Psyche Flashcards
‘O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear:’
- direct apostrophe - eulogising poem
- start of poem much like invocation - parallels The Odyssey - ‘Sing to me, Muse!’ - yet Keats actually wishes to sing the praises of Psyche to her
- double meaning - using his mind to praise his mind, hence why he is slightly embarrassed
- intimate poem - stressed through sibilance and assonance of ‘soft-conched’
‘Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?’
- classic Keats blending of fantasy and reality - makes poem ambiguous
- emphasised through rhetorical question
- uses old-fashioned pronunciations for poetic effect - ‘ed’ sound - using Shakespearean voice to sing of classical Goddess
‘I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:’
- ‘thoughtlessly’ implies dream-like state - negative capability as content with being in uncertainties
- plants/flowers symbol of love, beauty and fertility
- iambic pentameter until this point - indicates revelation
- sudden gap in metre in line 12 suggesting he has stopped to stare
‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:’
- evokes flowers with rich imagery - synasthetic - extensive description of senses implies maybe not dream
- Eros and Psyche parallel speaker - seem to be in liminal state (almost kissing)
- rhyme scheme changes to couplets to reflect love between couple
- picture of the imagination recognising itself
‘The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;’
- joy to see Psyche emphasised through epizeuxis - ‘happy, happy dove’
- surprise indicated by iambic pentameter turning to iambic trimeter - increases pace
- recognising the beauty of his imagination, through using his imagination
- exaggerates Eros’ love for Psyche through duplexity of her name - loves her so much that she is his soul
‘Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap’d with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.’
- love of Psyche overpowering
- thus explains his despair over nobody worshipping her
- deeply immersed in classical world - reader sees ‘temple’, not church, ‘oracle’, not priest
- assonance and alliteration - brings attention to last line
‘O brightest! though too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retir’d
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.’
- more superlatives
- recognises nobody will worship her - emphasised through epizeuxis ‘too, too’
- believes world was once full of imaginative belief - ‘holy the air’ - glorifies this time - romantic idea industrialisation has warped us
- ^^ shows Keats’ appreciation towards imagination
- use of light - she is now ‘brightest’ - structural point throughout
‘So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.’
- repetition of chanting lines yet inserts himself in
- ^^ suggests speaker’s imagination doesn’t help him just conjure visions but also inhabit them
- he becomes ‘pale-mouth’d prophet’ - entranced by own visions
- repetition of ‘thy’ - full dedication to Psyche/his mind
‘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:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;’
- cyclical structure - returns to forest, but now definitely in his mind
- here mystical holiness and pure natural beauty co-exist - Keats feels both are becoming increasingly lost
- seductively lovely landscape - emphasised through assonance at end of each line and consonance of ‘l’ sound
- sublime imagery - diacope of ‘steep by steep’ suggests mountains spread all around
- ^^ emphasises power of imagination
‘And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:’
- using imagination to appreciate one’s own imagination
- ‘midst of quietness’ - common Keats/Romantic idea to be comfortable and at peace in silence
- metaphor - explored through building of temple
- symbols of flowers return - flowers bred by ‘the gardener Fancy’ - personification of own imagination
- puts all earlier images into one place in his mind
- imagination has power to use raw material of outside world and improve it greatly
‘And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!’
- turns back to Psyche through apostrophe - cyclical structure
- allusion to myth of Psyche and Eros as he would visit his bride by night
- Psyche represents soul and thus Keats suggesting everyone needs love
- Psyche and Eros have child called ‘Voluptas’ meaning ‘delight’ - imagination also evidently creates things of delight
Form
- odes often use heightened language
- stanzas slowly expand in length - final one where one glorifies imagination is longest by far - Keats gets carried away in imagination
- lots of cyclical structure - e.g Keats ponders on things Psyche never received. Later considers, not only giving them, but becoming them
