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https://w.atwiki.jp/ce00582/pages/2559.html
import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; class java0709 extends Frame { public static void main(String [] args) { Frame f=new java0709(); f.setTitle("java0709"); f.setSize(600,600); f.setBackground(Color.yellow); f.setVisible(true); } java0709(){ Button bu = new Button( "ボタン" ); TextField te = new TextField(); add(bu, BorderLayout.NORTH ); add(te, BorderLayout.SOUTH ); pack(); setVisible( true ); addWindowListener(new stopwin()); } class stopwin extends WindowAdapter{ public void windowClosing(WindowEvent we){System.exit(0);} } public void paint(Graphics g){ g.setColor(Color.red); g.drawLine(100,100,250,250); } }
https://w.atwiki.jp/ce00582/pages/2560.html
import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; class java0710 extends Frame { public static void main(String [] args) { Frame f=new java0710(); f.setTitle("java0710"); f.setSize(600,600); f.setBackground(Color.yellow); f.setVisible(true); } java0710(){ Button bus = new Button( "ボタン" ); TextField tes = new TextField(); add(bus, BorderLayout.NORTH ); add(tes, BorderLayout.SOUTH ); pack(); setVisible( true ); addWindowListener(new stopwin()); } class stopwin extends WindowAdapter{ public void windowClosing(WindowEvent we){System.exit(0);} } public void paint(Graphics g){ g.setColor(Color.red); g.drawLine(100,100,250,250); } }
https://w.atwiki.jp/constellationparty/pages/6.html
Room 1 1-1 特筆すべき難所はない。 ■出現する敵 Alp,Bet 1-2 Alpの群れに注意。 ■出現する敵 Alp,Bet 1-E 1st Eclipticals 「Aries」との戦闘。 ■出現する敵 Alp,Aries
https://w.atwiki.jp/siyuki/pages/13.html
Javaネタ 昔、無名クラスを見つけて、 なんだこりゃ！？って喜んで載せてたけど、 クロージャや関数プログラミングが流行になった今、 結局静的にしかインスタンスを生成できない仕組みなんて 時代遅れなのかもしれない。 Java1.7について書いてみようと思う。
https://w.atwiki.jp/constellationparty/pages/7.html
Room 2 2-1 特筆すべき難所はない。 ■出現する敵 Alp,Bet 2-2 Betしか出現しない。 ■出現する敵 Bet 2-E 2nd Eclipticals 「Pisces」との戦闘。 ■出現する敵 Bet,Pisces
https://w.atwiki.jp/dominions3/pages/1121.html
Boots of Youth いつまでも若々しく。既に高齢な術者にも有益 Boots of Youth 靴 研究Lv 属性 属性2 内部ID 200 6 2 威力 攻撃補正 攻撃回数 長さ 防御力 防御補正 回避率 重さ 射程 弾数 特殊 その他 疲労回復補正：2、特殊：自然加齢停止 ゲーム内解説文 These leather boots have been drenched in the blood of ten young vigins. The wearer of these boots will cease his natural aging and is magically reinvigorated during battle. 和訳 これらの革靴は、10人の若き処女の血に浸されました。これらの靴の着用者は、その自然な加齢を停止し、戦いにおいては魔法的に疲労を回復します。 注記 老化を喰い止める効果を持つ疲労回復靴。処女の血を浴びるのは若返る手段の定番であり、魔法でも似たようなことをしている。 疲労回復機能だけなら、より早く解禁されているBoots of the Messengerのほうが上だが、こちらは総じて短命な人間の上位魔術師を延命できる点が非常に優秀。首都専用雇用で数を出すのに苦労する魔術師にはとくにありがたい。 既に老齢の魔術師でもAfflictionの自動付加を阻止できるようなので、利用できる場面は多いはず。コストもBlood Slaveで払えることを思えば安いので、量産も容易だろう。 なお、この靴の老化阻止はあくまでも自然な加齢を停止するのみで、DecayやBurden of Timeによる老化には機能しない。勘違いして対策に使わないこと。 コメント 名前 コメント
https://w.atwiki.jp/ms-60b/pages/27.html
プリセットのパッチメモリー「HeavyBooty」についての情報ページ。 コメント オーソドックスなディストーションサウンドにオートワウを加えたヘヴィーでファンキーなサウンド。ピッキングの強弱で変化するフィルターのかかり具合がポイント。 パッチ設定 OUT IN ← Ba Dist 1 Z Tron ← PAGE 1 Gain 40 Sense 2 Tone 53 Reso 5 Level 82 Drv 62 PAGE 2 Bal 78 Level 68 PAGE 3 パッチメモリーに戻る
https://w.atwiki.jp/sevenlives/pages/2579.html
J2SE1.3? Java
https://w.atwiki.jp/matlab/pages/17.html
ロードマップ APIAPIと層 JavaEEアプリケーションのパッケージングWebアプリケーション EJBアプリケーション エンタープライズアプリケーション 参考 ＜link_pdfプラグインはご利用いただけなくなりました。＞ 2006年5月、JavaEE5の正式仕様が公開される。 今回名前がガラッとかわったけど、これまでのバージョン、例えばJ2EE 1.4では、 ①Java2の2はいつまで2のままなの？ ②1.4の小数点以下がメジャーバージョンを指すのは如何なものか という理由からこの機会にJavaEE5にしようってことのよう。 ロードマップ 年 JavaSE JavaEE 1995 Java誕生 1996 JDK1.0 1997 JDK1.1 1998 JDK1.2 1999 J2EE1.2 2000 JDK1.3 2001 J2EE1.3 2002 JDK1.4 2003 J2EE1.4 2004 JDK5.0 2005 2006 JDK6.0 JavaEE5 2007 2008 JDK7.0 JDK6の年にJavaEE5が出た。１つずれてしまっている。 今日(2008/11/9)時点では、JavaEE6は2009年春予定、JDK7は2009年夏予定。 どこかでJavaEEのバージョンが飛ばされそうな気がする。 そういえば、JDK7をググるとクロージャがたくさんヒットする。 カウンタのサンプルしか見たことがないので、支持される意味がよくわからない。 API 主な機能 機能 J2EE1.3 J2EE1.4 JavaEE5 メモ ServletAPI 2.3 2.4 2.5 (JSR154) マイナーVerUp JSP (JavaServer Pages) 1.2 2.0 2.1 (JSR245) マイナーVerUp。式がUnified ELとなりJSFと統合 JSF (JavaServer Faces) - - 1.2 (JSR252) 式がUnified ELとなりJSPと統合され、仲間入り JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library) - - 1.2 (JSR52) マイナーVerUpし、仲間入り JTA (Java Transaction API) 1.0 1.0 1.0 (JSR907) EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 2.0 2.1 3.0 (JSR220) 根本から見直し JPA (Java Persistence API) - - 1.0 (JSR220) POJOベースO/Rマッピング JMS (Java Message Service) 1.0 1.1 1.1 XML/Webサービス関連機能 機能 J2EE1.3 J2EE1.4 JavaEE5 メモ Web Services - 1.1 1.1 (JSR109) Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform - - 2.0 (JSR181) JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) 1.1 1.2 1.2 JAX-RPC (Java APIs for XML based RPC) - 1.0 1.1 (JSR101) JAX-WSを使え JAX-WS (Java API for XML-Based Web Services) - - 2.0 (JSR224) JAX-RPCのVerUpで名前が変わった（下位互換なし） SAAJ (SOAP with Attachements API for Java - 1.1 1.1 (JSR67) JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) - - 2.0 (JSR222) 重要そう StAX (Streaming API for XML) - - 1.0 (JSR173) JAXBに付随して仲間入り その他 機能 J2EE1.3 J2EE1.4 JavaEE5 メモ JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) 1.0 1.5 1.5 (JCR112) JavaMail 1.2 1.3 1.3 (JSR919) JAF (JavaBeans Activation Framework) 1.0 1.0 1.1 (JCR925) JAXBはもしかしたら面白いのでは？JavaScript(Ajaxとの関連など) JSFはAjaxの動向次第かと。AjaxがExt系に走るのであれば、JavaEEはJax-WSに走るべき。 JSF+Ajaxは、仕様が乱立するので、どこかでJBoss SeemがJavaEE入りするのでは？ Ext系も乱立している。SWT(今もある？)の仕様に合わせてコンポーネントを作るべきじゃないの？ Ext系：クライアントコンポーネントモデル JSF系：サーバコンポーネントモデル APIと層 JavaEEアプリケーションのパッケージング Webアプリケーション WARについて書く。 EJBアプリケーション EJB-JARについて書く。 エンタープライズアプリケーション EARについて書く。 参考 UFJIS株式会社 斉藤賢哉、マスタリングJavaEE5、翔泳社、2007年 @IT http //www.atmarkit.co.jp/fjava/rensai3/jaee5mgrtn01/jaee5mgrtn01_1.html EJB2.x EJB3.0 http //otn.oracle.co.jp/forum/thread.jspa?messageID=35011604
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/15.html
One of the central themes in W. J. Bate’s definitive John Keats is the “large, often paralyzing embarrassment ... that the rich accumulation of past poetry, as the eighteenth century had seen so realistically, can curse as well as bless.” As Mr. Bate remarks, this embarrassment haunted Romantic and haunts post-Romantic poetry, and was felt by Keats with a particular intensity. Somewhere in the heart of each new poet there is hidden the dark wish that the libraries be burned in some new Alexandrian conflagration, that the imagination might be liberated from the greatness and oppressive power of its own dead champions. Something of this must be involved in the Romantics’ loving struggle with their ghostly father, Milton. The role of wrestling Jacob is taken on by Blake in his “brief epic” Milton, by Wordsworth in The Recluse fragment, and in more concealed form by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound and Keats in the first Hyperion. The strength of poetical life in Milton seems always to have appalled as much as it delighted; in the fearful vigor of his unmatched exuberance the English master of the sublime has threatened not only poets, but the values once held to transcend poetry ... the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent, HAROLD BLOOM Introduction 2 Harold Bloom That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song (So Sampson grop’d the Temple’s Posts in spite) The World O’erwhelming to revenge his sight. The older Romantics at least thought that the struggle with Milton had bestowed a blessing without a crippling; to the younger ones a consciousness of gain and loss came together. Blake’s audacity gave him a Milton altogether fitted to his great need, a visionary prototype who could be dramatized as rising up, “unhappy tho’ in heav’n,” taking off the robe of the promise, and ungirding himself from the oath of God, and then descending into Blake’s world to save the later poet and every man “from his Chain of Jealousy.” Wordsworth’s equal audacity allowed him, after praising Milton’s invocatory power, to call on a greater Muse than Urania, to assist him in exploring regions more awful than Milton ever visited. The prophetic Spirit called down in The Recluse is itself a child of Milton’s Spirit that preferred, before all temples, the upright and pure heart of the Protestant poet. But the child is greater than the father, and inspires, in a fine Shakespearean reminiscence The human Soul of universal earth, Dreaming on things to come. Out of that capable dreaming came the poetic aspirations of Shelley and of Keats, who inherited the embarrassment of Wordsworth’s greatness to add to the burden of Milton’s. Yielding to few in my admiration for Shelley’s blank verse in Prometheus, I am still made uneasy by Milton’s ghost hovering in it. At times Shelley’s power of irony rescues him from Milton’s presence by the argument’s dissonance with the steady Miltonic music of the lyrical drama, but the ironies pass and the Miltonic sublime remains, testifying to the unyielding strength of an order Shelley hoped to overturn. In the lyrics of Prometheus Shelley is free, and they rather than the speeches foretold his own poetic future, the sequence of The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion and Adonais. Perhaps the turn to Dante, hinted in Epipsychidion and emergent in The Triumph of Life, was in part caused by the necessity of finding a sublime antithesis to Milton. With Keats, we need not surmise. The poet himself claimed to have abandoned the first Hyperion because it was too Miltonic, and his critics have agreed in not wanting him to have made a poem “that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John Keats.” In the Great Odes and The Fall of Hyperion Keats was to write poems unmistakably his own, as Endymion in another way had been his own. Introduction 3 Individuality of style, and still more of conception, no critic would now deny to the odes, Keats’s supreme poems, or to The Fall of Hyperion, which was his testament, and is the work future poets may use as Tennyson, Arnold and Yeats used the odes in the past. That Keats, in his handful of great poems, surpassed the Miltonhaunted poets of the second half of the eighteenth century is obvious to a critical age like our own, which tends to prefer Keats, in those poems, to even the best work of Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley, and indeed to most if not all poetry in the language since the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps the basis for that preference can be explored afresh through a consideration of precisely how Keats’s freedom of the negative weight of poetic tradition is manifested in some of his central poems. Keats lost and gained, as each of the major Romantics did, in the struggle with the greatness of Milton. Keats was perhaps too generous and perceptive a critic, too wonderfully balanced a humanist, not to have lost some values of a cultural legacy that both stimulated and inhibited the nurture of fresh values. Mr. Bate finely says, commenting on Keats’s dedication sonnet to Leigh Hunt, that “when the imagination looks to any past, of course, including one’s own individual past, it blends memories and images into a denser, more massive unit than ever existed in actuality.” Keats’s confrontation with this idealized past is most direct from the Ode to Psyche on, as Mr. Bate emphasizes. Without repeating him on that ode, or what I myself have written elsewhere, I want to examine it again in the specific context of Keats’s fight against the too-satisfying enrichments with which tradition threatens the poet who seeks his own self-recognition and expressive fulfillment. Most readers recalling the Ode to Psyche think of the last stanza, which is the poem’s glory, and indeed its sole but sufficient claim to stand near the poet’s four principal odes. The stanza expresses a wary confidence that the true poet’s imagination cannot be impoverished. More wonderfully, the poet ends the stanza by opening the hard-won consciousness of his own creative powers to a visitation of love. The paradise within is barely formed, but the poet does not hesitate to make it vulnerable, though he may be condemned in consequence to the fate of the famished knight of his own faery ballad. There is triumph in the closing tone of To Psyche, but a consciousness also I think of the danger that is being courted. The poet has given Psyche the enclosed bower nature no longer affords her, but he does not pause to be content in that poet’s paradise. It is not Byzantium which Keats has built in the heretofore untrodden regions of his mind but rather a realm that is precisely not far above all breathing human passion. He has not assumed the responsibility of an expanded consciousness for the rewards of self4 Harold Bloom communing and solitary musing, in the manner of the poet-hero of Alastor, and of Prince Athanase in his lonely tower. He seeks “love” rather than “wisdom,” distrusting a reality that must be approached apart from men. And he has written his poem, in however light a spirit, as an act of self-dedication and of freedom from the wealth of the past. He will be Psyche’s priest and rhapsode in the proud conviction that she has had no others before him, or none at least so naked of external pieties. The wealth of tradition is great not only in its fused massiveness, but in its own subtleties of internalization. One does poor service by sandbagging this profoundly moving poem, yet even the heroic innovators but tread the shadowy ground their ancestors found before them. Wordsworth had stood on that ground, as Keats well knew, and perhaps had chosen a different opening from it, neither toward love nor toward wisdom, but toward a plain recognition of natural reality and a more sublime recognition-by-starts of a final reality that seemed to contain nature. Wordsworth never quite named that finality as imagination, though Blake had done so and the young Coleridge felt (and resisted) the demonic temptation to do so. Behind all these were the fine collapses of the Age of Sensibility, the raptures of Jubilate Agno and the Ode on the Poetical Character, and the more forced but highly impressive tumults of The Bard and The Progress of Poesy. Farther back was the ancestor of all such moments of poetic incarnation, the Milton of the great invocations, whose spirit I think haunts the Ode to Psyche and the Ode to a Nightingale, and does not vanish until The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn. Hazlitt, with his usual penetration, praises Milton for his power to absorb vast poetic traditions with no embarrassment whatsoever “In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them.” This observation, which comes in a lecture Keats heard, is soon joined by the excellent remark that “Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition.” The same lecture, in its treatment of Shakespeare, influenced Keats’s conception of the Poetical Character, as Mr. Bate notes. Whether Keats speculated sadly on the inimitable power of Milton’s positive capability for converting the splendor of the past into a private expressiveness we do not know. But the literary archetype of Psyche’s rosy sanctuary is the poet’s paradise, strikingly developed by Spenser and Drayton, and brought to a perfection by Milton. I am not suggesting Milton as a “source” for Keats’s Ode to Psyche. Poets influence poets in ways more profound than verbal echoings. The paradise of poets is a recurrent element in English mythopoeic poetry, and it is perhaps part of the critic’s burden never to allow himself to yield to embarrassment when the riches of poetic tradition come crowding in upon him. Poets need to be selective; critics need the humility of a bad conscience when they Introduction 5 exclude any part of the poetic past from “tradition,” though humility is never much in critical fashion. Rimbaud put these matters right in one outburst “On n’a jamais bien jugé le romantisme. Qui l’aurait jugé? Les Critiques!!” Milton, “escap’t the Stygian pool,” hails the light he cannot see, and reaffirms his ceaseless wanderings “where the Muses haunt / clear Spring, or shady Grove,” and his nightly visits to “Sion and the flow’ry Brooks beneath.” Like Keats’s nightingale, he “sings darkling,” but invokes a light that can “shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate.” The light shone inward, the mind’s powers were triumphant, and all the sanctities of heaven yielded to Milton’s vision. For the sanctuary of Milton’s psyche is his vast heterocosm, the worlds he makes and ruins. His shrine is built, not to the human soul in love, but to the human soul glorious in its solitude, sufficient, with God’s aid, to seek and find its own salvation. If Keats had closed the casement, and turned inward, seeking the principle that could sustain his own soul in the darkness, perhaps he could have gone on with the first Hyperion, and become a very different kind of poet. He would then have courted the fate of Collins, and pursued the guiding steps of Milton only to discover the quest was In vain—such bliss to one alone Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heav’n and Fancy, kindred pow’rs, Have now o’erturned th’inspiring bow’rs, Or curtain’d close such scene from ev’ry future view. Yeats, in the eloquent simplicities of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, saw Keats as having “been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement,” and thought therefore that the poet of To Autumn “but gave us his dream of luxury.” Yeats’s poets were Blake and Shelley; Keats and Wordsworth he refused to understand, for their way was not his own. His art, from The Wanderings of Oisin through the Last Poems and Plays, is founded on a rage against growing old, and a rejection of nature. The poet, he thought, could find his art only by giving way to an anti-self, which “comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.” Yeats was repelled by Milton, and found no place for him in A Vision, and certainly no poet cared so little as Milton to express himself through an anti-self. In Blake’s strife of spectre and emanation, in Shelley’s sense of being shadowed by the alastor while seeking the epipsyche, Yeats found precedent for his own quest towards Unity of Being, the poet as daimonic man taking his mask from. a phase opposite to that of his own will. Like Blake and Shelley, Yeats sought certainty, but being of Shelley’s phase rather than 6 Harold Bloom Blake’s, he did not find it. The way of Negative Capability, as an answer to Milton, Yeats did not take into account; he did not conceive of a poet “certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” (There is, of course, no irritable reaching after mere fact and reason in Yeats he reached instead for everything the occult sub-imagination had knocked together in place of fact and reason. But his motive was his incapability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” and the results are more mixed than most recent criticism will admit.) Keats followed Wordsworth by internalizing the quest toward finding a world that answered the poet’s desires, and he hoped to follow Shakespeare by making that world more than a sublime projection of his own ego. Shakespeare’s greatness was not an embarrassment to Keats, but the hard victories of poetry had to be won against the more menacing values of poetic tradition. The advance beyond the Ode to Psyche was taken in the Ode to a Nightingale, where the high world within the bird’s song is an expansion of the rosy sanctuary of Psyche. In this world our sense of actuality is heightened simultaneously with the widening of what Mr. Bate terms “the realm of possibility.” The fear of losing actuality does not encourage the dull soil of mundane experience to quarrel with the proud forests it has fed, the nightingale’s high requiem. But to be the breathing garden in which Fancy breeds his flowers is a delightful fate; to become a sod is to suffer what Belial dreaded in that moving speech Milton himself and the late C. S. Lewis have taught too many to despise. Milton, invoking the light, made himself at one with the nightingale; Keats is deliberate in knowing constantly his own separation from the bird. What is fresh in this ode is not I think a sense of the poet’s dialogue with himself; it is surprising how often the English lyric has provided such an undersong, from Spenser’s Prothalamion to Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence. Keats wins freedom from tradition here by claiming so very little for the imagination in its intoxicating but harsh encounter with the reality of natural song. The poet does not accept what is as good, and he does not exile desire for what is not. Yet, for him, what is possible replaces what is not. There is no earthly paradise for poets, but there is a time of all-but-final satisfaction, the fullness of lines 35 to 58 of this ode. I do not think that there is, before Keats, so individual a setting-forth of such a time, anywhere in poetic tradition since the Bible. The elevation of Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey still trembles at the border of a theophany, and so derives from a universe centered upon religious experience. The vatic gift of Shelley’s self to the elements, from Alastor on, has its remote but genuine ancestors in the sibylline frenzies of traditions as ancient as Orphism. Blake’s moments of delight come as hard-won intervals of rest from an intellectual Introduction 7 warfare that differs little if at all from the struggles towards a revelatory awareness in Ezekiel or Isaiah, and there is no contentment in them. What Keats so greatly gives to the Romantic tradition in the Nightingale ode is what no poet before him had the capability of giving—the sense of the human making choice of a human self, aware of its deathly nature, and yet having the will to celebrate the imaginative richness of mortality. The Ode to a Nightingale is the first poem to know and declare, wholeheartedly, that death is the mother of beauty. The Ode to Psyche still glanced, with high good humor, at the haunted rituals of the already-written poems of heaven; the Ode to a Nightingale turns, almost casually, to the unwritten great poem of earth. There is nothing casual about the poem’s tone, but there is a wonderful lack of self-consciousness at the poem’s freedom from the past, in the poem’s knowing that death, our death, is absolute and without memorial. The same freedom from the massive beliefs and poetic stances of the past is manifested in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, where the consolations of the spirit are afforded merely by an artifice of eternity, and not by evidences of an order of reality wholly other than our own. Part of this poem’s strength is in the deliberate vulnerability of its speaker, who contemplates a world of values he cannot appropriate for his own, although nothing in that world is antithetical to his own nature as an aspiring poet. Mr. Bate states the poem’s awareness of this vulnerability “In attempting to approach the urn in its own terms, the imagination has been led at the same time to separate itself—or the situation of man generally—still further from the urn.” One is not certain that the imagination is not also separating itself from the essential poverty of man’s situation in the poem’s closing lines. Mr. Bate thinks we underestimate Keats’s humor in the Great Odes, and he is probably right, but the humor that apparently ends the Grecian Urn is a grim one. The truth of art may be all of the truth our condition can apprehend, but it is not a saving truth. If this is all we need to know, it may be that no knowledge can help us. Shelley was very much a child of Miltonic tradition in affirming the moral instrumentality of the imagination; Keats is grimly free of tradition in his subtle implication of a truth that most of us learn. Poetry is not a means of good; it is, as Wallace Stevens implied, like the honey of earth that comes and goes at once, while we wait vainly for the honey of heaven. Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley knew in their different ways that human splendors had no sources but in the human imagination, but each of these great innovators had a religious temperament, however heterodox, and Keats had not. Keats had a clarity in his knowledge of the uniqueness and finality of human life and death that caused him a particular anguish on his own death-bed, but gave him, before that, the imagination’s gift of an absolute originality. The power of Keats’s imagination could never be 8 Harold Bloom identified by him with an apocalyptic energy that might hope to transform nature. It is not that he lacked the confidence of Blake and of Shelley, or of the momentary Wordsworth of The Recluse. He felt the imagination’s desire for a revelation that would redeem the inadequacies of our condition, but he felt also a humorous skepticism toward such desire. He would have read the prose testament of Wallace Stevens, Two Or Three Ideas, with the wry approval so splendid a lecture deserves. The gods are dispelled in mid-air, and leave “no texts either of the soil or of the soul.” The poet does not cry out for their return, since it remains his work to resolve life in his own terms, for in the poet is “the increasingly human self.” Part of Keats’s achievement is due then to his being perhaps the only genuine forerunner of the representative post-Romantic sensibility. Another part is centered in the Ode on Melancholy and The Fall of Hyperion, for in these poems consciousness becomes its own purgatory, and the poet learns the cost of living in an excitement of which he affirms “that it is the only state for the best sort of Poetry—that is all I care for, all I live for.” From this declaration it is a direct way to the generally misunderstood rigor of Pater, when he insists that “a counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,” and asks “How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?” Moneta, Keats’s veiled Melancholy, counted those pulses, while the poet waited, rapt in an apprehension attainable only by the finest senses, nearly betrayed by those senses to an even more premature doom than his destined one. What links together The Fall of Hyperion and its modern descendants like Stevens’s Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is the movement of impressions set forth by Pater, when analysis of the self yields to the poet’s recognition of how dangerously fine the sells existence has become. “It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” Though there is a proud laughter implicit in the Ode on Melancholy, the poem courts tragedy, and again makes death the mother of beauty. Modern criticism has confounded Pater with his weaker disciples, and has failed to realize how truly Yeats and Stevens are in his tradition. The Ode on Melancholy is ancestor to what is strongest in Pater, and to what came after in his tradition of aesthetic humanism. Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance lives in the world of the Ode on Melancholy Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Introduction 9 Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. The wakeful anguish of the soul comes to the courter of grief in the very shrine of pleasure, and the renovating powers of art yield the tragedy of their might only to a strenuous and joyful seeker. Keats’s problem in The Fall of Hyperion was to find again the confidence of Milton as to the oneness of his self and them, but with nothing of the Miltonic conviction that God had worked to fit that self and theme together. The shrines of pleasure and of melancholy become one shrine in the second Hyperion, and in that ruin the poet must meet the imaginative values of tradition without their attendant credences, for Moneta guards the temple of all the dead faiths. Moneta humanizes her sayings to our ears, but not until a poet’s courteous dialectic has driven her to question her own categories for mankind. When she softens, and parts the veils for Keats, she reveals his freedom from the greatness of poetic tradition, for the vision granted has the quality of a new universe, and a tragedy different in kind from the tragedy of the past Then saw I a wan face, Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had pass’d The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away. They held me back with a benignant light, Soft mitigated by divinest lids Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’d Of all external things— Frank Kermode finds this passage a prime instance of his “Romantic Image,” and believes Moneta’s face to be “alive only in a chill and inhuman way,” yet Keats is held back from such a judgment by the eyes of his Titaness, for they give forth “a benignant light,” as close to the saving light Milton invokes as Keats can ever get. Moneta has little to do with the Yeatsian concept of the poetic vision, for she does not address herself to the alienation of the poet. M. H. Abrams, criticizing Mr. Kermode, points to her emphasis on the poet as humanist, made restless by the miseries of mankind. Shelley’s 10 Harold Bloom Witch of Atlas, for all her playfulness, has more to do with Yeats’s formulation of the coldness of the Muse. Moneta is the Muse of mythopoeia, like Shelley’s Witch, but she contains the poetic and religious past, as Shelley’s capricious Witch does not. Taking her in a limited sense (since she incarnates so much more than this), Moneta does represent the embarrassments of poetic tradition, a greatness it is death to approach. Moneta’s perspective is close to that of the Rilkean Angel, and for Keats to share that perspective he would have to cease to depend on the visible. Moneta’s is a perfect consciousness; Keats is committed still to the oxymoronic intensities of experience, and cannot unperplex joy from pain. Moneta’s is a world beyond tragedy; Keats needs to be a tragic poet. Rilke dedicated himself to the task of describing a world regarded no longer from a human point of view, but as it is within the angel. Moneta, like this angel, does not regard external things, and again like Rilke’s angel she both comforts and terrifies. Keats, like Stevens, fears the angelic imposition of any order upon reality, and hopes to discover a possible order in the human and the natural, even if that order be only the cyclic rhythm of tragedy. Stevens’s definitive discovery is in the final sections of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction; Keats’s similar fulfillment is in his perfect poem, To Autumn. The achievement of definitive vision in To Autumn is more remarkable for the faint presence of the shadows of the poet’s hell that the poem tries to exclude. Mr. Bate calls the Lines to Fanny (written, like To Autumn, in October 1819) “somewhat jumbled as well as tired and flat,” but its nightmare projection of the imagination’s inferno has a singular intensity, and I think considerable importance Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wrecked and live a wrecked life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods; Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag’d meads Make lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds; There flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong. Introduction 11 This may have begun as a fanciful depiction of an unknown America, where Keats’s brother and sister-in-law were suffering, yet it develops into a vision akin to Blake’s of the world of experience, with its lakes of menace and its forests of error. The moss-lain Dryads lulled to sleep in the forests of the poet’s mind in his Ode to Psyche, can find no home in this natural world. This is Keats’s version of the winter vision, the more powerful for being so unexpected, and clearly a torment to its seer, who imputes error to Nature even as he pays it his sincere and accustomed homage. It is this waste land that the auroras of Keats’s To Autumn transform into a landscape of perfection process. Does another lyric in the language meditate more humanly “the full of fortune and the full of fate”? The question is the attentive reader’s necessary and generous tribute; the critical answer may be allowed to rest with Mr. Bate, who is moved to make the finest of claims for the poem “Here at last is something of a genuine paradise.” The paradise of poets bequeathed to Keats by tradition is gone; a tragic paradise of naturalistic completion and mortal acceptance has taken its place. There are other Romantic freedoms won from the embarrassments of poetic tradition, usually through the creation of new myth, as in Blake and Shelley, or in the thematic struggle not to create a myth, as in the earlier work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Keats found his dangerous freedom by pursuing the naturalistic implications of the poet’s relation to his own poem, and nothing is more refreshing in an art so haunted by aspirations to surpass or negate nature. Shelley, still joined to Keats in the popular though not the critical consciousness, remains the best poet to read in counterpoint to the Great Odes and The Fall of Hyperion. There is no acceptance in Shelley, no tolerance for the limits of reality, but only the outrageous desire never to cease desiring, the unflagging intensity that goes on until it is stopped, and never is stopped. Keats did what Milton might have done but was not concerned to do; he perfected an image in which stasis and process are reconciled, and made of autumn the most human of seasons in consequence. Shelley’s ode to autumn is his paean to the West Wind, where a selfdestroying swiftness is invoked for the sake of dissolving all stasis permanently, and for hastening process past merely natural fulfillment into apocalyptic renewal. Whether the great winter of the world can be relieved by any ode Keats tended to doubt, and we are right to doubt with him, but there is a hope wholly natural in us that no doubt dispels, and it is of this hope that Shelley is the unique and indispensable poet. 13 The total shape of the Ode on Indolence is, as I have said, a dialectical one of advance and refusal, advance and refusal, advance and refusal—the shape of a stalemate. At the moment represented by the ode, both the reverie of gestating vision and the regressive choice of preconscious insensibility are being jealously protected from the claims of the heart, of fame, and even of art itself. To think of constructing anything at all—a love affair, a place in the world of ambition, a poem—threatens the slumbering embryonic self. Keats finally remains obdurate, the dreamer of the dim dream, the viewer of the faint vision. But the strain evident in the disparate and parallel languages of Indolence, as well as in the inherent instability of the condition of spiritual stalemate, predicts a tipping of the balance as we know, it tips away from immobility toward love and art.1 The odes that follow Indolence investigate creativity by taking up various attitudes toward the senses, almost as though the odes were invented as a series of controlled experiments in the suppression or permission of sense-experience. Keats’s deliberate interest in sense-response has usually been cited as proof of his love of luxury or his minute apprehension of sensual fluctuation. It has not been generally realized that Keats’s search for “intensity” led him as much to a deliberate limiting of sense-variety as to a broadening of sensation, and led him as well to a search for an “intensity” of HELEN VENDLER Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Psyche From The Odes of John Keats. © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 14 Helen Vendler intellect that would rival the intensity of sense. In fact, the intensity to be found in the mind attracted Keats at least as much as, if not more than, the apparently easier intensity of sense; and the lapse of intensity following sexual climax seems to have been only an instance, for Keats, of a curious failure intrinsic to physical sensation itself. He described this eventual ennui of the senses at length in Fancy, contrasting it there with the associative powers of mental Fancy, which is able to assemble hybrid seasons and hybrid mistresses that combine all beauties and can never fade. Imaginative intellectual ecstasy seemed to Keats, at this point (Fancy was composed a few months before the odes), a more promising source of sustained intensity than physical sensation, and the second of the odes, the Ode to Psyche, is in this respect the most “puritanical” of the group in its intent (if not in its effect). It aims, whatever its sensual metaphors (and these will demand their own recognition later), at a complete, exclusive, and lasting annihilation of the senses in favor of the brain. The locus of reality in the ode passes from the world of myth to the world of mind, and the firm four-part structure emphasizes the wish to reproduce earlier sensual and cultic reality in a later interiorized form. The implicit boast of Psyche is that the “working brain” can produce a flawless virtual object, indistinguishable from the “real” object in the mythological or historical world. “O for a life of Thoughts,” says this ode, “instead of Sensations!” In Psyche Keats emerges from the chrysalis of indolence, permits his soul to become a winged spirit, and takes the smallest possible step toward the construction of a work of art. He concedes that he will shape his reverie toward some end (that reverie which had remained floating and inchoate in Indolence), but decides that it will prescind from the bodily senses, and will remain an internal making, as in Fancy, contained entirely within his own mind. The shape of the Ode to Psyche is, in its essence, the shape of that initial constructive act, and so is a very simple one. It is a reduplication-shape; we might compare it to the shape made by a Rorschach blot. Everything that appears on the left must reappear, in mirror image, on the right; or, in terms of the aesthetic of the ode, whatever has existed in “life” must be, and can be, restored in art. The notion of art which underlies Keats’s continual use of the trope of reduplication in the ode is a strictly mimetic one. The internal world of the artist’s brain can attain by the agency of Fancy—so the trope implies—a point-for-point correspondence with the external worlds of history, mythology, and the senses. The task of the poet is defined in excessively simple terms he is, in this instance, first to sketch the full presence of Psyche and her cult as they existed in the pagan past—that is, to show the locus of loss—and then to create by his art a new ritual and a new environment for Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 15 the restored divinity.2 Of course Psyche is incomplete without her other half, the god Cupid. Dissatisfied with the thinness of his allegorical and emblematic urn-figures in Indolence, and economically reducing his figures from three to two, Keats writes a hymn to the goddess traditionally representing the soul, but the soul under one aspect—the soul in love.3 Each of the subsequent odes worships a single divinity; each, like Psyche, is female; after Psyche, all are unpartnered. In the view of the Ode to Psyche, a pursuit of the most minute verisimilitude becomes the task of art, since divinity will not grace art with her presence if she lacks an exact interior re-creation of her former sensual and cultic world. In the fiction of this ode, art does not objectify the natural world in an external medium such as music or sculpture or even language. In the ode, Keats’s art is the insubstantial one of Fancy, the inner activity of the working brain, not even, as yet, the art of poetry embodied in words. The art in Psyche is the pre-art of purposeful, constructive, and scenic or architectural imaginings, not the art of writing; and the entire locus of this art is a mental domain, within the artist’s brain, where Fancy, engaging in a perpetual rivalry with nature, remains forever in a competitive (but apparently victorious) relation to an external world. In brief, in the Ode to Psyche Keats defines art as the purposeful imaginative and conceptualizing activity of the artist—entirely internal, fertile, competitive with nature, and successful insofar as it mimics nature, myth, and history with a painstaking spiritual verisimilitude. It is art without artifact. The artist is both worshiper of a divinity and its possessor the possession is envisaged here in mental, if erotic, terms, terms of invitation and entreaty rather than of domination or mastery. The shape of the poem pairs the opening tableau of the mythological Cupid and Psyche embowered in the forest with the closing envisaged tableau of the unpartnered Psyche awaiting Cupid in the bower of the artist’s brain; and, in the center, it juxtaposes the absent historical cult of Psyche with her imagined mental cult. I believe that the later odes demonstrate how unsatisfactory, on further reflection, Keats found this reduplicative mirrorimage conception of art—art as a wholly internalized, mimetic, imaginative activity. The ode declares, by its words and by its shape, that the creation of art requires the complete replacement of all memory and sense-experience by an entire duplication of the external world within the artist’s brain (a process we have seen, in its undirected and simply pastoral sense, in Indolence, where the soul, had itself become a lawn of flowers, complete with weather, light, and shade). Psyche asserts that by the constructive activity of the mind we can assert a victory, complete and permanent, over loss 4 16 Helen Vendler And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! The reparatory plot of the poem—the restoration of the proper cult and bower of Psyche—necessitates its mirror-shape, in which the second imaginative half of the poem reduplicates the first nostalgic portion, the replication in diction being most exact at the center of the poem. Psyche, because a late-born goddess, has, says Keats, no virgin choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. Keats will heal, one by one, with exact restitution, each of these lacks So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest. This nearly exact repetition (within a relatively short poem) of identical words, the earlier ones describing precise lacks, the later precise reparations, is adapted from Wordsworth’s reparatory technique of repetition in his Ode Intimations of Immortality.5 This strategy, unobtrusive in Wordsworth, is here verbally insisted on by Keats, so that the curative and restorative intent of this structure cannot be overlooked. At “So let me be thy choir,” the Ode to Psyche folds over upon itself and by repetition of diction intends to heal its wounds of loss. What is the wound that is being healed? It is, in Keats’s view, a wound to poetry itself, inflicted by Christianity. Because Christianity banished the pagan divinities, good and bad alike, the body of poetry inherited from the ancient world was, by Christian poets, mutilated. It was in Milton’s Nativity Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 17 Ode that Keats found the amplest description of the banishing of the pagan gods, and he borrows his vocabulary for Psyche from Milton’s equivocal and beautiful account of the effect of the nativity of Jesus on pagan religions. I quote Milton’s ode, italicizing Keats’s borrowings for Psyche The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs thro’ the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The lonely mountains o’er And the resounding shore; A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edg’d with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent; With flow’r-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. In consecrated earth, And on the holy hearth, The Lars, and lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns, and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint ... Peor and Baälim Forsake their temples dim; ... And mooned Ashtaroth, Heav’n’s queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine. All of Keats’s Miltonic words in Psyche are drawn from Milton’s banishing of the gentler and more civilized pagan divinities; none is drawn from Milton’s subsequent stanzas on the defeat of the more “brutish” gods.6 It is not to Keats’s purpose here to suggest the darker side of the pagan pantheon. For 18 Helen Vendler him, the classical world (even in its latest manifestation, Psyche) represented a repository of truth-giving mythology, and not, as it did for Milton, “error” or “fable.” Therefore Keats’s description of Psyche echoes the superlatives of Spenser’s Hymn to Heavenly Beauty These thus in faire each other farre excelling, As to the Highest they approach more near, Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling, Fairer than all the rest which there appear. Psyche, says Keats (recalling as well Shakespeare’s glow-worm), is the latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these. Keats’s ode, then, is a hymn to pagan heavenly beauty which, in despite of Milton’s ritual banishing, he will restore to sovereignty and will duly worship, thereby replenishing an impoverished poetic world where, imagination lacks proper deities to worship.7 The goddess who has captured his veneration is Psyche, the soul in love, and the problem the poet sets himself is to find a spell powerful enough to conjure Psyche back into existence. In one sense, of course, Psyche exists eternally, forever entwined with Cupid, in the realm of mythic forms.8 Keats must find a liturgical language suitable for her eternal mythical being, and then a language seductive enough to woo her into an allegorical being, within his mind. Everyone has noticed the revelatory change in language which takes place in the poem the first two stanzas are written, as one critic put it, in “early Keats,” while the last stanza exhibits in part the language of “late Keats.”9 In this ode, the early language of erotic experience disputes the later language of aesthetic experience, as Psyche is embowered first with her lover Cupid in the forest of myth, but lastly with her poet-priest in his internalized shrine. Cupid and Psyche, though drawn, as Keats said in his letter sending the poem to his brother, from Apuleius, are described in terms Keats had gleaned from Lemprière. Keats’s decision to take up this material at this time, material which he had long known, is explained in part by his evolving notion of the world as a vale of soul-making, unfolded in the same letter as the poem. But Cupid and Psyche remind us too of Love and Poesy in the Ode on Indolence, Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 19 though they have exchanged sexes, with Love now a masculine Cupid, Poesy a Muse called Psyche. Ambition (which vanishes entirely from the later odes) is here still present in the vow, with something of a boast in it “Yes, I will be thy priest.” The motives of Love, Poesy, and Ambition are still intertwined, but Keats has decided to modify allegory as, a way of exemplifying them, and has turned to mythology instead—not entirely seriously, as he had in Endymion, but in a more playful and self-conscious way “I am more orthodox than to let a hethen Goddess be so neglected” (Letters, II, 106). Keats’s perplexity on the subject of mythology arose from his severe notion of what it was to tell the truth. Though he had (as I stood tip-toe reveals) adopted Wordsworth’s theory in The Excursion about the allegorical source of mythology—that it originated from an attempt to adorn natural sights with the charm of story (a narcissus drooping over a pool, the moon alone in the sky)—Keats had expressed, as early as Sleep and Poetry, a suspicion that the proper subject of poetry was not only “the realm ... / Of Flora, and old Pan” (101–102; that is, the realm of allegorized natural beauty like that of the narcissus or the moon), but also human life. In the realm of Flora he could read allegorically “a lovely tale of human life” (110), but he would have to bid those joys farewell, in leaving them for “a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts” (123–125). It is not clear to Keats whether he can write about those agonies in mythological terms at all. One of his reproaches of the Augustan poets seems to be their neglect of nature and mythology at once; and yet, when in Sleep and Poetry he begins to enumerate his own possible subjects, he does not come to mythology until he enters, in memory, the house of Leigh Hunt, and recalls looking with him at a portfolio including a picture of Bacchus and Ariadne. After that, there follows a confusion of subjects—nature, mythology, past poets, ancient heroes, and modern revolutionaries, not excepting the allegorical figure of “Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet.” In turning in a “modern” and “worldly” way to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, a topic already the subject for sophisticated, even decadent, interpretation, both in literature and in the fine arts, Keats hoped, we may surmise, to enjoy the benefits of mythology without seeming to engage in a false archaism. His struggle with mythological material was not, as we shall see in the subsequent odes, to be so easily resolved, if only because he connected it so strongly with the pictorial and sensuous representational arts, rather than with thought and truth. Keats’s first sophisticating of mythology is evident in his assumption that it exists not so much in the pagan past as in an eternal region where, by purifying himself of skeptical modernity of thought (the dull brain that perplexes and retards), he may once again find himself. There is a formal 20 Helen Vendler liturgical beginning to this ode (to which I shall return), but its beginning in narrative time retells Keats’s penetration to that eternal region, as, by wandering “thoughtlessly” in a pastoral realm, he comes as spectator upon two winged creatures Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love. We recognize this couple—this “happy, happy dove” and her “winged boy”—as sentimental adumbrations of the youth and maiden on the Grecian urn, warm in their “more happy love! more happy, happy love!” shaded by their happy, happy boughs which cannot “ever bid the spring adieu.” However, by the time Keats writes the Urn, though he is still using the Psyche language of double happiness and no need to bid adieu, he has recognized that the blissful stasis can only precede consummation, not, as in the more innocent Psyche, outlast it. (By “recognize” of course, I mean, “realize in language and structure”—there was no time in which Keats did not recognize these plain truths in life.) To present erotic desire unlessened by recent consummation, as Keats does here in the figures of Cupid and Psyche, is to imagine an eroticism without any share in the human cycle of desire and satiation. (Mythology thus becomes here the world of heart’s desire, which puts into question its capacity as a literary vehicle for the agonies of human hearts.) The symbolic landscape in which Cupid and Psyche lie avoids the passionate and unequilibrated; the flowers are hushed, their roots are cool, they are even cool-colored “blue, silver-white, and budded syrian” (corrected from the blushing eroticism of “freckle-pink”)—though no one knows what Keats intended “syrian” to convey. (His publishers changed it to “Tyrian.”) The lovers themselves lie calm-breathing. In short, the divine couple are the pure idealization of an eternal erotic desire for unsated and recurrent sexual experience with the same partner.10 In this fantasy, love and beauty are served, but truth of human experience is not. The poet-spectator, having had a vision of the eternal Psyche, decides, against Milton’s proscription of pagan gods, to restore her cult, and to that end addresses her liturgically with the words which formally open the ode. He hails her in terms deliberately borrowed from Lycidas (as indeed the flower-catalogue of Psyche’s forest bower is also partially so borrowed) just as “bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear” compel the uncouth swain, so Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 21 Keats’s “tuneless numbers” are wrung by “sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,” in piety and pity for the banished goddess. Keats’s numbers must be “tuneless” (that is, silent, offering no audible tones) because the audible lyre of the ancients has fallen into disuse, but also because his own song will be only a silent inward one, an unheard melody. Keats’s only audience, in the internal theater of his working brain, is Psyche herself, the soul, bereft of all other devotees. Keats’s pious memory of her existence, and his sense of obligation in re-creating, however late, her cult, explain his “remembrance dear” and “sweet enforcement” to this piety. Yet the echo of Lycidas also tells us that this poem is, like its Miltonic predecessor, an elegy for a vanished presence. The restoration of the forgotten Psyche is the real subject of the poet’s endeavor, and two forms of re-creation are attempted in the ode. In the first, which opens the ode, the beloved divinity is represented as existing eternally in a world accessible by dream or vision when the conscious mind is suppressed, a world exterior to the poetic self. Had she been only within, the poet’s vision of her could with propriety only be called a dream; but if she were without, he could genuinely affirm that he had seen her with awakened eyes. (Once again, I interrupt to say that I do not mean that Keats, in life, is uncertain whether or not he had had a dream or seen a vision. The diction of dream and waking is for Keats a way of making truth-claims; when he wishes to insist that poetry has something to offer us which is more than fanciful entertainment, he turns, as in his description of Adam’s dream, to the metaphor of awakening and finding it truth.) The early rhetorical question in this ode—“Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?”—is clearly, as I will conclude later, meant to be answered, “With awakened eyes.” This, then, is the first restoration, a pastoral, “thoughtless” waking vision; the second is the restoration by consciously inward architectural reduplication, where Psyche will lie not in the forest grass but in the shrine of the working brain. The first restoration requires of the poet a mythological doubling of the self as a visible Cupid; in the second, the poet in his own person becomes the allegorical Love. In the drama of these parallel experiments—the poet in the first so passive, a thoughtless, wandering spectator, in the other so active, a creator with a working brain— lies the interest of the ode, and the proof of its evolution out of Indolence. The meaning of divinity changes in the two restorations in the first, divinity is conceived of as an idealized presence revealed in a past vision; in the second, divinity is conceived of as a presence which the poet must actively invoke, and create a repository for; and the intent of the poem in its latter part is consequently couched in the future tense of hope and will. The earlier part sees revelation as casual and easy 22 Helen Vendler So did he feel, who pull’d the boughs aside, That we might look into a forest wide, To catch a glimpse of Fauns and Dryades. That had been Keats’s earlier description, in I stood tip-toe (151–153), of the poet’s activity, in his writing motivated by “the fair paradise of Nature’s light” (126). Such a poet, Keats continues, would have been the one who wrote the tale of Cupid and Psyche, writing of them as if they were fauns and dryads, inhabitants of an unallegorized natural paradise, their tale one of charming adventure, happily ended (147–150) The silver lamp,—the ravishment,—the wonder— The darkness,—loneliness,—the fearful thunder; Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne. But this facile parting of forest boughs to show us a tale of love lost and won is no longer Keats’s idea of art, nor of the use to which it can put mythology. Poetry is no longer entertaining tale-telling, or even seeing; it is active doing, the poet’s human work, here seen, however, as a private task rather than as a service to society. The Ode to Psyche intends a wresting away of Psyche from the past, and a seduction of her into the present. Though Keats’s first tones to the goddess are those of elegiac religious observance (“O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers”), he ends with wooing And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! Though Psyche is originally said to lack a cult and prayers, what she is offered in the last stanza is a landscape and a chamber for love, all in the theater of the mind (which will become eventually Moneta’s hollow skull). The elements of erotic bower and sacred temple, which will fatefully lose their unison in The Fall of Hyperion, are still peacefully conjoined in the Ode to Psyche. The poet promises a “rosy sanctuary” (an erotic version of the Urn’s “green altar”), dressed “with the wreathed trellis of a working brain, / With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,” in a landscape where “the moss-lain Dryads” sleep there Psyche will find a fane that will be a bower for her and Cupid. These materials—wreath, trellis, bells, and moss in an Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 23 architectural setting—are also found (as Bloom early noted, in The Visionary Company, p. 394) in the beautiful “arbour” with its roof and doorway, placed near the opening of The Fall of Hyperion (25–29) I saw an arbour with a drooping roof Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms Like floral-censers swinging light in air; Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits. But on closer view the feast is seen to be over, and the arbor is littered with empty shells and half-bare grape stalks. When the poet consumes some of the remaining feast and drinks a draught of “transparent juice, / Sipp’d by the wander’d bee” (the nectar, we may suppose, of the gods), he sinks into a swoon, mastered by “the domineering potion.” When he awakes, he finds the landscape changed (60–62) The mossy mound and arbour were no more; I look’d around upon the carved sides Of an old sanctuary with roof august. In this fairy-tale substitution, the “drooping roof” of the trellised arbor has become the “roof august” of a sanctuary no longer rosy, like that of Psyche, but carved, as the later Keats fully accepts the separation of nature and art. Keats’s symbols in the epic imply his grand theme that while the first, youthful, perception of the world is erotic, the second, adult, one is sacrificial. As he wrote to Reynolds after completing, so far as we can judge, all the odes but Autumn, “I have of late been moulting not for fresh feathers wings they are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs” (Letters, II, 128). In Indolence, Keats had ached, within his chrysalis, for wings; in Psyche, both Cupid and Psyche are winged creatures though not yet shown in flight; in Nightingale, Keats at last wills to fly, if not on actual wings, then on the viewless wings of Poesy. The erotic dream died only with difficulty; in Psyche Keats is still in the realm of wings and arbors, not steps and sanctuaries. But though in Psyche bower and sanctuary are still one, a strain is evident in the fabric of writing. The ode attains its greatest writing not in its description of the rosy sanctuary-bower at the close, but in the slightly earlier description of the landscape surrounding that fane, the landscape of the as yet untrodden region of the mind that lies beyond the Chamber of Maiden Thought. Keats had been in what he called “the infant or 24 Helen Vendler thoughtless Chamber” when the ode began, as he wandered in the forest “thoughtlessly.” When the working brain enters, he is no longer thoughtless we are, he says, “at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle—within us” into the second Chamber, that of Maiden Thought, and it is there that the working brain operates, as it does through most of Psyche, “intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, seeing nothing but pleasant wonders.” That realm is still pastoral, but beyond it lie the “precipices” which show “untrodden green,” as Keats had said in his sonnet to Homer (Bate mentions the analogy in John Keats, p. 493) those steeps and cliffs are not barren, but green with a new, if more alpine, verdure. As one breathes in the atmosphere of the Chamber of Maiden Thought, Keats adds, in the famous letter I have been quoting (Letters, I, 280–281), that “among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages.” Keats had written this passage a year before writing the Ode to Psyche, and we sense a positive effort, at the close of the ode, to stave off the encroaching dark passages Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep. So the passage begins, opening into untrodden heights, and acceding to both the pain and the pleasure of thought as work which Indolence, refusing pain’s sting and pleasure’s wreath alike, had forbidden. But, as we recall, the rosy sanctuary finally seems to lie within a cultivated garden, “with buds, and bells, and stars without a name, / With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign.” It is not, however, the “gardener” Fancy who created the wild-ridged mountains and the dark-clustered trees they are the creations rather of unconfined imagination, and they represent the sublime, as the garden represents the beautiful. Many parallels in sublimity have been cited for these lines, parallels from Milton and Shakespeare especially, but their effect in the poem—given their Miltonic origins in the setting of Paradise (Paradise Lost, IV) and in the mountains and steep of the Nativity Ode—resembles the effect in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode of corresponding lines Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 25 The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; I hear the echoes from the mountains throng; The winds come to me from the fields of sleep. The winds, the mountains, and the steep form a characteristic Wordsworthian configuration of the sublime. The new dark-clustered thoughts this region will require will, Keats knows, give him pain, even though a pain which, because it calls up new creations, is compounded with pleasure. The new domain seems limitless “Far, far around shall those darkclustered trees / Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.” The farreaching and arduous sublimity of soul here envisaged is not maintained; the poem returns to the delicate, the beautiful, and the sensuous. It is hardly accidental that Keats should appropriate to himself, in a poem about two winged creatures, new pinions of his own by using the word “fledge” of his mountain-thoughts;11 but the pinions, and the hope of steeps and mountains, show that Keats’s notion of the pursuit of sublimity here flies on eagle wings. The patient sublunary legs are still to come. The earthly paradise described in the last stanza of the ode is entirely nonseasonal, nonagricultural, and nonbucolic (there are no crops, no flocks); it is a paradise within the working brain. Keats uses the paradisal index—the “there” or là-bas or dahin of that “other country”—but he has abandoned the dream of a passively received revelatory vision with which he began. The chance sight of Cupid and Psyche is not one simply recoverable by a glimpse through forest boughs. Yet his new, allegorical, later paradise reduplicates the earlier, mythological one. There are, in the interior world, sleeping Dryads lain on moss, just as the sleeping Cupid and Psyche had been couched in grass; there are dark-clustered trees where there had been a forest; there is a murmur of pines where there had been a whispering roof of leaves, streams where there had been a brooklet, stars to replace Phoebe’s sapphire-regioned star, mental flowers where there had been mythological ones, soft delight where there had been soft-handed slumber, wide quietness where there had been calm breathing, a bright torch to substitute for the aurorean light, and a “warm Love” in place of the winged boy. In all of these ways, the internalized closing scene of the poem is a copy, in its imagery, of the opening forest scene, just as the second of the two central Miltonic stanzas of the ode is a copy, in its catalogue of reparation, of the first, with its catalogue of loss. The imperative of reduplication is as clear in the matching of bowers as in the matching of cultic pieties. However, what is missing in the tableau of the last stanza is of course crucial we miss the figural center of the opening tableau, the “two fair creatures” embracing. “Let me prepare toward thee,” Keats might be saying at the end of the poem, as he lavishes all 26 Helen Vendler his profusion of imagery on the prospective interior world to be inhabited by Psyche. But she is not yet visible there, nor is Cupid the close of the poem is an entreaty and a promise, as Keats writes the archetypal poem of an absent center. If the Ode to Psyche were simply a restitution of what Milton’s Nativity Ode had extirpated from English poetry, it would end with its restitutive fourth stanza of restored cultic practice. Milton’s ode is far grander, in poetic success, than Keats’s; but even in this novice effort Keats sees that what is life to Milton is death to him. It is not enough to restore Psyche’s cult with a twin stanza written in Milton’s religious vocabulary; Keats must reinvent Psyche’s cult in his own language, the vocabulary of the luxuriant eroticism of his initial vision.12 Milton’s pagan deities, as they are seen in the Nativity Ode, are in no way erotic even those who might have been are not so presented— Ashtaroth sits alone as heaven’s queen and mother, and Thammuz is dead. Psyche’s restoration, for Keats, must be not only the restoration of her cultvoice, lute, pipe, incense, shrine, grove, oracle, and prophet—but also the restoration of her atmosphere and presence. Milton’s austere language permits itself nostalgia but no more; Keats, as Psyche’s worshiper, requires the radiance of present conjuration. The radiant eroticizing of the interior landscape of the mind, as it is decked and adorned and decorated, is Keats’s chief intent, as he makes himself a mind seductive to Psyche. When Psyche will have been won, and Love will have entered, the initial tableau will have been reproduced entire—but this last tableau will be a wholly mental one, in which the mind has been furnished by Fancy for the amorous soul, and Love is a welcome guest. Keats’s characteristic erotic adjectives—soft, bright, warm, rosy—together with the activity of Fancy, his presiding genius loci, engaged in perpetual breeding of flowers, transform the mind from a place conventionally reserved for philosophical thought to a place where all possible thoughts and fancies (conceived after the manner of the poem Fancy) are eroticized by the goddess’s imagined arrival. Worship, work, and embrace will be one in the mind-garden, in which the more literal Miltonic cult of swinging censers and moaning choir gives way to a new cult of tuneless numbers, in which Psyche’s priest becomes himself her lyricist, her bower, and her Cupid. Nonetheless, in spite of this amorous and sensual redefinition of religion and of the functions of the creative mind, the deepest energies of the Ode to Psyche lie in two nonamorous places—in the sublime, uncultivated periphery, lying outside the bower, of new-grown thoughts, and in the bold claim not for amorousness but for independent divining power, outstripping the soft dimness of dreaming “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.”13 These high and solitary sublimities—almost sequestered in this poem of Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 27 amorous contact and decorative luxuriance—predict the more solitary Keats of Urn, Autumn, and The Fall of Hyperion. And it must be remembered that the cost of the bower in Psyche is the total yielding up of the temporally bound senses for a wholly spiritual world, the consequent singing of numbers that must be tuneless (since they are embodied in no outward melody), and the absence of all audience for this song, except one’s own soul. These sacrifices of sense for mind, of melody for tunelessness, and of audience for a putative, though scarcely realized, solipsism, coexist uneasily with Keats’s sensually opulent style in the ode, a nonascetic style developed for the happier embraces, both spiritual and physical, of Endymion. The tension between the amorous mythological style and the desolate sacrificial implications of Psyche will not be solved conceptually until Keats writes the Ode on Melancholy, and not solved stylistically until he writes the ode To Autumn. But in the internalizing of divinity, Keats has already advanced, conceptually, beyond Endymion’s awkward doubling of the Indian Maid and Cynthia and beyond Indolence’s three self-projections. The wholly internalized Psyche—one’s own soul as interior paramour, as Stevens would call it—is one solution (but by no means a finally satisfactory one for Keats) to the question of the proper representation of divinity in art; and the internalized atemporal and nonagricultural bower is a solution (but again, for Keats, not an eventually satisfying one) to the problem of the modern representation of the locus amoenus, or beautiful place. Keats wished (as he says in his famous journal-letter immediately contemporary with the odes) to sketch this world as a “vale of Soul-making,” “a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity” It is pretty generally suspected that the christian scheme has been copied from the ancient Persian and greek Philosophers. Why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing Mediators and Personages in the same manner as in the hethen mythology abstractions are personified— (Letters, II, 103) Abstractions, Mediators, and Personages are the means of making moral truths “simple for common apprehension.” Keats’s own mythological and allegorical personages, whether Psyche or Moneta or Autumn, represent his groping after a method he thought common to all “systems of salvation,” and therefore true in a way beyond fancifulness. If Psyche, a “happy, happy dove,” seems to us understandably insufficient as a personage aiding in salvation, she is nonetheless proof of the immense if circumscribed faith Keats placed, at this time, in the active soul emerged from its chrysalis, in the 28 Helen Vendler strength of love in the soul, and in the imaginative force of the mind in finding constructive forms. The Ode to Psyche was of course inspired at least in part by the presence of Fanny Brawne next door in Wentworth Place, and Keats may not at first have been aware, as his ode took on its final dimensions, of the social, moral, and aesthetic restrictiveness of its wholly internalized, timeless, and tuneless cult. Psyche, his only audience for his tuneless numbers, both is and is not a mythological being, both is and is not an allegorical form. The ode does not solve the equivocal nature of her being, just as it does not solve the relation between beautiful Fancy and truthful Thought—the one concentrated in a small garden-fane full of happy spontaneity of erotic invention, the other mysteriously far-ranging, sublime, and connected with pain as with eagleaspiration. Cupid and Psyche together make up the actual joint divinity of the poem, and they stand for a unity of being through spiritualized eroticism, for flesh and soul in one couple—at the beginning not quite fused but not quite separate, at the end both invisible in darkness. It is a divinity Keats will forsake all his subsequent divinities in the odes, as I have said, are unpartnered females—the light-winged Dryad-nightingale, the unravished bride-Urn, veiled Melancholy, and the goddess Autumn.14 Psyche’s exact reduplicative pairing of the outside world (whether of myth or of cult) with the inside world (of mind or Fancy) enacts the erotic pairing of the sensual Cupid with the spiritual Psyche celebrated in the matter of the ode. This is Keats’s most hopeful ode, and yet his narrowest one. The willed pairing of flesh and soul in a perpetual and immortal embrace, the studied equivalence of the flowery bower of Nature and the architectural bower of Fancy, the total reconstitution of past religion in the present—the perfect “fit” of these competing realities is the dream embodied in the reduplicative shape of the Ode to Psyche. In the collapse of Keats’s hopes for a spiritual art exactly mimetic of the sensual vision there collapsed as well the erotic joint divinity, the happy coexistence of Fancy with Thought, the notion of art as idyllic verisimilitude, the concept of aesthetic activity as a purely interior working, the valuing of decorative, atemporal Beauty over austere, evolving Truth, and the pure idealization of the immortal soul rescued, by the agency of the poet, from the attrition of time. Psyche originally thought to find its distinctive language in the realm of religion mediated through Milton—as though the clear religion of heaven, as Keats wished to announce it, could borrow its diction from the religions of the past, Christian and pagan alike. Keats’s wish, expressed in the letter I have quoted, to find something to substitute for Christianity explains his first notion of a deity’s appropriate “numbers” as vows, voiced in piety, and culminating in a sanctuary. He will not cease to struggle for a religious Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 29 diction appropriate to his purposes, as The Fall of Hyperion testifies. But in mute confrontation with the religious language in Psyche there stand two other languages—that of pastoral eroticism and that of pastoral allegory, the first in the opening description of the forest bower, the second in the closing description of the cerebral fane. Each of these is contaminated, so to speak, by traces of the diction of religion; the diction of religion is contaminated, in its turn, by traces of them. The latter case is more quickly made Psyche is a vision, as a devotee might say, of a religious goddess, but she is addressed in the diction of physical love. She is the “loveliest” of visions, “fairer,” in this lover’s comparison, than Venus or Vesper, that “amorous glow-worm of the sky”; her choir is a virgin one making delicious moan (a detail not borrowed from Milton, but inserted by Keats), and her pale-mouthed prophet dreams in a fever of heat. She is brightest or bloomiest, and possessed of “lucent” fans (the adjective later repossessed for Fanny Brawne’s “warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast”). The religious, Miltonic edge is softened, warmed, coaxed into pastoral bloom. But that very bloom and heat is itself chilled or chastened by the religious use to which it is to be assimilated, into the formality of “O Goddess” and the austerity of “tuneless numbers.” With the introduction of Psyche’s “soft-conched ear” the earliest lines begin their modulation into sensuality, and yet a restraint put on sexual warmth causes the introduction into the forest embrace of the clear note of the brooklet, the cool note of the roots, and the denial of rosiness to the flowers. The suspension of the lovers’ lips checks the double embrace of arms and pinions (the latter the warmest, and most boyish, imagining in the poem—“Their arms embraced, and their pinions too,” a dream of an embrace doubled beyond merely human powers). The “trembled blossoms” and “tender eye-dawn” bear out the fragile and near virginal nature of this aurorean love; Keats is uneasy, given his purportedly religious aims, about the extent of the erotic that he can allow into his devotions. The governing question of the opening of the ode—“Who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?”—is, strictly speaking, epistemological rather than devotional, and springs, I think, from the opening of Indolence (already conceived even if not yet written down) “How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?” Keats had asked that question in self-reproach, and then had exclaimed, in self-release, after seeing the three figures full-face, “I knew the three.” To know them is also, as Keats admits in wishing to banish them, to know “how change the moons.” In Psyche, “the winged boy I knew,” says Keats, but Psyche is at first strange, as the urn-figures in Indolence had been; she, like them, is eventually recognized.15 Keats here raises the question of what he knows when he knows these personages, and though he briefly considers that his glimpse might have been a dream, he decides, as I have 30 Helen Vendler said, that he saw them with awakened eyes I “saw” two fair creatures, he announces, and later adds, “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired”; Psyche is the loveliest seen thing, the loveliest “vision.” There is no further mention of dreaming, after Keats’s first wondering question; everything else in the text supports those “awakened eyes” in their seeing. Seeing, and knowing who it is that one sees, and seeing truly, not in dream, is the first condition of Keats’s clear religion, the opened eyes precluding any surrender to the drowsiness Keats strove to maintain in Indolence. For all the resemblance between Indolence and Psyche in what we might call their use of the diction of bedded grass, it is, we must recall, Keats who drowses, in Indolence, amid stirring shades and baffled beams, his head cool-bedded in the flowery grass; but in Psyche it is the sleeping lovers who lie calm-breathing on the bedded grass, and Keats has become the clear-sighted observer with awakened eyes. Therefore, “not seeled, but with open eyes” (Herbert), Keats sees his own former bower; like Ribh at the tomb of Baile and Aillinn, he has eyes by “solitary prayer / Made aquiline,” which see what they could not have seen when he drowsed in indolence. Keats as yet scarcely realizes whither his newly aquiline gaze will lead. Eventually, as we know, it will disclose to him, behind a parted veil, Moneta’s face. But for the moment Keats yearningly believes that he can, while lifting his own head from the grass, maintain a heavenly couple there in his place. The diction appropriate to their eroticism grows the chaster for his separated gaze, but it preserves enough warmth for knowledge and passion alike to be entertained in the hospitality of the poem. The curb Keats has put on erotic fever in this passage is clear when we glance back to the passage on Cupid and Psyche in I stood tip-toe (143–46) What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips First touch’d; what amorous, and fondling nips They gave each other’s cheeks; with all their sighs, And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes. The balance of warm and cool is, in the ode, delicately kept in all the “stationing” of the first long stanza—the couple, though side by side, are nonetheless calm; embraced, they are disjoined; not bidding adieu, they are nevertheless not touching; they lie ready for a dawn that has not yet broken. The imagery of erotic pastoral is cooled not only by Keats’s detached seeing and knowing but also by his deliberately “tuneless” singing. Keats’s diction for the embracing couple here is far more secure than his diction with respect to himself. Though he begins in high seriousness, the Byronic irony fitfully evident in Indolence has its say here too, though shrunken to the brief double condescending to the “fond believing lyre” and Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 31 to “these days so far retir’d / From happy pieties.” This tone, never a successful one in Keats, marks an instability in his enterprise, and a doubt of the very possibility of ode-writing. How believing is his own lyre in this hymn; how remote can he be, in truth, from his own skeptical epoch? The irony in his joking tone about the neglected goddess in the letter to George does not survive very well its translation into verse. And of all the language in the poem, the language of religious cult, borrowed from Milton, is most derivative, and least Keatsian. The last diction invented in the poem is the diction for Psyche’s fane. It is at once the best and the feeblest in the poem, showing, as I have said earlier, the strain under which Keats is working. The feebleness is seen in two places in the random enumerative arabesque of “zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, / ... buds, and bells, and stars without a name,”16 and in the unselective amassing of Keatsian erotic words—rosy, soft, delight, bright, warm. But the diction of Psyche’s fane also possesses a strength; the fane is Keats’s first portrait of himself as artificer, as he becomes for the first time not the youth in love, the ambitious man, or even the votary of the demon Poesy (as he was in Indolence) but a maker of an object, here the goddess’s sanctuary. Emerged from his embryonic indolence, Keats is born into work; but his indecision about a proper diction for creativity disturbs him here. The diction of “the gardener Fancy” is still the diction of pastoral eroticism, that of “breeding”; and it issues (as in Fancy) in buds and flowerlike “stars” and “bells.” These Spenserian breedings take place in the realm of the Dryads, amid moss and streams and birds and bees, where lulling sleep is (as it was in Indolence) the governing mode of being. In conflict with this soft, mythic pastoral is the Shakespearean and Miltonic strenuousness of the fane’s mountain landscape; and yet the sublime landscape is itself vegetative, “grown” from that pain and pleasure which, though two separate things when refused in Indolence, grow to one paradoxical single thing, “pleasant pain,” when admitted to the precincts of mind. The phrase is of course a blemish on the poem; but like so many of Keats’s blemishes it stands for an intellectual insight for which he has not yet found the proper style in poetic language. Keats, at this moment, can only note, baldly, that pleasure and pain have some intimate connection; the answerable style for painful pleasure and pleasant pain is yet to be found. The diction of the fane is, as I have said, allegorical, as the original diction of Psyche’s bower is not (being mythological, and narrative). Keats had thought of following the line “Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same” with the line “So bower’d Goddess will I worship thee,” but he deleted it, realizing that his goddess was no longer in a bower but in a fane, that bower language is not fane language, that nature is not architectural 32 Helen Vendler artifact. Catching himself up short, he put in the open casement, that casement which in Indolence had so meltingly brought the man-made and the natural into conjunction, as “the open casement press’d a new-leaved vine.” Here, the open casement will serve, so the poem hopes, to admit warm Love, the human form divine, instead of the natural bloom. But the landscape has perceptibly, in the thought-burdened allegorical moment, darkened from the erotic one presented mythologically; the new forest region, unlike the original one, is unknown, as yet untrodden; there are branches rather than buds or blossoms; they cluster darkly; mountains loom, wild-ridged; instead of feathery pinions there is a sterner fledge of trees; zephyrs are replaced by wind. The darkness persists into the indeterminacy of “shadowy thought” at the end, as Keats undertakes at one and the same time the burden of allegorical writing and the architectural objectification of self in artifact, an artifact which remains as yet internalized in thought, but which has been effectively freed of its creator and endowed with architectural presence and topographical depth. The Ode to a Nightingale, which we next approach, marks a fresh approach to all the questions raised by the odes preceding it. In it Keats takes a step beyond the creative reverie of Indolence, beyond even the first creative interior constructions of mental Fancy in Psyche, and envisages the artist’s necessary embrace of a medium—in this case music, the art of Apollo. He thus takes up, in choosing music, the idea of an art which of its nature precludes mimesis and verisimilitude, an abstract art appealing only to the sensation of the ear, an art devoted, perforce, to a beauty to which truth is irrelevant. He will, pursuing his symbol of the artist as musician, adopt a more ironic view of aesthetic experience, one in which a remote composersinger, indifferent to and unconscious of any audience, pours forth a song to a listener who is physically so passive, being pure ear, as almost to approach the condition of insentience. In Nightingale the immortal world of art, far from being an exact reduplication of the world of life, as in Psyche, is in fact in all ways its opposite. In Psyche, the embracing sculptural frieze-figures are no longer allegories of the poet’s desire for ambition, love, and poesy, but rather have taken on a separate, objectified existence of their own. This existence lapses somewhat at the end, where the poet seems to prepare to become Cupid, but Psyche retains her independence. As a pagan goddess, she preexisted her poet, and does not depend on him for her essence, as the Love, Ambition, and Poesy of Indolence do. Keats’s attraction toward a presence less contingent than his own selfhood dictates several of his other objects of worship—a bird, an urn, a season. In the later odes, after Psyche, he goes beyond an interest only in the psychology of inner reparatory creation into an interest in artifact, medium, audience, and the intrinsic will-toTuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 33 annihilation in art itself. But in one aspect, Nightingale represents a regression from Psyche. Though the composer-singer-bird is not “indolent,” neither does she have a “working” brain; her art is one of happy spontaneity, coming as naturally as leaves to a tree. Keats still hopes that art need not be “work” intellectually planned. But the working brain will not be absent forever; art as work reappears with the Urn. NOTES 1. [Stillinger’s notes.] Text (including heading) from 1820. Variants and other readings from Keats’s draft (D), his letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819 (L), and transcripts by Brown (CB) and Woodhouse (W2). Heading Ode to] Ode To (Ode added afterward) D 4 into] to into L 5 dreamt] dreamt altered to dream’d W2 6 awaken’d] awaked L 9 couched] cl couched L 10 roof] fan D, L, W2, and originally CB; fan altered to roof by Keats in CB 13 ‘Mid] interlined above In D; Near W2 14 silverwhite] freckle pink in the margin (but silver-white undeleted in the text) in D; freckle-pink L; freckled, pink W2 14 Tyrian] syrian D, L, CB, W2 15 calm] soft CB 17 bade] bid D, L, W2 20 eye] dawning eye D 22 O happy] O p happy L 23 true!] ~ ? L 24 latest] lastest L 26 Phoebe’s] successively (a) Night’s wide full, (b) Night’s orb’d (c) Phoebe’s D 28 hast] hadst L 30 delicious] melodious D, CB, W2 32–34 No and no] No r and no r in all eight places in D 36 brightest] Bloomiest D, L, CB, W2 42 among] interlined above above D 43 by my] by (corrected by Keats to by my) CB 43 own] interlined above clear D 44 So] O D, L, CB, W2 45/46 Thy Altar heap’d with flowers, (written vertically in the margin with a mark for insertion after 45, the line and the mark then deleted) D 47 From] interlined above Thy D 57 lull’d] interlined above charmd L 57 to sleep] asleep altered to to sleep CB 62 feign] interlined above frame L 63 breeding ... breed] successively (a) plucks a thousand flower and never plucks (b) plucking flowers will never pluck (c) breeding flowers will never breed pluck (never deleted by mistake instead of pluck in the third version) D 63/64 So bower’d Goddess will I worship thee D 67 the ... Love] warm Love glide altered to the warm Love D; Love W2. 2. Psyche is “restored,” not “resurrected” she was forgotten, not dead; The opening tableau shows she is ever immortal. She is not a “dying immortal” or “immortal but also fading,” as Leon Waldoff would have it (“The Theme of Mutability in the ‘Ode to Psyche,’” PMLA [1977], 412). Psyche is, as Keats said, “neglected.” On the other hand, Waldoff ’s psychoanalytic reading of the ode as a “rescue fantasy” (p. 410), a “defense against irrevocable loss” (p. 415), and, finally, an “adaptation” (p. 417) are intelligent insights into the ode as a psychological document. His concluding emphasis on will and resolution is far truer to the poem than readings which emphasize only irony or an empty center. The long and sometimes fanciful discussion of the ode by Homer Brown (Diacritics 6 [1976], 49–56) considers, following Harold Bloom in the Map of Misreading (p. 153), that “Milton’s Satan as the artist of deceit at Eve’s ear becomes the ‘gardener Fancy’ and the speaker of Keats’s Ode” (p. 54). Brown urges too strongly that “the mortality of all the gods, including art, including the Psyche of this Ode, the mortality of all cultures” is Keats’s concern (p. 56). But the poem is a restoration poem (however qualified). It is a poem about substitution, as Brown says, but not about endless substitution around and over a Derridean absence such is not its tone. Leslie Brisman argues (“Keats, Milton, and What One May ‘Very Naturally Suppose’”) that Keats is engaging in the creation of a 34 Helen Vendler “countermyth” against the decay of nature, a countermyth asserting that “inspiration [is] renewed as faithfully as are plants and seasons” (p. 4). (See Milton and the Romantics 6 [1975], 4–7.) 3. I am not unaware by how much the poem falls short of its claim of restitution, nor of the ironies (discussed most recently by Sperry and Fry) that it encounters on its way to the final fane. But these difficulties in the path—culminating in the vacancy of the final tableau—do not defeat the passionate tone of the poem. Bloom, not insensitive to the ironies, yet speaks of the poem’s “rhapsodical climax,” and sees the open casement emphasizing “the openness of the imagination toward the heart’s affections” (Visionary Company, pp. 395, 397). It should not be forgotten that for Keats, especially in his moments of prizing verisimilitude, it was important to speak the truth about his life; one of the truths behind the Ode to Psyche was that he was not yet embowered with Fanny Brawne. That he still hoped and longed for her is evident from the final entreaty, and it goes counter to the current of the poem to prize its uncertainties over its hopes, still ardent and as yet undefeated. 4. Commentators have expended a good deal of effort on making an allegorical identification of Psyche. She is “the soul of human love” (G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome, p. 302); the mind rescued by Love (Bate, John Keats, p. 490); the visionary imagination (Perkins, The Quest for Permanence, p. 222 ff.); the human-soul-in-love (Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 390); “the simple consciousness of Being” (Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode, p. 226); “the goddess of the poetic soul, the Muse” (Sperry, Keats the Poet, p. 254); the “moth-goddess, who symbolized melancholic love” (Garrod, Keats, pp. 98–99); “the intelligent ‘Spark’ struggling to become a soul ... a love-goddess with an understanding of troubled human experience ... a personification of human nature subjected to an inevitable and cruel process of growing up and growing old” (Allott, “The ‘Ode to Psyche,’” in Muir, John Keats, pp. 84, 86); “Love itself, the poetic-butterfly-moth idea” (Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth, p. 206); and so on. Probably some such identification is necessary if one is to write about the poem at all; but surely the point to be made is that Keats is engaged in one of his recurrent recoils against emblematic allegory; such recoils always took him in the direction of mythology. Mythology was suggestive, emblematic allegory bald. Mythology, capable of motion, hovered; emblematic allegory was frozen in a single gesture. Mythology derived from narrative and came bearing, even if lightly, the aura of its narrative around it; allegory, originating in conceptualization, had no richness of story about it. The fluidity of concept associated here with Psyche comes precisely from her mythological origins; the ode marks Keats’s resistance to the “fair Maid, and Love her name” sort of writing, to which he had resorted in Indolence. 5. I discuss this art of wounds and cures at length in “Lionel Trilling and the Immortality Ode,” Salmagundi 41 (1978), 66–86. 6. Though critics mention the derivation of this passage from Milton, they have failed to see that Keats draws only on the passage about the more acceptable pagan gods, and they have not seen Keats’s anti-Miltonic aim—to put the gods back into English poetry, when Milton had banished them as unfit and false subjects for the Christian poet. 7. Allott (p. 87) and Sperry after her (p. 254) mention that Keats recalls the banning of pagan gods in Milton, but they do not see that Keats saw the ban as a loss to poetry, or that he is defying Miltonic truth-categories. Douglas Bush’s assumption that Keats adopted echoes from Milton “simply because they fitted his idea of providing [Psyche] with proper rites” seems to take too lightly Keats’s indignation that anyone should think it Tuneless Numbers The Ode to Pysche 35 possible to do without “the beautiful mythology of Greece.” See “The Milton of Keats and Arnold,” Milton Studies 11 (1978), 103. 8. She in fact is the only one of the “faded Olympians” not to have declined; she is still properly addressed as “brightest.” It therefore seems no part of Keats’s intent to show her as careworn and acquainted with grief, as Allott would have it (Muir, pp. 84, 86). 9. I owe this formulation to Professor Patrick Keane of Le Moyne College. 10. I cannot therefore share Fry’s conviction that the couple represent “the bisexual and at least partly daylit scene of creation that chaster poets, notably Collins, had tried to represent euphemistically” (The Poet’s Calling, p. 223). Nothing is being “created” by Cupid and Psyche, whether in the myth or in Keats’s poem; they are figures for sexuality, but not for procreation. (Keats’s departure from Comus, where Milton envisages twins born from the union of Cupid and Psyche, is explicit.) Nor can the forest scene be legitimately called a “primal scene” (Fry, p. 225) if those words are to carry the shock and dismay which Freud predicated in the mind of the child witnessing such a scene. Keats does not stand to his scene as a child witnessing a parental act; the scene is a projection of his own desire, and he cannot therefore be said to be, as Fry says he is, following Bloom, “the poet as voyeur” (p. 225). If Fry means that Cupid and Psyche are to be taken as figures drawn from Adam and Eve, then there is no reason to call the scene “bisexual,” at least not in the usual sense of that word. 11. He speaks of his “half-fledged brain” in a letter of July 1819 (Letters, II, 130). 12. The chiastic structural pattern of bower-cult-cult-bower (what I have called the mirror-image shape of the ode) seems to me clear enough to bring into question Fry’s notion that the shape of the ode is one of “rondure”—“The whole poem is the shrine, couched and soft-couched. It is a shell, rounded as the mind” (The Poet’s Calling, p. 227). 13. Homer Brown notes the defiance of Milton (“blind and blindly superstitious”) in these lines. But he thinks of Psyche as too exclusively one with Keats, contrasting Keats’s ode to the traditional ode “of worship to an otherness.” Keats is not writing a hymn to himself; Psyche is, not least, Fanny Brawne. See Brown, “Creations and Destroyings Keats’s Protestant Hymn, The ‘Ode to Psyche,’” Diacritics 6 (1976), 49–56. 14. Leon Waldoff, also making the point that Keats’s divinities are female (in a paper delivered at the MLA, 1980, and entitled “Processes of Imagination and Growth in Keats’s Odes”), argues psychoanalytically that all are attempts at the (impossible) restoring of a maternal image. 15. Lawrence Kramer in “The Return of the Gods Keats to Rilke,” Studies in Romanticism 17 (Fall 1978), 483–500, places the ode into a tradition of the theophanic poem, “the genre in which the return of the gods takes place” (p. 484), and writes very interestingly on “the riddle ritual” (p. 494) of the naming of Psyche, and the subsequent withholding of her name. 16. Sperry voices the same criticism (p. 259); but he is wrong in saying (p. 257) that the “buds ... burst into thought ‘with pleasant pain.’” They do not—only thoughts, in the form of trees on the steep, do. Fancy is not painful; thought is. Keats allows in his earthly paradise in this poem only flowers, not fruits, thus restricting his gardener to the single season of spring.