'Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty'
 Shakespeare's is generally acknowledged to have been the greatest
achievement in English Literature. However, it is John Keats (1795-1821)
who is considered to have had the greatest potential. He died at 25
after a writing career of just 4 years as against Shakespeare's of 24.
"Keats' genius," wrote GM Hopkins, "Was so astonishing...that one may
surmise whether if he had lived he would not have rivalled Shakespeare."
If the guiding principle of Wordsworth's poetic life was "natural
piety", that of Keats' was beauty. "With a great Poet the sense of
Beauty overcomes every other consideration", he writes in one of his
multitudinous letters to immediate family members and close friends,
which provide a fascinating insight into the thought process behind his
poetry and from which all his non-verse sayings as quoted here are
taken. And again, "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things."
It is in this spirit that he opens his long poem, "Endymion", with the
celebrated line, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever", and famously
declares at the end of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "'Beauty is Truth,
and Truth Beauty' - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know."
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John Keats |
This principle initially manifests itself in a rapturous involvement
with the beauties of nature. The early poem beginning, "I stood tip-toe
upon a little hill", leaves one flabbergasted at the manner in which
Keats combines sensuousness with accuracy in his descriptions of the
natural scene, eg: "Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of
sunny beams Temper'd with coolness.
How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out
the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and
there they are again."
Such lines enable us to agree with Matthew Arnold when he says," No
one in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the
fascinating felicity of Keats, the perfection of loveliness...In the
faculty of naturalistic expression, what we call natural magic, he ranks
with Shakespeare." Yet, it is important to remember, as Arnold goes on
to say, that "the 'yearning passion for the Beautiful' which was with
Keats, ..is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man or poet, it
is an intellectual and spiritual passion." Keats puts it thus, "I am
certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the
truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be
Truth."
Poetic imagination
Keats identified two great principles which have proved vital to our
understanding of the workings of the poetic imagination. One is Gusto,
regarding which he declares that "the poetical Character.. is...
everything and nothing...it lives in gusto....A poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity - he is
continually in, for, and filling some other body." This quality of gusto
is what, for example, enables Keats virtually to take part in the
existence of the minnows in the above extract from "Tip-toe". (It is
also what enables Shakespeare to create such utterly different, yet
utterly real, dramatic characters in a single play as Iago and Othello.)
Negative Capability, the second principle, is "when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason." (It too, as Keats confirms, "is a
quality Shakespeare possessed so enormously.") You could call it the
passive faculty of the poetic imagination, whereas Gusto is the active
one. These two qualities are often confused with one another. Perhaps
the reason is that the great poet invariably manifests both, not only in
the same work but at the same time, as does Keats in his later and
greater poems, notably "Ode to a Nightingale."
In this poem Keats finds himself transported by the song of a
nightingale. Gusto enables him to "fly...on the viewless wings of
Poesy", and envision the invisible nightingale as, in DH Lawrence's apt
phrase, "the most unsad thing in the world." Yet, Negative Capability
simultaneously evokes the poet's own sad uncertainty as to whether this
"was a vision or a waking dream" and his doubtfulness of its endurance,
since "the fancy cannot cheat so well." This is the most moving and
tragic of Keats' poems. It shows how man yearns for the permanence and
perfection represented by the "immortal bird not born for death", while
he is doomed (as the poet understood it) to decay and death, with even
"youth growing pale, and spectre-thin, and dying" (as Keats would soon
do himself).
Prime example
Yet the ecstasy of the yearning is seen to persist alongside the
"forlornness" of the reality. This is the beautifully sad truth seized
by the imagination and missed by Lawrence in his commentary on the poem.
The "Ode to Autumn" is often said to be one of the most perfect poems
in the language. Familiarity cannot stale our wonderment at Keats'
"natural magic" in this its finest manifestation. The poem is a prime
example of the so-called "pathetic fallacy", whereby human motivations
are attributed to natural phenomena, in this case the autumnal season.
In Keats' hands, however, the fallacy becomes a verity as Autumn is
evoked as a virtually Wordsworthian presence having its own unique
identity. One of the secrets of Keats' magic must surely be the verb(al)
power of his diction.
Central phase
In the first verse Autumn successively conspires, blesses, bends,
fills, swells, plumps and sets, seeming in its dynamism to be an
extension of Summer itself.
In the second verse, Autumn is actually personified as a harvest
worker, first "sitting careless on a granary floor", next "on a half-reap'd
furrow sound asleep", then as a post-harvest gleaner gazing into a brook
and finally as languidly tending a cider-press.
This is where the season seems to mature into its restfully beautiful
central phase. In the final verse a melancholy strain enters the writing
and we feel that Winter cannot be far off. This is suggested by the
references to "the soft-dying day", "the wailful choir" in which " the
small gnats mourn...borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or
dies". With the last line, "And gathering swallows twitter in the
skies", we realise with a pang, and without Keats having to tell us,
that they are gathering in preparation for their flight to warmer climes
ahead of the desolation soon to come upon the landscape.
The artistic experience that comes closest to this Ode is to be found
not in poetry but in music, namely the third (called "Autumn") of
Vivaldi's 4 violin concerti known as "The Four Seasons."
Indeed, if the poem and the concerto were to be considered in
isolation from the rest of the poetic and musical repertoire, it would
be difficult to come to the usual conclusion that music is the greater
art. |
