In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. I thought I’d fit more Keats in but there was a lot to say about these two.
A few months ago, I wrote on my personal site about my very narrow taste in poetry. I put that narrowness down largely to my inability to visualize (aphantasia) or to remember vividly real or imagined episodes (severely deficient autobiographical memory, SDAM). I wrote that I like the poetry of Keats, unlike that of the other Romantics, and speculated that this might be because the sensuous quality of his writing is strong enough to “overpower or break through the extremely unsensuous … quality of my imagination.” I was thinking in particular of the first stanza of his ode “To Autumn”:
… to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruits with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel … (“To Autumn”, ll. 3–8)
I said that I might write about his poetry at some point in this newsletter but that I didn’t expect to be able to find anything new to say about it. In retrospect I think I was less worried about coming up with something new than at the prospect of having to read a representative sample of criticism so I could hope to avoid putting forward a long-debunked argument, or one so universally accepted that to repeat it would be otiose.
At the time, I hadn’t yet read Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021) but knew that I wanted to read it and that afterwards I’d very likely want to write something about it. Reading Nersessian’s book, which includes the six odes, I found that I don’t want to look particularly at the sensuousness of the poetry: it turns out not, after all, to be the quality that most attracted me.
So, if Keats’s appeal for me does not lie primarily in his descriptions of granaries full to bursting and perfectly ripe fruit (or rich and exotic sweets and spices “in argosy transferred | From Fez”), how would I account for it? I believe it has something to do with the simultaneity — and the balance — of predictability and surprise in these poems. The forms are predictable in their regularity: there are several sonnets, though with varying and sometimes unusual rhyme schemes; the odes tend to have 10-line stanzas, but again with variations. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses a stanza form with a short (trimeter) eighth line, while “To Autumn”, the last of the odes, has an eleventh line and an intricate rhyme scheme: the first seven lines of each of the three stanzas rhyme ABABCDE, with the last four rhyming DCCE, CBBE and CDDE respectively. (“Ode to Psyche” is another story entirely.)
The metre tends to be regular, though it does not avoid enjambment: in the first two lines of “Ode to a Nightingale”, we’re told that “a drowsy numbness pains | My sense” (which hides, or at least deemphasizes, the rhyme of “pains” with “drains”). Nersessian finds it initially “surprising” (Nersessian, p. 33) that a poem addressed to a nightingale makes no clear mention of Philomela.
I’d like to draw attention to another surprise in the first stanza of this ode which might seem too obvious to need mentioning but yet which I suspect is sometimes overlooked. Line 5 reads “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot …” Envy, particularly of the bird’s happy lot, at first appears to be an emotion we’d ascribe to a party other than the bird itself: to the poet, perhaps. But no. After another line, “But being too happy in thine happiness …”, we return briefly to the main clause: “That thou,” (emphasis added); and then we’re off again into subsidiary clauses, until the sentence is completed in the final line of the stanza: “Singest of summer in full-throated ease.” So, putting the main clause together, “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot … That thou … Singest of summer in full throated ease”. The poet is telling us that the nightingale is not envious of its own happy lot; which doesn’t preclude the possibility that somebody else might be.
But why should anybody expect a bird to feel envy of a “lot” that it’s already enjoying to the full? If we substitute “jealousy” for “envy” it might be a bit clearer. The nightingale is not concerned to preserve its present happy state, it feels no need to leave “a stain upon the silence”. At least that’s what the poet believes. He thinks that the bird is not envious (jealous) of its joyful and fortunate lot because it has no reason to believe that it could ever end. In stanza 7, the poet addresses the nightingale as immortal:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
It can’t, obviously, be the same bird, still alive since biblical or ancient times. The point is that, as the poet conceives it, the nightingale has no consciousness of its own mortality: it doesn’t expect to die, so it could be said to be subjectively immortal: it will behave as if it were. That’s the big difference between it and the poet, who is all too aware that his days are numbered and that the number is small.
In the preceding stanza, he has told the bird, and the reader that
… for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain …
Knowing that life will end, and perhaps very soon, he is attracted to the idea of meeting death head-on, but with certain provisos: he is only half in love with it, and only if it is “easeful” and without pain. He is well aware that these conditions are unlikely to be met. He has already noted that ours is a world in which
… men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs … (“Ode to a Nightingale”, stanza 3)
A review that I read of Nersessian’s book said that her chapter discussing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the one that is likely in future to be assigned for students to read. It’s the most eye-catching, but it may be the point in her book where I find her argument least persuasive; she immediately acknowledges that what she has to say is “controversial” (Nersessian, p. 43). The case she makes is that the speaker of the poem is a character or persona whom the poet undermines by giving him bad lines, abhorrent views and an aggressive tone. That would, as she says herself, bring this closer to a dramatic monologue than a typical ode. That in itself is hardly damaging to her argument, as Keats was certainly given to experimenting with the ode’s form.
If Nersessian is right, Keats has written an ode whose speaker extolls rape and sexual violence. She’s not, of course, the first to have pointed out that the first line’s “still unravish’d” is — or ought to be — a shock. In 1984, Barbara Everett, objecting to Helen Vendler’s use of the phrase “entirely idyllic”, wrote:
… a phrase like the extraordinary description of a bride’s state as “still unravished”, heralding as it does the plain suggestion of mass rape in the first stanza, needs far more sensitive analysis than it is usually given by critics. (Everett, 155)
It is certainly the case that the scene depicted on the urn is full of violence. Men or gods, driven into a “wild ecstasy”, pursue “maidens loth” who “struggle to escape”. Rape must surely be imminent.
Who is the speaker speaking to? Who is the “Thou” who is still unravished? I’ve often felt that prepositions don’t get as much attention as they seem to warrant. Here, the prepositions are straightforward: of the six odes, three are addressed “to” some entity: “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to Psyche”, “To Autumn”. The other three are “on” something: two are about moods, emotions or mental states. This one, uniquely, is “on” an inanimate object. In the second stanza, the speaker’s words are directed in turn at the soft pipes, the fair youth and the bold lover, all of whom are shown on the surface of the artefact. It’s only in the final stanza with “Oh Attic shape!”, that it becomes indisputable that the ode’s addressee is the urn itself. It, the inanimate object, is the thing that is still unravished.
Of course, the maidens loth remain unravished too, if only for the duration of the scene shown on the urn. The threat and the fear remain, though frozen in time. They have remained so for centuries, ages. Surely, then, Nersessian must be right? How can we imagine that Keats is identifying himself with this vicious speaker who enjoys the prospect of rape, who delights in the “struggle to escape”?
I’d like to spell out something even more obvious than what I had to say above about the opening stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”. Obviously, the word “still” is ambiguous. It has the same meanings as the French toujours: both “as yet” and “always” or “permanently”. When Marlowe’s Faustus complains that his soul “must live still to be plagu’d in hell”, he means eternally. Forever. There’s no ambiguity there.
“Still” also means motionless, and this sense of the word is clearly in operation here. The lack of movement reinforces our perception that the other sense of “still” indicates a permanent state, not one that is liable to end at any moment. When Nersessian says that Keats knows his urn to be “an image of a rape about to take place” (p.46), we should not forget that in the image the attack is not going to take place: it is permanently frozen. Does this make a difference? I’m going to argue that it obviously did to Keats. The core of Nersessian’s argument is this:
The speaker of Keats’s ode reads like a rapist. What else is that ghastly assertion, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty: for but to destroy the difference between a hypothetical harm and a real one — to demand, in other words, that the aesthetic appeal of the urn cleanse and redeem the horror it depicts? (p. 50)
There is no doubt that the world — the scene — depicted on the urn is horrific, brutal, violent. But surely it is the poet himself and not merely the invented persona of a speaker, who tries to convince the reader that the urn has an aesthetic value and purpose? If the speaker is a cynical apologist for rape whose words, if we properly understand them, we must instantly dismiss, why shouldn’t we just as promptly dismiss the urn itself, as a meretricious piece of propaganda?
And if we don’t, it must be because the aesthetic function of the urn is not to “cleanse and redeem the horror”, not to justify the violence or to give it value. Rather, I want to suggest, Keats is relying on the “beauty” of the urn as consolation or reassurance that the world, in spite of the pain, misery, suffering and violence that it unavoidably includes, can still be considered “beautiful”.
Keats is very well aware that the world is, perhaps above all else, a site of suffering. We’ve seen him in the “Ode to a Nightingale” describe it as a place “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow | And leaden-eyed despairs”. He (or his speaker, if Nersessian is right) tells the urn that it will continue to exist “in midst of other woe | Than ours” (stanza 5).
I take Keats to mean by the conclusion of the poem that whatever is found to be the truth about the world and about our existence in it must be accepted as beauty, however painful, difficult or loathsome — however ugly — it might seem. That is our consolation. He’s not at all convinced of the truth of his claim. He introduces it not confidently but tentatively. That, I’m suggesting, is why he brings it in backwards: the corollary first, the main statement afterwards, and without even repeating the verb!
William Empson discusses “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” in the chapter “A is B” of his The Structure of Complex Words (1951). In that chapter, he discusses statements of the form “A is B”, which assert that one thing is another, as “might is right”. In some cases, such expressions express an identity (in which case the phrase should be reversible) but more often than not they express a more complicated relation between the terms. I’ve suggested in the previoius paragraph that, in Keats’s formulation, “Beauty is truth” only because that follows from his claim that truth is, in a very particular sense, beauty.
I don’t intend to say anything more here about Empson’s treatment of statements in the form “A is B”, but I may return to it in future. I should say something, however, about his remark about the deficiency of one line in particular:
I think that “Oh Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede” is a very bad line; the half pun suggesting a false Greek derivation and jammed against an arty bit of Old English seems to me affected and ugly … (Empson, p. 374)
Nersessian too finds something to object to:
Don’t forget the repetition of “Attic/attitude,” another oratorical embellishment reminding us this speaker loves, if nothing else, the sound of his own voice. (Nersessian, p. 51)
Perhaps the line can be said to be partly saved by the enjambment, which draws some of the attention away from “brede”: “with brede | Of marble men and maidens overwrought”. Nersessian argues that the bad lines and phrases are the poet’s indication to the reader that this speaker’s pronouncements are not to be taken at face value. I prefer to think that, for example, the excessive repetitions of “happy” in the third stanza are signs of Keats’s tentativeness, his own lack of confidence in the case he’s attempting to make.
Works cited
The odes are quoted from Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, University of Chicago Press paperback, 2023.
Other works
William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, Hogarth Press paperback, 1985.
Barbara Everett, “Keats: Somebody Reading” in Poets in Their Time, Clarendon paperback, 1991, pp. 140–158.