Love And Tragedy In The Poems Of John Keats
Towards the end of his life he, John Keats, experienced what people believed to be the most productive time of his career. The release of two of his poems “La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A Ballad” and “Ode to Psyche” were published and he got the credit he deserved. We go into the mind of Keats and we see the way he uses interpretation to prove his points and the hidden messages he incorporates into his work. Most importantly we take two different poems that represent the ideal theme in most of Keats’ poems.
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad was published in 1820 towards the end of John Keats’ life, and right after the death of his brother Tom. It was initially written in 1819 but the revised version was initially published a year after it was completed. Both versions have their differences and you can particularly notice it by reading the first line. The poem in general is told to us through a knight, who is the speaker. The knight takes us on a journey of love and lust, and ultimately disappointment. We begin with a seasonal transition in the very first two stanzas. The imagery we get shifts from dark to light. So what is very vivid to imagine would be a knight gathered around with some of his friends on a chilly winter night and once he begins telling the story we get a feeling of warmth and a lot of color. Keats uses a lot of imagery so that the reader can get a really good picture of the beauty this woman has. The third stanza entirely describes the woman’s beauty to us, he writes “I see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever dew: and on thy cheek a fading rose, fast withereth too”. This beautiful woman is being described through the beauty of nature and here we also see more of the cold and hot images. The next stanza consists of him describing him a little bit more. To him she is so beautiful he is questioning if she could be real or just be a fiction of his imagination, to be more specific a “faery’s child”. The speaker is so infatuated with her that he begins to make her crowns and bracelets out of flowers, praising her for being so beautiful, as if to say she is his queen. They continue to share the experience of infatuation and he says “she looked at me as she did love, and made sweet moan”. The knight then placed her on to his horse and they took off and he could see nothing else but the happiness that shone on her face and he could hear nothing else but her beautiful voice when she sang. This next stansa is when we begin to see a shift of tone.
The beginning of this poem we have a very bright and positive outlook on it. After they ride off in his horse she confesses her love to him in an unusual language to him. She then takes him to a “grot” which really translates to a cave, in which she cries and cries and he kisses her four times to comfort her. The most important part of the story comes after that. The woman begins to sing a lullaby to him and he falls asleep, a very peaceful and deep sleep comes over him. This stanza is the most important one to the entire poem it reads “And there she lulled me asleep. And there I dreamed-- Ah! Woe betide! The lastest dream I ever dreamed, On the cold hill’s side”. Not long after he falls asleep he sees “pale kings and princes too” and that is when they tell him what is really happening to him. They keep crying “La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall” meaning that she was having power over him and his emotions. The knight wakes up and finds himself on the cold hill side and that is where he temporality stays. There really is no coincidence that the last stanza is the same one as the first stanza. The knight becomes obsessed with this woman and he completely forget about everything and everyone else to ultimately come out hurt in the end.
Ode to Psyche was published in 1819 around the same time as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. So this poem begins with the speaker calling out to the goddess Psyche, hoping she will hear his words and forgive him for singing out the secrets he should have kept. We quickly are pulled into the story the speaker is describing. We begin with a question, he asks himself whether it was reality of he dreamt seeing the winged Psyche. Then we are introduced to two fair creatures that the speaker has stumbled upon on a walk he took that day. These two fair creatures were “couched side by side, in deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof of leaves and trembled blossoms where there ran a brooklet, scarce espied” (9-12). Here we get a sense of pure love and the heavy amount of nature used to describe the feeling and mood that is being set. The two creatures embrace each other with their arms and their wings too but they do not kiss. It became very clear to the reader that the speaker was having trouble identifying who one of the creatures was, hence the question at the beginning of the poem, but he eventually answers his own question and comes to identify it was Psyche. In the second stanza the speaker begins to address Psyche once more and begins to describe her as the loveliest and most beautiful of all the goddesses and gods in Olympus. He is declaring that he thinks she is the most extravagant goddess he has ever seen even “though temple thou hast none”. That last quote was a reference that he once made in one of his letter to his brother. In the letter he was explaining how Psyche at the time being was still not embodied as a goddess and was ultimately neglected so it makes sense that in his poem she yet has no altar filled with flowers, no choir to make her moan upon the midnight hour.
The fourth stanza is where the speaker begins to declare the love he is feeling for her. We also see the shift and we get a lot of desire in the stansas after the second one. The speaker willingly volunteers himself to be her own personal choir and make her moan upon the midnight hours, and basically be everything she does not have, and becomes her worshipper. He goes on and on about all the things he would do and with all this imagination it seems as if his imagination is a lot more fertile than an ordinary garden. This poem was filled with a lot of hidden messages that represent Keats’ true imaginative ideas. Both of these poems have very similar themes yet they are presented very different. It is obvious that we know the romantic era was known for ideas like imagination, inspiration, nature, and many other things. Keats seems to really stick to all three of these major ideas. Although he never really expresses his own personal opinion physically he does do it through the characters in his poems.
The main thing that Keats used in these two poems was references to nature. In the first poem he uses nature to describe the woman’s beauty and we see the transition of season come into play once he begins to tell the story of the knight. We see the shift of light and dark during the beginning, middle and end of the poem as the journey descends. The entire first poem is filled with lust and love and it takes the speaker out of his reality and takes him to an entirely different world. During those few moments he was able to get out of civilization and go to a peaceful place where there was no wrong. This was something a lot of writers were influenced by specially during the industrial revolution. The second poem consists of heavy nature descriptions as well. The very beginning of the poem is actually a description of the are that way Cupid and Psyche were laying in. A beautiful stream, underneath very unique and breathtaking leaves. There were a lot of flowers mentioned in the poems and most specific crowns of flowers. In both poems the crown of flowers are significant because it is always the suitors that are creating them for the women in the poems.
Like mentioned above it is the two suitors that make these accessories for the love interests. I should point out that in both poems the men are head over heels for the women and with the beauty they bring with them. It seems that they are infatuated with their looks more than anything else. In a way it is somewhat a similar pattern between them two. Boy meets girl and feels a deep connection so he will do anything to keep feeding that hunger for love they feel inside. I think that is definitely one of the biggest themes in a nutshell. There is also a lot of dream references in both of them. One has more impact than the other when it comes to dreams but they’re still mentioned in both. With all the imagery in both it gave off some artwork feelings. It was like we can depict the picture in our minds because the descriptions were all so vivid and raw.
The biggest difference that seemed pretty obvious was that the first poem was a dreamstate journey and the second poem was a myth being somewhat proven. The vibes were very different as well. The first poem was very upbeat and it felt like we as readers had fallen in love with someone and we were on this incredible high only to be completely destroyed in the end and be left all alone. It was more of a tragedy story and it seemed a lot more relatable than the second poem. The second poem incorporated a lot more of the imagination aspect. It represented a story of a man being madly in love with a woman he met and wanting to give his all to her. It had a lot of Greek God references and it was a very colorful poem all through out, there was never really any dark side to it. I do need to mention that as I was reading the second poem all I kept thinking about was William Blake and the vision he had as a child and the angels he would write about in the “Chimney Sweeper”.
Both of these poems had a great amount of detail and had a huge connection with nature each in a different spectrum. Every detail is important when describing a character and Keats did a good job connecting with them and using nature to describe the appearances. It really gave the reader a clear picture of what he intended things to look like in his poems. Keats did a great job glorifying the idea of imagination and expression of creative. These poems were very much similar and very much different all in one but Keats was able to get a similar message across in a good way.
