Ode on Indolence

Engraving of the Sosbios Urn done by John Keats

"Ode on Indolence" is a poem written by the British poet John Keats. It is one of his spring odes of 1819 along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". The exact date of composition for the five odes remains unknown, but they were written around the same time. Unlike the other odes, "Ode on Indolence" remained unpublished until 1848, 27 years after Keats’s death, despite that Keats wrote in a letter that its composition had brought him more pleasure than any of the other odes.

The ode follows a poet’s consciousness as he contemplates a morning of laziness before regarding three figures dressed in "placid sandals" and "white robes". The narrator then examines them through a series of questions and statements about life and art. Although critics rate "Ode on Indolence" as inferior to Keats's other 1819 odes, the poem is important because it contains themes and imagery that appear in many of his other works along with providing biographical insight into Keats's life.

Background

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton

Keats was not a professional writer. Instead, he worked as a surgeon for Guy's Hospital in Southwark, London and earned little. During spring 1819, Keats left the hospital in order to devote his time to poetry. Previously, Keats would rely on his brother, George, for financial support, but George left England to settle in Illinois. On May 12, George wrote to Keats requesting financial support himself because of unexpected expenses that came from settling in America. Keats fell into despair and guilt when he was unable to spare money for his brother, and he wished to give up the time he devoted to writing poetry. Keats resolved to give up writing poetry in order to devote his time to working once more, and it was in this mindset that Keats, giving up on poetry, began to write his "Ode on Indolence".

The beginning of Keats's feelings on the topic of indolence can be found in a 19 March 1819 letter to his brother George, which makes it likely that Keats would have written a close to the same time period. However, there is evidence to suggest that places the poem closer to June. The actual date when Keats wrote the ode, along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode to a Nightingale", is unknown because he only dated the poems as being written during May 1819. What is known is that Keats worked on the four poems together and they are similar in both their stanza forms and their themes.

Since the poems are interconnected, literary scholars argue that the poems form a sequence within their structures. Robert Gittings, a 20th-century biographer, believes that the poem had to be one of the early 1819 odes that was probably written on 4 May 1819, based on the type of weather Keats mentioned existed while composing the poem. Douglas Bush claims that "Ode on Indolence" was probably written after "Ode to a Nightengale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "Ode on Melancholy". Near the end of the century, Andrew Motion, in his biography of Keats, focuses on stanza forms in order to determine that "Ode on Indolence" was written after "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale", but that there is no way to date them. However, Motion is willing to argue that "Ode on Indolence" came last. In The Consecreated Urn, Bernard Blackstone admits that "Ode on Indolence" has been considered by various critics to have been the first, the second, and the last of the five odes to be written.

While Keats was writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the other poems, his friend Charles Brown was busy transcribing copies and submitting them to Richard Woodhouse, Keats's friend and publisher. Keats was not satisfied with "Ode on Indolence", and it was not printed alongside any of the other odes that he wrote that year. Instead, the poem lay unpublished until 1848. However, he did enjoy the process of writing the poem, as he wrote in a letter to his friend Sarah Jeffrey: "the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence".

Structure

The ode begins with an epigraph from Matthew 6:28. The poem itself consists of six stanzas of ten lines each, exhibiting a complex rhyme scheme common to many Romantic odes. Keats’s style of using iambic pentameter and an ABAB rhyme scheme for the first four lines of each stanza shows an adherence to Classical poem structure. However, the ode breaks from the classical formation with a series of asymmetrical 6-line endings to each stanza referred to by Gittings as a "Miltonic-based sestet"

The poem contains a complicated use of assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds. This can be seen in line 19, "O why did ye not melt, and leave my sense", where the pairs ye/leave and melt/sense share vowel sounds. A more disorganized use of assonance appears in line 31, "A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd", with the pairs third/turn'd, time/by, and pass'd/passing share vowel sounds. In terms of scansion, the first line of the poem shows Keats's adherence to iambic pentameter, which continues throughout the duration of the poem:

˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/	˘	/
One	mourn	be-	fore	me	were	three	fig-	ures	seen.

However, Keats sometimes inverted the accent of the first two syllables of each line or a set of syllables within the middle of a line. Within the poem, 2.3% of the internal syllables are inverted while only .4% of the internal syllables of his other poems contain such inversions.

Poem

The poem relies on a first-person narration style similar to "Ode to Psyche". The ode begins with a classical scene in a similar manner to "Ode on a Grecian Urn", but the scene in "Indolence" is allegorical. The opening describes three figures that operate as three fates:

One morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;

And one behind the other stepp'd serene,

In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn

When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again, as, when the urn once more

Is shifted round, the first seen shades return; (Lines 1-8)

The figures remain mysterious as they circle around the narrator. Eventually they turn towards him him and it is revealed that they are Ambition, Love, and Poesy, the themes of the poem:

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,

And ever watchful with fatigued eye;

The last, whom I love more, the more of blame

Is heap'd upon her, maiden most unmeek,—

I knew to be my demon Poesy. (Lines 35-40)

The poet wishes to be with the three figures, but he is unable to join them. The poem transitions into the narrator providing reasons why he would not need the three figures and does so with ambition and love, but he cannot find a reason to dismiss poesy:

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:

O folly! What is Love? and where is it?

And for that poor Ambition—it springs

From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;

For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—

At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;

O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense! (lines 41–50)

Concluding the poem, the narrator argues that the figures should be treated as figures, and that he would not be mislead by them:

Lolcat explains.

So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise

My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;

For I would not be dieted with praise,

A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!

Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more

In masque-like figures on the dreary urn;

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,

And for the day faint visions there is store;

Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle spright,

Into the clouds, and never more return! (lines 51–60)

Themes

In The Odes of John Keats, Helen Vendler suggests that Ode on Indolence is a "seminal" poem constructed with themes and images that appeared more influential in other poems by Keats . Many of the same thematic elements that appear in the ode also appear in Keats' other works, and the poem shares structural elements with both "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy". Also, the ode presents many of the Classical themes found in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles", and other works by Keats. The Classical influence upon the Romantic Poets affected other writers including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, but Keats’s odes contain a higher degree of Classical references than most of the poets of his time.

The mood of "Ode on Indolence" is connected to the Keats's state of being that he describes in a letter to his brother George earlier in 1819: "indolent and supremely careless [...] from my having slumbered till nearly eleven [...] please has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase—a Man and two women—whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement". While critics have suggested that Keats’s description of indolence may have arisen from the use of opium, others such as Willard Spiegelman have suggested that the indolence of the poem arises from the narrator’s reluctance to partake in the labor associated with poetic creation.

In his letter written between February 14 and May 3 1819, Keats describes in detail the images he discusses in the second stanza and whose image reappears for a third time in the third: "This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: "I long after a stanza or two of Thompson's Castle of Indolence... Neither Poetry, Nor Ambition, nor Love, have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase". When the figures appear within "Ode on Indolence", the poet desires to know their names and laments his ignorance. It is only in retrospect that the poet understand the nature of the intrusion upon his indolence, leading him to ask the figures whey they did not melt in line 14. The figures vanish when the narrator is able to recognize them for what they are, and the narrator copes by trying to dismiss his need for them. Poesy alone is the narrator unable to dismiss, which reflects Keats's giving up of poetry in order to focus on a career and earn money. At the time, Keats was giving up on writing poetry as he was no longer able to work on his epic, Hyperion. He desired to write great poetry but he feared that his pursuit of poetry was just a delusion. As such, the conclusion of the poem is Keats dismissing the images, and his poetry, as figures that he would not allow to mislead him.

Regarding Keats's general philosophy, the ode is an early work discussing his concept of soul making. Within his poems that explore this philosophy, Keats begins by questioning suffering, breaks it down, and draws conclusions about the world. The process is filled with doubt, but his poems end with a hopeful message. The hopefulness contained within "Ode on Indolence" is found within the vision he experiences in the last stanza. The poems as a whole are able to capture Keats's philosophy of negative capability, a concept of reconciling thought and sensation as with other opposite pairs, and his view on the chamber of maiden thought, the development progression of the mind. The poems fall within Keats's belief that his works should capture the beauty of art while acknowledging the harshness of life. However, the poem if read as the final poem in the sequence of the odes reveals that Keats is resigned to giving up his poetic career, and that life made it difficult for him to continue as a poet.

Critical responses

"Ode on Indolence" was never seen by literary critics as a great poem compared to the other odes written by Keats in 1819, and, as Walter Evert summarizes it, "It is unlikely that the 'Ode on Indolence' has ever been anyone's favorite poem, and it is certain that it was not Keats's. Why he excluded it from the 1820 volume we do not know, but it is repetitious and declamatory and structurally infirm, and these would be reasons enough." However, the poem does have some importance, as Walter Jackson Bate points out, "its value is primarily biographical and not poetic".

Many critics rely on the poem as a point of comparison. A 19th-century review of the poem by Charles Wentworth Dilke says that while while Indolence can be read as a supplemental text to assist the study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, it remains a much "inferior" poem. Thomas McFarland, in 2000, picked up Dilk's comparison of Ode on Indolence with Ode to a Grecian Urn and wrote, "Far more important than the similarity, which might seem to arise from the urns in Keats’s purview in both Ode on Indolence and Ode on a Grecian Urn [...] is the enormous dissimilarity in the two poems. Ode on Indolence, as even the few lines quoted here show, is a flaccid enterprise that hardly bears mention alongside that other achievement."

Sidney Colvin, in his 1917 biography, ranked grouped "Ode on Indolence" with the other 1819 odes as examples of short poems that made up Keats's achievement as a poem. In 1948, Lord Gorell describes the fifth stanza as, "lacking the magic of what the world agrees are the great Odes" but describes the language as "Delicate, charming even". Later in a 1968 biography of Keats, Gittings describes the importance of the poem: "The whole ode, in fact, has a borrowed air, and he acknowledged its lack of success by not printing it with the others [...] Yet with its acceptance of the numb, dull and indolent mood as something creative, it set the scene for all the odes that followed."

Following this in 1973, Stuart M. Sperry describes the poem as "a rich and nourishing immersion in the rush of pure sensation and its flow of stirring shadows and 'dim dreams'. In many ways the ode marks both a beginning and an end. It is both the feeblest and potentially the most ambitious of the sequence. Yet its failure, if we choose to consider it that, is more the result of deliberate disinclination than any inability of means." Motion, in 1997, argues, "Like 'Melancholy', the poem is too articulate for its own poetic good [...] In two of his May odes, 'Melancholy' and 'Indolence', Keats defined themes common to the whole group with such fierce candour that he restricted their imaginative power. His identity had prevailed."

References

• Aske, Martin. Keats and Helenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 34
• Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
• Bate, Walter Jackson. The Stylistic Development of Keats. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
• Blackstone, Bernard. The Consecrated Urn. Longmans Green: London (1959).
• Bloom, Harold . The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
• Colvin, Sidney. John Keats. New York: Octagon Books, 1970.
• Dilke, Charles Wentworth . Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Ed. Richard Monckton Milnes. Anthenaeum, 1848.
• Evert, Walter. Aesthetics and Myth in the Poetry of Keats. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
• Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1968.
• Gleason, John. A Greek Eco in Ode on a Grecian Urn. RES New Series Vol. XLII, No. 165. Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Lord Houghton. Memoir of John Keats Republished in Rare Early Essays on John Keats. Ed. Carmen Joseph Dello Buono, M.A. Norwood: Darby, Pa.
• Lord Gorell.John Keats: The Principle of Beauty. London: Sylvan, 1948.
• McFarland, Thomas. The Masks of Keats. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Motion, Andrew. Keats. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Ober, William. "Drowsed With the Fume of Poppies: opium and John Keats". Bull NY Academy Med, 1968.
• Smith, Sarah. John Keats. G.K Hall: Boston, 1981.
• Sperry, Stuart M. Keats the Poet. Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Spiegelman, Willard. Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
• Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology. Blackwell: Malden, Oxford. 1995.
• Yoon, Myung Ok. "The Paradoxical Theme in Keats's Ode on Indolence".[1]. accessed 12-4-08.

External links

• Text of the poem