A
Note on Keats’s
K.
VISWANATHAM
Reader
in English, Andhra University
I
have a notion that the Odes of Keats are more beautiful than when he wrote
them. They are enriched by the emotion of all who have found solace and
strength in their loveliness.
Maugham: The
Summing Up. p. 185
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.
These
lines from the Ode to Nightingale are said to refer to the Bible story
by all annotators and critics. But a doubt arises if Keats’s Ruth is the same
as the Bible Ruth. It is just possible that Keats’s fancy kidnapped Ruth not
from Moab but from the banks of Tone.
Keats’s
Ruth is sad, sick for home, in tears, amid the alien corn. The Bible Ruth is
neither sad nor sick for home nor in tears though amid the alien corn nor is
there a mention of nightingale in the Book of Ruth. The Moabitess clave
to Naomi unlike Orpah and became a citizen, naturalized in Bethlehem. She
marries Boaz and is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As far as the Bible
story goes, even ‘alien corn’ is inapplicable.
The
story of Ruth is one of the loveliest and most elevating in the Old Testament.
The sentiments expressed by Ruth remind a Hindu reader of similar
expressions in Samskrit literature. The husband’s household is the
daughter-in-law’s home and the parental house is ‘alien corn’. In a play of
Bhasa the father says that his daughter came of age to serve her father-in-law
and mother-in-law; he does not say that she came of age to be married. Ruth’s
following Naomi, her mother-in-law, is a noble turn of the blood: Bethlehem can
be your native place as much as Moab may be the place of your birth.
Dr.
Barnes has this very fine appreciation of Ruth: The Book of Ruth is
exquisite in its simplicity and grace; Goethe described it as the loveliest
little idyll that tradition has handed down to us. The story moves forward
easily and naturally; it is filled with the spirit of kindliness...Early or
late it deserves to be immortal. Contrast the fierce nationalism of Esther with
the words of Ruth the Moabitess to the Israelite widow: Whither thou goest, I
will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people,
and thy god my God. With such affection the daughter of Moab came to Bethlehem.
Half the world now turns with like love to the Judaen village. (The Outline
of Literature, p. 92) The story is touchingly illustrated by P. H. Calderon
in the picture ‘Ruth and Naomi’ in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
It
should be very clear now that the Bible Ruth cannot be Keats’s Ruth. Then who
is this Ruth? My suggestion is that this is Wordsworth’s Ruth. Wordsworth has a
poem, Ruth or The Influence of Nature. Of course there is no mention of
the nightingale in this poem too. But Ruth abandoned by her lover from the
green savannahs is in tears, amid alien corn and so sad that she becomes mad.
She is imprisoned and escapes and lives under the woodland tree soothed by
nature. I think this fits like a glove Keats’s lines; the very title of
Wordsworth’s poem strengthens my suggestion.
The
context also seems to support this suggestion. The nightingale is immortal.
(Sapient critics like Bridges and Garrod, as if scoring a point against Keats,
say: How is the bird immortal? There is no logical fallacy at all for the
simple reason that poetry is not logic. What the imagination seizes as beauty
is truth to the poet. Poetry is full of truths felt in the blood, not discovered
in the pia-mater.) Its song, which Keats listens to, should have been heard by
emperor and clown in ancient times. Nature’s riches, unlike the cinema shows,
are for the poor and rich alike. And coming down to later times the song should
have solaced Ruth too. The word ‘perhaps’ is significant; Keats is not sure of
his facts. Keats imagines that, because the nightingale’s song filled him with
a drowsy numbness, it should have given similar happiness to the emperor if
uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, (Perhaps Keats is referring to Hans
Anderson’s story of the Chinese Emperor and the Nightingale.) to the clown
suffering from looped and windowed raggedness, to Ruth in tears in a foreign
country, to a princess pining away in a magic palace beyond the perilous seas.
Whether it is in far-away countries or far-off times, the immortal bird is
there with its full-throated ease. Keats cannot imagine a starved and songless
nightingale or a song which tells of far-off unhappy things and battles long
ago. The bird is happy; its song is happy; the poet is happy till the world
‘Forlorn’ plunges him again in the weariness, the fever and the fret. The poet
is disillusioned.
The
nightingale’s song or the Grecian Urn is a fraud: they cannot be relied upon
for long. For sometime they are like an opiate. You forget the leaden-eyed
despairs. And then comes reality like a killing frost. It is just like coming
out of an air-conditioned room; the moment you step out, the comfort too is
gone.
This
is what Keats states in these two odes. They are twins with the same soul or
content. The nightingale’s ecstasy becomes a plaintive anthem the unravished
bride of quietness becomes a cold pastoral. Fancy cannot cheat for long; you do
not know if you are awake or asleep. You do not know if it is a vision or
reverie. In other words, is it a revelation or a shortlived ecstasy of humbug?
In the world of commonsense the nightingale’s song is
neither plaintive anthem nor ecstasy. These are, poetic imaginings like the bird’s
immortality. It is neither Eliot’s Jug, jug to dirty ears’ nor
Milton’s (most musical, most melancholy.’ The nightingale’s song is plaintive
not because of the Greek story of Philomela ‘by the barbarous king so rudely
forced’ but because of its ineffectiveness in drugging Keats into permanent
happiness. The song is a stimulant–that is all: like Huxley’s mescalin or the
boozers’ gin or everybody’s coffee. At the height of ecstasy the poet desires
to cease upon the midnight with no pain just as Othello turns to his fair
warrior and says:
If
it were now to die
It
were now to be most happy, for, I fear,
My
soul hath her content so absolute
That
not another comfort like to this.
Succeeds
in unknown fate
Happy
insensibility to the heart-break and misery induced by the brede of marble or
the nightingale’s song cannot be a permanent succedaneum if you are living clay
and not a sod. One of the wisest remarks of Keats is that the afflictions of
Man are as native to the world as man himself; one cannot dream away these
afflictions. “Suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful
morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot
escape destroy its annoyances–they are as native to the world as itself, No
more can man be happy...” The happiness induced by the song is so unreal,
insecure and fragile that a mere word ‘Forlorn’ dissolves it. That is strange!
How ridiculous!
In
a way the Ode is verbally, in addition to being ideationally stitched. The
‘full-throated’ in the 1st stanza takes us to the ‘vintage’ of the 2nd. ‘Away’
in the last line wafts us to the ‘away’ in the 3rd and the ‘aways’ in the 4th,
‘No light’ of the 4th connects with ‘I cannot see’ of the 5th and ‘darkling’ of
the 6th. ‘Rich to die’ of the 6th takes us to the ‘immortal’ of the 7th. And
‘forlorn’ of the 7th is just one step to the ‘forlorn’ of the 8th–and the
forlornness of Keats and the hopelessness of the shadow of a great rock in a
quaking land.
It
is interesting to note in all the Odes traces or echoes of the same poetic
vocabulary as if a lecturer should ring variations on the same lecture intended
for more than one class. The ‘drowsy numbness’ of Nightingale is echoed
in ‘drowsily’ of Melancholy and Lethe figures in Nightingale and Melanchory;
‘rich to die’ shows itself in ‘rich anger’. ‘Beauty cannot keep her
lustrous eyes’ is equated by ‘Beauty that must die’. Nightingale and Psyche
have ‘forest dim’ and ‘in a forest’. Moss-lain dryads are matched by
light-winged dryad, Bacchus rushes back to the Sorrow ode as the
sacrifice in the Urn goes back to Endymion. The bird is immortal:
‘she’ cannot fade. Hungry generations is repeated in ‘When old age shall this
generation waste’. There are casements in Psyche and Nightingale. ‘Many
a mused rhyme’ is in ‘our rhyme’. The ecstasy of the Nightingale becomes
‘wild’ in the Urn. Spring in the Urn is questioned in Autumn: Where
are the songs of spring? The Urn as a whole reminds one of Indolence ode.
‘Did I dream or see?’ is a repetition of ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ ‘Their lips
touched not but had not bade adieu’ is a recasting of ‘Never canst thou kiss’.
‘Happy’ is plural in Psyche and Urn. ‘Midnight hours’ of Psyche
is in Nightingale ‘cease upon the midnight’. Pipes and forest boughs
are in Psyche and Urn. The bees in Autumn are the
murmurous haunt of flies in Nightingale. Psyche, the loveliest vision,
is mournful in Melancholy.
This
verbal stitching proves that all the odes from Indolence to Melancholy
spring out of the same generative experience, the same notebook, the
self-same matrix. Keats is questing for happiness that stays put in this vale
where but to think is to be full of sorrow. And happiness eludes the poet. In
the Nightingale he realizes Fancy cannot cheat so well; in the Urn the
silent form teases him out of thought; even in the Autumn the question
is raised: Where are the songs of Spring? ‘Thou hast thy music too’ is like the
five-worded statement in the Urn. Does ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’
mark the acme of a metaphysical Keats?
The
critics give us an album of snaps of Keats’s spiritual development. They start
with a puny and sensual Keats of slippery blisses and sidelong looks of love.
Next we have the photo of a mere artist untroubled by a soul. At the third
stage Keats is one of flint and iron, not a milksop as pictured by Shelley.
Hence Adonais may be great as an elegy; as a picture of Keats it is
negligible. Keats’s poetry is a triumph of character. When we consider that the
tradition was in decline, the family ineffective, his education inadequate, and
the contemporaries uncomprehending we cannot but admire his toughness. Cut up
by reviews, separated from George, bereaved of Tom, financially lamed by a
loophole in the will, devoured by love, struck down by galloping consumption
any other would have collapsed; Keats composed his odes; he is the Alexander of
song. The fourth snap reveals Keats as the embodiment of Ripeness is all.
Shakesperian vision and comprehension are ascribed to him. Arnold’s He is with
Shakespeare, Bradley’s He is of the tribe of Shakespeare, Murry’s Ripeness is
all–fill out this picture. Next Wasserman makes out a metaphysical Keats. A
plea is made for supplementing the study of Keats’s poetry by a study of his Letters.
The Letters are to an understanding of Keats what the Prelude is
to an understanding of Wordsworth. But why should we allow ourselves, protest
some, to be influenced by the Letters when we discuss the Poems? As we
close the album, we are told that in the last analysis Keats’s poetry is
unsatisfying. And readers’ interest shifts from magic casements to None can
enter here, from elfin grot to the granary floor, from beaded bubbles to globed
peonies, from honied indolence to Beauty is truth.
In
the odes Keats is shuffling off the dreams and the phantoms. He is discovering
himself. Poetry is no longer a drug; it is a deed; a cockney becomes a classic;
Spenser is subsumed in Shakespeare; Flora and Pan give way to a nobler life,
the agony and strife of human hearts. The earlier Keats is poetical; the later
Keats is a poet. Hence his remark that poetry should be great and unobtrusive,
a thing which enters one’s soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself
but with its subject. Eliot’s well-known statement that the greatest poetry is
that which goes behind poetry is partly derived from Keats. In the Odes Keats
is trying to steady himself about Art and Life, Beauty and Truth, Change and
Permanence, the Actual and the Ideal, Sensation and Thought, the Practical and
the Visionary, the Eternal and the Temporal. Keats’s poetical Odessey was from
Spenser to Shakespeare, from Endymion to the Odes. Who fished the
murex up? The coarse-bred son of a livery stable keeper. Who wrote the Hyperion?
The poet of Endymion. Both the facts are astonishing and tease us
out of thought.
The
Odes are a great lake. They are richly meditative; Hamlet might have written
them, says Ian Jack. Here Keats has no master and he leaves no disciple. Out of
the song and the Sonnet he has fashioned a galleon-like stanza which moves slow
because of consonantal density and strength (as Mr. Bate has analysed).
Shelley’s poetry leans forward eagerly (as Dr. Leavis put it excellently) and
Keats’s stays put; it is unhasting and unresting; it does not sprint; like a
snake which has swallowed a rat it moves slow. Keats believes in loading every
rift with ore. Denotative elaboration, always a sign of an amateur, gives way
to the economy of suggestion. Gone is the drowsy richness, the voluptuous
enchantment, the hot-house heaviness, the dreamy vagueness, the misted
opulence, the vapoury dimness though, of course, even in the Urn the
repetition of ‘happy’ is a damnable iteration. The Greek spirit tightens the
odes; personal suffering makes them meditative; English strength pervades them.
Minor talent flowers into a genius of the first order and a versifying pet lamb
is something of a philosopher. It is harder, says a critic, to write a great
ode than a great drama. We find here
the
grandeur of the ode
Growing
like Atlas stronger from its load
The
odes are a calendar of the seasons. It is the personal background, the higher
thought about beauty and permanence, economy and felicity, a meditative
richness that keep these apart in Keats. We are in touch with the mind of Keats
here.
The
Psyche is an allegory of love and the purification of the human soul. It
celebrates cosmic nuptials and is agonizingly alive. Melanchory is
Poesque and revises our traditional opinion of melancholy. Autumn is
bursting with tumescence and is regarded as the greatest and completest of them
all. The personification in the second strophe is said to be the greatest and
we forget hey are words at all in this ode. But the two veriest glories are the
Nightingale and the Urn. The Nightingale is said to be the
most richly representative, a cri de coeur, deeply charged with human
feeling: ‘distillation’ is Pettet’s word. But to Blackstone the poem is
crippled right at the start and to Wasserman forces contend wildly in the poem
not only without any resolution but without any hope of resolution. It is not
Keats but Wasserman that bewilders us. The ode to Nightingale can as well be an
ode to Death which is life’s high mead and absolute felicity.
But
undoubtedly the most provocative is the Urn. The poem like the silent form
teases us out of thought; it is a Hamlet among Keats’s odes. It is the Holy
Grail or the Tarpeian Rock of Keatsian criticism. The Urn has nothing to do
with Lord Holland just as the Nightingale has nothing to do with Hampstead. The
ode is an ode to an imagined Grecian Urn a fragment of auto-biography, a tract
on aesthetics, a paper on creative process, a debate on life and art, a
discussion of poetry and other arts, an explanation of the poetry of
suggestion, a critique on the Timeless and Time, an essay on realism and art
for art’s sake. And to state that Nightingale and Urn are ‘escapist’ poetry is
to be ourselves ‘escapist’ from criticism and interpretation.
The Beauty = Truth equation is a commonplace to some, to others a New Testament of Dantesque grandeur. According to Bridges the lines save the poem; according to Eliot they spoil the poem. To Quiller Couch they are the reflection of an amateur; to Prof. Bowra they are the last word on a type of creative activity. Some say that with that precision, which great poetry affords, Keats has epitomized in 5 words the doctrine of aesthetics just as in ‘magic casements’ he has expressed the quintessence of romance. It is a pseudo-statement to Richards and meaningless twaddle to others, a commonplace from Plato downwards or is to be found elsewhere in Keats. To some the Urn is a central poem; it gathers to itself all other resonances, urns, pots, jars, vases, concavities, sea grottos, mountain caves; it is the image of the womb, a centre of power, of healing and wisdom. Dr. Leavis debunks this that it need not raise metaphysical tremors of excitement or illumination. No wonder the ode is the most familiar, the richest in texture, the most obscure.
An
ode which had led critics of stature to contradict one another should have its
argument put down carefully in ordinary prose for the sake of clarity. Keats
sees on an urn maidens struggling to escape from a mad pursuit, pipes and
timbrels play-struggling under the trees. He then muses: the trees will not
lose their freshness, the youth cannot leave his song, the lover cannot kiss,
she cannot fade. He sees another scene–the scene of the sacrifice and muses:
the streets of the town will ever be silent and none to tell us why the town is
desolate or uninhabited.
The
idea is that in art things, pleasant and unpleasant, are given permanence. Art
gives
To
one brief moment caught from fleeting time
The
appropriate calm of blest eternity
In
nature the trees lose their freshness; in life the lovers kiss and she fades.
‘For ever wilt thou love and she be fair’–is pleasant; ‘Never canst thou
kiss’–not pleasant; a desolate and silent town also is not pleasant. In art
nothing grows and decays; we welcome this power of art. But art confers
eternity on unpleasant things too. Iago is as undying as Desdemona and Caliban
is as alive as Miranda. Then the last stanza bristles like a porcupine with
difficulties and scares away the critic. The urn is addressed as attic shape,
fair attitude, silent form, cold pastoral. The first two do not trouble us;
‘silent form’ also does not tease us out of thought. The poet seems to say:
Well, I have been imagining all these things about the urn and the figures on
the urn but the urn itself is silent. It baffles us like eternity. The meaning
of the urn is intriguing like the smile of Mona Lisa or the face of the
Sphinx.
Merely
as a piece of sculpture it seems to preach to mankind of the next generation
afflicted by woes other than ours:
Beauty
is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye
know on earth and all ye need to know
Now
this text is interpreted as the Bible of Keatsian Aesthetic. On the other hand
Keats seems to debunk it. It is a cold pastoral, no longer a sylvan historian;
the nightingale’s song cools off into a plaintive anthem. Hopes are dupes and
fears are not liars. Art gives only temporary respite from the woes of
life; art is not a permanent solution or anodyne. Merely to say: This is all ye
know and all ye need to know–sounds rather ridiculously pompous and all
knowing, if we bear in mind Keats’s negative capability or the power of
presenting uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without an irritable reaching
after fact and reason. This is not all we know; we know something more and some
of us do not know this. This is not all we need to know; we need other types of
knowledge–for instance the knowledge of cooking. Art means selection, selection
means exclusion. How then can we say: Beauty is truth...?
Beauty
is not the only truth. To the poet it may be so. Truth is larger than Beauty.
Poet’s truth is not the only truth; there is the scientist’s truth, the
philosopher’s truth, the prophet’s truth, the bricklayer’s truth, the
bomb-thrower’s truth. Shakespeare is the largest truth and beauty we have in
art. But even a bardolater has to admit that life is larger than Shakespeare
and more various. Keats with his ineffable common sense recognizes this higher
truth and hence rejects the Urn and its inadequate message announced so
pompously, so fanatically, so un-Keatsianly. Did not Keats say: Man should not
dispute and assert, but whisper results to his neighbour? (Letter, 19 Feb.
1818)
What
follows ‘cold pastoral’ cannot be regarded as the highest reach of Keats’s
thought. There is disillusionment in the Nightingale ode; there is
disillusionment in the Urn. Can appreciation of art be the be-all and
end-all of existence? Can the mad pursuit and the sacrifice solace suffering
humanity? Thou shall remain a friend to man in the next generation too, says
the poet. You have been our friend, you will be the friend of the next
generation too to whom you pass on the same unconvincing and dispiriting
message of beauty is truth. Is it not silly and cruel to talk about beauty to
groaning man, now or in future? What a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for
certainties in this life! Just as the bird is imagined as immortal, the
Urn is imagined as eternal. The bird is no more immortal than the urn is
eternal. The bird may die and the urn may be destroyed by a vandal. Hence Prof.
Wilson: Keats was struck with the durability of the marble as contrasted with
the vanishing beauty of natural life:
For
ever wilt thou love, and she be fair
But
to obtain this durability in marble all motion in time was excluded, a single
moment given in fixed isolation from all before and after. Language restores
the motion and life of time and also invests the whole truth with a durability
outlasting the marble’s...A single accidental explosion could destroy the
Parthenon. What accident short of a world cataclysm could destroy the Odessey,
multiplied and distributed as it is over the whole earth’s surface? (The
Miraculous Birth of Language, p. 184) Language effects the marriage of
Parmenides and Heraclitus. The longevity of Tithonus was useless to Aurora; the
eternality of the Urn is ineffectual to man. The poet has no doubt that people
will take refuge in art but the solace is sawdust and ashes. The Urn is Job’s
comforter. Or does the poet exhort the urn to remain a friend to man? After all
art is something, if not all. Whether the message is all-sufficing or not,
posterity will lean on art. Is the Urn worthy to remain a friend? Is it a
pretension on its part? To pose as a friend. In life too many remain as
friends, though they are not a help. ‘The better for my foes and the worse for
my friends’ as a character says in a play of Shakespeare.
Keats rates life higher than art. To him fine writing is next only to fine doing. I am ambitious of doing some good to the world, he said. The following is a pertinent statement: I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think poetry itself a mere jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance. For although I take poetry to be the chief, there is something else wanting in one who passes his life among books or thoughts on books.
It
is unconvincing to state that this Keats–the Keats of the Letters and Hyperion–shouts
from house tops Beauty is truth...Those who do not feel the giant agony of the
world rot on the pavement of the fane in Hyperion. My contention is
Keats rejects the Grecian Urn as he rejects the Nightingale. One has to flow
with the currents of life. I think Keats would have blithely agreed with the
sentiments of the poet Cleon to King Protus in Browning’s Monologue:
if
I paint
Carve
the young Phoebus, am I therefore young?
I
can write love odes: thy fair slave is an ode
I
get to sing of love, when grown too grey
For
being beloved: She turns to that young man
The
muscles all a ripple on his back
I
know the joy of kingship–well thou art king.
To
rest in art is to deny life and to pull out aesthetic rabbits out of these
lines is far-fetched ingenuity. Bridges’ statement that the poem postulates the
superiority of ideal art to nature goes overboard and the interpretations of
various critics that here Keats says the last infallible word on art walk the
plank. Keats is not the poet to escape the realities of life and seek happiness
in a stimulant. He writes Beauty is truth...only to reject it. If at all he
approves of beauty it is beauty coupled with truth as explained by Shakespeare
in 54th sonnet: Beauty of face is not enough; the goodness of the heart is
needed. The young man of the sonnets is affiicted by–economy of the closed
heart. The dog rose has as rich a dye as the natural rose but the fragrance of
truth is not there. Hence selfish beauty dies to itself. The beauty of the Clod
is superior to the beauty of the Pebble. Maugham states roundly: For art, if it
is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility,
tolerance, wisdom, and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty but right
action. (The Summing Up. p.187)
From
a note on Keats’s Ruth we have gone to Keats’s Beauty is truth. Both are
central to an interpretation of Keats. You can relate the Nightingale, writes
a critic, to other odes, to the rest of his poetry, to the Romantics, to
Spenser, and Shakespeare or to itself. The song of the nightingale might have
‘happied’ Ruth–only for a short time as it ‘happied’ Keats; the imaginative
participation in the ecstasy of the song is of short duration. The wave of
reality destroys the sand castle of happiness. Similarly the warmth of art in the
urn cools off. And when we are vexed and harried by woes, is the urn a friend
to man? And is not its message a cold pastoral? Is that all we need to know in
this strange and changing world that something made static by art is an
all-sufficing truth? Does the poet have less common sense than we?
It
is a tragic fact that what makes us melancholy is the impermanence of beauty.
Indolence cannot cure this; the nightingale cannot eliminate; the Grecian urn
cannot modify it; the Autumn cannot blind us to this. Keats states this truth
variously and richly.
yet
there ever rolls
A
vast idea before me.
A
Thing of Beauty
Of
course Keats does affirm his creed: I cannot live without poetry. To him a
thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Thou
wast the deep glen–
Thou
wast the mountain top–the sage’s pen–
The
poet’s harp–the voice of friends–the sun;
Thou
wast the river–thou wast glory won;
Thou
wast my clarion’s blast–thou wast my steed
My
goblet full of wine–my topmost deed:
Thou
wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O
what a wild and harmonised tune
My
spirit struck from all the beautiful!
One
has to compare this with Rupert Brooke’s The Great Lover. It is Keats’s
religion that the first in beauty shall be first in might. He is attached to
the Principle of Beauty, the memory of Great Men, and the Eternal Being. What
the imagination seizes as beauty is truth to him. What shocks the virtuous
philosopher delights the chameleon poet. He hovers over fine phrases like a
lover. He knows that poetry is joy in beauty, that beauty is joy in truth (not
philosophical or metaphysical or scientific but poetic), that truth is joy in
goodness (not ethical goodness but the unending diversity of god’s creation). O
for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts, he cries. He is not convinced
of the truth of anything unless the holiness of heart’s affections tells him
so. His snail-horn perception of beauty dislikes poetry that has a palpable
design on us. He disliked being bullied into a philosophy by Wordsworth’s
egotistical sublime. A poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. All these
seminal remarks fill out the image of Keats the aesthete. But he wanted to be
of some help to his fellow men. Scenery is fine, he said, but human nature is
finer. He would make the miseries of the world his misery and do good to the
world through his poetry: the dreamer and the poet are distinct. If such are
Keats’s views is it just to have him, ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ to mere
aesthetic doctrine spun out of his lines? We do him injustice if we think of
him as a Happy Prince of silken phrases and silver sentences in the Ivory Tower
of Aestheticism
Barricaded
from the fierce storm of life
So Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is
all
Ye
know on earth and all ye need to know
is not the Testament
of Keatsian Aesthetics; on the other hand the lines are a Note of Repudiation.
To preach beauty to suffering humanity is like fighting with windmills. Art is
a sad nostrum hawked about by dreaming quacks.
There
are more things Earth, Horatio,
Than
are dreamt of in our aesthetics
The lines have always
been interpreted as a kind of sutra on beauty. Beauty and Truth are not
two but one, two sides of the same thing, synonyms. If beauty is
over-emphasized, it leads to art for art’s sake; if truth is over-emphasized,
it leads to realism. To a poet no truth is a truth unless it is proved on the
pulse of his being,
The
passions that build up our human soul
Beauty
without goodness is beauty from ashes and cannot be the Pillar of Truth to distressed
humanity.
Finally,
Keats points out the inadequacy of Imagination and Art to cure the ills that
flesh is heir to. A poet should not be a dreamer of dreams but a doer of
deeds–in his poetry and through his poetry; they should acknowledge themselves
as the legislators of the world. So the Nightingale ode and the ode to Grecian
Urn are not a Breviary of Keats’s faith but a melody of disillusionment, a
Song of aesthetic heresy. Keats’s conviction is not different from what Jean
Paul Sartre states in his words on page 42:
In
Beauty my grand-father saw the presense of Truth made flesh and the source of
the loftiest aspirations. In certain exceptional circumstances–when a storm
broke out in the mountains or when Victor Hugo was inspired–it was possible to
attain to the sublime point where Truth, Beauty and Goodness became one.
The
Hindus mention the same triad of essentials: satyam (truth), sundaram (beauty),
sivam (goodness).