User:Rgonz470/Ode to Psyche

= Article Draft: Ode to Psyche =

Background
Keats was never a professional writer. Instead, he supported himself with a small income that he earned as a surgeon for Guy's Hospital. At the age of 23, Keats left the hospital, losing his source of income, in order to devote himself to writing poetry.

Medical Experience
Much of John Keats' medical experience reflects itself onto his work. As mentioned above, John Keats apprenticed at Guy's Hospital. He began his work when he was 14 years old, doing work such as bookkeeping, preparing the surgery room, synthesizing drugs, and dressing wounds. He was soon promoted to the role of dresser, and eventually he became a certified apothecary. It took Keats six months of hospital training and studying to pass his exam in order to earn his title as an apothecary but he worked for his position and made it happen. As a medical student, he was not earning much. He was overworked with tasks and studies six days a week, therefore he ended up dropping his apothecary work. As a dresser/apothecary, Keats witnessed many horrors. He was practicing medicine in a time where medical advancements were very behind. When dissecting corpses, there was a fetid stench of rotting flesh. Keats was not fond of the many odors he encountered while working at the hospital. He also had to hold patients down for procedures as they cried from the torturous medical practices of the era. Due to these experiences, anatomy and physiology were present in his poetry. As an apothecary’s apprentice, Keats witnessed physical pain up close, and likewise, the early deaths of family members impacted his work.

Structure
"Ode to Psyche" begins with an altered Shakespearean rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFFEEF. The use of rhyme does not continue throughout the poem, and the lines that follow are divided into different groups: a quatrain, couplets, and a line on its own. These are then followed by a series of twelve lines that are modelled after the Shakespearean sonnet form, but lack the final couplet. The next lines are of two quatrains, with cddc rhyme, followed by two lines that repeat the previous rhymes, and then a final quatrain, with efef rhyme. Within the poem there are instances of end rhyme as well as internal rhyme. A great majority of the lines in the ode have ten syllables in the form of iambic pentameter. Yet, at least three of the lines in each stanza have six or less syllables, making the format fit into iambic trimeter and iambic dimeter. Following is an example of each of these metric formats within the Ode to Psyche. Iambic Pentameter: Lines 1 and 2.....1................2.....................3..................4...................5 O GOD..|..dess! HEAR..|..these TUNE..|..less NUM..|..bers, WRUNG

........1..................2..................3................4.................5

By SWEET..|..en FORCE..|..ment AND..|..re MEM..|..brance DEAR

Iambic Trimeter: Line 12

.......1...................2..................3

A BROOK..|..let, SCARCE..|..e spied

Iambic Dimiter: Line 23

.....1................2

His PSY..|..che TRUE

Summary
In the ode, Keats speaks of having dreamt of this goddess Psyche walking through a forest. She lay in the grass in a grotto made of leaves and flowers in the embrace of Adonis. Keats therefore will be her choir, her lute, her incense, her shrine, her grove, her oracle, and her prophet. He will be her priest and build a temple in his mind to her. In her sanctuary there will be a "bright torch" and a window open at night through which her lover, Cupid, may enter.This shows how Keats believed Psyche was powerful enough to be his religion, as pronounced by his appeals to worship. ‘Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind’.

Theme
In addition to the theme of dedicating one's self to the mind, the theme of reception plays heavily upon the poem's presentation; Andrew Bennett states that the poem, like all poems, is "'heard' both by itself (and therefore not heard) and by an audience that reads the poem and 'hears' it differently". Bennett implies that the word "wrung" in line one contains a double entendre as it also alludes to the "ringing in the ears" involved with active listening. The poem's treatment of the reader as a third-party to the conversation between the narrator and the goddess exemplifies the narrative question common among many of Keats's odes and leads Bennett to question how exactly the reader should regard his place within the poem, or outside of it.

Additionally, the theme of power is highly present in the Ode to Psyche. Psyche is refrained from worship paraphernalia, she has no voice, and her realm of freedom is within the mind of the poet. Therefore, her freedom is an illusion because she resides within the control of Keats. This ode is an attempt to dominate Psyche within his thoughts and create a temple of love which is also an attempt of becoming higher power and idolization within his poem. In this poem, John Keats makes a connection between the endless capacity held by the human body and mind. “A bright torch,” one of the poem’s resonant images, touches on the rapid electrical firing of neurons, where the nerves in the nose, skin, tongue, eye, and ear absorb various stimuli and then transmit messages to the body’s processing center—the brain. A bright torch may also represent the flame of life in the soul, which fuels the physical body—one of the greatest mysteries to mankind.

Critical Reception
Walter Jackson Bate states that the poem has "always puzzled readers ... But finding the poem so elusive, we return to it only after we know the others far better. If we had hope to use them as keys, we discover they do not quite fit the lock. Meanwhile they have given us a standard hard to equal. Hence we either feel a disappointment about the 'Ode to Psyche' or else, remembering the care Keats supposedly gave it, we once more put the poem aside for future consideration." However, he also states that "The modern, respectful attitude toward this ode is deserved. But the itch for novelty has encouraged a few critics to suggest that the poem, in some dark but fundamental way, has more to it as a whole than do the later odes."

To Harold Bloom, the last lines of Keats's ode "rivals any as an epitome of the myth-making faculty". He elaborates further on this when he writes, "The poem Ode to Psyche is unique, and also central, for its art is a natural growth out of nature, based as it is upon a very particular act of consciousness, which Keats arrests in all its concreteness." Bloom also states how the diction in the Ode to Psyche is vague, creating a dreamlike state.