Keats’ Odes encompass cycles and cycles within cycles; they
are a literary meta-monument par excellence. The most overt cyclical energy
I’ve spotted in the Odes subsists between “Grecian Urn,” “Psyche,” and
“Nightingale.” That Psyche and Grecian Urn set setting something in place to be
reified— a cohesive gestalt vision of visions, and a blazon of the visionary as
an emanation from the chiasmus between sense, tactility, and imagination— which
is parodied, deconstructed and supplanted by subjective necessity against
negative capability in Nightingale, is the basic premise. What is “doubled”
between Grecian Urn and Psyche is profound— the visionary synecdoche, of young
lovers frozen into immobility in a forest, appears to Keats on the Grecian Urn
itself, and then magically manifests before his eyes as Eros and Psyche,
embodied physically in three dimensions as Keats strolls through an actual
forest in Psyche; that Psyche, owing to her position in classical lore,
constitutes the literal apotheosis of Daphne and Syrinx in Grecian Urn; that
all these processes of recognition and assimilation had to evince an (odal)
sense of the celebratory; and that what becomes tactile, as Grecian Urn leads
to Psyche, is another recognition, that liminal states and modes of being,
“half” modes, usually situated between sleep-states and wakefulness, are
necessary to the cultivation of the visionary, and visionary happiness, in such
a way that the poet himself disappears into a liminal trance to channel the
rough tactile materials of his trade into sufficiently honed, “quiet” (or
murmurous) forms.
In short, Grecian Urn up to Psyche establish a
self-enclosed, self-contained system— a system both of artistic representation
and of self-awareness, poetic and otherwise, around representational processes
in general. The manner in which Nightingale talks back to the two Odes
constitutes both a (partial) critique and a (partial) denial— by beginning
Nightingale with an apostrophe to himself, and his own vulnerability, this
version of odal protagonist adumbrates the limitations of the established odal
system and cycle— that the happiness of self-transcendence and liminal states
of consciousness cannot always be achieved; that the tactility of things can be
torturous as well as ecstatic; that the entire applied odal method, in fact,
exaggerates what is inherently (partially) banal in tactility and liminal
states of consciousness; and that exercising a “purple-stained mouth”
perpetuates its own cycle of unrealistic expectations and weakly-strung nerves.
Just as Psyche’s casement opens on love and refreshment, Nightingale’s opens on
perilous seas and forlorn realms; Psyche’s forest is viewed in broad daylight,
Nightingale’s in confining, “embalmed” darkness; the “heathen goddess” becomes
an indifferent (immortal) animal; and the totalized purview of the visionary is
revealed as an “easeful Death.” Even synesthesia, Keats’ accustomed manner of
deranging and re-configuring the tactile, has its disasters— the “shadowy sounds”
of the forest reinforce the protagonist’s isolation, melodious plots of
greenery extend past his reach, sight and hearing do a dance more irritating
than not. Because Nightingale closes and rounds out the relevant odal trio, the
meta-commentary and meta-critique enact an inquiry with, as is typical with
Keats, a sense of half-determinate conclusions.
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