642 Keats, John
praises “One-thoughted, never wand’ring, guileless
love, / Unmask’d, and being seen—without a blot!”
(l. 2–3). Keats adopts the excessive tone of courtly
romance, claiming that if his lover remains cold and
distant he will die, or worse, continue to live on as
his lover’s “wretched thrall” (l. 11) and “Forget, in the
mist of idle misery, / Life’s purposes” (l. 12–13). The
last lines of the poem dwell on the way the speaker’s
lovesick suffering has impacted his life, leading
“the palate of my mind” to lose its sense of taste and
leaving “my ambition blind” (l. 12–14). The last line
is significantly Keatsian: The worst thing that love
threatens to do to the speaker is to rob him of his
poetic ambition.
Cynical poems like “Modern Love” (1848) are
quick to criticize what Keats perceives as the shal-
lowness and commerciality of romantic relation-
ships: “And what is love? It is a doll dressed up / For
idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle” (l. 1–2). The
poem seems to mock Keats’s earlier idealism—“silly
youth doth think to make itself / Divine by loving”
(l. 3–4)—and expresses anger over lovers’ tendency
to read high drama into their shallow relationships.
Fools! If passions high have warmed the
world,
If queens and soldiers have played deep for
hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth
of weeds. (l.11–14)However, having sneered at those who want to
believe that “Cleopatra lives at Number Seven”
(l.9), the speaker concludes by seeming to wish his
idealism back intact, as symbolized by his demand
that lovers “make me whole again that weighty
pearl” (l.12) which their excesses have presumably
destroyed. In that respect, Keats’s poems seem never
to stray far from Keats’s early, idealistic celebration
of love as a state approaching divinity.
Siobhan Carroll
nature in the poetry of John Keats
Romantic poets are generally characterized as being
interested in the relationship between human beings
and nature. John Keats is no exception to this rule.
One of his earliest poems, “On the Grasshopper and
the Cricket” (1817), begins with the line “The poetry
of earth is never dead” (1). Keats likens insects to the
singing poets of the earth and claims that their song
never truly ceases, for when the grasshopper’s voice
is silenced by winter’s frosts the cricket’s voice takes
over: “from the stove there shrills / The Cricket’s
song, in warmth increasing ever, / And seems to
one in drowsiness half lost, / The Grasshopper’s
among some grassy hills” (12–14). Although natural
life involves the passing of seasons and, eventually,
death, nature has built-in mechanisms that ensure
the continuity of beauty from season to season and
year to year.
Keats returns to the relationship between nature
and mortality in his famous poem “To Autumn”
(1820). Although autumn, as the forerunner of win-
ter, might seem like a gloomy season, Keats hails it
as the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (1).
In wording that echoes that of “On the Grasshop-
per and the Cricket,” the poet first asks “Where are
the songs of spring?” (23) before concluding that,
although the sounds of new life are beautiful, those
of autumn also have their charms: “Think not of
them, thou hast thy music too” (23–24). However,
a potentially negative note appears elsewhere in the
poem, when Keats reflects on autumn’s production
of “later flowers for the bees / Until they think warm
days will never cease” (9–10). Unlike humans, bees
and other forms of natural life are both blessed and
cursed by ignorance of their mortality.
In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats expounds fur-
ther on the natural world’s ignorance of present and
future woes. As a human, the speaker in the poem
cannot help but be aware of the misery of others,
and as a result feels that “to think is to be full of
sorrow” (27). By listening to a nightingale, which
is ignorant of the cares and troubles of the world,
the speaker is temporarily able to forget his human
perspective: “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
/ What thou among the leaves hast never known /
The weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where
men sit and hear each other groan” (21–24). Nature,
however, cannot provide a lasting refuge for the poet.
The speaker is eventually awakened from his trance
and enters back into consciousness of human pain
and mortality.