Ode to psyche Flashcards
(30 cards)
Form
Experimental ode form
- to give an impression of spontaneously recalling a dream or vision
- Romantic - based in feeling, individual approach to arts
“Psyche”
Ancient Greek Goddess
- Mortal human who was turned into a God
- In love with Cupid
“O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers”
- Poetic apostrophe, highlights Keats’ admiration for her
- imperative verb
“Tuneless numbers”
- modest tone, implying that his work does not have any beauty compared to the beauty of Psyche
- archaic word to describe lines of poetry
“wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear”
“Sweet enforcement” - oxymoron, highlights a strong need to celebrate beauty of Psyche
- inspiration, Keats expresses the need to respond to the inspiration he has felt - role/ job of the poet
Romantic to respond to inspiration
“And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conche ear”
- Respectul and modest tone
“Conch-shell” - celebrating the beauty and spirituality Psyche represents, a sensual beauty
“Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?”
- Keats reflects on the power Psyche has over him
- Imagination is portrayed as powerful and holds as much beauty/ power as reality
- Keats had a vision of Psyche and her lover - spiritual tone, highlights the power of imagination
- Spiritual experience
“In the deepest grass, beneath the wisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms”
- Intimate tone, personification
- Protective landscape, nature as protective
- Highlights the importance of the two lovers, suggests their value, being cherished
- In Ancient times, natural world and spiritual world were much closer
“Mid hush’d cool- rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian”
Synesthesia (visual, tactile and olfactory imagery)
- Creates an immersive experience of overwhelming beauty and ideal bliss
- Nature personified as admiring Cupid and Psyche
“They lay calm breathing, on the bedded grass”
- Paradox that they are calm and passionate simultaneously
- Keats negative capabilities
“Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft- handed slumber”
- Soft moment of a Romantic ideal
- Calm moment between kissing
“At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love”
- Dawning, highlights new and fresh live
- Symbolic of ideal, young, beautiful love
“The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!”
“dove” - symbol of peace, freedom and love
“His Psyche true” - dramatisation of the recognition of Psyche
- Psyche is seen as even more beautiful, Keats portraying audience/ himself as overwhelmed by her beauty
“O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!”
“loveliest” - placing Psyche above the gods, contrasting her
“Latest” “loveliest” - superlatives highlight her quality
“Faded hierarchy” - lost significance of Olympus
“Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire region’d star”
“amorous glow worm of the sky”
Phoebe - Goddess of the moon
- Contrasting Psyche with the moon to highlight how she is more beautiful
- suggestion of her otherworldly beauty
“No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet”
- Sensual and sensory worship
- Suggestion that she should have been worshipped in the same way
- Repetition of negatives, highlights a sense of injustice
Anaphora - highlights unfairness and injustice
“From chain swung censer teeming”
- Sensory image of worship
Semantic field of religion
Highlights a neglect from mankind
“O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre”
Apostrophe, highlighting an ideal
- Keats contrasts elements of the classical era with his era
“Too, too late” highlights the vast change between the two eras and how he has a sorrow and perhaps longing for the modern world to become more like the classical
“Find believing lyre” - songs/worship - highlighting how the classical is greater for the praise they gave
“When holy were the haunted forests boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire”
- Image of the ancient times, classical time is viewed as magical and having a greater sense of spirituality, highlights injustice of Psyche
“Happy pieties”
Modern age as less spiritual than classical
But, Keats will do his best to praise Psyche
“I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan”
Dedicating himself as a poet to celebrate Psyche in the ways the classical world were unable to
Speaker is filling the void of worship
Volta
“Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet”
No becomes thy - direct response, positive, personal - role of poet can offer a missing worship
Echoes stanza 3
Anaphora
“Yes I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind”
Metaphor - highlighting the power of the poets imagination and how the imagination is physically expanding his mind (Romantic)
- Achieved the purpose of worshipping Psyche
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain”
- Alliteration
- Oxymoron, Keats’ Negative Capabilities
“Fledge the wild- ridged mountains steep by steep”
- Lands are portrayed as more powerful and strong
(Awe inspiring, sublime, highlighting power of imagination)
