Keats: Ode on Indolence
The Poem Draws a Distinction between Poetry and Indolence.
Keats explores ambition and poetry in the context of discussing laziness. While poetry emerges as a powerful impulse for Keats, he finally wishes it away.
In Keats’ Ode on Indolence, the reader finds the author in a rather tense confrontation between his passion for poetry, along with its partners love and ambition, and a world devoid of them. This triad, beginning as ‘figures’ etched on a marble urn, later become ‘Phantoms’ that Keats wishes to exorcise.
In the third and fourth stanzas, Keats wishes he had ‘wings’ with which to fly - demonstrating his fancy for the three passions. By the conclusion of the poem, though, Keats decidedly rejects the triad in favor of a ‘head cool bedded’ - but he has produced a poem in the process of setting the issue to rest.
There is, therefore, a tension between the three passions and Keats’ resolve against them that never fully subsides. While he deliberately dismisses the triad at the poem’s conclusion and has clearly emphasized their haunting effect, one retains the sense that Keats could never succeed in ridding himself of his love for poetry - especially since he is in fact expressing himself in that form. That the poem is titled ‘on Indolence’ further suggests that his passion for poetry and a self-detached laxity must in some way be linked.
Opening Triad in First Stanza
The opening stanza provides Keats’ first encounter with the triad. They appear as ‘figures’ like those found “on a Marble Urn.” The figures are ‘side faced’ and it is still uncertain as to their makeup. They have ‘bowed necks’ which suggest that they are looking down at the ground, and have ‘joined hands.’ Thus the figures are in some way linked together. Further they are ‘serene’ in their step and have ‘placid sandals.’ At this point they do not seem threatening. They are white-robed, possibly ghost-like in their pre-phantom stage.
The Shapes Hypnotize
The shapes take Keats over completely, his ‘pulse grew less and less;’ his senses are dulled and he can not feel either pleasure or pain. Still, even this death-like slumber becomes preferable to the haunted state that corresponds to his experience of the phantoms: “O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but nothingness?” Keats wishes the shapes would go away, and leave him to his alternative which is “nothingness.”
Poetry at Odds with Indolence
Keats writes in Stanza IV “O, for an age sheltered from annoy, / that I may never know how change the moons, / Or hear the voice of busy common-sense.” Poetry especially takes him away from his indolence. Poetry is subject to time, like the stages of the moon, and it is also subject to common sense. Thus indolence or nothingness is a preferable state to the vicissitudes of time and even language.
Final Rejection of Three Phantoms
In the fifth stanza, Keats is insistent that he can get along without the three phantoms as time passes in sleep, while he also writes “The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May.” While Keats describes the clouds as having tears, they are significantly held in lids rather than producing actual tears or rain. The fact that Keats has them held back suggests that his voice in the poem has some sympathy for the three phantoms, but not enough to chase him from passivity.
In the final stanza, he calls out to them, “Vanish, ye Phantoms, from my idle spright, / Into the clouds, and never more return!” With the shapes gone, the work of writing the poem is safely over, and indolence may return.
