Odes responses

Hello Romanticists,

I have chosen three odes for us to discuss in our penultimate class.  I have selected these because all three are about attempting to exist in two realms simultaneously.  Shelley, we know, was both extraordinarily abstract in his political and poetical theories but also devoted to pragmatic social movements of the day.  Similar is Keats’ enchantment with other worlds.  He is drawn into worlds of gods and fairies, into beautiful and ideal worlds beyond our capacity to fully grasp.  And yet, the most characteristically Keatsian move is the awakening from these dream worlds (the knight wakes up on the cold hill’s side; the reader thuds back to her own reality with the sudden ending of “Eve of Saint Agnes”).  The poems for Tuesday are all attempts to reconcile ideals with lived experience, the eternal with our specific temporal moment. 

Unlike the other Keats poems we have read, “Ode to a Nightingale” has no single moment of awakening but rather is a series of awakenings, a continual process of realization that keeps the speaker balanced between dreaming and wakefulness.  “Ode to the West Wind” and “To Autumn” take the same season as their focal point.  While Shelley’s poem is filled with chaotic energy straining toward future fulfillment, Keats’ poem finds a calm balance in cyclical change which is both dynamic and eternal. 

Happy Reading,

Prof. M.

Autumn Sunset by English Romantic painter John Constable

Engraving of a Nightingale by Thomas Bewick, from The History of British Birds (1797)

Melancholic Keats responses

Dear Romanticists,

First, my apologies for the late posting; if you do not get a chance to upload your post before class, no worries.

In the 1819 letter assigned for Tuesday, Keats challenges the popular Christian notion of the world as a “vale of tears,” or a place in which people ceaselessly suffer until removed to Heaven by a merciful god (1459-60, Napoleonic edition).  This is not to say that Keats denies the pain of existence—how could he?—but rather he believes that pain is a vital and even salutary element of human life:

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul, a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways?” (1459).

Forms of suffering develop our souls; they refine our senses, shape our identities, and teach us to feel for others.  Our poems for Tuesday explore how, precisely, pain is connected to these larger phenomena.  In “Ode on Melancholy” Keats joins the discussion Wordsworth and Coleridge developed in their earlier odes on psychic pain.  “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” returns to the ballad form that has largely faded from our notice since the first half of the course.  Echoing both the encounter structure and the supernatural interest of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it tells the story of romantic betrayal.  Finally, as a sonnet grappling with devotion and mortality, “Bright Star” might remind you of Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy.”  As you read, consider the ways in which Keats expands or departs from these models of melancholic poetics. 

Happy reading,
Prof. M.