Use of Images in the Poetry of John Keats - Essay Example

Swarnambika S Kristy 4th Year Romantic Literature 01 April 2007 Use of images in Keats' poetry from ical art and Mythology IntroductionJohn Keats attached great importance to imagination. The negative capability of Keats is not the result of any intellectual process. It results from imagination. Keats was always suspicious of reason. He believed in imagination alone. In one of his letters he writes, "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be true". Like Shakespeare, Keats himself was of imagination impact. It was with his rich imagination that he could make his poems spontaneous. In the poem, Ode to Autumn, Keats is lost in his images. The poem gives not only fullness and softness of autumn but also its more masculine qualities of roughness and vigor. Not only does it offer mellow fruitfulness and clammy cells, the fume of poppies and the last oozing, but also the moss'd cottage trees, the granary floor, the brook, the cider-pass, the stubble plains, the small gnats and the river shallows. It shows that ripeness for Keats is both a varied and an ordered concept. Influence of Hellenism on Keats' works Keats was greatly influenced by Hellenism and English translations of Greek literature. The ancient Greeks called their country Hellas and themselves Hellenes. Keats was a Greek by instinct. His borrow of subjects from Greek mythology for his Endymion and Hyperion is not as significant as his total absorption in the spirit of ancient mythology, which, indeed, is a kind of primitive poetry. The world of Greek paganism lives in his verse with its frank sensuousness and joys of life, with its mysterious oracular messages and eternal questionings of the natural world. With unrivalled felicity he recreates the blind faith and fervor of the ancient pagans and the sensuous character of their rituals in his Ode to Psyche. "So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; The shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming". The faculty of imagination which attributes human qualities to the objects of nature is called anthropomorphic. In mythology, Indian or Greek, this faculty finds the fullest play. Keats possessed this anthropomorphic faculty to a very remarkable degree. He hardly ever remained long in the domain of the abstract, as it is found from his Autumn Ode. It is only in the first line that autumn is an abstraction or the 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'. In the very second line, autumn is found conspiring with the maturing sun as a close bosom-friend. In stanza 2, autumn appears as a harvester, a reaper, a gleaner and a cider maker. These personifications are so different from the cold and frigid personifications of the eighteenth century poetry. Keats' autumn is like Pan of Greek mythology, to which we owe its vegetative plenty, its mellow fruitfulness, its familiar sights and its characteristic music. The three stanzas in Ode to Autumn show a gradual rise of thought. In the first stanza, autumn is viewed as the season itself, doing the season's work, bringing all the fruits of the earth to maturing in readiness for harvesting. In the second stanza, autumn, personified in a woman's shape, is present at the various operations of the vintage. In the last stanza, the close of the year is associated with sunset; the songs of spring are feeling of the continuous life of nature, which externally renews itself in insect, animal and bird. The close of the ode, though solemn, breathes the spirit of hope. Romanticism has been defined as the "Renaissance of wonder", i.e. re-awakening of interest in the supernatural. For the romantics, there are more things in heaven and earth than people dream of. There is a world of unseen behind and above the world of the senses. Keats was also fully indulged in that super sensuous world. It is the magic and mystery, the belief in ghosts and fairies, of the middle ages, that captivated his heart. The Eve of St.Mark and The Eve of St.Agnes are based upon two different medieval superstitions, and in the La Belle Dame sans Merci we get the medieval belief that certain cruel fairies entangle mortals in their love, and then betray them and ruin them. Lamia is based on the superstition of those dark ages regarding the serpent - women, and the harm they could cause by their beauty. Keats achieves perfection of form along with positive substance of poetry. His poetry is characterized by emotion, spontaneity, inspiration and imagination as well as with that restraint, self-control and polish which are the hallmarks of classicism. Even the romantic themes of the marvelous and the wonderful, and of medieval superstition, are enclosed by him in forms of classical perfection. The melancholy which runs through his poetry arises from his yearning for beauty. His Hellenism may be summed up in the words of Sidney Colvin, thus: "He indeed resembles the Greeks in his vivid sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature, and he loved to follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete shapes of supernatural human activity and grace". Endymion and Greek Mythology Keats has certainly made use of the myth of Endymion to explore his own way to realize the truth that is beauty. But the myth remains only the framework. Keats invents quite a lot. The real significance of the poem lies in search of truth, through the "bare-circumstance" of this legend. Keats did not fit myths into an allegorical pattern as Elizabethans did or did not use them only to decorative effect as the eighteenth century people did. Keats recited Endymion to Wordsworth at the house of Haydon in 1817, when Wordsworth's comment was "a very pretty piece of paganism". But the poem is remarkable for its Greek love of myth and beauty. The Legend of Psyche The story of Psyche can be found in the Golden Ass of Apuleius. No doubt the poem Ode to Psyche manifests a profound influence of Greek myths on Keats. The poet has been inspired by the Psyche myth, and he introduces in the poem the atmosphere of Greek worship. But the poem is not merely a piece of lovely decorative mythology. It is something more. Psyche is the soul, not recognized as goddess in the classic Greek mythology. Spiritual values associated with Psyche speak of the powers of imagination of Keats. Personification of Nature Keats personifies the powers of nature. He looks at nature, like the Greeks, with wonder and childlike delight. He feels disillusioned with the spirit of enquiry which has suffocated simplicity and wonder and long for good old days of holiness. For Keats, every object of nature is haunted by an attendant deity, god or goddess. The tree is haunted by the Dryad and the sea is haunted by the Naiads. In the Ode to Nightingale, he writes: "That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees". The forests are haunted by Pans and Satyres. In the Ode to Autumn, the poet treats autumn as a goddess or a mythological woman in the spirit of Greek worship of the object of nature. Combination of Romanticism and Classicism The poem To Sorrow in Book IV of Endymion is complete with Greek mythology. We find in the poem Bacchus and Silenus riding on horse and jolly Satyrs. Though the poem contains numerous references from Greek mythology, yet in spirit it is a romantic poem. The picture of the Indian maid weeping beneath some palm tree for her shadowy lover, the descriptions of the far off lands of Egypt, Abyssinia and Tartary, and the dense jungles and the wandering beasts are all romantic. The following lines have caught the spirit of romance: "Or on a moonless night, To tinge on siren shores, the salt sea-spry" The poem is remarkable for its lyrical beauty. A mood of tender irony and pathos like that of the best Elizabethan songs is found in the poem. The term 'imagery' can be used in two senses. First, in the sense of metaphor, and secondly as the expression of sense-experience, is impressed upon the mind. A remarkable feature of Keats' sensuous imagery is the combination of different sensations and a subordination of other sensations of those of touch and taste. His images are solid, rounded and intense. Touching with dazzled lips, her starlit hands, incense pillowed every summer night; cool rooted flowers etc are only a few examples. His visual imagery is then product of an eye usually directed to particulars of things close at hand. The visual interest lies mainly in a motionless picture. The essential quality of Autumn is fixed in a motionless, eternal moment. The evening clouds are stopped. "While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue". Keats is a great pictorial artist. His pictures are vivid and accurate. His images are concrete and complete. His poetry, except in Hyperion, is devoid of elaborate descriptions as in Milton's Paradise Lost. His images are more directly descriptive rather than illustrative nature. According to Cloude Lee Finney, "The imagery of Keats' poetry has two notable characteristics. In the first place, it is comprehensive, having images of all the sensations of the sensory system - sensations of sight, hearing, touch, temperature, pressure, taste, smell, motor sensations, hunger, thirst, lust, etc. In the second place, it is sensuous being rich in images of the intimately physical sensations of touch, temperature, pressure, taste, smell, and the internal sensations". According to Fogle, Keats' imagery is synesthetic. Synesthetic quality is to bring into focus several diverse sense impressions of an object and transmute them into a single image. Here is an example of synesthetic imagery from Endymion: "Here is wine, Alive with sparkle-never, I over, Since Ariadne was a vintager, So cool a purple" This is an example of compression through synesthesia for sharper poetic effect: In the first place, "purple is a sort of metaphor for "wine"; in the second place, the visual sensation of the color of wine blends synesthetically with the immediately cooling effect of drinking wine, the tactual sensation. Hence the last line of the above passage is an example of double compression. Conclusion Keats' images, similes and metaphors are drawn from a variety of sources. Many of his images echo poets like Spenser, Shakespeare, Drayton, Dryden and others. His images have an associate charm. The best of them are drawn from nature and common things which are for the first time represented as beautiful. His originality seems inexhaustible. His images have a synesthetic quality. He uses sense-images in abundance. To Psyche presents a remarkable instance of 'synesthetic imagery': "Midhush'd cool-rooted flowers, fragrant eyed, blue silver-white and budded Tyrian". To conclude, Keats is a romantic poet because of his love of nature, of superstition of fine phrase and music, of melancholy and middle ages, and of wonder and mystery. He is intensely subjective and emotional. He loves art for the sake of art. In his poetry, however, there is a balance between the formal perfection of the classics, and the emotion and imagination of the romantics. In fact, we find in Keats' poetry the essence of romanticism. Reference 1. Nicholas Roe, "John Keats and the Culture of Dissent", Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997. Read More