Reading Keats In 2023

     At the beginning of his poetic vocation, John Keats had resolved to follow the examples of two great poets: Edmund Spenser and John Milton.  As they did, he too intended to write pastoral poems, then progress to epic verse.  Keats wanted to imitate the pattern of these earlier poets as a means to achieve the same level of profundity they did.  He laid out this scheme in his early poem, Sleep and Poetry.   In the spring of 1818, he published his pastoral romance, Endymion, inspired by his reading of Spenser, but he included a preface specifying deficiencies he anticipated critics would observe in his work.  His preface to the poem eloquently expresses his concerns: 

     “Knowing within myself  the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.

     What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.”

    In January of that same year, Keats was about to revise the second book of Endymion; he put aside the poem and decided to reread King Lear instead.  His rereading inspired the following sonnet:

  On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!

   Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!

   Leave melodizing on this wintry day,

Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:

Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,

   Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay

   Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,

   Begetters of our deep eternal theme,

When through the old oak forest I am gone,

   Let me not wander in a barren dream,

But when I am consumed in the fire,

Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

As honestly critical as he is in his preface, his sonnet radiates a critical turn in Keats’s aspiration as a poet.  At this specific stage in his poetic development, he knows he must move beyond writing pastoral poetry and ascend to the realm of genuinely greater human passions.  The first two lines, which refer to Endymion, acknowledge the lure of writing pastoral poetry (“Fair plumed Syren!).  Lines three and four, however, want to silence the pastoral impulse within his imagination.  Once silenced (“mute”), Keats signals his farewell (to composing) to pastoral poetry (“Adieu!”) and directs his imagination to “burn through” the “fierce dispute,/Betwixt damnation and impassion’d  clay” of Shakespeare’s  Lear.  For Keats, Shakespeare has always been a force within his consciousness, but at this point in his life Shakespeare assumes a kind of divinity that he approaches humbly as he invokes his aid to raise him out of a “barren dream” and transmute him like the newly born “Phoenix” into a poet who can “fly” to greater heights of poetic glory.  

     Keats continued to revere Spenser and Milton, and one can continually sense their essential presence in his poetry, but he also understood that for him to become a great poet he needed to “find the agonies, the strife/Of human hearts'' and, distill these passions into sublime poetry.  He found those emotions in Shakespeare, who along with Spenser and Milton, empowered Keats to write his greatest poetry in the few years he lived after finishing Endymion. 

     One of Keats’s greatest poems is Ode to a Nightingale.  In the poem, Keats is listening to an unseen Nightingale, whose song lures him into a trance-like state of mind:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

            My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

                           But being too happy in thine happiness,—

                   That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

                           In some melodious plot

   Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

                               Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

      The effect of the nightingale’s song is astonishing.  It draws Keats into a trance-like state as he becomes intoxicated by the beauty of the song.   He feels as though a “drowsy numbness pains” his consciousness; as though he had swallowed poison (hemlock); or had quaffed an opiate that is pulling him into the Greek river of forgetfulness (“Lethe-wards).  As he experiences the bird’s beautiful song, he tells the unseen nightingale that he is not envious of the bird’s “happy lot” but simply “too happy in thine happiness.”  

      However, this is no simple poem about the ecstatic joy that can be found through nature.  In the next two stanzas, Keats longs for a “beaker full” of wine, to escape this world and to efface his knowledge of the grim suffering that life can inflict.  (His younger brother Tom had recently died of tuberculosis).  In stanza 4, he seems to unite with the nightingale, as he rejects wine as a source of inspiration and turns instead to poetic imagination (poetic fancy), “wings of Poesy.”  As his imagination soars above the terrestrial world, he envisions the “Queen-Moon” (stanza 4) on her throne surrounded by fairies, but he realizes immediately that there is only darkness (“no light”) in the realm of “starry Fays.   “[E]mbalmed” in “darkness” (stanza 5) and unable to see “what flowers are at [his] feet,” he can “guess” each “soft incense” they emit.  Fully absorbed in a trance-like state without the sense of sight (Darkling), he listens to the nightingale, and muses on the peacefulness of oblivion (stanza 6): “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon a midnight with no pain.”  (It is in this stanza that one finds allusions to Shakespeare, specifically the play Hamlet).  Longing for “easeful death" has supplanted the feeling of taking an opiate  in stanza 1.  In stanza 7, the bird’s song evokes the healing power of the Nightingale's song through time immemorial.  But suddenly, Keats is abruptly called back to reality by a single word that conveys the despair he wants to  escape, “Forlorn” (stanza 8).  As startling as the opening of the poem is for the reader, the last stanza astounds both the reader and Keats to an even greater degree.  The word “Forlorn” summons Keats back to the world of reality, pulling him from the faeryland trance he entered through the nightingale’s song.  As he awakens from his trance, the nightingale flies away, and he bids it “Adieu” as its “plaintive anthem fades/Past the near meadows”...till “‘tis buried deep/In  the next valley glades.”  Once the bird’s song has “fled,” he is left wondering whether he experienced a “vision, or waking dream?”  

     The poem ends with Keats unable to discern whether or not he has  had a “vision” or has merely been lost in a “dream.”  What is not lost, however, is the significance of his experience.  The nightingale, no less mortal and like Keats and all humanity, will in its own time perish.  What will persist through time is its song as it is heard by successive generations.  Though the bird will die, the time and change-defying persistence of its song make it immortal, and it is in listening and meditating (and composing the poem) on that song that Keats gathers to himself a sense of the immortal.  

     In the ode that follows Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats examines (in the sense of both study and question) a work of art.  Unlike Nightingale, Keats removes himself personally from the poem, creating a speaker who approaches the urn objectively, and philosophically.  The poem begins with the speaker viewing the urn and assigning it a higher artistic value than the very poem he is composing:

  Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

    Of deities or mortals, or of both,

        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

 What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

    What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

                      What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

     In the first four lines of Grecian Ode, the speaker displays a confidence in what he thinks he knows as he describes and defines the urn in its entirety as a physical work of art above his artistic/poetic capability.  In the next four lines he focuses on the painted scenes and figures on the urn, and his matter of fact declarative sentences give way to questions attempting to elicit from the urn a definitive and detailed account of what and whom these images are depicting.  The speaker might seem at a loss once his eyes close in on the urn’s images, but his questions are rhetorical rather than literal. In Nightingale Keats wants to surrender his consciousness to the bird’s song and “leave the world unseen,/And with thee [nightingale] fade away into the forest dim.”  Here, the speaker might seem dependent on the urn for inspiration in some way analogous to the way Keats clearly is in Nightingale, but he maintains an objectivity even as the urn’s aesthetic beauty fires his imagination.  

     That objectivity formulates the speaker’s declaration in the second stanza that unheard melodies “Are sweeter” than those heard.  The silent pipers resonate in the speaker’s imagination and will continue to be “sweet” to those who come long after Keats to see and respond to this work of art.  As in the first stanza, the lines that follow the initial four zoom in on the specific figures on the urn.  Existing in perpetuity (on the urn), the lovers will never fade and even though their passion will never be consummate, the speaker professes that their eternal youth and love negates their unfulfilled passion.  

     In the third stanza, the speaker continues his fervent, joyful observations of the trees and lovers depicted on the urn.  He celebrates the timeless “happy boughs,” the forever “unwearied” “melodist,” and the inextinguishable love and youthfulness of the “Bold Lover” and the female, “For ever panting, and for ever young.”  His feelings of euphoria ebb temporarily when reality edges back into his consciousness and he articulates vicissitudes of human passion and love:

All breathing human passion far above,

    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d

        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

 

      After this brief intrusion of reality, the speaker again concentrates on the urn.  The fourth stanza mirrors the first as the air of distant history and mysterious, mythological ritual returns.  The speaker wonders who the priest and the crowd approaching the “green altar” are.  Then he ponders: “What little town by river or sea shore,/Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel/Is empty of this folk, pious morn?”  The first question examines the urn’s scene and figures, but the second contemplates something beyond this self-contained artifact, a space purely imagined, the forever empty, silent and desolate town.  

     Perhaps it is the drift into that “desolate” space that compels the speaker to refocus on the complete urn and consecrate it as a silent, though eternal form that,

      shalt remain, in the midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

    Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

     These three poems of Keats demonstrate a crucial element of 19th Century English Romantic poetry, (1798-1832).  The poets of the previous period (Neoclassical) stressed the importance of objectivity, restraint and logic in their poems.  The Romantics, beginning with William Wordsworth, rejected this approach in favor of expressing emotions and unleashing the imagination.  The difference can be summed up by comparing two statements regarding poetic intentions from Alexander Pope (18th Century poet) and Wordsworth:

'Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse's steed;

Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;

The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse,

Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Pope, An Essay on Criticism

     

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of Powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads  

The distinction between these two modes of poetic creativity is Pope’s principle that inspiration (“Muse’s steed”) needs to be reigned in, to be harnessed, in order to construct a poem, as opposed to Wordsworth’s belief that poetic creativity arises when the poet feels an initial emotion, recalls that emotion later in a state of “tranquility,” then re-absorbs that emotion completely into his consciousness until it becomes innate and organic within his imagination.  Two other English poets who believed in the organic power of the imagination were Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a close friend of Wordsworth) and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  These three poets, and Keats, wrote some of the greatest poetry one could read. But because Keats's poems can be difficult for someone new to his poetry, readers might avoid his poetry and unfortunately miss out on an experience that is superbly imaginative.  With patience, a little resolve and perhaps some critical aid, anyone can learn to love this poet (and many more) if given the chance. 

Tennyson's Ulysses

    In Victorian England (1832-1901), Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the most popular poet of his time.  During the 20th century, however, his reputation fluctuated.  T. S. Eliot at first saw his poems as lacking in genuine feeling, but later acknowledged Tennyson's greatness and influence.  The poet W. H. Auden was even harsher in his criticism.  He remarked that Tennyson was "undoubtedly the stupidest" poet.  Perhaps readers today would find Tennyson's poems too old fashioned or too irrelevant for them.  Reading complex syntax and vocabulary might confuse and annoy them concluding that reading Tennyson is undoubtedly a waste of time; time to be better spent on social media.  But none of these reactions would be correct.  

    Tennyson wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language and his works equal or surpass all of his 19th century peers.  Only a handful of 20th century poets equal Tennyson's poetic prowess---Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Neruda, Auden. The poets who have more recently (1950-2023) donned the mantles of national poet laureates appear to wear such honors "like a giant's robe/Upon a dwarfish thief," when their verse is set side by side with Tennyson's.  

    In his poems, the reader encounters lyrical beauty and psychological depth as he explores a variety of subjects such as the death of his closest friend, his ambivalence regarding religious faith, and his reflections on immortality.  A good poem to start with is his poem "Ulysses."  Extending the Greek myth as told by Homer, Tennyson imagines Ulysses old and past his physical prime.  Despite being diminished by age, Ulysses refuses to resign himself to living his remaining years idlily administering "laws unto a savage race."  He chooses instead to search for more adventures before the force of time saps what remains of his vitality.

            There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

            There gloom the dark, broad seas.  My mariners,

            Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me-

            That ever with a frolic welcome took

            The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

            Free heart, free foreheads--you and I are old;

            Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.

            Death closes all; but something ere the end,

            Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

            Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

            The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

            The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep

            Moans round with many voices.  Come, my friends,

            'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

            Push off, and sitting well in order smite

            The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

            To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

            Of all the western stars, until I die.

            It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

            It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

            And see he great Achilles, whom we knew.

            Though much is taken, much abides; and though

            We are not now that strength which in old days

            Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--

            One equal temper of heroic hearts,

            Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

            To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

    Ulysses has spent twenty years away from home.  Ten years fighting the Trojans at Troy and ten years wandering the Mediterranean trying to reach home.  In both the Iliad and The Odyssey, Ulysses had faced seemingly insurmountable danger and death, time and again. His reputation is famous, as he himself proclaims, "I am become a name."  But fame and the twenty years he longed to return to his wife, son and city cannot compensate for the uninspiring life of a mere politician.  Even though his age should counsel and convince him to accept time's unambiguous reality, enterprises of great pitch beckon him to refuse what more sensible but less daring men would undertake.

    "Ulysses" is a good place to begin, if one wants to experience Tennyson's poetry.  Then, one should take time to read more of his poems, in order "To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."  If one is put off initially by the poems, the willingness to "strive, to seek to find, and not to yield" will more enrich and reward those who persevere.  

You can read full poem here:

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson | Poetry Foundation

Prejudice and Ignorance

     I was reading the news in The Washington Post, recently and I came upon a news story about antisemitism.  In the first paragraph, the report cited an incident in which someone had graffitied the words, "Jews Not Welcome," over the entrance sign of the Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.  I had recently seen stories reporting increasing antisemitism in the U.S. and was angered by what I read.  As I read down two paragraphs further, I encountered Rachel Barold, who is fourteen and a freshman at the high school.  While being interviewed, she told the reporter that she was not surprised by the graffiti.  She said, "We're ridiculed constantly," by other students who make fun of "a Jewish person's nose," or mention how "they are glad not to be Jewish."  

    Like Rachel, I wasn't surprised by the antisemitism graffitied on the high school sign; but I was by the naked bigotry her classmates cavalierly tossed in her face.  Bethesda is a very wealthy and well-educated community, and its schools are among the best in the state of Maryland.  In such a community, I would have thought the bigotry of her classmates would have been cloaked or more subtle than that.  After all, it's 2022, not the 1960s or 1970s.  Her experience made me think about where I grew up and the schools I attended.  

    When I was young, I lived in a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island, New York, and attended a local Catholic grammar school in the 1960s and early 1970s. My classmates were a mix of average Italian and Irish kids.  While there, we learned our lessons in grammar, spelling, reading and arithmetic.  We also learned that Protestants, though Christians, were "outside" the true religion, but even worse, that Jews had rejected the "true savior" of the world and consequently were damned to an eternity in hell.  For us, reviling Jews was a matter of religion, encouraged by eminent figures we aspired to emulate.

    After I finished Catholic grammar school, I had to attend the free public junior and senior schools, since my parents couldn't afford the tuition charged by the Catholic high schools.  While there, I encountered teachers who said that it was wrong to be prejudice against other races and religions; that we should not judge people by their appearance; that we should respect all people regardless of who they were or where they came from.  Their words and ideas were liberating and inspiring; they made me recognize and reject the bigotry that Catholic school had imparted.  Antisemitism became ugly and vile, an evil to be condemned without hesitation.  

    But not all teachers in that public school were beyond bigotry.  One fall afternoon, during high school football practice a teammate missed a tackle.  The boy happened to be Jewish, and the head coach thought it clever to motivate him to do better by yelling "K_____, what the hell is wrong with you!  Guns for the Arabs, damnit!"  Some of the players cringed at the racist rant of the coach; others laughed and joked about it afterwards.  It's interestingly to note, the coach's teaching responsibilities included 10th grade European history, which one would think included a unit and lessons on the Holocaust.  However, at that time, New York State social studies teachers weren't mandated to teach about the Holocaust.  That requirement finally did come into effect in 1994.   Even so, I suspect he wouldn't have been terribly effective in communicating the horrors of the Nazi's systematic attempt to exterminate all European Jews.   

    The antisemitism observable in the friends I had in high school fluctuated between blunt outbursts and whispered remarks.  Some friends openly expressed their antisemitism with racist slurs, while some tried to camouflage it by a warped attempt at logic.  The latter would say, "I'm not prejudice.  I just don't like anyone who is too Jewish."  (These individuals would apply the same characterization to African Americans who acted "too black.")  Forty years later, I wonder how some of them would react to what Rachel Barold has been experiencing.  I am confident that some would feel the same anger and disgust I feel.  But some might feel what they felt back then and find those feelings validated by influential individuals such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and the like who condone antisemitism from platforms. 

    Clearly there was something wrong with the educational system when I was a student. Being formally taught about prejudice was rather hit or miss.  If we had a teacher who enabled us to get rid of our prejudices, we were lucky.  Today, educators should be above any prejudice and bigotry against Jews, black and brown people, Asian, or LGBTQ, since they are trained to prepare and teach lessons about prejudice.  As mentors and role models, these teachers should foster in students the decency and respect all human beings deserve regardless of who they are or where they come from.  

A Brief Christmas Thought

    Christmas is the season of getting and spending, of the hurly-burly of Black Friday and Cyber-Monday commercialism.  It can be the best of times and it can be the worst of times.  From Thanksgiving to the 24^th of December, the rounds of shopping roll on unabated.  Yet, beyond the all-consuming materialism, which magnifies the gap between the haves and the have-nots, there resides a certain something that matters as much as anything I can think of. 

    I don’t think it’s a belief in Jesus’ birth as a manifestation of God, which, anyway, continues its steady slide from religious belief into the realm of mythology, that offers us what really should matter most.  I do believe, however, some of his teachings are still essential currency for the season.  The idea of putting others, including strangers, first; of giving to the poor; of not envying the wealthy.  

    It's clear people give more generously to those who are poor at Christmas time than any other time of year.  It’s perhaps not so clear that our envy of the rich diminishes all that much during this season.  Yet, it seems true that we are genuinely motivated to focus on what matters most in this life, which is our affection, commitment and love for one another.

    As we move through the season, it would be apt to recall the words of Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, after he has been chastened by the Ghosts of the past, the present, and the future: "I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it alive all the year.  I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.  The spirits of all Three shall strive within me."