Many critics have regarded John Keats’s, Ode to Psyche as inferior to his other odes in his 1819 collection. It definitely has not received the critical attention that Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale has but I personally deem this particular ode as my favorite because of the strong emotion and sensual jargon in this particular piece. The way Keats laces each beautiful word together, gives me goose bumps as I read. I think this poem represents everything beautiful about the art of poetry. For a poet to create something so masterfully vivid through words on a page with layered metaphors that can be interpreted endlessly by whoever reads their work is so inspiring to me.
Once I got past the bewitching vocabulary in Ode to Psyche, I started to look for metaphors and meaning behind the poem. I finally came to the conclusion that while it is possible that this poem is a metaphor of Keats’s love for Fanny Browne, it is more probable in my opinion, considering the Romanticist mindset, that this is an extended metaphor about the art of poetry.
Keats has created a temple to worship Psyche, a place to immortalize her beauty and metaphorically created a temple to worship and immortalize poetry. To worship Psyche, he gives her a portion of his brain that will forever create the naturalist of beauties, in this case poetry.
My favorite lines from Ode to Psyche:
7-14: “I wandered 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.”
17-20: “Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu,/ As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,/ And ready still past kisses to outnumber/ At tender eye-dawn or aurorean love.”
32-25: “No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet/ From chain-swung censer teeming;/No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat/Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.”
55-57: “Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;/And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,/ The moss-lain dryads shall be lulled to sleep.”
perspectivesonlit 