What are the dominant themes in Keats Odes?
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“Keats Odes grow directly out of inner conflicts.” — Explain.
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Discuss some of the main themes of Keats “Odes”.
Answer: The poetic career of John Keats spanned only about five years, but in this brief period, he produced a small cache of literary gold. Keats was among the most romantic of the Romantics. He possessed a very tender heart and the happenings in the real world around him ‘would deeply touch him. His poetical works reflect his vision of life as he experienced it. He has repeatedly underlined the transient nature of life. That human life, with all its vitality and buoyancy, is subject to decay and death had been a subject of mortification in most of his poetical works.
The Odes of Keats mark the highest development of his poetic genius and stand at the crux of his poetic achievement. The Odes are the direct outcome of the personal experiences of his life containing certain conflicts, struggles and tensions. The fundamental conflict was the choice between real life and ideal life, which he created to retreat into it from the complicated reality, which is full of pain and sorrow. Another point of conflict was art and life. They also touch upon the issues of relation between pleasure and pain, permanence and change. Most of the odes of Keats, arising from the inner conflicts that troubled him, reflect completely the struggle that was going on in his mind. The Odes are his poetic efforts to escape from the troubled realities of life. He made sincere efforts to escape into the world of imagination, the world of beauty, the world of perfection. But his endeavors are always thwarted by a painful realization of the actualities of life.
The tension between transient and permanent recurrently features as dominant theme in the Odes. In Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats underlines the transient nature of human life. In the poems, the transience of life has been put in stark contrast to the permanence of art. The nightingale is the symbol of art and beauty, the chief characteristic of which is permanence. It is a universal and undying ‘voice’. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the mutability of life is contrasted with the permanence of art typified by the marble urn. The permanence of the picture on the Greek fringe is contrasted with the decay and change of real human actualities, with the world where everything is undergoing a never-ceasing change.
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Art, represented by the Grecian urn remains unaffected by the claws of Time, where life is affected and gets deprecated. Thus, Keats very impeccably shows the mortality of life and the immortality of art.
“Ode on Melancholy” also expresses the transience of beauty and joy and the idea that true melancholy lies in the realization that all that is beautiful in the world is subject to decay and demise. “Ode to Autumn” also touches upon the theme of transience as he voices the ensuing departure of the `season of mellow fruitfulness’.
The Odes reflect that conflicts that were going on in Keats’s mind. In the Odes, he is in pursuit for permanence and beautiful. But, he is not successful in his quest for happiness. The futility of escaping into the ideal world of imagination is eventually realized. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, the reverie is broken in the last stanza and the poet returns to the world of reality and forlornness and process of fading. Similarly, by the last stanza of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the enchantment has waned and the actual has reasserted itself. This unearths the idea that art can never take place of life. For Keats, art is not a desirable substitute of life, though it is useful as a temporary relief.
