"Ode to Psyche": The Freshly-made Soul

by Matt Smaus

Abstract

John Keats led a short, tormented life marked by great despair, obsessive and unconsummated love, and apparent poetic failure. Nonetheless and perhaps on account of this, he has since become possibly the most memorable and resounding poet of the Romantic period. "Ode to Psyche" followed upon a tumultuous period of internal conflicts and resolutions within the poet in which relatively few actual poems were produced. Its remarkable emergence heralded in the more famous odes that are considered now some of his finest work. "Psyche" is important as a stepping-stone piece, as the poem that squared away all his conflicting emotions and rose victoriously out of disillusionment and desperation to make sense of his pain. It tied up the loose ends of a very dark stage of his life, an amazing feat of finding peace among paradox, and cleared the slate for the rebirth of inspiration, with a vengeance.

Publication and Pre-Productive History

"Ode to Psyche" is the first of John Keats' great odes, written among a smattering of sonnets between April 21 and 30, 1819. He was living at the time in Wentworth Place, the house of Charles Brown at Hampstead, and was just coming out of a two-month period in which his poetry had been scarce and often uninspired. He had also undergone several profound realizations including his new philosophy of life as "a vale of soul-making": an acceptance of grief and pain as necessary to the creation of a unique individual. This is particularly relevant to the poem, for the 'psyche' signifies the soul. He had read William Adlington's translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass, the ancient source of the myth of Psyche and Cupid, as well as Mary Tighe's Psyche, from which Keats borrowed much of his wording and several of his images.

The first draft of the poem is lost, but in a letter to his brother George dated April 31, Keats transcribed the earliest existing version. The paragraph immediately preceding the poem is quoted in every work that mentions "Ode to Psyche", and is vitally informative for its illustration of the state of mind that Keats was in while composing. He writes:

The following Poem-the last I have written is the first with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have for the most part dash'd off my lines in a hurry. This I have done leisurely-and I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage me to write other things
in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. (letter 123, April 31)

The true significance of these words is still unknown to Keats at their writing. It is, indeed, this 'peaceable and healthy spirit' which enabled him to compose the flawless and more famous odes that followed. Though "Psyche" is not considered so flawless, it is an achievement in its own right, a sure move with a new confidence, the first under the direction of a new Muse.

On May 4 a copy of the poem was handed to John Hamilton Reynolds, a good friend who Keats had met in Leigh Hunt's literary circle in 1816 and who had printed Keats' work in the past. It was this copy that Richard Woodhouse, Keats' chief transcriber, copied into his book of transcripts. The differences between Woodhouse's version and the one from Keats' letter are primarily only in punctuation and generally insignificant, with the most glaring being a clumsy adjustment of the line, 'Blue, freckle-pink, and budded Syrian' to 'Blue, freckled, pink, and budded Syrian'. This proved not to matter at all in the end, for the published version read: 'Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian'.

"Ode to Psyche" was included in Keats' second volume of work, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, the completed manuscript of which was received by Keats' publisher Taylor and Hessey by the end of April 1820. The book was published on either July 1 or 3 of the same year. "Psyche" followed after the "Ode on a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which were preceded only by the three title poems. None of the sonnets written at the same time as "Psyche" made it into the book.

The publisher had changed 'bloomiest' to 'brightest', considered a less objectionable substitute to the improperly formed word. He also broke up the lengthy first stanza into two parts. Keats at this point was in no position to bicker with his publisher, desperate for any kind of possible sale.

Keats had written Brown that he regarded this publication with "very low hopes". It was his last attempt at a successful literary career, and in his expectation of failure (his disillusionment was with critics more than in his own abilities as a poet) he had already nearly resigned himself to "try what [he could] do in the Apothecary line." Nonetheless, good reviews began to pour in, beginning with one by Charles Lamb in the New Times on July 19, and continuing through that of Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review in August, to still more in September. The sales of the book were very slow, however, on account of George IV's effort to divorce his wife, and the resulting clamour that arose from her attempts to assert her rights as Queen in London. The press was consumed in every detail of this, and throughout the entire summer all book sales were extremely slow. By the time the book began to receive any serious attention, it no longer mattered to Keats' future. He had grown terribly ill and moved to Italy. The volume's eventual success, rather than being significant to Keats' living career, was the beginning of his lofty posthumous reputation.

A Synthesis of Paradox

The 'peaceable and healthy spirit' expressed in the letter's preface to the poem has to be wondered at. Keats had been grappling with his lack of inspiration for a while before, and the poems he did write, such as "Why Did I Laugh Last Night?" were dark and ironic. Keats had also become more and more disillusioned with people. Besides the critics' constant slandering, he was stunned by the financial fickleness of his friends and the way in which noble ideals were so easily voiced and so rarely supported by action. Keats met Samuel Coleridge, who had been an instrumental influence to him as a young poet, on April 11. Offended by the older poet's egotistic monologue, he wrote of the encounter: "I heard his voice as he came towards me ­ I heard it as he moved away ­ I had heard it all the interval." His failing optimism is evidenced in the following passage from his letter on March 19: "among these human creatures there is continually some birth of heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish."

Keats reacted to this by searching for a path of his own, independent from the influence of the people he knew, through the difficulties the world posed. In "Psyche" he writes: "Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired." Besides signifying a solitary search for inspiration, this line makes reference to Keats' love of Greek mythology which, though 'faint' to modern eyes, held greater spiritual appeal to him than Christian values, and had permeated his poetry since his association with Leigh Hunt had begun many years before. The goddess Psyche, though, had made only one quick appearance in the earlier poem, "I stood tip-toe." More than being neglected within his own work, however, Psyche was a figure who, in Keats' words, "was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apulieus the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour." So Keats had a fresh diety on his hands, the perfect vessel for the expression of all that had been brewing inside him. Specifically, as the embodiment of the soul, the goddess Psyche was the perfect representative of his "vale of soul-making" philosophy.

Keats, in his letter, summed this new philosophy up with the question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Keats' life had been stricken with despair for some time and had recently worsened with his Love of Fanny Brawne that, because he was unfit for husbandry at the time, did nothing more than torment him. So, with this new world-view, he could accept all the 'World of Pains and troubles' as necessary for his spiritual growth as an individual. Keats says to Psyche in his ode to her:

Yes, I will be thy priest, 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 (50-53)

In an 'untrodden region' of his mind, unspoiled and fresh, Keats is giving himself completely to whatever this new view on life has in store for him. His 'branched thoughts' reflect the branching away of his 'vale of soul-making' philosophy from the Christian 'vale of tears.' Changing the concept from one in which only Christ can save you from the world of pain and suffering to one in which the grief is necessary for the creation of a soul allowed Keats just the sort of independence and resolution he needed to reinvest himself in poetry. He was thenceforth able to find the 'peaceable and healthy spirit' he was searching for with which he wished to create his poems. Pain had even become 'pleasant.'

Keats had been frustrated with the state of mind in which he habitually wrote poetry. Such thoughts as: "In the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing" (letter 123, March 8) are found throughout his letter. He felt that the way in which he traditionally 'dash'd off [his] lines in a hurry' had not resulted in his best poetry and was quite proud of the way in which he took 'even moderate pains' with "Ode to Psyche."

It is an unlikely synthesis of ideas that occurs in "Psyche." The stoic acceptance and even appreciation of pain lead to the desired state of 'leisure' necessary to create some of his finest work. The exalted odes are a result of this process, and the often-overlooked "Ode to Psyche" is the forebear of these. It is the poem that first brought together all the ideas that had been gestating during the preceding period of fertile contemplation and faltering poetic inspiration. Keats had discovered that by facing directly into his pain and exploring it honestly he could arrive at a peaceable detachment from it at the same time that he embraced it.

In the midst of his detachment, solitude, and independence of thought, Keats was intent on keeping himself open to the mysteries that life would throw at him, to keep the 'casement ope at night', the soul impressionable during the darkest of times, a 'bright torch' lit. By being open to life's mystery, accepting and even celebratory of life's pain, he would 'let the warm Love in!' He had come to grasp the apparent contradictions as essential to his individual development. Confident that his Intelligence was being schooled and made into a soul, he happened upon a period of peaceful, inspired poetical composition. It would last about three weeks, as Keats' short life was marked by constant extremes, but it would allow him a respite from the turmoil of his life for long enough to attain some of the finest work to come out of the Romantic period.

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