Ode On Indolence - Themes

Themes

The poem centres on humanity and human nature. When the poet sees the figures, he wants to know their names and laments his ignorance. Eventually, he realizes that they are representative of Love, Ambition, and Poetry. While he longs, he fears they are out of reach and therefore tries to reject them. He argues that love is what he needs least and dismisses it by questioning what "love" actually means ("What is Love? and where is it?"). He rejects ambition, but it requires more work ("And for that poor Ambition—it springs / From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;"). Unlike the personas of Love and Ambition, the narrator is unable to find a reason to banish Poesy (Poetry), which reflects the poets' inner conflict: should he abandon poetry to focus on a career in which he can earn a decent living? Keats's sought to write great poetry but feared his pursuit of literary prominence was based on a delusional view of his own merit as a poet. Further, he was incapable of completing his epic, "Hyperion". As Walter Jackson Bate explains, to Keats "Neither a finished 'grand Poem' nor even the semblance of a modest financial return seemed nearer."

Keats realized that he could never have Love, could not fulfil his Ambition, and could not spend his time with Poesy. The conclusion of "Ode to Indolence" is a dismissal of both the images and his poetry as figures that would only mislead him. Even indolence itself seems unattainable; Andrew Motion writes that the figures force Keats to regard indolence as "the privilege of the leisured class to which he did not belong." If the poem is read as the final poem in the 1819 ode series, "Ode on Indolence" suggests that Keats is resigned to giving up his career as a poet because poetry cannot give him the immortality he wanted from it. Ironically, the poem provided Keats with such immortality. Besides the biographical component, the poem also describes Keats's belief that his works should capture the beauty of art while acknowledging the harshness of life. In this way, the poems as a group capture Keats's philosophy of negative capability, the concept of living with unreconciled contradictory views, by trying to reconcile Keats's desire to write poetry and his inability to do so by abandoning poetry altogether and accepting life as it is.

Within the many poems that explore this idea—among them Keats's and the works by his contemporaries—Keats begins by questioning suffering, breaks it down to its most basic elements of cause and effect, and draws conclusions about the world. His own process is filled with doubt, but his poems end with a hopeful message that the narrator (himself) is finally free of desires for Love, Ambition, and Poesy. The hope contained within "Ode on Indolence" is found within the vision he expresses in the last stanza: "I yet have visions for the night/And for the day faint visions there is store." Consequently, in her analysis of The Odes of John Keats, Helen Vendler suggests that "Ode on Indolence" is a seminal poem constructed with themes and images that appeared more influential in his other, sometimes later, poems. The ode is an early and entirely original work that establishes the basis of Keats's notion of soul making, a method by which the individual builds his or her soul through a form of education consisting of suffering and personal experience. This is a fundamental preoccupation of the Romantics, who believed the way to reconcile man and nature was through this soul development, education—the combination of experience and contemplation—and that only this process, not the rationality of the previous century, would bring about true Enlightenment.

The classical influences Keats invoked affected other Romantic poets, but his odes contain a higher degree of allusion than most of his contemporaries' works. As for the main theme, indolence and poetry, the poem reflects the emotional state of being Keats describes in an early 1819 letter to his brother George:

ndolent and supremely careless ... from my having slumbered till nearly eleven ... please has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. 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.

Willard Spiegelman, in his study of Romantic poetry, suggests that the indolence of the poem arises from the narrator's reluctance to apply himself to the labour associated with poetic creation. Some critics provide other explanations, and William Ober claims that Keats's description of indolence may have arisen from the use of opium.