John Keats - His Great Odes

“Keats is probably the only romantic poet, apart from Blake, whose rank is conspicuously higher that it was in the nineteenth century”, says Douglas Bush. Selincourt finds his odes comparable to Shakespearean sonnets. Six of the odes are considered to be Keats’ major odes – To Autumn, To Psyche, To a Nightingale, On Indolence, On Melancholy and On a Grecian Urn. These odes have an underlying unity. They portray a common attitude towards life and revolve around a single central mood. They are different phases of a single experience.
In his odes Keats is poignantly concerned with the fleeting nature of beauty, joy and love. He is always pre-occupied with finding a way of perpetuating the ephemeral. For instance, in the two of his odes – ‘To a Nightingale’ and ‘On a Grecian Urn’, Keats suggests different methods to perpetuate the momentary joys. The urn is symbolic of beauty in the midst of human suffering.
They all take the poet away from the lazar house of life and a dull, perplexing human mind. In ode ‘To a Nightingale’ Keats laments about the transience of happiness in the real world:

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan
Where Palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs
Where youth grows pale, spectre thin and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,
And leaden-eyed despair
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eye
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

The poet suggests two ways to immortalize the blissful moments. First, he wishes for an “easeful Death” at the blissful moment to eternalize the bliss. Secondly, he wants to take the help of “the viewless wings of Poesy”, that is, poetry, to perpetuate happiness.
Similarly, in the ode ‘On a Grecian Urn’ the poet suggests the medium of art to perpetuate the fleeting moments of happiness. Art does so by lending them an unchangeable form and shape. In this ode, the poet has depicted the permanence of art versus the transitoriness of life. Even in his ode ‘To Psyche’ the poet aims at immortality the beauty of Psyche, by building a temple in her name in some “untrodden region of my mind”.
Keats’ odes are fine examples of a perfect paradox. The idea of joy in immortal beauty and acceptance of transience form the basis of Keats had mastered the technique synthesizing the two. Thus, the theme that recurs in all the odes is transience versus permanence. For example, in the ode ‘On Melancholy’, the poet mentions beauty, but not without an immediate realization of its short-lived nature. Talking of melancholy he says;
She dwells with beauty – beauty that must die
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu...
…………………………………….
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine.
Another characteristic feature of Keats’ odes is that pain and pleasure exist together. Be it the “aching pleasure” of ‘To a Nightingale’, or “heart aches” of ‘On Melancholy’, pain (or melancholy) and pleasure (or joy) exists side by side. His ode ‘On Melancholy’ concludes with the idea that a person who has a sensitive heart, who understands the subtle joys can in the true sense enjoy melancholy.
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
The other common feature of all his odes is ‘negative capability’. This quality aims at objectivity amidst terrible personal suffering. It is the ability of identifying oneself with the experience. It aims at a negation of the self. It is related to the concept of beauty. The ability of discovering beauty in everything overpowers all other considerations, in the case of a great poet. In his ode ‘On a Grecian Urn’ Keats sums up as:
‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
In his ode ‘On Melancholy’ identifies himself with what he describes, so completely that poet and the experience seem one. He renders the ode objective inspite of terrible personal suffering. In the odes ‘To a Nightingale’ and ‘On a Grecian Urn’, Keats faces the tragic dilemma of life with courage though he does not offer a proper solution to the dilemma. He can enter into the joy of the nightingale “too happy in thine happiness”. Even with an acute awareness of the mutability of human life he can still enjoy the “unheard melodies” and the “still unravished bride of quietness”.
We find a mature manner of introspection in his ode ‘To Autumn’. The poet accepts the inevitability of the three-fold cycle of life – birth, growth and death. Autumn is a season often symbolic of death and decay but Keats has portrayed it as a season of ripeness and fruition, a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Only once is the poet nostalgic about Spring:
Where are the songs of spring?
Ay where are they? but reconciles very quickly to say about Autumn: “Thou hast thy music too”.
The poet is aware that nothing exists in isolation. Spring, which is a harbinger of hope, birth and life, too is not eternal. Keats accepts Autumb as a part of the greater and more permanent rhythm of life – birth, growth, death and renewal.
The moment and eternity, in their essence, are one. Each and everything has a role to play in the total process. Death is accepted as something inherent in the cycle and ripeness implies dissolution. The problem of transience and permanence, thus, vanishes. Keats finds an earthly, human, natural paradise which “whoever seeks abroad may find”.