Keats
Ode to Psyche
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dream to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof 10
Of leaves and tremblend blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bid adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: 20
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan 30
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir'd 40
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
So let me by thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane 50
In some untrodden region of my mind
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, 60
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delith
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
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Written April 1819. Psyche, a mortal beauty, aroused the jealousy of Venus, who sent her son Cupid to torment her. He, however, fell in love with her, and visited her secretly by night, forbidding her to see his face; one night she lit a lamp, saw who her lover was. and was deserted by him; but after many trials they were reunited and married.
The story is generally taken as an allegory of the soul (psyche), but Keats makes of her a goddess of beauty, who has not been properly worshipped; in the poem he imagines himself her priest, instituting thew cult of beauty.
The poem receives human colouring from the fact that in the month it was written Fanny Brawne, afterwards Keats's fiancée, came to live next door to him at Wentworth Place, which had a common garden with Keats's rooms.
The style of the poem resembles Dryden's irregular odes, and has many likenesses to Milton, especially Paradise Lost, Book IV, "the garden of Eden".
l. 2. - "By sweet enforcement" - cf. Milton, Lycidas, l. 6.
l. 4. - "soft conched" - Shaped like a shell, but soft.
l. 14. - "Tyrian" - Purple, from the purple dye of Tyre; but Keats wrote, and may have meant "Syrian".
ll. 32-35 and 46-49. - Reminiscent of Milton, Nativity Ode, stanza XIX.
l. 41. - "lucent fans" - Shining wings.
l. 60. - "With the wreathed trellis of a working brain. - this striking image is partly derived from Keats's medical study of anatomy. Cf. "branched thoughts", l. 52 above.
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