John Keats

I. His Major Poetic Works

1) Endymion

Endymion was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world where human love & ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it.

2) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems

In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems, was published, The three title poems all deal with mythical & legendary themes of ancient, medieval, & Renaissance times. At the heart of these poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the imagined with the actual & man with woman.

3) Hyperion

The unfinished long epic includes two fragments, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, modeling on Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy separately. Its theme is the conflict between the old and the new, and the story is derived from Greek mythology. The poem describes the struggle for power in heaven, the displacement of the old Titans headed by Saturn by the new generation of gods, the Olympians headed by Zeus.

4) Odes:

Of all the short poems by Keats, his odes and sonnets are the most important. The dominant theme of these poems is that the world of nature is beautiful, the realm of art and poetry is wonderful, but the human society is full of miseries. For example, in the poem Ode to a Nightingale, Keats identifies himself with the ideal beauty and hopes that the song of the bird will help him to escape from the world of suffering, where “to think is to be full of sorrow”, into the world of eternal happiness.

"Ode on an Grecian Urn"

It shows the contrast between the permanence of art & the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn: the lovers, musicians & worshippers on the Urn exist simultaneously & for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory & the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience & suffering.

"Ode to a Nightingale"

It expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness & human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy & sorrow, song & music. Death & rapture which free him into the world of dream. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth & despair, rapture & grief. Inspired by the nightingale's song, his thoughts now ascend from the transfigured physical world, through the imagined ecstasy of death, to the timeless present of the nightingale's song. The ultimate imaginative view of "faery lands forlorn" evaporates in its extremity as the full associations of the word "toll" the poet back from his near-loss of self-hood to the real & human world of sorrow & death.

II. Characteristics of Keats's Poetry

Keats's poetry is always sensuous, colorful & rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of his senses. Sight, sound, scent, taste & feeling are all used to give an entire understanding of an experience. He has the power of entering the feelings of others-either human or animal. With vivid & rich images, he paints poetic pictures full of wonderful color. Keats's poetry, characterized by exact & closely-knit construction, sensual descriptions, & by force in imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.

III. Selected Readings:

1. "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Situation and Setting: In England, Keats examines a marble urn crafted in ancient Greece. (Whether such an urn was real or imagined is uncertain. However, many artifacts from ancient Greece, ones which could have inspired Keats, were on display in the British Museum at the time that Keats wrote the poem.)

Two scenes: Pictured on the urn, a type of vase, are pastoral scenes in Greece. In one scene, males are chasing females in some sort of revelry or celebration. There are musicians playing pipes (wind instruments such as flutes) and timbrels (ancient tambourines). Keats wonders whether the images represent both gods and humans. He also wonders what has occasioned their merrymaking. A second scene depicts people leading a heifer to a sacrificial altar. Keats writes his ode about what he sees, addressing or commenting on the urn and its images as if they were real beings with whom he can speak.  

Structure: The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, & the last epitomizing the relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.

Stanza1: general questions about the urn

Stanza2: one side of the urn: piper and lovers

Stanza3: lamentation: envy of the happiness of the piper and the lovers

Stanza4: the other side of the urn: people going to a sacrifice ritual

Stanza5: lamentation: Beauty is truth, truth beauty; human life is short while art lasts

Stanza 1

THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,  你委身“寂静”的、完美的处子，
  Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,  受过了“沉默”和“悠久”的抚育，
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 呵，田园的史家，你竟能铺叙
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: 一个如花的故事，比诗还瑰丽：
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape 在你的形体上，岂非缭绕着
  Of deities or mortals, or of both,  古老的传说，以绿叶为其边缘；
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?  讲着人，或神，敦陂或阿卡狄？
  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?  呵，是怎样的人，或神！在舞乐前
  What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?  多热烈的追求！少女怎样地逃躲！
   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?   怎样的风笛和鼓谣！怎样的狂喜！

Stanza 2

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 听见的乐声虽好，但若听不见
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;  却更美；所以，吹吧，柔情的风笛；
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,  不是奏给耳朵听，而是更甜，
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:  它给灵魂奏出无声的乐曲；
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 树下的美少年呵，你无法中断
  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;  你的歌，那树木也落不了叶子；
    Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,  卤莽的恋人，你永远、永远吻不上，
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;  虽然够接近了－－但不必心酸；
  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,  她不会老，虽然你不能如愿以偿，
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!           你将永远爱下去，她也永远秀丽！

Stanza 3

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 呵，幸福的树木！你的枝叶
  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;  不会剥落，从不曾离开春天；
And, happy melodist, unwearied,  [un WEER e ED] 幸福的吹笛人也不会停歇，
  For ever piping songs for ever new;  他的歌曲永远是那么新鲜；
More happy love! more happy, happy love!          呵，更为幸福的、幸福的爱！
  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,  永远热烈，正等待情人宴飨，
    For ever panting, and for ever young;  永远热情地心跳，永远年轻；
All breathing human passion far above,  　幸福的是这一切超凡的情态：
  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,  它不会使心灵餍足和悲伤，
    A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.          没有炽热的头脑，焦渴的嘴唇。

Stanza 4

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?  这些人是谁呵，都去赶祭祀？
  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,  这作牺牲的小牛，对天鸣叫，
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,  你要牵它到哪儿，神秘的祭司？
  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?  花环缀满着它光滑的身腰。
What little town by river or sea shore,          是从哪个傍河傍海的小镇，
  Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,  或哪个静静的堡寨山村，
    Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?  来了这些人，在这敬神的清早？
And, little town, thy streets for evermore 呵，小镇，你的街道永远恬静；
  Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 再也不可能回来一个灵魂
    Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.          告诉人你何以是这么寂寥。

Stanza 5

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 哦，希腊的形状！唯美的观照！
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,  上面缀有石雕的男人和女人，
With forest branches and the trodden weed;  还有林木，和践踏过的青草；
  Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 沉默的形体呵，你象是“永恒”
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!         使人超越思想：呵，冰冷的牧歌！
  When old age shall this generation waste,  等暮年使这一世代都凋落，
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 只有你如旧；在另外的一些
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,  忧伤中，你会抚慰后人说：
  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all “美即是真，真即是美，”这就包括
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 你们所知道、和该知道的一切。

Summary & Annotations

Stanza I
Stanza I begins slowly, asks questions arising from thought and raises abstract concepts such as time and art. The comparison of the urn to an "unravish'd bride" functions at a number of levels. It prepares for the impossibility of fulfillment of stanza II and for the violence of lines 8-10 of this stanza. "Still" embodies two concepts--time and motion--which appear in a number of ways in the rest of the poem. They appear immediately in line 2 with the urn as a "foster" child. The urn exists in the real world, which is mutable or subject to time and change, yet it and the life it presents are unchanging; hence, the bride is "unravish'd" and as a "foster" child, the urn is touched by "slow time," not the time of the real world. The figures carved on the urn are not subject to time, though the urn may be changed or affected over slow time.

The urn as "sylvan historian" speaks to the viewer, even if it doesn't answer the poet's questions (stanzas I and IV). Whether the urn communicates a message depends on how you interpret the final stanza. The urn is "sylvan"--first, because a border of leaves encircles the vase and second because the scene carved on the urn is set in woods. The "flowery tale" told "sweetly" and "sylvan historian" do not prepare for the terror and wild sexuality unleashed in lines 8-10 (another opposition); the effect and the subject of the urn or art conflict. Is it paradoxical that the urn, which is silent, tells tales "more sweetly than our rime"? Twice (lines 6 and 8) the poet is unable to distinguish between mortal and immortal, men and gods, another opposition; is there a suggestion of coexistence and inseparableness in this blurring of differences between them?

Paradox and opposites run through the rest of the poem. As you read and reread the poem, you should become aware of them.

Stanza II

Using paradox and oxymoron to open Stanza 2, Keats praises the silent music coming from the pipes and timbrels as far more pleasing than the audible music of real life, for the music from the urn is for the spirit. Keats then notes that the young man playing the pipe beneath trees must always remain an etched figure on the urn. He is fixed in time like the leaves on the tree. They will remain ever green and never die. Keats also says the bold young lover (who may be the piper or another person) can never embrace the maiden next to him even though he is so close to her. However, Keats says, the young man should not grieve, for his lady love will remain beautiful forever, and their love–though unfulfilled–will continue through all eternity. 

Stanza III

Keats addresses the trees, calling them “happy, happy boughs” because they will never shed their leaves, and then addresses the young piper, calling him “happy melodist” because his songs will continue forever. In addition, the young man's love for the maiden will remain forever “warm and still to be enjoy’d / For ever panting, and for ever young. . . .” In contrast, Keats says, the love between a man and a woman in the real world is imperfect, bringing pain and sorrow and desire that cannot be fully quenched. The lover comes away with a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” 

Stanza IV

Keats inquires about the images of people approaching an altar to sacrifice a "lowing" (mooing) cow, one that has never borne a calf, on a green altar. Do these simple folk come from a little town on a river, a seashore, or a mountain topped by a peaceful fortress. Wherever the town is, it will be forever empty, for all of its inhabitants are here participating in the festivities depicted on the urn. Like the other figures on the urn, townspeople are frozen in time; they cannot escape the urn and return to their homes. 

Stanza V

Keats begins by addressing the urn as an “attic shape.” Attic refers to Attica, a region of east-central ancient Greece in which Athens was the chief city. Shape, of course, refers to the urn. Thus, attic shape is an urn that was crafted in ancient Attica. The urn is a beautiful one, poet says, adorned with “brede” (braiding, embroidery) depicting marble men and women enacting a scene in the tangle of forest tree branches and weeds. As people look upon the scene, they ponder it–as they would ponder eternity–trying so hard to grasp its meaning that they exhaust themselves of thought. Keats calls the scene a “cold pastoral!”–in part because it is made of cold, unchanging marble and in part, perhaps, because it frustrates him with its unfathomable mysteries, as does eternity. (At this time in his life, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis, a disease that had killed his brother, and was no doubt much occupied with thoughts of eternity. He was also passionately in love with a young woman, Fanny Brawne, but was unable to act decisively on his feelings–even though she reciprocated his love–because he believed his lower social status and his dubious financial situation stood in the way. Consequently, he was like the cold marble of the urn–fixed and immovable.)  Keats says that when death claims him and all those of his generation, the urn will remain. And it will say to the next generation what it has said to Keats:  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” In other words, do not try to look beyond the beauty of the urn and its images, which are representations of the eternal, for no one can see into eternity. The beauty itself is enough for a human; that is the only truth that a human can fully grasp. The poem ends with an endorsement of these words, saying they make up the only axiom that any human being really needs to know.

Form

Each of the five stanzas in "Grecian Urn" is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially "Autumn" and "Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

Theme: On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature & art, for art has the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be protected from change, while artifact can remain intact.

Figures of Speech
.
The main figures of speech in the poem are apostrophe and metaphor in the form of personification. An apostrophe is a figure of speech in which an author speaks to a person or thing absent or present. A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two unlike things without using the word like, as, or than. Personification is a type of metaphor that compares an object with a human being. In effect, it treats an object as a person--hence, the term personification. Apostrophe and metaphor/personification occur simultaneously in the opening lines of the poem when Keats addresses the urn as "Thou," "bride," "foster-child," and "historian" (apostrophe). In speaking to the urn this way, he implies that it is a human (metaphor/personification). Keats also addresses the trees as persons in Stanza 3 and continues to address the urn as a person in Stanza 5. Other notable figures of speech in the poem include the following: 

Assonance 
bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time 

Alliteration 
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian, who canst thus express   

Anaphora
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?  
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?  
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?   

Paradox
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? (The images move even though they are fixed in marble)

Oxymoron
those [melodies] unheard 
peaceful citadel (citadel: fortress occupied by soldiers)

2. “Ode to a Nightingale”

Summary

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his "drowsy numbness" is not from envy of the nightingale's happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely; he is "too happy" that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word "forlorn," he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is--an imagined escape from the inescapable ("Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf"). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

In "Indolence," the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In "Psyche," he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale's song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, "But here there is no light"; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he "cannot see what flowers" are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which is in many ways a companion poem to "Ode to a Nightingale." In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

夜 莺 颂
　

我的心在痛，困顿和麻木
刺进了感官，有如饮过毒鸠，
又象是刚刚把鸦片吞服，
于是向着列斯忘川下沉：
并不是我嫉妒你的好运，
而是你的快乐使我太欢欣——
因为在林间嘹亮的天地里，
你呵，轻翅的仙灵，
你躲进山毛榉的葱绿和荫影，
放开歌喉，歌唱着夏季。

哎，要是有一口酒！那冷藏
在地下多年的清醇饮料，
一尝就令人想起绿色之邦，
想起花神，恋歌，阳光和舞蹈！
要是有一杯南国的温暖
充满了鲜红的灵感之泉，
杯沿明灭着珍珠的泡沫，
给嘴唇染上紫斑；
哦，我要一饮而离开尘寰，
和你同去幽暗的林中隐没：

远远地、远远隐没，让我忘掉
你在树叶间从不知道的一切，
忘记这疲劳、热病、和焦躁，
这使人对坐而悲叹的世界；
在这里，青春苍白、消瘦、死亡，
而“瘫痪”有几根白发在摇摆；
在这里，稍一思索就充满了
忧伤和灰色的绝望，
而“美”保持不住明眸的光彩，
新生的爱情活不到明天就枯凋。

去吧！去吧！我要朝你飞去，
不用和酒神坐文豹的车驾，
我要展开诗歌底无形羽翼，
尽管这头脑已经困顿、疲乏；
去了！呵，我已经和你同往！
夜这般温柔，月后正登上宝座，
周围是侍卫她的一群星星；
但这儿却不甚明亮，
除了有一线天光，被微风带过，
葱绿的幽暗，和苔藓的曲径。

我看不出是哪种花草在脚旁，
什么清香的花挂在树枝上；
在温馨的幽暗里，我只能猜想
这个时令该把哪种芬芳
赋予这果树，林莽，和草丛，
这白枳花，和田野的玫瑰，
这绿叶堆中易谢的紫罗兰，
还有五月中旬的娇宠，
这缀满了露酒的麝香蔷薇，
它成了夏夜蚊蚋的嗡萦的港湾。

我在黑暗里倾听：呵，多少次
我几乎爱上了静谧的死亡，
我在诗思里用尽了好的言辞，
求他把我的一息散入空茫；
而现在，哦，死更是多么富丽：
在午夜里溘然魂离人间，
当你正倾泻着你的心怀
发出这般的狂喜！
你仍将歌唱，但我却不再听见——
你的葬歌只能唱给泥草一块。

永生的鸟呵，你不会死去！
饥饿的世代无法将你蹂躏；
今夜，我偶然听到的歌曲
曾使古代的帝王和村夫喜悦；
或许这同样的歌也曾激荡
露丝忧郁的心，使她不禁落泪，
站在异邦的谷田里想着家；
就是这声音常常
在失掉了的仙域里引动窗扉：
一个美女望着大海险恶的浪花。

呵，失掉了！这句话好比一声钟
使我猛醒到我站脚的地方！
别了！幻想，这骗人的妖童，
不能老耍弄它盛传的伎俩。
别了！别了！你怨诉的歌声
流过草坪，越过幽静的溪水，
溜上山坡；而此时，它正深深
埋在附近的溪谷中：
噫，这是个幻觉，还是梦寐？
那歌声去了：——我是睡？是醒？