Ode to Indolence

[Angel]

Ode to Indolence

John Keats

'They toil not, neither do they spin.' One morn before me were three figures seen,

1
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide[1]
With vases, to one deep in Phidian[2] lore.

2
How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness?

3
A third time came they by: - alas! wherefore[3]?
My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o'er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press'd a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle's lay[4];
O shadows! 'twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

4
A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd[5]
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd
And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
The first was a fair maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap'd upon her, maiden most unmeek, -
I knew to be my demon Poesy.

5
They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition - it springs
From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;
For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

6
So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreary urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle spright[6],
Into the clouds, and never more return!

1-betide: Happen, occur.
2- Phidian: Adjective alluding to Phidias (circa 490-430 BC), a sculptor of ancient Greece. It is believed that he supervised construction of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens and sculpted the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the world.
3- wherefore: Why.
4- throstle's lay: The song (lay) of a thrush (bird).
5- turn'd . . . me: Each passing figure turns his face toward the speaker.
6- spright: Spirit, soul, spirit.

source: cummingsstudyguides.net
The Norton Anthology of English Literature; major authors; 7th ed.; 2001

[Angel]

Ode to Indolence, written in March 1819 is his first great ode. it reminds us of Keats' remark that "what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet" because the philosopher misunderstands the poet in the same way that we may misunderstand this poem.Keats allegorizes Love, Ambition, and Poetry as the three figures that are dismissed in favor of Indolence that offers the deep visions of beauty and truth. what he is actually dismissing is the popular views of transitory love, ambition, and poetry. True indolence is the true poetic meditation, the state of selflessness from which shall emerge 'the finer tone.' He actually longs for a world in which transitory moments of love and beauty can become eternal and poetry can eternalize beauty and truth.

On March 19, 1819, Keats wrote to George and Georgiana Keats: "This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless... Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a Greek vase, a man and two women, whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the mind."
The Ode was probably written soon after this time , but was not published until long after the poet's death in 1848.

source: A Survey of English Literature; vol. 2; Amrullah Abjadian; SAMT Publications; 2005
The Norton Anthology of English Literature; 4th ed.

[Angel]

Summary

In the first stanza, Keats’s speaker describes a vision he had one morning of three strange figures wearing white robes and “placid sandals.” The figures passed by in profile, and the speaker describes their passing by comparing them to figures carved into the side of a marble urn, or vase. When the last figure passed by, the first figure reappeared, just as would happen if one turned a vase carved with figures before one’s eyes.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the figures directly, asking them how it was that he did not recognize them and how they managed to sneak up on him. He suspects them of trying to “steal away, and leave without a task” his “idle days,” and goes on to describe how he passed the morning before their arrival: by lazily enjoying the summer day in a sort of sublime numbness. He asks the figures why they did not disappear and leave him to this indolent nothingness.
In the third stanza, the figures pass by for a third time. The speaker feels a powerful urge to rise up and follow them, because he now recognizes them: the first is a “fair maid,” Love; the second is pale-cheeked Ambition; and the third, whom the speaker seems to love despite himself, is the unmeek maiden, the demon Poesy, or poetry. When the figures disappear in the fourth stanza, the speaker again aches to follow them, but he says that the urge is folly: Love is fleeting, Ambition is mortal, and Poesy has nothing to offer that compares with an indolent summer day untroubled by “busy common-sense.”
In the fifth stanza, the speaker laments again the figures’ third passing, describing his morning before their arrival, when his soul seemed a green lawn sprinkled with flowers, shadows, and sunbeams. There were clouds in the sky but no rain fell, and the open window let in the warmth of the day and the music of birdsong. The speaker tells the figures they were right to leave, for they had failed to rouse him. In the sixth stanza, he bids them adieu and asserts again that Love, Ambition, and Poesy are not enough to make him raise his head from its pillow in the grass. He bids them farewell and tells them he has an ample supply of visions; then he orders them to vanish and never return.


Form

Like all the other odes but “To Autumn” and “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Indolence” is written in ten-line stanzas, in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. Like the others (again, with the exception of “Ode to Psyche”), its stanzas are composed of two parts: an opening four-line sequence of alternating rhymed lines (ABAB), and a six-line sequence with a variable rhyme scheme (in stanzas one through four, CDECDE; in stanza five, CDEDCE; in stanza six, CDECED).


Themes

Chronologically, the “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode. It was composed in the spring of 1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few months before “To Autumn.” However, when the odes are grouped together as a sequence, “Indolence” is often placed first in the group—an arrangement that makes sense, considering that “Indolence” raises the glimmerings of themes explored more fully in the other five poems, and seems to portray the speaker’s first struggle with the problems and ideas of the other odes. The story of “Indolence” is extraordinarily simple—a young man spends a drowsy summer morning lazing about, until he is startled by a vision of Love, Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow the figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning outweigh the temptations of love, ambition, and poetry.

So the principal theme of “Ode on Indolence” holds that the pleasant numbness of the speaker’s indolence is a preferable state to the more excitable states of love, ambition, and poetry. One of the great themes of Keats’s odes is that of the anguish of mortality—the pain and frustration caused by the changes and endings inevitable in human life, which are contrasted throughout the poems with the permanence of art. In this ode, the speaker’s indolence seems in many ways an attempt to blur forgetfully the lines of the world, so that the “short fever-fit” of life no longer seems so agonizing. The speaker rejects love and ambition simply because they require him to experience his own life too intensely and hold the inevitable promise of ending (of love, the speaker wonders what and where it is; of ambition, he notes the pale cheek and “fatigued eye,” and observes that it “springs” directly from human mortality). He longs never to know “how change the moons” and to be “sheltered from annoy.” This is why Poesy offers the most seductive, and also most hateful, challenge to indolence. Poetry is not mortal and changeable (Poesy, in fact, is a “demon”), but it is anathema to indolence and would require the speaker to feel his life too acutely—thus it has “not a joy” for him as sweet as the drowsy nothingness of indolence.
Though the poem ends on a note of rejection, the persistence of the figures and the speaker’s impassioned response to them indicate that he will eventually have to raise his head from the grass and confront Love, Ambition, and Poesy more directly—a confrontation embodied in the other five odes, where the speaker struggles with problems of creativity, mortality, imagination, and art. Many of the ideas and images in “Ode on Indolence” anticipate more developed ideas and images in the later odes. Each ode finds Keats confronting some sort of divine figure, usually a goddess; in “Indolence,” he confronts three. The lushly described summer landscape, with its “stirring shades / and baffled beams,” anticipates the imaginary landscape the speaker creates in “Ode to Psyche”; the experience of numbness anticipates the aesthetic numbness of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the anguished numbness of “Ode on Melancholy”; the birdsong of the “throstle’s lay” anticipates the nightingale and the swallows of “To Autumn.” The Grecian dress of the figures and their urn-like procession anticipate the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and also cast back to an earlier poem, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” in which the speaker’s confrontation with some ancient Greek sculptures makes him feel overwhelmed by his own mortality. (The “Phidian lore” the speaker refers to at the end of the first stanza is a direct reference to the earlier poem: Phidias was the sculptor who made the Elgin marbles.)
In this way, the “Ode on Indolence” makes a sort of preface to the other odes. It does not enter into a dramatic exploration of love, ambition, or art, but rather raises the possibility of such a confrontation in a way that casts light on the speaker’s behavior in the other odes. Its lush, sensuous language, and its speaker’s oscillation between temptation and rejection in the face of the figures’ persistent processional, indicate a fuller, deeper, and more acutely felt poetic exploration to come. But for now, the speaker is content to let the figures fade and to give himself wholly to the numb dreaminess of his indolence.

source: sparknotes.com