Ode to Psyche Notes

Psyche and Eros Myth

The poem "Ode to Psyche" is based on the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros.
Psyche is the Greek word for soul.
The story revolves around Psyche, a woman so beautiful that Love (Eros) fell in love with her.

Psyche was the youngest and most beautiful daughter of a king.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was jealous of Psyche's beauty.
Aphrodite sent Eros, her son, to punish Psyche.
However, Eros pricked himself with his own arrow and fell in love with Psyche.
Eros summoned Psyche to his palace but remained invisible to her.
Psyche later lit a lamp to see Eros, angering him and causing him to leave.
Psyche then had to complete difficult tasks to appease Aphrodite and win back Eros.

The myth of Psyche was first recorded in the second century AD, making it more recent than most myths.
Psyche was never worshiped as a real goddess, this compels Keats' speaker to dedicate himself to becoming her temple, her priest, and her prophet.
The poem was inspired by Lucius Apuleius' "The Golden Ass," where the Cupid and Psyche story is referred to as the "latest born of the myths."
Keats noted that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before Apuleius, who lived after the Augustan age.
Classical antiquity had no knowledge of Psyche before Apuleius invented her.

Keats builds a shrine to Psyche in his imagination, something classical antiquity had not done.
He leaves one window open for love to enter, referencing how Cupid (Eros) entered Psyche's room every night in Apuleius' story.
In Keats' version, Psyche is initially punished by Aphrodite (Venus) and Zeus (Jupiter).
Psyche was eventually pardoned by Zeus but wasn't awarded the status of goddess due to her late arrival on Mount Olympus but could share in the immortality of Eros.
Keats treats her like a goddess, worships her, and consecrates her essential action, loving as well as her achievement of happiness and fulfillment.
Through extreme passion and profound suffering, she reaches joyful immortality, which becomes an extended metaphor for the making and the career of the poet.

Robert Graves suggests that Keats' main interest was the poet's relationship with poetry, using sexual imagery.
The poem has been interpreted: extended metaphor about poetry. Allegory for the soul psyche.
Keats may be suggesting there is something godlike about the human soul.

The poem appears after Keats' discussion of "soul making" in a letter to George and Georgiana.
Keats contrasts the Christian view of earthly existence as a "veil of tears" with the idea of "soul making."
"Soul making" involves pains and troubles to school an intelligence and make it a soul.
Keats felt the soul has sparks of divinity and can possess a place peculiar to each one's individual existence.
The psyche of the poem can be seen as keeps his soul as he wishes it to be, and contemplating selfhood offered him a serene joy.

The speaker finds two fair creatures, Eros and Psyche, lying side by side in the grass in a forest.
The speaker recognizes Eros but asks who Psyche is.
The speaker describes Psyche as the youngest and most beautiful of all Olympian gods and goddesses.
Psyche's youth is the reason she lacks worship.
The speaker wants to pay homage to Psyche, becoming her choir, music, and oracle.
The speaker declares he will become Psyche's priest and build her a temple in his mind.
This temple will be in an untouched region of his mind, surrounded by natural beauty and tended by imagination.
He promises Psyche soft delight and leaves the window of her abode open for Eros to enter.