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Keats was famous for his odes and
several long poems. Under the principle of “Beauty is truth, truth in
beauty”, the short poems Keats wrote are rich in images of beauty and verbal
music and word painting. For instance, in his Ode to a Nightingale:
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”
All five perceptions of the reader’s: tactile,
gustatory, olfactory, visual and auditory are strongly appealed by the
verbal imaginary and music created by Keats. Keats pursued the principle of
beauty in all things. He once wrote that: “I am certain of nothing, but the
holiness of the heart’s affection, and the Truth of Imagination. What the
imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or
not.”
Of the numerous short poems written by Keats, the most
important are his sonnets and odes, such as Ode to Autumn, Ode on
Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the most famous Ode to a
Nightingale—all written in 1819 with the praise of beauty as their
general theme, and When I Have Fear reveals Keats’ tragic foresee of
his premature death:
“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”
The five long poems that Keats wrote are under this principle
as well: Endymion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia and
Hyperion.
1.Endymion: A Poetic Romance is a splendid apprentice work
written in 1818. It is a story between the moon goddess Cynthia who falls in
love with a beautiful shepherd of Mt. Latmos. This story also mingles with
the legend of
Venus and Adonis. This apprentice poem developed the theme
that Keats pursued in his future poems—the love of beauty:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases: it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
2.Isabella, or the Pot of Basil is a story adopted from
Bocaccio’s Decameron.
A rich family girl Isabella felt in love with a poor servant Lorenzo. But
was undermined by her wicked brothers. They tricked Lorenzo away and then
murdered and buried him in a forest. Isabella found the body of her beloved
with grief, and then buried the head in a flowerpot. Unfortunately, her
brothers discovered it. They stole the pot and threw it away. Completely
desperate, Isabella died. Here, the denouncement of social injustice and
evils only plays a minor part, the main purpose for Keats’ writing is the
pursuit of beauty. However, this time, he describes an abnormal beauty—the
morbid beauty:
“They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall,
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flagon by his side:
The wakeful blood hound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: --
The chains life silent on the foot worn stones; --
The key turns, and the door upon its hinged groans.”
Through the musical rhymes, which just like a funeral march, the poem
creates an unexpected beauty.
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