state of mind that Keats was in while composing. He writes:
The following Poem-the last I have written is the first with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have for the most part dash'd off my lines in a hurry. This I have done leisurely-and I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage me to write other thingsin even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. (letter 123, April 31)
The true significance of these words is still unknown to Keats at their writing. It is, indeed, this 'peaceable and healthy spirit' which enabled him to compose the flawless and more famous odes that followed. Though "Psyche" is not considered so flawless, it is an achievement in its own right, a sure move with a new confidence, the first under the direction of a new Muse.
On May 4 a copy of the poem was handed to John Hamilton Reynolds, a good friend who Keats had met in Leigh Hunt's literary circle in 1816 and who had printed Keats' work in the past. It was this copy that Richard Woodhouse, Keats' chief transcriber, copied into his book of transcripts. The differences between Woodhouse's version and the one from Keats' letter are primarily only in punctuation and generally insignificant, with the most glaring being a clumsy adjustment of the line, 'Blue, freckle-pink, and budded Syrian' to 'Blue, freckled, pink, and budded Syrian'. This proved not to matter at all in the end, for the published version read: 'Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian'.
"Ode to Psyche" was included in Keats' second volume of work, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, the completed manuscript of which was received by Keats' publisher Taylor and Hessey by the end of April 1820. The book was published on either July 1 or 3 of the same year. "Psyche" followed after the "Ode on a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which were preceded only by the three title poems. None of the sonnets written at the same time as "Psyche" made it into the book.
The publisher had changed 'bloomiest' to 'brightest', considered a less objectionable substitute to the improperly formed word. He also broke up the lengthy first stanza into two parts. Keats at this point was in no position to bicker with his publisher, desperate for any kind of possible sale.
Keats had written Brown that he regarded this publication with "very low hopes". It was his last attempt at a successful literary career, and in his expectation of failure (his disillusionment was with critics more than in his own abilities as a poet) he had already nearly resigned himself to "try what [he could] do in the Apothecary line." Nonetheless, good reviews began to pour in, beginning with one by Charles Lamb in the New Times on July 19, and continuing through that of Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review in August, to still more in September. The sales of the book were very slow, however, on account of George IV's effort to divorce his wife, and the resulting clamour that arose from her attempts to assert her rights as Queen in London. The press was consumed in every detail of this, and throughout the entire summer all book sales were extremely slow. By the time the book began to receive any serious attention, it no longer mattered to Keats' future. He had grown terribly ill and moved to Italy. The volume's eventual success, rather than being significant to Keats' living career, was the beginning of his lofty posthumous reputation.
A Synthesis of Paradox
The 'peaceable and healthy spirit' expressed in the letter's preface to the poem has to be wondered at. Keats had been grappling with his lack of inspiration for a while before, and the poems he did write, such as "Why Did I Laugh Last Night?" were dark and ironic. Keats had also become more and more disillusioned with people. Besides the critics' constant slandering, he was stunned by the financial fickleness of his friends and the way in which noble ideals were so easily voiced and so rarely supported by action. Keats met Samuel Coleridge, who had been an instrumental influence to him as a young poet, on April 11. Offended by the older poet's egotistic monologue, he wrote of the encounter: "I heard his voice as he came towards me I heard it as he moved away I had heard it all the interval." His failing optimism is evidenced in the following passage from his letter on March 19: "among these human creatures there is continually some birth of heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish."
Keats reacted to this by searching for a path of his own, independent from the influence of the people he knew, through the difficulties the world posed. In "Psyche" he writes: "Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired." Besides signifying a solitary search for inspiration, this line makes reference to Keats' love of Greek mythology which, though 'faint' to modern eyes, held greater spiritual appeal to him than Christian values, and had permeated his poetry since his association with Leigh Hunt had begun many years before. The goddess Psyche, though, had made only one quick appearance in the earlier poem, "I stood tip-toe." More than being neglected within his own work, however, Psyche was a figure who, in Keats' words, "was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apulieus the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour." So Keats had a fresh diety on his hands, the perfect vessel for the expression of all that had been brewing inside him. Specifically, as the embodiment of the soul, the goddess Psyche was the perfect representative of his "vale of soul-making" philosophy.
Keats, in his letter, summed this new philosophy up with the question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Keats' life had been stricken with despair for some time and had recently worsened with his Love of Fanny Brawne that, because he was unfit for husbandry at the time, did nothing more than torment him. So, with this new world-view, he could accept all the 'World of Pains and troubles' as necessary for his spiritual growth as an individual. Keats says to Psyche in his ode to her:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a faneIn some untrodden region of my mind,Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant Pain,Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind (50-53)
In an 'untrodden region' of his mind, unspoiled and fresh, Keats is giving himself completely to whatever this new view on life has in store for him. His 'branched thoughts' reflect the branching away of his 'vale of soul-making' philosophy from the Christian 'vale of tears.' Changing the concept from one in which only Christ can save you from the world of pain and suffering to one in which the grief is necessary for the creation of a soul allowed Keats just the sort of independence and resolution he needed to reinvest himself in poetry. He was thenceforth able to find the 'peaceable and healthy spirit' he was searching for with which he wished to create his poems. Pain had even become 'pleasant.'
Keats had been frustrated with the state of mind in which he habitually wrote poetry. Such thoughts as: "In the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing" (letter 123, March 8) are found throughout his letter. He felt that the way in which he traditionally 'dash'd off [his] lines in a hurry' had not resulted in his best poetry and was quite proud of the way in which he took 'even moderate pains' with "Ode to Psyche."
It is an unlikely synthesis of ideas that occurs in "Psyche." The stoic acceptance and even appreciation of pain lead to the desired state of 'leisure' necessary to create some of his finest work. The exalted odes are a result of this process, and the often-overlooked "Ode to Psyche" is the forebear of these. It is the poem that first brought together all the ideas that had been gestating during the preceding period of fertile contemplation and faltering poetic inspiration. Keats had discovered that by facing directly into his pain and exploring it honestly he could arrive at a peaceable detachment from it at the same time that he embraced it.
In the midst of his detachment, solitude, and independence of thought, Keats was intent on keeping himself open to the mysteries that life would throw at him, to keep the 'casement ope at night', the soul impressionable during the darkest of times, a 'bright torch' lit. By being open to life's mystery, accepting and even celebratory of life's pain, he would 'let the warm Love in!' He had come to grasp the apparent contradictions as essential to his individual development. Confident that his Intelligence was being schooled and made into a soul, he happened upon a period of peaceful, inspired poetical composition. It would last about three weeks, as Keats' short life was marked by constant extremes, but it would allow him a respite from the turmoil of his life for long enough to attain some of the finest work to come out of the Romantic period.
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