Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Keats's odes can tempt us to either a mindless or a single-minded response. One temptation is to surrender to the richness of texture and perfection of utterance in a stupor of admiration. Keats himself seems a victim of the other when he writes: ‘Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. He is envisaging a deep and undivided response, uncomplicated by effects of alienation. Yet, while the odes do lack the ostentatious virtuosity of earlier poems such as Endymion, their writing remains ‘startling’, disconcerting and anything but monotone to an alert reader.It can be difficult to trust oneself to the complexity of textual play in the odes. For example, the first three stanzas of Ode on a Grecian Urn address the urn with unhesitating and mounting rapture. In its silence, the urn is praised for transcending the narratives of poetry. Initially, the insistent questions which complete the first stanza —‘What men or gods are these? What maidens loth’— seem of a rhetorical tendency: they are not enquiries, but expressions of wonder at the energy and attitudes portrayed. The second and third stanzas celebrate a world which is ‘for ever new’: the urn's silent portrayal of music is set above music itself, while the perpetual eagerness of the lovers is far superior to the cloying of normal ... log in or subscribe to read full text