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IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL) ISSN(E): 2321-8878; ISSN(P): 2347- Vol. 1, Issue 6, Nov 2013, 59- © Impact Journals
BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY: THE CORE OF KEATS’S ROMANTICISM
MD. ZIAUL HAQUE^1 & NAZNEEN RAHMAN^2
(^1) Lecturer, Department of English, Asian University, Dhaka, Bangladesh (^2) Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Asian University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
ABSTRACT
Escaping into the world of imagination is an easy way to forget the present pains of life. John Keats, the most romantic among romantics wants to get free from the present pains of life and searches beauty in the world of imagination. To Keats, beauty lies in truth and anything true is beautiful. He loves nature and his touch transforms everything into beauty. He creates an imaginary world of dream where one can forget the harsh realities of life. But one has to come back and face the real world and be in his senses. We seek pleasure and find its true meaning in this world rather than escaping. So, the question arises does the escaping into the world give real pleasure or accepting the reality of life is the best way of getting beauty and pleasure. This article tries to persuade Keats’s aphorism through some of his famous odes and shows Keats’s way to escape into the world of imagination and search for beauty. At the same time, it also aims at eliminating the pessimistic approach and accepts the truth of real life after comparing the fake endeavor to escape.
KEYWORDS: Romantic Poetry, Beauty and Pleasure, Love, Adventure
INTRODUCTION
John Keats is one of the most dominant romantic poets in English literature. His poetry is full of sinuousness, imagination, love and beauty which are the essence of romanticism. But his invocation to love, beauty and art surpass all other romantic poets. Still now his poetry attracts the readers for its various themes. But the question is that which is the core theme of his romanticism? Which is the ultimate truth of his art? This article will try to find out the answer of these questions.
No doubt the essence of romanticism is found in all literature and the complete expression of the individual is expressed in all romantic poetry .According to critics art is the creation of beauty and romantic art gives us the kind of beauty which is uncommon and mysterious. Romantic poets invoke this beauty and that is why their poetry is highly subjective, imaginative, exciting, curious, aspiring and restless. It represents the world of dream and the romantic poets like to escape from the harsh realities of life to a world of romance and beauty. The famous poet, John Keats, is considered to be the most romantic of all the romantic poets as he is the most escapist of all them. He wishes to
“Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget The weariness, the fever and the fret” of real life. Keats’s poetry is the purest poetry in the sense that it is neither political nor expressing any social significance.
Keats, like other romantics, tries to find an escape in the past. The ancient Greeks and the glory of the middle age attract Keats’s imagination immensely. He is inspired by the past and rarely writes about the present. The theme of Endymion, Lamia and Hyperion is classical while the style is romantic. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Isabella and the Eve of
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St Agnes are medieval in origin. So, Keats escapes from the realities of the present to the past. The themes which we find in Keats’s poetry are highly romantic and most of his poetry is busy in the quest of beauty. Love, adventure, chivalry, pathos are also some of his themes. The fear of death runs through some of his poetry and disappointment in love is still another theme found in his poetry. He loves nature and his touch transforms everything into beauty. He has a great devotion to beauty and he finds truth in anything which is beautiful. Beauty is his religion and this beauty makes him forget everything. To Keats, beauty is everywhere. So, beauty is the dominant theme and one of the major hallmarks of Keats’s poetry. Therefore, this paper focuses on Keats’s romanticism which conveys us the message through his poem
“Ode to Grecian Urn” where he says Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. (49) But if we study his poetry with great attention we see that the essence of truth and beauty lie not in an imaginary world rather in real life. So it is the reevaluation of his poetry to eliminate the pessimistic approach which leads us to total darkness and the same time it is not the way of escaping from the realities of life but find pleasure among the pains of the world with the said target.
In the ‘Ode to Grecian Urn’, the urn is depicted as a beautiful piece of art and according to Keats it seems as if a legend which is carved on its sides. Keats asks what legend is meant by the extra ordinary forms of the figures on the urn which has been the same for centuries. This poem presents the Urn in its mystery and shows what questions it poses to the poet. The main subject consists of the scenes on the Urn, not as a casual observer might notice them, but as Keats sees them with the full force of his imaginative insight into the metaphysical problems which they raise and their hint of another life different from that which we ordinarily know. It also relates the experience gained from the Urn to its special order of reality and answers the questions which the poem has raised.” (Bowra 135-136)
The urn is a mystery and Keats shows imagination as superior to reality. As Keats writes: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; (11-12). These lines assert that the unheard music is far sweeter than the music heard. Anything beautiful must be true which in Keats’s words is
“What the imagination creates on Beautiful must be true whether it existed before or not.” But it is universal that art is permanent while human life is temporary. The urn will be as it is forever. The leaves of the trees will remain evergreen, neither shedding the old leaves nor having new leaves. The music will be there forever which we can never hear-still it is more melodious. The musician creates music unceasingly without the fear of dying one day. The young lover will always crave for the love of his maiden. The maiden will always run away and remain beautiful forever. The lover’s love is unique in the sense that his love is ever fresh and will never perish. And the maiden will be young throughout her life not to think of growing old. But the earthly love usually leads to sorrow and darkness. The love and beauty depicted on the urn is somewhat different from reality; love in real life gains everything, loses interest, fades and dies; and beauty is transitory, it leaves the body of a maiden transforming her into an old woman. Then we find that the poet’s imagination creates a small town which is empty and silent as all the people are out of town with a priest for the purpose of sacrificing or for a pious deed. As Brian Stone says, “The absence of life in the town emphasizes the absence of real life in the urn itself. The town is doubly dead; it is not pictured on the urn, and its inhabitants have all left it. If art, as represented by the urn and its pictures, is the ultimate consolation, it is also death, because it promises no movement.”(83)
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Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, - (23-24) Here the poet looks back to spring; the sweetness of the season for a moment but immediately comes back to the present and enjoys the beauty of autumn. His love of nature is fully exposed in this ode. The search of joy in the present, the isolated beauty of the hour gives the ode a unique charm. Autumn is not the beginning of winter rather it is a season of fruitfulness and fulfillment. The critic, Sidney Colvin says: “In words so transparent and direct we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and season seem speaking to us.”
“Ode on Melancholy” reveals the truth that melancholy and all that is beautiful, delightful and joyful live together. If somebody deeply understands beauty, joy or delight, he’ll be able to grasp the intensity of melancholy. According to Keats, melancholy is an essential part of beauty because it is from beauty that melancholy is born. Too deep thought of melancholy destroys the true essence of it. Brain Stone says,
This poem is a concentrated expression of Keats’s familiar belief about the necessary conjunction, for himself as poet, of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, using analysis of the mood of melancholy as the means. (The Poetry of Keats.85)
The first stanza warns us against a deep thought of melancholy which may give rise to a dead soul. As the poet says:
“Do not drown your senses in total forgetfulness, if you want to feel the full force of melancholy. By doing so, your soul will become dead and you will not feel any kind of anguish or pain.”
The poet asks not to go with those who try to seek death. We should not invite such any thing which with its gloomy and melancholic touch will drown our melancholy too deep destroying the true sense of melancholy:
For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. (9-10) The second stanza tells us how to enjoy sadness with deep fulfillment. Melancholy is like a thin layer in front of our happiness which does not create any darkness. When we are sad, we should deeply enjoy our sadness by watching the beauty of a morning rose, the rainbow colors, and flowers, beloved’s angry look, etc. In the third and the last stanza the poet gives us the real picture of melancholy. Here “She” is Melancholy itself, which Keats personifies as female. The goddess of Melancholy and the goddess of Beauty dwell in the same temple:
She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die; (21) We know that beauty is transitory and this feeling makes us sad. Again the goddess of Melancholy and the god of Joy are dwellers in the same temple. Joy is also short-lived and while we are experiencing the pleasures of joy, we have the fear of this joy to be vanished in a short period of time. That’s why the poet rightly wrote the famous lines:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine, (25-26) One who has tasted delight; he and he can only enjoy and praise melancholy. The ode is so enriched by imaginative and intellectual perception that Swinburne (Fraser, 48) considered it ‘the subtlest in sweetness of thought and feeling’ of all the odes.
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: The Core of Keats’s Romanticism 63
Through above discussion of Keats’s famous odes, we can say that whatever is beautiful must be true; and whatever is true must also be beautiful. Thus beauty and truth are inseparable. Beauty and truth are two sides of one and the same thing. Because beauty is a kind of lens or window that gives us a glimpse of a greater dimension of reality which is true and very much closer to God or the source of being or meaning where there is no place of escapism rather beauty lies in the real world of men, not merely in art or in the fairyland of fancy. Here truth stands for the real and actual world as distinguished from the world of imagination. Avoidance of reality can’t be the source of beauty. It is not a way out of all pains. It’s a momentary. It is not the permanent solution of life. That is why Keats also frequently came back to the real world from that of imagination. His Nightingale came back to the earth time to time. Short lived pleasure could not give it ultimate peace and happiness and it can not be the way of ultimate truth and permanent beauty. Because ultimate truth and beauty don’t lei in the state of escapism but in the state of reality that he finally exhibited in his poetry. His aim was at the creation and revelation of beauty but of beauty wherever its elements existed. And we see these elements are existed in this world which is full of well and woe and if we want to ignore it through escaping we will fall upon the thorn of life and it will bleed us. So it is better to accept the reality of life. So the core of Keats poetry advocates us not to escape and seek short lived pleasure rather find the deep truth in the real life which is the core of ultimate beauty and that is the truth beauty. The hardships of our lives carry the essence of truth where people should seek the beauty and take everything as beautiful so that we may find the meaning of truth which will lead us to our death — the ultimate truth.
However it can be said that the word Beauty envisages the lovely things that can be trendy and cherished by all of us which would give gratification instead of momentary happiness. Further the truth refers to the plain facts of life which may be pleasant or unpleasant. But we should have courage to accept them with equability which is rather difficult. This makes our life beautiful. So if we closely study his poetry we see that he advocated to beauty and truth in one side, on the other side he sometimes tried to find out this beauty and truth in the world of imagination. So beauty, truth, imagination, reality have become the dominant theme of his poetry. But finally “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” supersedes all other themes of Keats poetry and according to Keats – “that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.
REFERENCES
- Bowra, Maurice. The Romantic Imagination. Oxford University Press: London, 1966.
- Stone, Brian. The Poetry of Keats. Penguin critical studies: Penguin Books, 1992.
- Byron, Glennis. John Keats Selected Poems. York Press: London, 2001.
- Murry, J.M. Keats, 4th^ ed. New York: Noonday Press, 1995.
- O’Neill, Judith. Reading in literary criticism, 2nd^ ed. Universal Book Stall: New Delhi, 1990.
- Bate, Walter Jaction. Negative Capability. A Collection of Critical Essay. Ed. by Walter Jakson Bate: Prentic-Hall, Inn. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1998.
