SPARKNOTES
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/
THE ODES -Context
In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems in the English language. Among
his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes, written between March and September 1819—
astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keats’s poetic achievement is made all the more
miraculous by the age at which it ended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode “To Autumn,” in February
1821.
Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was still young, he lost both his
parents. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he was
fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually he went to medical school. But by the time he
turned twenty, he abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book
of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential magazine, and his second book attracted
comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keats’s brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December
1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in Hampstead.
In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During this time, Keats began to experience
the extraordinary creative inspiration that enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time
before he died. His health and his finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of 1820, hoping
the warmer climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death brought to an untimely end one of
the most extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century—indeed, one of the most extraordinary poetic
careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for
his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in
his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among “the English poets”
when he had died.
Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, a movement that espoused
the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and
themes evident in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation
between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of
human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for
beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations—though at the
same time, they are all uniquely Keats’s.
Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story—there is no unifying “plot” and no recurring characters—and
there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the
extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and
develop the same themes, partake of many of the same approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way,
exhibit an unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do not stand on their own—
they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of the sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed
wholly or partially from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to read. There has been a great deal
of critical debate over how to treat the voices that speak the poems—are they meant to be read as though a single
person speaks them all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode?
There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question itself is wrong: The consciousness at
work in each of the odes is unmistakably Keats’s own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it
is unlikely that all the events really happened to Keats), but given their sincerity and their shared frame of thematic
reference, there is no reason to think that they do not come from the same part of Keats’s mind—that is to say, that
they are not all told by the same part of Keats’s reflected self. In that sense, there is no harm in treating the odes a
sequence of utterances told in the same voice. The psychological progress from “Ode on Indolence” to “To
Autumn” is intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to imagine that the odes are
spoken by a sequence of fictional characters. When you think of “the speaker” of these poems, think of Keats as he
would have imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speaker’s trajectory from the numb drowsiness
of “Indolence” to the quiet wisdom of “Autumn,” try to hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of
Keats’s extraordinary language.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Theme: The Inevitability of Death
Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For
Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of
a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols
of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On
Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream
of becoming as great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic
achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to understand—and surpass—the work of his
predecessors. Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and terminate his
projects; he expresses these concerns in the mournful 1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”
Theme: The Contemplation of Beauty
In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although
we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and
landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), books (“On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a
Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” [1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful
things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first book
of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” envies the immortality of the lute players and trees
inscribed on the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed their
leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they shall never catch their mistresses, these
women shall always stay beautiful. The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences.
They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and eventually dies.
Motif: Departures and Reveries
In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic
realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a
new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful object makes the departure possible. The
ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or
rationality, is part of Keats’s concept of negative capability. In “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” the
speaker imagines a state of “sweet unrest” (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his lover’s breast
forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have experiences and insights that they can
then impart into poetry once they’ve returned to conscious life. Keats explored the relationship between visions
and poetry in “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Motif: The Five Senses and Art
Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected with various types of art. The speaker
in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another,
musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the figures remain motionless, held fast and
permanent by their depiction on the sides of the urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch
them by holding the vessel. Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing,
we cannot hear the music. Similarly, the speaker in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” compares hearing
Homer’s words to “pure serene” (7) air so that reading, or seeing, becomes associating with breathing, or smelling.
In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that he might adequately
describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five senses must be involved in worthwhile
experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art.
Motif: The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker
In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the work—that is, the work itself chronicles an
experience in such a way that the reader recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the
intervention or explanation of the poet. Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an object that they erase
themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to
and indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is
enclosed in quotation marks. Since the poem’s publication in 1820, critics have theorized about who speaks these
lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the
poet is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and troubling.
Ode on Indolence
Summary: In the first stanza, Keats’s speaker describes a vision he had one morning of three strange figures wearing white
robes and “placid sandals.” The figures passed by in profile, and the speaker describes their passing by comparing them to
figures carved into the side of a marble urn, or vase. When the last figure passed by, the first figure reappeared, just as would
happen if one turned a vase carved with figures before one’s eyes.
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the figures directly, asking them how it was that he did not recognize them and how
they managed to sneak up on him. He suspects them of trying to “steal away, and leave without a task” his “idle days,” and goes
on to describe how he passed the morning before their arrival: by lazily enjoying the summer day in a sort of sublime numbness.
He asks the figures why they did not disappear and leave him to this indolent nothingness.
In the third stanza, the figures pass by for a third time. The speaker feels a powerful urge to rise up and follow them, because he
now recognizes them: the first is a “fair maid,” Love; the second is pale-cheeked Ambition; and the third, whom the speaker
seems to love despite himself, is the unmeek maiden, the demon Poesy, or poetry. When the figures disappear in the fourth
stanza, the speaker again aches to follow them, but he says that the urge is folly: Love is fleeting, Ambition is mortal, and Poesy
has nothing to offer that compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by “busy common-sense.”
In the fifth stanza, the speaker laments again the figures’ third passing, describing his morning before their arrival, when his soul
seemed a green lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows, and sunbeams. There were clouds in the sky but no rain fell, and the open
window let in the warmth of the day and the music of birdsong. The speaker tells the figures they were right to leave, for they
had failed to rouse him. In the sixth stanza, he bids them adieu and asserts again that Love, Ambition, and Poesy are not enough
to make him raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He bids them farewell and tells them he has an ample supply of visions;
then he orders them to vanish and never return.
Form: Like all the other odes but “To Autumn” and “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Indolence” is written in ten-line stanzas, in a
relatively precise iambic pentameter. Like the others (again, with the exception of “Ode to Psyche”), its stanzas are composed of
two parts: an opening four-line sequence of alternating rhymed lines (ABAB), and a six-line sequence with a variable rhyme
scheme (in stanzas one through four, CDECDE; in stanza five, CDEDCE; in stanza six, CDECED).
Themes: Chronologically, the “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode. It was composed in the spring of
1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few months before “To Autumn.” However, when the odes are grouped
together as a sequence, “Indolence” is often placed first in the group—an arrangement that makes sense,
considering that “Indolence” raises the glimmerings of themes explored more fully in the other five poems, and
seems to portray the speaker’s first struggle with the problems and ideas of the other odes. The story of
“Indolence” is extraordinarily simple—a young man spends a drowsy summer morning lazing about, until he is
startled by a vision of Love, Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow the
figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning outweigh the temptations of love,
ambition, and poetry.
So the principal theme of “Ode on Indolence” holds that the pleasant numbness of the speaker’s indolence is a preferable state to
the more excitable states of love, ambition, and poetry. One of the great themes of Keats’s odes is that of the anguish of
mortality—the pain and frustration caused by the changes and endings inevitable in human life, which are contrasted throughout
the poems with the permanence of art. In this ode, the speaker’s indolence seems in many ways an attempt to blur forgetfully the
lines of the world, so that the “short fever-fit” of life no longer seems so agonizing. The speaker rejects love and ambition simply
because they require him to experience his own life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of ending (of love, the speaker
wonders what and where it is; of ambition, he notes the pale cheek and “fatigued eye,” and observes that it “springs” directly
from human mortality). He longs never to know “how change the moons” and to be “sheltered from annoy.” This is why Poesy
offers the most seductive, and also most hateful, challenge to indolence. Poetry is not mortal and changeable (Poesy, in fact, is a
“demon”), but it is anathema to indolence and would require the speaker to feel his life too acutely—thus it has “not a joy” for
him as sweet as the drowsy nothingness of indolence.
Though the poem ends on a note of rejection, the persistence of the figures and the speaker’s impassioned response to them
indicate that he will eventually have to raise his head from the grass and confront Love, Ambition, and Poesy more directly—a
confrontation embodied in the other five odes, where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality, imagination,
and art. Many of the ideas and images in “Ode on Indolence” anticipate more developed ideas and images in the later odes. Each
ode finds Keats confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in “Indolence,” he confronts three. The lushly
described summer landscape, with its “stirring shades / and baffled beams,” anticipates the imaginary landscape the speaker
creates in “Ode to Psyche”; the experience of numbness anticipates the aesthetic numbness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the
anguished numbness of “Ode on Melancholy”; the birdsong of the “throstle’s lay” anticipates the nightingale and the swallows of
“To Autumn.” The Grecian dress of the figures and their urn-like procession anticipate the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and also cast
back to an earlier poem, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” in which the speaker’s confrontation with some ancient Greek
sculptures makes him feel overwhelmed by his own mortality. (The “Phidian lore” the speaker refers to at the end of the first
stanza is a direct reference to the earlier poem: Phidias was the sculptor who made the Elgin marbles.)
In this way, the “Ode on Indolence” makes a sort of preface to the other odes. It does not enter into a dramatic exploration of
love, ambition, or art, but rather raises the possibility of such a confrontation in a way that casts light on the speaker’s behavior in
the other odes. Its lush, sensuous language, and its speaker’s oscillation between temptation and rejection in the face of the
figures’ persistent processional, indicate a fuller, deeper, and more acutely felt poetic exploration to come. But for now, the
speaker is content to let the figures fade and to give himself wholly to the numb dreaminess of his indolence.
Ode to Psyche
Summary: Keats’s speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess Psyche, urging her to hear his words, and asking that she forgive him
for singing to her her own secrets. He says that while wandering through the forest that very day, he stumbled upon “two fair creatures” lying side
by side in the grass, beneath a “whisp’ring roof” of leaves, surrounded by flowers. They embraced one another with both their arms and wings, and
though their lips did not touch, they were close to one another and ready “past kisses to outnumber.” The speaker says he knew the winged boy, but
asks who the girl was. He answers his own question: She was Psyche.
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses Psyche again, describing her as the youngest and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods and
goddesses. He believes this, he says, despite the fact that, unlike other divinities, Psyche has none of the trappings of worship: She has no temples,
no altars, no choir to sing for her, and so on. In the third stanza, the speaker attributes this lack to Psyche’s youth; she has come into the world too
late for “antique vows” and the “fond believing lyre.” But the speaker says that even in the fallen days of his own time, he would like to pay
homage to Psyche and become her choir, her music, and her oracle. In the fourth stanza, he continues with these declarations, saying he will
become Psyche’s priest and build her a temple in an “untrodden region” of his own mind, a region surrounded by thought that resemble the beauty
of nature and tended by “the gardener Fancy,” or imagination. He promises Psyche “all soft delight” and says that the window of her new abode
will be left open at night, so that her winged boy—”the warm Love”—can come in.
Form: The four stanzas of “Ode to Psyche” are written in the loosest form of any of Keats’s odes. The stanzas vary in number of lines, rhyme
scheme, and metrical scheme, and convey the effect of spontaneous rhapsody rather than considered form. Lines are iambic, but vary from dimeter
to pentameter; the most common rhymes are in alternating lines (ABAB), but there are abundant exceptions, and there are even unrhymed lines.
(“Hours,” at the end of line ten in the third stanza, is an example.) The number of lines in a stanza is simply organic and irregular; stanza one has 23
lines, stanza two has 12, stanza three has 14, and stanza four has 18.
In the first stanza, every line is written in iambic pentameter except lines 12, 21, and 23 (the first two are trimeter, the last dimeter). The full rhyme
scheme is ABAB CDCD EFGEEGH IIJJ KIKI. It can essentially be broken into five parts: two pairs of four-line, alternating rhymes (ABAB
CDCD), a looser seven-line sequence that includes rhythmic irregularity and two unrhymed words (EFGEEGH, with the trimeter in line 12 and the
unrhymed words “roof” at the end of line 10 and “grass” at the end of line 15), two couplets (IIJJ), and a final four-line section with alternating
rhymes (KIKI), differing from the first in that the “I” rhyme-lines (which match the rhymes of the first couplet above) are shorter than the “K”
lines, with the trimeter of line 21 and the dimeter of line 23. (This sounds far more complicated than it is; penciling in the letters at the end of each
line will make the scheme much easier to follow.)
The second stanza is shorter and much simpler. It follows a strictly alternating rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF, and the only irregularities are
metrical, with two trimeters, lines 6and 8. The result is that the CDCD section of this stanza differs slightly from the others; the D-lines are shorter.
The third stanza has trimeters in lines 10, 12, and 14; other than that, the stanza is written in iambic pentameter. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB
CDDCEF GHGH. This is relatively self-explanatory, except that “moan” and “hours,” the E- and F-lines (lines 9and 10) do not have precise
matches; “moan” rhymes roughly with “fans” and “Olympians,” and “hours” rhymes roughly with “vows” and “boughs,” but neither of these
matches is as precise as the other rhymes in the stanza. If those rhymes “count,” the rhyme scheme of the stanza should be written as ABAB
CDDCDA EFEF.
The final stanza has trimeters in lines 16 and 18, and follows a relatively simple and natural rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EE FGFG HIHI. In
other words, each section is four lines long and alternates rhyming lines, except for the EE couplet in lines 9and 10.
It is very important to note that the large number of irregularities and long algebraic rhyme schemes in this ode should not be taken as signs of great
formal complexity. “Ode to Psyche” is much more freely and loosely written than any of Keats’s other odes, and the fact that it is difficult to
schematize testifies to this spontaneity and freedom rather than to an elaborate preconceived formal scheme. The other odes, though their stanzas
and rhyme schemes are easier to describe in terms of form, are much more strictly ordered and make much deeper use of strict form than does the
“Ode to Psyche.” In fact, there is little to gain from long formal analysis of the Psyche ode; its form is better understood in the loose and general
terms in which it seems to have been planned.
Themes: With its loose, rhapsodic formal structure and its extremely lush sensual imagery, the “Ode to Psyche” finds the speaker turning from the
delights of numbness (in “Ode on Indolence”) to the delights of the creative imagination—even if that imagination is not yet projected outward into
art.
The basis for the story of “Ode to Psyche” is a famous myth. Psyche was the youngest and most beautiful daughter of a king. She was so beautiful
that Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was jealous of her; she dispatched her son, Eros, the god of love (the Cupid of Roman mythology
and the “winged boy” of Keats’s poem) to punish Psyche for being so beautiful. But Eros was so startled by Psyche’s beauty that he pricked himself
with his own arrow and fell in love with her. Eros summoned Psyche to his palace, but he remained invisible to her, coming to her only and night
and ordering her never to try to see his face. One night, Psyche lit a lamp in order to catch a glimpse of her lover; but Eros was so angry with her for
breaking his trust that he left her. Psyche was forced to perform a number of difficult tasks to placate Venus and win back Eros as her husband. The
word “psyche” is Greek for “soul,” and it is not difficult to imagine why Keats would have found the story attractive—the story of the woman so
beautiful that Love fell in love with her.
Additionally, as Keats observed, the myth of Psyche was first recorded by Apuleius in the second century A.D., and is thus much more recent than
most myths (this is why Keats refers to Psyche as the “latest born” of “Olympus’s faded hierarchy”). It is so recent, in fact, that Psyche was never
worshipped as a real goddess. That slight is what compels Keats’s speaker to dedicate himself to becoming her temple, her priest, and her prophet,
all in one. So he has found a way to move beyond the numbness of indolence and has discovered a goddess to worship. To worship Psyche, Keats
summons all the resources of his imagination. He will give to Psyche a region of his mind, where his thoughts will transform into the sumptuous
natural beauties Keats imagines will attract Psyche to her bower in his mind. Taken by itself, “Ode to Psyche” is simply a song to love and the
creative imagination; in the full context of the odes, it represents a crucial step between “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode to a Nightingale”: the
speaker has become preoccupied with creativity, but his imagination is still directed toward wholly internal ends. He wants to partake of divine
permanence by taking his goddess into himself; he has not yet become interested in the outward imaginative expression of art.
Ode to a Nightingale
Summary
The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a
nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but
rather from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees
and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the
country and like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he
explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret”
of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot
keep her lustrous eyes.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his
pards”), but through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where
even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker
says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the muskrose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often
been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks
that the idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul
ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing
has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking
out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his
preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed
him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the music is gone, the
speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.
Form
Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically
variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line
of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its
rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has
the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.
Themes
With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of
human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale,
and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The
speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of
disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the
nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s
state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third
stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was
supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the
figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven,
imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly
succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his
meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the
inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the
speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.
In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal
pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world,
and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and
renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich
though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”; he
knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object
not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that
expression—the nightingale’s song—is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Summary: In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures
frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian”
that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a
picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle
to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of
trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the
youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third
stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his
songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing
human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders
where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its
citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza,
the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long
dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing
the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.
Form: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the
last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and
divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme
scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in
stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially “Autumn” and
“Melancholy”), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic
structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in
other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic
structure closely at all.)
Themes
If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays
his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s
viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s
meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are
simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but neither can they have experience
(the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).
The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he
examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: “What men or gods are these? What maidens
loth?” Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this
line of questioning.
In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what
the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to
the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all
transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity—when passion is satisfied, all that remains is
a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the
speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their
procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If
these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn
from the urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on
the urn in the fourth.
It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt
gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the
processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The
third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he
has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.
In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence
outside of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry generations,”
as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it
cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.
The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among
the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure
who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be
the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not
need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and selfcontained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather
the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and
truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.
Ode on Melancholy
Summary
The three stanzas of the “Ode on Melancholy” address the subject of how to cope with sadness. The first stanza tells what not to
do: The sufferer should not “go to Lethe,” or forget their sadness (Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology); should
not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of Prosperpine,” is a poison; Prosperpine is the mythological queen of the
underworld); and should not become obsessed with objects of death and misery (the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl). For, the
speaker says, that will make the anguish of the soul drowsy, and the sufferer should do everything he can to remain aware of and
alert to the depths of his suffering.
In the second stanza, the speaker tells the sufferer what to do in place of the things he forbade in the first stanza. When afflicted
with “the melancholy fit,” the sufferer should instead overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty, glutting it on the morning rose,
“on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,” or in the eyes of his beloved. In the third stanza, the speaker explains these injunctions,
saying that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked: Beauty must die, joy is fleeting, and the flower of pleasure is forever
“turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.” The speaker says that the shrine of melancholy is inside the “temple of Delight,”
but that it is only visible if one can overwhelm oneself with joy until it reveals its center of sadness, by “burst[ing] Joy’s grape
against his palate fine.” The man who can do this shall “taste the sadness” of melancholy’s might and “be among her cloudy
trophies hung.”
Form
“Ode on Melancholy,” the shortest of Keats’s odes, is written in a very regular form that matches its logical, argumentative
thematic structure. Each stanza is ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. The first two stanzas,
offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme, ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the
ending slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order
from the previous two stanzas. As in some other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Grecian Urn”), the two-part rhyme scheme of
each stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well, in which
the first four lines of each stanza define the stanza’s subject, and the latter six develop it. (This is true especially of the second
two stanzas.)
Themes
If the “Ode to Psyche” is different from the other odes primarily because of its form, the “Ode on Melancholy” is different
primarily because of its style. The only ode not to be written in the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker admonishing or
advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode; presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In
many ways, “Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and
“Urn,” the beautiful descriptions of nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of “Nightingale,” and the philosophy of
“Urn,” all find expression in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy” is more than simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it,
the speaker at last explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that lets him move beyond
the insufficient aesthetic understanding of “Urn” and achieve the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”
For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy” urges action rather than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the
eagerly embraced drowsiness of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy numbness” of “Nightingale,” the speaker declares that he
must remain alert and open to “wakeful anguish,” and rather than flee from sadness, he will instead glut it on the pleasures of
beauty. Instead of numbing himself to the knowledge that his mistress will grow old and die (that “Beauty cannot keep her
lustrous eyes,” as he said in “Nightingale”), he uses that knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely. Because she dwells
with “beauty that must die,” he will “feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.”
In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing synthesis of melancholy and joy, in a way that takes in the tragic
mortality of life but lets him remain connected to his own experience. It is precisely the fact that joy will come to an end that
makes the experience of joy such a ravishing one; the fact that beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more
thrilling. The key, he writes, is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at the heart of all pleasure—to “burst joy’s grape” and gain
admission to the inner temple of melancholy. Though the “Ode on Melancholy” is not explicitly about art, it is clear that this
synthetic understanding of joy and suffering is what has been missing from the speaker’s earlier attempts to experience art.
“Ode on Melancholy” originally began with a stanza Keats later crossed out, which described a questing hero in a grotesque
mythological ship sailing into the underworld in search of the goddess Melancholy. Though Keats removed this stanza from his
poem (the resulting work is subtler and less overwrought), the story’s questing hero still provides perhaps the best framework in
which to read this poem. The speaker has fully rejected his earlier indolence and set out to engage actively with the ideas and
themes that preoccupy him, but his action in this poem is still fantastical, imaginative, and strenuous. He can only find what he
seeks in mythical regions and imaginary temples in the sky; he has not yet learned how to find it in his own immediate
surroundings. That understanding and the final presentation of the odes’ deepest themes will occur in “To Autumn.”
To Autumn
Summary
Keats’s speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom
Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a
female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or
watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the
songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the “small gnats” hum above the shallows of the
river, lifted and dropped by the wind, and “full-grown lambs” bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden,
and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.
Form
Like the “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is
eleven lines long (as opposed to ten in “Melancholy”, and each is metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of
both thematic organization and rhyme scheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is made
up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows
an ABAB rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and the second line rhyming with the fourth. The second part of
each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme scheme: The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzas are
arranged CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second part
offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic division is only very general.)
Themes
In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or
complex in Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for
migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of
themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy” presents itself as a
strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this
quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.
“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular
goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of
temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of
winter’s desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full
grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss
in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation
of the entire human condition.
Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the
cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural
creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons
he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”),
no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in “Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the
attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of
pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).
In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the swallows recall the nightingale; the fruit
recalls joy’s grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but it also recalls a
wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often
explicitly about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic
creation. In his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection directly:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...
In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the
resulting “grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow
underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the
cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will
come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in “Melancholy,” abundance and loss, joy and sorrow,
song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To Autumn” beautiful is that it brings an engagement
with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The development the speaker so strongly resisted in
“Indolence” is at last complete: He has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned
wisdom by accepting the passage of time.Symbols
Music and Musicians
Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry and poets. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance,
the speaker describes musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we
can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of “To Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to sing.
Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season of flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a
Nightingale” uses the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful
birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music
represents the ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death through
the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.
Nature
Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world
with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to
create extended meditations and thoughtful odes about aspects of the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,”
hearing the bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans. The speaker of
“Ode on Melancholy” compares a bout of depression to a “weeping cloud” (12), then goes on to list specific flowers that are
linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In “Ode to Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky
to find ways to worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and the moon rests
amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from which to ponder, but he also discovers in
nature similes, symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe.
The Ancient World
Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia,
often take place in a mythical world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to
populate poems, such as “Ode to Psyche” and “To Homer” (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the
Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life. In ancient cultures, Keats
saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there
was hope that a poem or artistic object from Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats
or another writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keats’s great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats
quietly prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”
Notes for the class: What is an ode?
An ode is an exalted lyric poem, aiming at loftier thought, more dignified expression, and
more intricate formal structure than most lyrics. Another characteristic of odes is that they
often addressed to someone or something.
An ode is a long lyric poem, serious and dignified in subject, tone, and style, often written to
celebrate an event, person, being or power--or to provide a vehicle for private meditation.
Sometimes an ode may have an elaborate stanzaic structure. Almost all odes are poems of
address, in which the poet uses apostrophe( repetition of the initial word of thou -a poetic
figure of speech in which inanimate object or absent person is directly addressed).
The ode was originally a Greek form used in dramatic poetry, in which a chorus would follow
the movements of a dance while singing the words of the ode. Those odes often celebrated a
public occasion of consequence, such as a military victory. From those ancient Greek
beginnings, the form has descended through the Western culture to appear in English divested
of dance and song.
Irregular odes: they have no set rhyme scheme and no set stanza pattern.
Horatian odes follow a regular stanza pattern and rhyme scheme, as does the ode by Keats.
Study Questions
1. What are some of the recurring motifs that appear throughout the six odes? Given
the chronological problems with the usual ordering of the odes (“Indolence,” often
placed first in the sequence, was one of the last odes to be written), to what extent do
you think the odes should be grouped as a unified sequence?
2. Taken together, do the odes tell a “story,” or do they simply develop a theme? Do
you think the speaker is the same in each ode?
3. How does the “Ode on Indolence” anticipate the themes and images of the other
five poems? Given the speaker’s later confrontations with Love, Ambition, and
Beauty—as well as with such themes as mortality and the creative imagination—does
the conclusion of the Indolence ode seem ironic?
4. In what ways is “Ode to Psyche” different from the other odes? How do these
differences affect the poem’s attempt to describe the creative imagination? Why
might the speaker want to use his imagination for Psyche’s worship?
5. From Psyche’s bower to the nightingale’s glade to the warm luxury of Autumn, the
odes contain some of the most beautiful sensory language in English poetry. But
many of the odes intentionally limit the senses they inhabit. With particular reference
to “Nightingale” (which suppresses sight) and “Grecian Urn” (which suppresses every
sense but sight), how do the odes create an abundance of believable sensation even as
they limit it?
6. The odes are full of paradoxical and self-contradictory ideas—the attribution of
human experience to the frozen figures on the urn, for instance. But the “Ode on
Melancholy” builds its entire theme on an apparent paradox—that pleasure and pain
are intimately connected and that sadness rests at the core of joy. How does the
language of “Melancholy” strengthen that sense of paradox? What does it mean for
trophies to be cloudy, pleasure to be aching, a lover’s anger to be soothing, and
“wakeful anguish” a thing to be desired?
7. On its surface, the ode “To Autumn” seems to be little more than description, an
illustration of a season. But underneath its descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of
the most thematically rich of all the odes. How does Keats manage to embody
complex themes in such an apparently simple poem?