OR
Comment critically on Keats’s sensuousness and state what value it contributes to his poetry.
OR
“Keats is a mystic through senses”-discuss with the help of poems prescribed.
OR
Assess Keats’ sensuousness on the strength of his poems.
Answer: “Poetry”, says Maine, “as it came to Keats , was not a spiritual vision as with Wordsworth , not an emancipating vision as it was with Shelley – but a joy , a supreme and unlimited joy which sprang out of sensation and this joy arising out of sensation was as exquisite as Coleridge’s through imagination.’’
While Wordsworth spiritualizes and Shelley intellectualizes Nature, Keats expresses her through the senses. The colour, the scent, the touch, the pulling music, these are the things that stir him to his depths. There is not a mood of earth he does not love, not a season that will not cheer and inspire him.
“It was a temper in Keats”, says Stopford A. Brooke, “Of unlimited and unmuffled pleasure, a sensitive girl-like sensuous pleasure in beauty and in the consolation of beauty to the soul.” He flies from one beautiful object of Nature to another, in a butterfly of fashion; tasting and slipping honey and little caring to settle down upon one.
The cry for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts is characteristic of Keats. The delight in sensuous beauty in its upward manifestation depends party on the soul and party on the sense. Physically, Keats was endowed with so fine and pleasure -loving an organization that his senses as well as his soul were delicately responsive to outward impressions.
Says his friend Haydon:
“The glitter of the sun seemed to make his nature tremble.”
He luxuriated in sensation, and went into raptures over the taste of claret or of a fruit. In almost all his fine works, we find him sailing in the same vessel of sensuousness. “In these works”, says Hudson, “Keats communicates something of his keener susceptibility to the outduller and more phlegmatic senses”.
‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, wonder of romance as it has been often described, is a poem of sensuous impressions.
“Keats”, writes Ms Garland “is sensuous in the sense that he delights and luxuriates in all things that please the eye, the ear or the tongue”. According to Herford, “In his mind, Keats dwelt in palaces, beautifully wrought with the carvings of gold and jewellery. He travelled through the realms of gold; he tasted exquisite fruits and spices, smelt roses and lilies; he lived among Greek Gods and Fairies of the Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
According to Milton, poetry should be simple, sensuous and impassioned. Says Mathew Arnold: “The eminency in Keats’ poetry is of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous. It is easy to discover in his works, the whole gamut of sensations, set off by a richness and softness of colouring which reveal the complacency of refined fondness.”
There is a thesis, that with a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration”. He is pre-eminently a man of sensation. His poetry has rarely been equalled in description of the beauties perceptible to the senses such as- form, colour, perfume or music and it is full of passion. It is above all aspiration and desire and the object of his desire is not the intellectual beauty of Shelley, but that which reveals itself to the enchantment of the sense.
But Keats is by no means the epicurean according to whom the true enjoyment of life is secured only through a calm and detached reasonableness.
The entire poetry of Keats breathes out an aroma of sensuousness and it is on account of this aroma of sensuousness, that his poetry is marvellously beautified. Let us examine the sensuous beauty of his beautiful ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:
“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!”
Though not his masterpiece, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, is undoubtedly the greatest of Keats odes enshrining a profoundly deep philosophical idea that escape from the grim realities of life is almost impossible. According to a noted American critic: “This Ode is a masterpiece of Keats in the sense that it helps us in following Keats’s logic that perfect happiness, beauty and love are beyond man’s reach because Keats himself yearned passionately and sincerely for these , but never had”.
“Keats in this poem, solves an extremely complex and intricate philosophic problem that has baffled many a bald-headed philosophers: “Can Fancy help one to escape from the worries and pains of the realistic world?” or, in other words, – living in the material world full of cares and anxieties, can we forget its stern realities?
Keats solves this question by saying:
“Fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf”.
In the similar fashion, in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the sight of the Grecian Urn raises a thrill of love and sensuous delight in the heart of the poet . He wants to revive in the poetry, the festive occasion of the sacrifice carved on the urn. The poet is led to think that in this way, the superiority of Art over Nature is established. Art is permanent while human life and sensuous beauty are transitory.
Hence, to conclude, it will not be an exaggeration to say that there are enough evidences in his poetry where Keats has revealed his mysticism without parting away from sensuousness. It is, therefore, appropriate and apt enough to say that -“Keats is a mystic through senses”. Poetry to Keats is a joy wrought out of sensation because in one of his letters, he himself has remarked:
“With a great poet, the sense of beauty obliterates every other consideration.”