John Keats, the youngest of the great Romantic poets, had a superb lyric gift, honed by close study of literary predecessors such as Dante, Milton and Shakespeare. One of the things that sets him apart from some of his English Romantic contemporaries is the degree to which he studied the technical question how his predecessors achieved their effects, rather than focusing more exclusively on the question what they were attempting to convey. Toward the end of his tuberculosis-shortened life, he wrote the series of great odes for which he is best known. Here is his “Ode to Autumn.”
J. Keats
CCLV. Ode to Autumn
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-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 5
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; 10
For Summer has o’erbrimm’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; 15
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook; 20
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,â€â€
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day 25
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
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; 30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The ode was derived from an ancient Greek form, as a celebratory address to a deity. Keats closely copies the ancient Greek manner of anthropomorphizing the force in question, personifying the aspects of Autumn, behind whom the figure of Ceres may be discovered. The fortuitous pun on “ode” as “owed” rings throught the piece as well. Keats clearly thinks that Autumn has not been given her due.
Here at the latitude in which I dwell, which is equal almost to Keats’, it’s understandable that the songs of Spring should be more avidly celebrated. Winters are harsh and long, and it’s a great relief to divest oneself of those layers at the end of winter, and natural enough to give thanks for the broadening of the lit hours, and the reinvigoration of the land. But Keats realizes that all is interconnected, and that the great seasonal forces that unleash the springtide lurk, not in potentia, but as realized, in the Autumn, when, as Shakespeare would have it, in another context, “ripeness is all.” Autumn conspires with the sun to bring everything to its fullest potential, its fullest expression. In the seasonal cycle, this moment of absolute ephemerality, when the contending forces of weakening summer and strengthening winter are at an absolute standstill, everything is at perfect equipose. Like the Indian summer for the silly bees, we are hoodwinked by the pleasure of Indian summer, and yet, unlike them, we know that we must brace for winter. And yet, Keats asks, who has the philosophy betwixt us? Should we not rather celebrate the moment for what it is, a climax, than to mourn that it must pass and we descend into winter?
Throughout, Keats conceives of Autumn and the sun as conspiring, of (etymologically) “breathing together” in order to bring natural creation to fulfillment, enlarding it, and his use of gerunds such as “to plump” helps bridge the gap between the stasis and fullness of noun-ishness, and the still striving urge of the verb, representing their interrelation. Indeed, it is this sense of almost tactile fullness and tangibility–as in the image of the pendent branches of the apple trees, or of the stalk bent under its own weight over the stream–that critics associate with Keats’ achievement: the extraordinary engagement of the reader’s vocal organs in the (even subvocal) production of the effects which he represents. The sense of conspiracy and of inspiration was not accidental; when he wrote the odes, Keats had known for some time that he was dying of tuberculosis. As Keats was dying in Italy, the very different, somewhat ethereal Romantic Shelley wrote to him, and Keats responded:
I received a copy of the Cenci, as from yourself from Hunt. There is only one part of it I am judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the mammon. A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God – an artist must serve Mammon – he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps. You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and ‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl’d for six Months together. And is not this extraordina[r]y talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards – I am pick’d up and sorted to a pip.
The references to loading every rift with ore and to Mammon come straight from Book One of Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Keats’ own poetical craft depends on engaging the vocal apparatus, which somehow manage to stand in for the body as a whole, and he urges Shelley, who is at heart a platonist, to become, in effect, a greater sensualist in his verses.
The image of the wailing choir of gnats, rising or falling as the light wind lives or dies, best expresses the perfect equipose that Keats conveys, and recalls Shakespeare in Antony & Cleopatra:
Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can
Her heart inform her tongue,–the swan’s
down-feather,
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.
Like the Nile itself, she is an earth-force, a material matrix.
Keats’ craft is rather well summed up by another great poet:
Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:
Not true
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –
A poem should not mean
But be
— Archibald MacLeish
It is, to my ear, the quietest poem in the English language, and one of the very greatest. Please take it to heart.
Please don’t tell me Thomas Dolby ripped that gem. Never read that , thank you.
Sorry, but what’s the Dolby reference, Bill? I should probably add that I don’t think that MacLeish is being consciously nasty to Canadians in his poem.
Thank you, Mr. Collins.
You called me Mr. Collins just to tweak me, anonymous. And it worked.
Yeah, but the “thank you” was sincere.
Good post, Dan. I enjoyed that.
Avast, Dan Collins, brother of mine own,
Who’st hand hath touched, as I, the very same
Of drunken dwarf who stumbled ‘long the bricks
Of Charlottesville! How sweetly, and yet sad….
I ope my ear to Summer’s lost refrain,
And harken’d to that bard of yesteryore,
(who’s verses bent on bending Fanny Brawne)
and weept I too conceits of tearful oozings
That steeply o’erbrimmed my clammy cell,
And, wiping meekly at my stubbled plains,
A wailful choir of gnats I did enjoin:
O! Keats! O! Collins! Brothers of mine art!
I stand before thee, palpable and dumb!
And tweak thee, as the satyr tweaks the goatling,
To twitter in the twirling twilit glade:
Our waning usurpy of hearty blogdom.
Well met, say I. And ere we quit this shore,
What say we lode are pockets up with ore.
Nice.
Blogs, at their best, resemble the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London in the 18th and 19th centuries. Members come by regularly, sometimes to interact…and other times merely to observe. Some come for companionship, some for comfort; some for discussion with like-minded individuals, some to hone arguments for their position against those of contrary opinion.
Sometimes, members drop in merely because they’re in the neighborhood….and are given something to ponder to take with them when they leave.
Thanks, Dan.
Some of us just drop in for the opium … and the loose women.
<pours half a gallon of vodka into a plastic tumbler>
Here, this’ll tighten her up.
I really enjoyed this post, and you have compelled me to add my mother’s favorite poem. We talked about it every year at this time, and it makes me miss her all the more now that I can no longer quote it back and forth with her.
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
October’s Bright Blue Weather
O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather;
When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;
When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;
When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;
When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;
When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October’s bright blue weather.
O sun and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October’s bright blue weather.
Thank you from the bottom of this English teacher’s heart.
A soul is all the poorer for not having read poetry.
Thanks, all, for the communion, represented in iamfelix’s recollections, and Witheld’s immortal verses–“Soliloquy to a Mournful Choir of Gnats” (which really is quite good). And be nice to your mothers, and grateful to your English teachers.
“Quietest poem”…yes; it would certainly ruin it to declaim it like some other odes.
I don’t know. Something about that haiku doesn’t look right.
Sanity Inspector:
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of that Wilde comment. Walter Jackson Bate wrote a great intellectual biography of Keats, and I think he wrote on Wilde, too. Of the English Romantics, Keats and Coleridge speak most directly to me. Wordsworth had the fusive power to generate lines such as this one, on Newton’s statue at Cambridge:
“The marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
Byron tickles me. Blake . . . errrrr.
That marginal poem written by Keats in his Cap and Bells, rendered as “This living hand,” is perhaps the most haunting thing I’ve ever read.
(snapping gum)
It’s got a good beat, but you can’t dance to it. I’d give it a five.
That’s a good one too, Dan. If I remember:
I have always loved the use of meter in the last two lines—in the penultimate line, the trochaic substitution in the fourth foot is a brilliant synchopation. And then trailing off the last line with silence is genius. “I hold it towards you [beat] [beat] [beat].” It always makes think of Miles Davis and his knowing “what notes not to play.”
As i’ve gotten older, I find I love that poem more for its form than its sentiment though. Essentially it’s saying, to a reluctant lover, “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead. So, for your own sake, you’d better let me ‘grasp’ you earnestly” Which is about as manipuilative as you can get. It’s not a great moment for him. But, as he was twentysomething, horny and in love, and knew he was going to die soon, it’s hard to hold it against him either. It just makes me all the more sad that he died so young.
So, tell me again, how much does a grecian urn, exactly?
(Ducks)
Patrick–
Whatever he’s “ode”…