Keats in Technicolor

teaching notes

We don’t make Keats anymore in the same way that we don’t make Technicolor movies. No one does the chemistry anymore, it’s too expensive. It just can’t be done. It just isn’t done. What I mean by this is that there’s a certain vividness. The vowels, the sonorousness, the logical connection between thoughts. English does not come out of the laboratory like this anymore.

In one of my early plays, Messages, which I wrote at a time when I was reading a lot of poetry, one character describes another as having “an emotional brain or a brainy heart.” And I think I must have been channeling Keats. The Keats poem has an emotional brain or a brainy heart. Cognition and embodied emotion are unified.

Take “Ode to a Nightingale”:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

The sound comes late in this first stanza; we end with the full-throated ease of the summer singer, the light-winged dryad, the melodious plot; all this is a buried lead. Sensation comes after the thought, critically. Cognition has to fight its way through the heartache, through a drowsy numbness, through Keats’s intuition of death—the tuberculosis in his lungs, but really the tuberculosis in a broader sense that had infested his whole system: the blood and oxygen that circulated from brain into lungs and heart and back again, the blood that warned of death.

The odes in particular can be read as the plaintive self-mourning of a consciousness that is decaying back into nature, consciousness broken down by illness into the very nature that it contemplates. “In the next valley-glades… was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”

The Keatsian music, this Keatsian music, is generated by the paradoxical relationship of the instrument to itself, like a violin solo played on a violin made of rotting wood: there’s a brief moment where perhaps the rot, the warp, creates a unique sound before the whole structure splinters and becomes unplayable.

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats writes:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

The urn might as well be Yorick’s skull: a frieze of a once living complex life-form and life-blood. The urn is also Keats’s own corpus of poetry, the body shape, the perfect fragments he intends to leave behind, to be read and wondered at, centuries or millennia hence.

In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva writes:

Death… becomes displaced and builds a logic. If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, “I” am therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always potentially condemnable. I am from the very beginning subject to persecution as well as revenge. The infinite meshing of expulsions and hazings, of divisions and inexorable abominable reprisals, is then thrown into gear. The system of abomination sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume the place of the victim in order to justify the purification that will separate me from that place, as it will from any other, from all others. Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly build a victimizing and persecuting machine at the cost of which I become the subject of the symbolic as well as the other of the object.

Another related way of reading Keats’s Late Odes is as a rejection of abjection—the building of a counter-logic to contain the death drive, the death lust, that as we know through his letters became more and more impossible to resist as his condition and his abjection, his physical pain and self-revulsion, became more and more severe. The odes are tropes or forms to contain the death drive and make it vibrate and sing. Almost as Keats writes in “Ode to Psyche”: “too, too late for the fond believing lyre.”

“Yes, I will be thy priest,” Keats writes to Psyche, 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.” As tuberculosis branched through Keats’s lungs and as a reciprocal degree of pain branched through his brain, Keats built new brain regions to counter that suffering and became a priest of his own imagination, a priest of his own mind, so that he could,

in the midst of this wide quietness,

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same.