John Keats’ poem, “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell" is a Petrarchan sonnet with the rime scheme ABBAABBACDDCDC; it dramatizes a basic tenet of the Romantic Movement, the desire to live a bucolic life and to commune with nature.
Octave: “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”
In the octave, the speaker declares that if he must live alone or in “Solitude,” he would choose to live in a rural setting. He particularly scorns the city and demonstrates that feeling by asking of “Solitude” not to require him to live “among the jumbled heap / Of murky buildings.”
The speaker clearly disdains humankind’s clumping together in edifices in the city. He invites Solitude to “climb with me the steep.” He wants to roam in hills in the open air, unencumbered by streets, signs, and crowds of people. He desires the green grass and the sounds of rivers moving naturally through the landscape.
The speaker issues forth the Romantic sensibility of yearning for “Nature’s observatory,” from which “the dell, / Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell.” He craves to reside among the flowers and clear river on a hillside, instead of living in a shabby city apartment. He adds that he would prefer to “[keep his vigils] / ‘Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap / Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.”
His lovely pastoral descriptions are the stuff that made the hearts of the Romantics flutter with ecstasy, as they conveniently omitted from their country-life fantasies the inconveniences that had originally motivated human beings to construct and collect in cities.
Sestet: “But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee”
In the sestet, the speaker adds a proviso to his notion of perfect solitarian living out in the country. He reveals that even though he would happily live alone as described in the octave, he would prefer to be accompanied by someone who is capable of offering “the sweet converse of an innocent mind.”
His “soul’s pleasure” is to be able to have conversations with someone who is like minded, someone “[w]hose words are images of thoughts refin’d.” He wants to share his bucolic existence with someone who thinks as poetically as he does.
What he ultimately discloses is that he would like to live in the country with solitude, but not total solitude, because he has decided that the height of “bliss of human-kind” is when two like-minded people—“two kindred spirits”—can escape from the city and fly to the rustic locale together.
Other Keats Articles:
Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”: The Awe of Discovery
Keats’ “Ode to Autumn”: A Celebration of Beauty
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