'Ode to Psyche'

“O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung / by sweet enforcement”

immediate apostrophe → lets readers know this is an ode

asking Psyche to listen to his song without music

lots of sibilance

an invocation = a small prayer to a god at the beginning of an ancient Greek/Roman poem/music

With what apostrophe does ‘The Odyssey’ start?

“Sing to me, Muse!”

“And pardon that they secrets should be sung / Even into thine own soft-conchèd ear”

speaker = a little sheepish about asking the Goddess to listen!!

conch → allusion to the sea…?

archaic diction → timelessness of Psyche’s power

using his own ‘Psyche’ to praise ‘Psyche’ - so he’s a little embarrassed…

“Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The wingèd Psyche with awakened eyes?”

rhetorical question → winged → has butterfly eyes

awakened eyes → seeing with the imagination, power of imagination without actual sight?

“I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly, / And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise”

negative capability → receptive + dreamy state?!

“forest” as a synecdochic symbol of the imagination, and the mind → this poem is, after all, a product of the speaker’s imagination

concentration of commas in the second line → reflects panic + shock…?

“fainting with surprise” = feels a bit Gothic…!

“Saw two fair creatures, couchèd side by side / In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof”

Eros + Psyche → couched = sensual + luxurious already…?

“deepest grass” → hidden deep within the imagination

“whispering roof” = seems a like constant but hushed sound → sensuality…?

“creatures” = supernatural

“of leaves and tremblèd blossoms, where there ran / a brooklet, scarce espied:”

LINE OF IAMBIC TRIMETER!!!

symbols of beauty in flowers → knowledge as a Doctor

trimetric line = represents a shortened pace → the speaker stops to gawk at the lovers

“ ‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, / Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, / They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass”

rich + verdant imagery → floral → known from being a doctor

“calm-breathing” = liminal, “fragrant-eyed”,

luscious colours?

“Tyrian” = purple → uses most senses to describe the flowers

Edenic setting!

“Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; / Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu”

reveals a time-stuckness → temporal dilaaaattion

like the speaker, the lovers are in a space-between → liminality

anaphora → repetiveness and cyclicality while being in the stuck time?!

“As if disjointed by soft-handed slumber, / And ready still past kisses to outnumber / at tender eye-dawn of aurorean love”

“past kisses” → liminal and non-linearity of time

uncertainty + dreaminess

bodily but also dreamlike

“tender eye-dawn of aurorean love” → shrinks an expansive love into the tenderness + localisation of eyes!

“The wingèd boy I knew; / But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? / His Psyche true!”

worked out that the boy is Eros

“O happy, happy dove?” → epizeuxis → immense power of imagination

his psyche created this psyche → goddess of the realms that dreams come from: the soul and the mind

‘Ode to Psyche’ form

stanzaic form of iambic pentameter + iambic trimeter

Keats use his psyche to playfully spin an ode to Psyche herself!

“O latest born and loveliest vision far / of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy”

Psyche could be on par with the Olympians, but she isn’t given that reward?

O → can’t help but write odic after odic stanza to Psyche!!!!

“latest born” → modern !

“Olympus faded hierarchy” → Keats recognises the futility of Psyche being an Olympian → but he wants her to be there anyway…!

“Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-regioned star / Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;”

Phoebe = Goddess of the Moon

Vesper → AKA Venus → goddess of love and sex

Psyche → superlative form of beauty → the imagination outweighs the aesthetic beauty of Goddesses.

“Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, / Nor altar heap’d with flowers; / Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan / Upon the midnight hours; / No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incence sweet / From chain-swung censer teeming; / No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat / Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming”

1. anaphoric asyndeton represents the desperation of the speaker, or that the speaker kind of makes Psyche a ritual + chant of her own!!!

2. by listing them all, this poem metatextually serves as an offering to Psyche

3. imagination draws from the ancient Greco-Roman cultures, rather than the church

   1. SYNTACTIC PARALLELISM!

“O brightest! though too late for antique vows, / Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,”

another ecphonesis

“too late” → “too, too late” → diacope, Speaker seems to feel a nostalgia for the time they never lived in.

lyre = Apollo → god of Poetry → e.g. Psyche too modern to have ancient Apollonian poetry about her, but so it’s up to Keats do that…!

“When holy were the haunted forest boughs, / Holy the air, the water, and the fire; / Yet even in these days so far retired / From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, / Fluttering among the faint Olympians / I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d”

won’t let modern day cynicism get him down!!

“I see, and sing, by my own eyes insprid’” → Keats uses his own imagination to thank Psyche if nobody else will…!

modern day lacks the ‘holy’ experience of the past!

“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-mouthed prophet dreaming”

REFRAIN FROM EARLIER, ONLY CHANGED!

Keats reframes his previous lamentation about the absence of Psychic devotion, now embracing his own praise!!

“Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / in some untrodden region of my mind;”

voltaic moment?? speaker takes it upon themself to build Psyche a shrine themself!!

“I will be thy priest” = embedded clause → at the centre of this poem is the appreciation that the speaker has for Psyche!

“Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:”

the brain → imagined as a tree → Edenic + something that needs to nurtured and cultivated

“pleasant pain” → there is a sadness to cognitive development, as exposure to reality allows the mind to think unpleasant things - but it can also be a beautiful thing too!

“Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees / Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; / And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees”

Mystical holiness + pure natural beauty don’t just co-exist, but combine into a new place in the speaker’s inner landscape

this forest feels more English than the previous Hellenistic references?

/ee/ assonance creates a kind of sonic harmony → new Eden

“The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep; / And in the midst of this wide quietness / a rosy sanctuary will I dress”

moss-lain → seems old + tired, static?

‘l’ consonance → heaviness?

“wide quietness” - verdant + luscious greenery? all inside his head still!!

“With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, / With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, / With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign”

imagines the brain as something that needs to be tended to and cultivated → and protected → can be dangerous?

“buds, and bells” → developing ideas?

“stars without a name” → ideas that are in the making need to be protected!

“The gardener Fancy” → Fancy meaning ‘imagination’ —> the mind must cultivate and love itself

"Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: / And there shall be for thee al soft delight”

never breed the same → could breed the same kind of plant, only that each one is individual → reverence for the individuality of the brain + the mind!

all thoughts are unique

diacope = “breeding” = constant development and nurturing

“That shadowy thought can win, / A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm love in”

Imagination can create new meaning → “shadowy thought” can take over if the mind is not tended to enough, but can also create loveliness if only “Love”/Eros is let in → which is what we were seeing earlier with the two lovers intermingling!

Eros + Psyche

alluded to → Eros visits his bride by night →

Metamorphoses by Platonicus

when was Ode to Psyche written?

April 1819

Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before…

the time of Apulenius the Platonist

Keats on Psyche:

“I am more orthodox than to let a he[a]then Goddess be so neglected”

R and J → star of her cheek

 This could be read as an allusion to Romeo and Juliet, with the mortal Psyche bearing resemblance to Juliet, whose "brightness of […] cheek would shame those stars"