... life is but a day

A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way

From a tree’s summit ...

There is no release from this ceaseless rhythmic pattern of change except through the acceptance and reconciliation of contraries within oneself.

While the classical poet accepts with quiet resignation the continual farewell of earthly joys, the Romantic is perpetually in a quest for some permanent refuge that can bear the onslaught of Time, Decay and Change. Wordsworth in The Excursion seeks ‘stability without regret or fear’, ‘the central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation’. To Keats, however, this serenity of vision is born out of a contemplation of beauty implicit in the joy of the passing moment — ‘a pigeon tumbling in the clear summer day’, ‘light uplifting of a maiden’s veil’. This burst of lyrical joy in the poet’s sense of oneness with a beauty that is fast-fading involves a going out of the constraints of the self to other existences wherein the poet waits, watches and grows along with the flower, with the sparrow picking at the gravel and with the soul blossoming between the contradictions of life and death, between fulfilment and extinction.

‘The excellence of Art’, Keats affirms, ‘is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate in their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth’. The reality disclosed in King Lear may be tragic, but through a heightened awareness of the truth of existence reality becomes transformed utterly, giving birth to a ‘terrible beauty’ — a beauty not of soft colours and light, but that of a spectacle of human existence transfigured to universal truth. Loneliness, suffering, death seen in isolation in Isabella, St. Mark, Lamia is transmuted into a thread of continuity where flowering, fruition, death and immortality coalesce to form the girdle of Eternity. In the Endymion the search for an ideal glimpsed dimly in vision leads to a journey that ends in finding beauty through love and sympathy for a life rooted in the bounty of earth. While the Shelleyan Alastor is a lonely idealist, frustrated in his quest for the unattainable, Keats’s Endymion moves towards the knowledge that the actual world of human life must be accepted and that only through participation in that life can the ideal be achieved.

In Ode to a Nightingale the poet remains unsure of his grasp of the Truth, whether the realm of the nightingale or that of Man is the living reality. The world of ‘green darkness’, however enchanting, remains ‘forlorn’ and alien to mankind because it is not sanctioned by reality. The Keatsean instinct is to seek a particular sense-object experience and hence the search for beauty continues till it is realised in real, earthy life.

The Ode on a Grecian Urn reconciles the contraries in the realm of Art. ‘The great end of poetry’, Keats writes, is ‘that it should be a friend to "soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man".’

The urn as a work of art draws upon the well of life for its inspiration and allows us a glimpse into that region where mortal sufferings, desolation, overwhelming happiness without ‘life’s satiety’ are perceived in unison. The varied passions ranging from consummate joy to the torment of an aching heart are viewed in life in their fragmented, disjointed form. In the realm of art contraries melt into a unified pattern, easing the burden of mystery.

In Ode to Autumn it is the seasons, a symbol of life, which gives truth to the conviction that forces of destruction are as native to the world as the forces of creation. Autumn is both Life and Death, seemingly participating in activity, yet above the cycles of Time and Decay. She is confined by the boundaries of Time, yet is lifted above the temporal, as ‘drows’d with the fume of poppies’, she prolongs the pause of the season. The poem is a poignant expression of that idea from the New Testament — ‘If it die, it brings forth much fruit.’

The leitmotif of ‘death is life’s high need’ runs through the works of Keats and gives it a special richness. The moment of the birth of an organism is also the moment of death. The one way of looking does not preclude the other: Ripeness is all. The ‘unusual intensity’ of his life, which had an element of folklore in it, brought him happiness, sorrow, peace and insight into a world enclosed in the ‘silent growth of flowers’, the stillness of the urn and the full-throated song of summer. His is a voice that lives beyond the pales of Time, linking the voice of ancestors to their children.