Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of “Sleep and
Poetry”; those in brackets to endnotes.
John Keats is not
known as a theoretician, but his early “Sleep and Poetry” provides a
programmatic manifesto in defense of his Romantic practice. Characteristically, he makes a case through
images rather than syllogisms. This is
wholly in keeping with Keats’ principle of Negative Capability, perhaps his
most significant contribution to literary theory. The reader who pays regard to the poem’s
images from the start will develop the system of correspondences critical to
the climactic passage.
Though the title
seems to balance sleep and poetry, the poem in fact is about the latter. The opening paean to sleep is a feint, introducing
the notion of a free imagination and setting up even greater praise for
poetry. After an epigraph from the
pseudo-Chaucerian The Floure and the Leafe which in fact describes
sleeplessness as distressing and inexplicable, Keats proceeds to identify sleep
with a series of images that establish a foundation for his theme.
First he
celebrates the beauties of nature in a conventional catalogue which, for all
its predictability (birds, bees, blooms, bowers) includes palpable and specific
detail: a “pretty hummer” that “buzzes cheerily,” “a musk-rose, blowing/ In a
green island, far from all men’s knowing.”
The primary meaning is at first a simple affirmation of sensuality, but
even this significance is complicated by the rose being unknown, presumably
because a mentally conceived flower is superior even to the beautiful ones in a
real garden. Similarly, the value of the
“nest of nightingales” is heightened by its extreme secrecy analogous to an
individual subjectivity.
Birdsong also
suggests poetry, which leads to the culminating terms of the first rhetorical
period’s cluster of images, “Cordelia’s countenance,” and “a high romance,” anticipating
the poem’s conclusion by recalling poetic texts rather than natural objects and
both implying love, the one paternal and the second romantic. The poet’s goal, though, lies beyond. All of pretty these images fall short of
sleep’s power to please and shorter yet of the sublimity of the highest poetry.
Having moved from
attractive aspects of nature to images evoking art and human affection, in the
second half of the verse paragraph Keats lists images meant to convey the nature
of sleep itself. Having just mentioned
literary accounts of passion, Keats now associates sleep with the charms of
actual lovers maternal and romantic.
Sleep closes our eyes and sings lullabies as though a loving
mother. Sleep is the “silent entangler
of a beauty’s tresses,” a phrase suggesting the lady in bed. It is a “happy listener” to the upwelling
sense of felicity that greets each “new sunrise,” for, at any rate, “all the
cheerful eyes.” This praise is, again,
designed to more greatly magnify the glory of poetry once Keats’ entire
progression of thought emerges.
In the next verse
paragraph (ll. 19-40) the series of associations from prettiness to love to
bliss forms a crescendo that exalts poetry to the level of a numinous experience. It surpasses the experience of beauty in
nature and, indeed, is ineffable, “beyond thought.” (19) Keats mentions birds, considered
intermediaries between the human and the divine, before admitting the
inadequacy of language. “What is
it? And to what shall I compare
it?” For Keats poetry provides access to
a “glory” which is a direct experience of reality and thus contains hints at
least of Ultimate Reality. It is “awful,
sweet, and holy,” appearing in many guises, sometimes, “fearful,” sometimes
“gentle,” yet always “wondrous” and most accurately traceable only in
images. As art is generally oblique in
its implications, the truth seems coy, often revealing only “shapes,” “aerial
limning,” “faint-heard hymning,” yet such evidence is sufficient “sometimes” to
elicit a jubilant reaction from the soul: “rejoice! rejoice!” This experience of an illuminated sublime is
familiar to many besides himself. (41-46)
He cunningly creates a community of the initiated, of all those who “can
feel his being glow,” by saying that he will not “insult” his readers by
attempting to sketch what they already know from their own lived experience.
The sensual
delights of the imagination are detailed in the next section (47-84) as the
poet contemplates the ascent of his own Parnassus. “Not yet a glorious denizen” of that realm,
he offers the sacrifice of praise as well as, in fantasy, his own death “like a
fresh sacrifice” ‘to the great Apollo.”
His approach is marked by the heady intoxication of “o’erwhelming sweets.” This is for Keats the locus amoenus,
the “bowery nook,” the “elysium,” identified with the entire body of poetry,
what I like to call “the ocean of words,” for Keats “an eternal book” where
everything is “lovely” and nymphs play in the woods. There he might entertain “imaginings” of all
sorts, “vistas of solemn beauty” inspiring him to “write on my tablets all that
was permitted,/ All that was for our human senses fitted.” Mysteriously, only through such fabulating
flights of the mind can the individual ”seize” (or understand) “all the events
of this wide world.” Keats then
overturns his earlier modesty topoi and anticipates gaining “wings” and a
concomitant immortality through his own verse.
The rush of this
grand ambition is then brought up short with the admonition “Stop and
consider! Life is but a day,” followed
by a series of images of life’s evanescence: “a fragile dew-drop,” “a poor
Indian’s sleep,” turning to the more hopeful “the rose’s hope while yet
unblown,” concluding with the quite wonderful “a laughing school-boy. Without
grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” With this more sanguine view, Keats returns
in lines 96-121 to his poetic ambitions, asking, with a poignance inevitable
for those who know the poet’s biography, for ten years to produce his oeuvre. The thought I enough to return him to the
idyllic quasi-Classical scenes that for him suggest the beauties of art in
general, often with erotic even orgiastic imagery. The poet says he will “choose each pleasure
that my fancy sees,” “catch the white-handed nymphs,” “woo sweet kisses,” “play
with their fingers, “touch their shoulders.”
He imagines in fact a troupe of nymphs all ministering to his comfort,
teaching the doves to fan him with its wings, dancing, enticing,
till in the bosom of a leafy world
We rest in silence, like the two gems upcurl’d
In the recesses of a pearly shell.
(119-121)
This final image with its snug lapidary beauty is a neat
formulation of purely aesthetic satisfaction.
Yet the poet feels
he must, with an act of will, summon up his gravitas and “bid these joys
farewell” in pursuit of “a nobler life” that embraces not beauty alone but also
the “agonies” and “strife of human hearts.”
This resolution is followed immediately by a vision of an Apollonian
heroic charioteer, the embodiment of the poet as redeemer, bringing in his
train “shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear,” an entire spectrum of emotion,
laughing, weeping, but always beautiful like “a lovely wreath of girls.” The onward impetus on this lord of poetry is
“awfully intent,” implying the dread and delight of his comprehensive view.
The vision then
vanishes, as visions do, the chariot “fled into the light of heaven,” bringing
Keats crashing down into “a sense of real things” that “like a muddy stream” he
feels may “bring my soul to nothingness.”
He is sustained by the sublime memory of poetry’s potential and muses
over the decline of the art in his own age, recalling a Golden Age in which the
British muses had no care “than to sing out and comb their wavy hair.” In another of Keats’ breath-taking images he
describes how earlier poets, a “fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony”
until their song, a “mighty self of convoluting sound” which gains such
immensity that it becomes “huge as a planet” and rotates “eternally around a
dizzy void.” (173-177)
This grand afflatus comes and goes,
however, in the life of the world as well as of the individual. A summary of the images in the latter portion
of the poem will indicate this oscillation between the previously defined
poles. The ordinary aesthetic pleasures
are evoked still by the images of pastoralism, most succinctly by the “sweet
music” of the “swan’s ebon bill.” (223, 226)
Yet the joy of these immediate delights is curtailed by suffering,
mortality, and the great unknown. For
Keats art provides the most effective strategy for coping with an unknowable
and often inimical world. Faced with
“the shiftings of the mighty winds that blow/ Hither and thither” (286-7) “the
mighty winds,” he finds a route “out the dark mysteries of human souls.” (289) Through the sort of via negativa not
unlike the ancient Skeptics’ and Stoics’ concept of ἐποχή and which Keats
called Negative Capability, the poet is capable of not only accepting inability
to understand the cosmos, but building insight from that lack.
yet there ever rolls
A vast idea before me, and I glean
Therefrom my liberty; thence too I’ve seen
The end and aim of Poesy.
(290-3)
Here poetry is named as the only
route to a clear enlightened vision. Yet
that “liberty” brings no end to suffering and striving, though the truth be
manifest
As a large cross, some old cathedral’s crest,
Lifted to the white clouds.
(295-297)
There remains a kind of
existential “ocean dim” “spreads awfully before me” (306-307), presumably made
up of ignorance and suffering, irreducible but tolerable through art. A
proper Pegasus, not the neo-Classical “rocking horse” (186) with “might half
slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237) has the power “to sooth the cares, and
lift the thoughts of man” (247) in spite of “trees uptorn,” (242) etc.,
bringing “delightful hopes” and “heart-easing” words. (268)
Keats recognizes the hazards of the
visionary’s role, indeed he embraces the Romantic myth of the artist’s likely
early death, which proved so poignantly true in his case.
Ah! rather let me like a madman run
Over some precipice; let the hot sun
Melt my Dedalian wings . . .
(301-303)
This
self-dramatizing image embodies an existential crisis with the poet as hero facing
a cosmos sufficiently disturbing to drive the persona back to refuge in the
sensual beauty which defines the pleasures of the mind, while the poet knows he
must accept also the harshness of the world and the limits of his own knowledge. The mention of myrtle, Aphrodite’s flower
(248), represents a resolution in art between the joys and distresses of the
world. The plant, primarily associated
with love (and under Christianity with the Virgin), also signified the victor
in athletic and poetic competitions (a usage also echoed in the New Testament)
[2]
Keats’ vision of life, abundant and delightful yet inevitably tragic, is rendered livable by imagination, by art. In the concluding passage, Keats takes his inspiration and comfort from the symbolic elaborations of the art objects he sees about him in Hunt’s cottage. He restates his earlier description of poetry functioning with insouciant mastery, “’tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237),
And with these airs come forms of elegance
Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance,
Careless, and grand — fingers soft and round
Parting luxuriant curls; — and the swift bound
Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.
(331-336)
The reader is
left, then, in the end with what to Keats was most significant: a handful of
images: the immediately appealing musk-rose and the nymphs, but also the
alarming images of the uprooted trees, the Indian about to go over the
waterfall, and the precipice. The
contradiction is then resolved by art, signified in the pearly shell, the cross
“huge as a planet,” and the charioteer.
Keats’ conclusion
is a charming and intimate recapitulation with details of the poet’s visit to
Leigh Hunt’s cottage on the Vale of Health (in which Shelley and Byron were
also guests). His demonstration of the
power of images is here raised to another order by his use of the objets
d’art he saw about him [3], selected by Hunt and viewed by Keats as
symbolic representation of their values.
Since Keats here plays the role of consumer of art as well as creator,
this passage serves as an example of art’s uplifting influence.
The images of antiquity represent beauty
embodied in art includes nymphs as well as “fauns and satyrs taking aim at
swelling apples with a frisky leap.”
Here the poet includes a vision of nature itself, seen as though freshly
through the eyes of the artists of the past.
The sexual association of this reverence for nature is clear in language
like “the wild thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.” While the mythological prints on the wall
celebrate nature, love, art, and, in particular the art of antiquity, and, by
implication, offer a sort of pagan divine service as well, the gap of centuries
separating the poet from the Classical era suggests his lack, his longing, his
hunger. The picture of Petrarch and
Laura reinforces the same scheme as does the bust of Sappho, each with
associations both erotic and artistic.
half smiling down
At nothing; just as though the earnest frown
Of over thinking had that moment gone
From off her brow, and left her all alone.
Sappho’s peace of mind is imagined
to have arrived at the moment that ratiocination, “over thinking” ceased. Surely Keats sought a similar resolution for
himself and his readers.
While the construction of the value of
beauty is the primary theme, Keats’ political ideals support his aesthetic
ones. More than a nationalist icon, the
bust of Alfred the Great probably suggested to Keats the king’s support for
learning and culture as well as the notion that he advanced constitutional
rule. Kościuszko, to whom Coleridge and
Hunt himself had also written sonnets, was a hero in freedom’s cause for the
Romantics [4].
With the sight of these meaningful images,
Keats is uplifted and declares, “And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay.”
(401) The positive operation of these
works of art on the consciousness of the poet anticipates a similar effect of
the poem on the reader. In effect, the
author represents himself as having “reprogrammed” his mind through
contemplation of both art and nature, and the alteration of consciousness
occurs through the developing montage of images alone.
Regularly through the poem, the lower
levels of inspiration are marked by the Classical images of pastoralism and the
higher by divine figures, only to vanish at the summit of aesthetic experience
as language becomes unable to bear the theme.
Keats maintains the vigor of his skepticism, proceeding without
illusion, with the conviction that the symbolic manipulations of art provide
the most potent solace in a fallen world both beautiful and terrifying. For him the most profound truth is accessible
by looking closely, meditating, one might say, on certain images which have
their own order and the capacity to program the consciousness, his own and his
readers’. Whereas sleep is a mere
temporary escape, like the unmixed sylvan fantasies of pastoralism, Keats seeks
to provide an authentic and lasting heart’s-ease in poetry “to sooth the cares,
and lift the thoughts of man” (247).
1. I am reminded of the elusiveness of
enlightenment suggested by the Zen Ox-herding pictures.
3. These works are
listed by Sir Sidney Colvin in his John Keats (ch. 3) as Poussin’s
“Empire of Flora,” his “Venus and Adonis,” and several, perhaps, of his “Bacchanals;”
Stothard’s “Bathers,” “‘Vintage,'” and Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura;
and Raphael’s “Poetry,” from the Stanza della Segnatura.
4. Among the many
other poets of the age who wrote in praise of Kościuszko were Henry Francis
Cary (“Ode to General Kosciuszko”), Byron (“The Age of Bronze”), Southey (“To
A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey”), and Thomas Campbell (“Pleasures Of Hope”).
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