Bid the Spring Adieu: On Late Keats

The questions that concerns Keats in his later poems, from 1820 on, are far different than the questions that he asks in his earlier poems, from 1817 or before. In Keats’s later poems the line of inquiry that he enters into is far more speculative and complex than his early work, tending toward as methodology of thinking that favors process over completion. This trend in Keats’s development not only points to a more complicated relationship with his craft but also to a more complicated understanding of mortality, love, and imagination. Keats’s early poems, though well crafted, show only the outer workings of the poet that he will become some three years on. In the early poems there is a tendency in Keats’s writing to approach his subject more glancingly, to dwell on delight and fancy. Many of the poems read like a bucolic that frames his way of seeing, and appreciating, beauty and, save for a few examples, generally end in a concise affirmation of his subject. In addition to the above progressions in Keats’s writing there is a more marked turn contextually in his poems away from English traditions and toward the classical traditions of Greece and Rome. All of the these transformations in Keats’s writings show a poet who has undertaken to write and consider his position in his art and in the world that is decidedly more complex and mutable; transformations that embraces ambiguity of meanings and the conflicts of reasoning toward complexity and contradiction.

In the early poems of 1817 Keats utilizes a tone and a contextualization in his writing that figures an understanding of the world and his craft that is formed out of an unrestrained fascination with imagination and beauty. Many of the poems, the sonnets in particular, deal with imagery and with themes that are decidedly bucolic and search out for moments of, in Keats’s phrasing, “delighted fancy”. Much of the early work aims to please and sets as its task the discovery of distilled moments of grace. Sonnet IV (“How many bards gild the lapse of time”) works as a typical example of the style and content that Keats was working with. The sonnet deals, ostensibly, with the role of influence on the poet and how influence operates on the poet’s conscious and on the poet’s work. Two things should be noted from the onset: first Keats is figuring his poem toward an English, Anglo-Saxon, context when he asks “[h]ow many bards gild the lapse of time!” (ln 1), and second he is using the Petrarchian sonnet form. These two features point towards Keats’s position at the time concerning which tradition he should draw from, and his basic dilemma: should he face toward the English tradition, the bard, or should he face toward the classical world toward the Rome of Horace and Ovid. This straddling of poetic tradition is not something that Keats will resolve, but as he matures he begins to take on, more and more, classical figures from myth and history. What’s important in this sonnet, and what is typical of Keats’s early works, is how his content and images work toward fancy and follow a progression in reasoning which is fairly consistent within itself, which is, that the poem works toward a resolution of meaning and reaches it without too many turns or lapses. In Sonnet IV the work one does not find questions or doubts about where the poet is in relation to those that have come before; there is no anxiety over status or decisions concerning voice. Instead Keats figures the ‘bards’ that have come before him as writers of “beauties, earthly, or sublime” (4), and though there is some darker resonances in Keats’s speaker’s reading out the ‘sublime’, the poem does not bring it forward. The speaker then discuss how when he begins the act of writing the voices of these past writers will “throng before his mind”, but they do so in a manner that is both productive and charmed: “But no confusion, no disturbance rude/ Do they occasion; ‘tis a pleasing chime” (7-8). The sonnet continues along these line of pleasure for pleasure’s sake and ends with the very temperate line that those past bards “Make pleasing music; and not wild uproar” (14). Keats here is not striving to create a poem that is grappling with metaphysical uncertainty, as his poems after 1817 are, but is trying to create moments of crystallized ideals of beauty and harmony. In the 1817 poems love is courtly and the landscape framed.

However Keats’s poem “Sleep and Poetry” of 1817 develops a number of textual motifs that Keats will come back to in his later poems. “Sleep and Poetry” is a poem, like Sonnet IV, that deals with the craft of writing, of the poet’s task, and the scope of the art, it is also a poem that finds that the task of poetry is powerful, broad, and ‘fearful’. “Sleep and Poetry” sees Keats working on some of the metatextual considerations that will return throughout his work and it also points to the unresolved methodological approach of some of his later works. There is not in “Sleep and Poetry” a clear line or a concise progression in the internal logic of the poem; however, that is not to say that the poem is not reasoned to its own demands. Instead, the poem is dealing in tropes that cannot be easily reasoned with. It is in this poem that there emerges a radical shift in the position of the poet and his figures. In “Sleep and Poetry” the work of the poet is not to find and delineate clean lines of beauty, but is a darker and more difficult work:

 

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,

Where I can find the agonies, the strife

Of human hearts. (122-125)

 

Here the work of the poet is ontological, it is meant to enter into being, into its extreme and difficult forms and to be multivariant in its looking, to see from diverse perspectives, or as Keats words it, “thousands in a thousand different ways” (148).

By 1820 Keats has accepted the task of the poet that he had laid out in “Sleep in Poetry”. Not only did Keats begin to work in broader strokes, taking on several longer poems, but his poetry began to formulate a position that dealt in difficulty. Typical of the 1820 poems is his “Ode to a Nightingale”. From the onset of the poem one can see that the world is no longer that of middle ages England but has become tied in with classical figures. Here, instead of Spenser and of knights and damsels, Keats is calling on the world of myth: it is hemlock that has been drunk, it is in Lethe were he has sunk. Additionally, Keats is constructing a poem that follows a line of reasoning that is generally more amorphous than the line of his early poems. “Nightingale” operates with a rhetoric which works through the pairing of diverse figures, namely the nightingale that lacks the knowledge of pain and the poet figure who envies this epistemological state, which work in an interlacing logic that is discordant with the poems of 1817. In “Nightingale” it is knowledge and experience which harbors pain and suffering, it is memory and recollection, two figures which his early poems brought delight, and attached experience to the immortal. In fact, the nightingale’s song, detached as it is from suffering, is instead of a crystallization of ideal beauty, a beauty that the poet longs to die within. It is a song that is devoid of meaning and because of that pain: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme…Now more than ever seems it rich to die” (61-64). In effect the speaker in the poem has arrived at the formulation that to be without pain is to be without meaning. An additional break from is early work is made clear in this poem, in “Sleep and Poetry” the poem ends with the poet waking from sleep and preparing to write the lines which the reader has just read. In “Nightingale” there is no clear division between poetic vision and wakefulness, but there is now a line between imagination and reality which has become blurred, or more precisely the differentiation between poetic vision and reality is no longer admitable. In the final line of the poem the speaker posses a question which is, because of its rhetoric, unanswerable and is necessarily so, “Do I wake or sleep?” (89). When Keats asked questions in his poems of 1817 the answer was supplied by the poet or was readily graspable, and almost never ended the poem. Here though Keats has made the final statement of his poem a continuation, an aspect of method. There is no tidy answer to Keats’s question and it is not meant to be. The poem is entering into a new metaphysical ground where it is process and method which are under consideration and not a terminus or crystallization of meaning. Keats here in “Nightingale” and in other of his poems of this period is no longer drawing out lines that inscribe the world in a meaning and in beauty, but is instead confronting his failure to suss out such a meaning, such a beauty. The transition between Keats’s early poems and his later poems is the movement between aligning his poetry along a single perspective toward a vision which contains ‘thousands’. This transition not only presses Keats to write a poetry that is more complicated metaphysically but it also leads him into forms that are more grand and more labyrinthine, and gives an image of a writer that has not settled on the world, a writer that is still naming, that is unfinished.

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