Ode on Indolence (1819, 1848)

Question 1

meter

Answer 1

…….The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, as the first and second lines demonstrate.

……..1…………………2……………3…………..4…………..5
One MORN,..|..be FORE..|..me WERE..|..three FIG..|..ures SEEN
……..1………………2………………3………………4……………….5
With BOW..|..èd NECKS,..|..and JOIN..|..èd HANDS,..|..side- FACED

Question 2

form

Answer 2

keatsian sonnet, constitutes 5 stanzes

Question 3

‘They toil not, neither do they spin.’

Question 4

One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowèd necks, and joinèd hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp’d serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

Answer 4

The ode begins with the appearance of three elusive figures who circle before us like shady
forms inscribed upon a continually rotating marble urn, disappearing each time the urn is ‘shifted round’, only to reappear again, ‘as when the urn once more / Is shifted round, the first seen shades return’.

There is something unsettling about this
repeated shifting motion; the action suggests an anxiety to keep turning the imagined urn around to get a sense of the whole (even while doing so sees one side forever slipping out of view). It implies rather an ‘irritable reaching’ than a ‘content[ment] with half knowledge’, in Keats’s account of Negative Capability, or the kind of
serenity and poised state of mind one might associate with indolence.

So the poem progresses to become seemingly caught between irritability and half-contentment;
after the shifting, grasping movement of the first stanza, the second ends with a richly self-undoing phrase which hovers in suspended knowledge, dissolves cohesion, and leaves it unclear where to go from here or which stanza ought properly to come third

Question 5

With bowèd necks, and joinèd hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp’d serene,

Answer 5

The unusual compound-adjective suggests the simultaneity of at once showing the side of
the face, and facing the side. Perhaps it also carries the more disquieting suggestion of ‘two-faced’ or ‘Janus-faced’, and may owe something to the ‘half-faced fellowship’ of Shakespeare’s Hotspur as he ‘apprehends a world of figures here, / But not the
form of what he should attend

In visual art, ‘side-faced’ refers to a profile portrait,
a portrait whose subject is only ever half seen, half known. In a poem that at times seems equally unwilling to meet its readers fully in the face, Keats is concerned at the outset of the ode with how figures of selective disclosure might be realised in poetic form.

Question 6

betide

Answer 6

Happen, occur

Question 7

Phidian

Answer 7

Adjective alluding to Phidias (circa 490-430 BC), a sculptor of ancient Greece. It is believed that he supervised construction of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens and sculpted the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Question 8

commentary on poems own artistic productivity = locates a dynamic somewhere
between vain busyness and creative restlessness, between fruitless idleness and generative passiveness.

Out of this dynamic the ode emerges, a product of the creative energy that Keats finds latent within a state of contemplative indolence.

Answer 8

One might equally say that only a poem peculiarly lacking in fixedness or stasis could allow itself to be so shuffled about. Rather than motionlessness, then, the unstable formulation of the poem’s stanzas allows for a constancy of motion without linear progress.

Question 9

They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

Answer 9

The stanza turns on the rhyming of ‘urn’, ‘urn’, ‘return’.

The passive voice which describes how the figures ‘were seen’ or the urn ‘is shifted’ displaces Keats from the action impelling his own poem

The figures themselves appear hushed in
conspiratorial fellowship: ‘with bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced’. ’

Question 10

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a mask?
Was it a silent deep-disguisèd plot
To steal away, and leave without a task

Answer 10

The syntax conspires in the ‘deep-disguised plot’ that the second stanza describes, drawing on the shifting meanings contained within a word so that, as the lines unfold, so too do their underlying complexities.

The plot to ‘steal away, and leave’ implies a furtive attempt to depart, only, as the line runs onto the next, it becomes clear that the subject switches from the figures to Keats’s ‘idle days’, so that ‘leave’ refers not so much to their taking leave but to his being left without, and ‘steal’ takes on the further sense of theft.

There is an uneasy symmetry in the stanza between Keats’s initial resentment that the figures will leave and leave his idle days without a task, and resentment that they will not leave and leave his sense unencumbered.

Question 11

My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower:
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?

Answer 11

One of the surprises of this stanza is Keats’s objection to the figures’ retreat
on the grounds that it will deprive him of a task (rather than regarding their presence
as a disruption of his indolence which he might then resume once they have left).

This is ‘deeply puzzling’, Willard Spiegelman notes in his study, Majestic Indolence, ‘since we might expect Keats to object to just the opposite, that is, to the figures’ bringing to rather than removing from him an occupation that might spell the end to
idleness’.

Keats suggests, however, that there is more at stake than merely a temporary state of distraction, since the figures’ presence at once empties out the
productive, tasked aspect of his indolence, leaving him in a state of vacancy, and at the same time leaves him troubled by a lingering knowledge or feeling, so that he is left imploring them to ‘leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness’

Question 12

‘leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness’.

Answer 12

Working with tropes of absence/presence and emptiness/fullness, Keats demands with his double negatives (‘Leave me unhaunted with everything
except nothing’, he is saying) a release from temptations of the will which is simultaneously a repletion of ‘nothingness’, for which another word is, of course, indolence itself.

This provides a lucid summary, but it risks leaving the lines unhaunted of some of their hovering ambiguities. Spiegelman singles out the familiar tropes and syntactical ploys that Keats goes in for ‘with his double negatives’ and his paradoxical formulations. But Spiegelman’s gloss, ‘he is saying’, implicitly reduces this to all he is really saying, and the final summative ‘of course’ makes too easy an equation of Keats’s complex negations by counting their haunting ‘nothingness’ as just another
word for indolence

Question 13

“all but—nothingness?”

Answer 13

The extended dash is crucial, a pause for thought that stops just short of calling for total thoughtlessness. The line declines to choose between all or nothing, opting instead to remain suspended between modes of awareness. Being
‘unhaunted quite by all—but nothingness’ is somehow not the same as being haunted by nothingness.

The verse allows the shifting meanings in each word to maintain a hovering sense of all that is being negated: ‘quite’ means completely here, but also allows for the modifying (and oxymoronic) sense of being only ‘quite’ complete; while ‘all—but’ means here everything except, but also invokes the more colloquial meaning of ‘all but’ to mean ‘very nearly’. The intimations of an only almost nothingness are suggested as well by the way that ‘unhaunted’ carries a ghostly trace of that which it negates (just as the ‘unravished’ state of the Grecian Urn brings withit a disturbing hint of its potential for ravishment). The lingering sense of something which is not fully felt draws upon the etymological root of indolence to describe a
state of non-pain.

Question 14

indolence is not a state of vacancy or insensibility but one of

Answer 14

paradoxical alertness to the presence of absence – ‘the feel of not to feel it’, as Keats puts it, ‘the know of not to know it’ in Susan Wolfson’s formulation of Negative Capability

Discussions of these lines are drawn into reiterating their paradoxical, circumlocutory logic in an attempt to gesture towards this slippage
between modes of cognition: Deborah Forbes cites it as ‘a kind of conscious unconsciousness’, while Jacques Rancière writes, ‘indolence is a doing that is also a not doing’.

Such formulations might sound gnomic, but they acknowledge the poem’s way of teasing out distinctions that are drawn finely but not firmly, of
allowing oppositions to coexist, so that the ode might claim not to feel what its language makes felt, might at once reject an untasked idleness and embrace an unhaunted indolence.

Question 15

These are the shifting states that Keats seeks to keep in play

Answer 15

But the lingering ambiguity creates a potential rupture in narrative progress or momentum at this point of the poem, leaving it at the mercy of the three circling figures to set the thing in motion again.

Question 16

A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d
And ached for wings, because I knew the three;

Answer 16

As speaker and figures exchange knowing glances, it seems they are engaged in playing out a pattern that has already been played many times before. In action almost choreographed, they pass, ‘and, passing, turn’d’, flashing a glance in Keats’s direction as they go – yet only for a ‘moment whiles’, Keats notes, punning on ‘wiles’, perhaps,
with a nod to their allure.

In Michael O’Neill’s words, it is as though ‘having
recognized them, he knows them only too well’.

Question 17

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,—
I knew to be my demon Poesy.

Answer 17

A letter to his brother written in March 1818 reveals a previous encounter: cavalierly declaring himself to be ‘in a sort of temper indolent and extremely careless’, Keats continues, ‘neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem
rather like three figures on a greek vase—a Man and two women—whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement’ (LJK, II. 78-9)

The sense of familiarity here corresponds to the ode’s newly arrived at ability to recognize the
figures, which might suggest a line of progress in the poem, a progress which is nonetheless undercut by the sense that Keats has all the while been indulging both himself and the three figures by willfully allowing himself to be beguiled.

Question 18

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;

Answer 18

No sooner have the figures arrived than they are gone again, and their evasions take on the more negative associations of shiftiness as a form of
deceitfulness.

As he invokes each figure again, Keats views them now with a worldly-wise disillusionment: ‘What is love’, he scoffs, ‘and where is it?’. Once they have faded, he seeks to convince himself that he never really cared for them anyway.

‘Forsooth!’ and ‘O folly!’, he postures, in affronted expostulations that upset the ode’s more
lyrical aspects and seem to parody its prior seduction by the urn-like figures.

Question 19

As Ambition, ‘ever watchful with fatigued eye’, is worn out by her own watchfulness, Keats’s vigilance against ambition becomes its own paradoxical ambitiousness.

Answer 19

And as for that ‘poor Ambition’, he now tells us, ‘It springs / From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit’. The line proceeds in fits and starts, the language clipped and monosyllabic, its short vowels spat out between fricatives and glottal stops.

The renunciation of the allurements and illusions of Love, Ambition and Poesy sounds a note of petulance and meanness at this point as the poem seems to fall out of love with its own lyricism.

Question 20

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;

For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence;
O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

Answer 20

As he invokes each figure again, Keats views them now with a worldly-wise disillusionment: ‘What is love’, he scoffs, ‘and where is it?’. Once they have faded, he seeks to convince himself that he never really cared for them anyway. ‘Forsooth!’
and ‘O folly!’, he postures, in affronted expostulations that upset the ode’s more
lyrical aspects and seem to parody its prior seduction by the urn-like figures.

As Ambition, ‘ever watchful with fatigued eye’, is worn out by her own watchfulness, Keats’s vigilance against ambition becomes its own paradoxical ambitiousness. And as for that ‘poor Ambition’, he now tells us, ‘It springs / From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit’. The line proceeds in fits and starts, the language clipped and monosyllabic, its short vowels spat out between fricatives and glottal stops. The renunciation of the allurements and illusions of Love, Ambition and Poesy sounds a note of petulance and meanness at this point as the poem seems to fall out of love with its own lyricism.

Question 21

‘For
Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,— / At least for me,—’.

Answer 21

Turning on Poesy herself, the poem assumes an uneasy self-reflexiveness, its syntax breaking down into dashes, reneging on itself in stultified clauses

The lineation that would initially deny Poesy any joy whatsoever does so by effectively grinding the poem to a halt, as though Keats needs to interrupt and extract himself from the verse in order to
renounce its effect.

Question 22

And once more (third time) came they by:—alas! wherefore?
My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:

Answer 22

From the recollected poise of early summer comes the knowledge that it is in those precious moments when the active straining after thought is suspended that the mind is at its most richly productive, its thoughts coming unbidden and arriving with the pleasant surprise of budding warmth or birdsong drifting in at an open casement. Yet, this apparently smooth narrative progression belies a more unsettled pattern. Time
slips out of sync as the figures pass by for the third time – again. The fifth stanza’s ‘a third time came they by’ repeats the formulation in the third stanza, ‘a third time passed they by’.

Question 23

The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;
O Shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

Answer 23

How many third times have there been? Trapped in a Beckettian waiting game, like the character in Stirrings Still who asks only that the shadowy
others ‘leave him or not alone again waiting for nothing again’, here the figures’ comings and goings play out a drama in which nothing happens, thrice.

It is made clear whether the repeated third time is the same time seen from two different
perspectives, or whether it represents ‘a return and counter-shift’, as Stillinger suggests. When Richard Monckton Milnes first published the poem, he silently amended the opening of stanza five from ‘A third time’ to ‘And once more’ in order
to avoid the ambiguity of a second third time. But that ambiguity seems right here, since it conveys something of the structural shiftiness intrinsic to the ode’s indeterminacy, an indeterminacy that is testified to by the very fact that its stanzas could be so confused.

Question 24

So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!

Answer 24

The ode seems to have come full circle, repeating the circlings and recirclings of the figures themselves, as though Keats would go back on his rejection even as he bids them depart. Keats’s confidence in the knowledge, ‘I yet have visions for the night / And for the day faint visions there is store’, allows for the possibility that the figures
have been an enabling source of creative energy, and that, at the same time, the rejection of them provides the necessary self-possession and commitment to indolence that produces this store of visions.

Question 25

Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return!

Answer 25

The final line of the ode ends, ‘never more return!’, which in fact returns us to the very beginning: both the first and last stanzas include the end rhymes ‘return’, ‘urn’ and ‘once more’.

The ode seems to have come full circle, repeating the circlings and recirclings of the figures themselves, as though Keats would go back on his rejection even as he bids them depart. Keats’s confidence in the knowledge, ‘I yet have visions for the night / And for the day faint visions there is store’, allows for the possibility that the figures
have been an enabling source of creative energy, and that, at the same time, the rejection of them provides the necessary self-possession and commitment to indolence that produces this store of visions.