Keats’s Sensuousness
The term ‘sensuous’ usually refers to the enjoyment and delights borrowed from the senses. Sensuousness is that quality which is derived from five senses- sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It is a way of perception through five senses. A sensuous poet uses those word pictures that help the reader to understand the sights and sounds expressed or suggested in a poem .John Keats is best known for his use of such images that appeal to human senses. For this reason, he is often called a sensuous poet.
The Ode on a Grecian Urn contains a series of sensuous pictures—passionate men and gods chasing reluctant maidens, the flute-players playing their ecstatic music, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the tree enjoying an everlasting spring, etc. The ecstasy of the passion of love and of youth is beautifully depicted in the following lines:
More happy love! more happy happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young.
The Ode to a Nightingale is one of the finest examples of Keats’s rich sensuousness. The lines in which the poet expresses of passionate desire for some Provencal wine or the red wine from the fountain of the Muses appeal to both our senses of smell and taste:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene…….
These lines bring before us a delightful picture of Provence with its fun and frolic, merry-making, drinking and dancing. Similarly the beaker full of the sparkling, blushful Hippocrene is highly pleasing. Then there is the magnificent picture of the moon shining in the sky and surrounded by stars. The rich feast of flowers described in the stanza that follows is one of the outstanding beauties of the poem. Flowers, soft incense, the fruit trees, the white hawthorn, the eglantine, the fast-fading violets, the coming musk-rose—all this is a delight for our senses.
In the Ode to Autumn, the bounty of the season has been described with all its sensuous appeal. The whole landscape is made to appear fresh and scented. There is great concentration in each line of the opening stanza. Each line is like the branch of a fruit tree laden with fruit to the breaking point. The vines suggesting grapes, the apples, the gourds, the hazels with their sweet kernel, the bees suggesting honey—all these appeal to our senses of taste and smell. The three stanzas of “To Autumn” Keats presents three different sets of images appealing to three different senses. “To Autumn”, thus, very strongly reflects Keats’ sensuousness.
The first stanza of “To Autumn” mainly appeals to the sense of taste. The poem opens with a rich picture of Autumn in the mind.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”
Here autumn is a season of “mellow fruitfulness”. The vines, laden with the clusters of the thatch roofed country houses. The juicy grapes appeals to the sense of taste of the readers. Similarly, the apples, the gourd, the hazelnuts and honey bring water to the mouths of the readers. Though these images at first appeal of the sense of sight, they ultimately appeal to the sense of taste.
The second stanza appeals to the sense of sight. Keats personifies ‘Autumn’ and presents it as a country woman to convey an idea about Autumn’s occupations. Autumn, in the shape of a woman, is seen on a granary floor, sitting carelessly while her disordered hair is soft lifted by the winnowing wind. Sometimes, she is found in deep sleep on a half reaped cropland .At some other time, she is found to wade across a hilly brook taking the load of a gleaner on her head. She is also found to work patiently with her cider-press to collect juice from the fruits. Thus, autumn has several occupations that can be seen with our eyes. In other words, Autumn is a woman appeals to our sense of sight very vividly.
The third stanza deals with the sense of hearing. The poet says-
“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not for them, thou hast they music too,………”
In describing autumn, the poet alludes to the season of spring. Autumn does not have the song of spring. But she has her own music. There is the wailful choir of small gnats, which directly appeals to our sense of hearing. Then there are lambs ‘bleating, the songs of the hedge-crickets, the whistles of redbreast, the twittering of the swallows that appeal directly, to the sense of hearing.
Conclusion
Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.
As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of unfulfill’d renown”.
Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism. However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.
Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.
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