A Note on Keats's Quintuplets

A Note on Keats’s

The sad heart of Ruth and Beauty is truth

K. VISWANATHAM
Reader in English, Andhra University

I have a notion that the Odes of Keats are more beautiful than when he wrote them. They are enriched by the emotion of all who have found solace and strength in their loveliness.
Maugham: The Summing Up. p. 185

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

These lines from the Ode to Nightingale are said to refer to the Bible story by all annotators and critics. But a doubt arises if Keats’s Ruth is the same as the Bible Ruth. It is just possible that Keats’s fancy kidnapped Ruth not from Moab but from the banks of Tone.

Keats’s Ruth is sad, sick for home, in tears, amid the alien corn. The Bible Ruth is neither sad nor sick for home nor in tears though amid the alien corn nor is there a mention of nightingale in the Book of Ruth. The Moabitess clave to Naomi unlike Orpah and became a citizen, naturalized in Bethlehem. She marries Boaz and is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As far as the Bible story goes, even ‘alien corn’ is inapplicable.

The story of Ruth is one of the loveliest and most elevating in the Old Testament. The sentiments expressed by Ruth remind a Hindu reader of similar expressions in Samskrit literature. The husband’s household is the daughter-in-law’s home and the parental house is ‘alien corn’. In a play of Bhasa the father says that his daughter came of age to serve her father-in-law and mother-in-law; he does not say that she came of age to be married. Ruth’s following Naomi, her mother-in-law, is a noble turn of the blood: Bethlehem can be your native place as much as Moab may be the place of your birth.

Dr. Barnes has this very fine appreciation of Ruth: The Book of Ruth is exquisite in its simplicity and grace; Goethe described it as the loveliest little idyll that tradition has handed down to us. The story moves forward easily and naturally; it is filled with the spirit of kindliness...Early or late it deserves to be immortal. Contrast the fierce nationalism of Esther with the words of Ruth the Moabitess to the Israelite widow: Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy god my God. With such affection the daughter of Moab came to Bethlehem. Half the world now turns with like love to the Judaen village. (The Outline of Literature, p. 92) The story is touchingly illustrated by P. H. Calderon in the picture ‘Ruth and Naomi’ in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

It should be very clear now that the Bible Ruth cannot be Keats’s Ruth. Then who is this Ruth? My suggestion is that this is Wordsworth’s Ruth. Wordsworth has a poem, Ruth or The Influence of Nature. Of course there is no mention of the nightingale in this poem too. But Ruth abandoned by her lover from the green savannahs is in tears, amid alien corn and so sad that she becomes mad. She is imprisoned and escapes and lives under the woodland tree soothed by nature. I think this fits like a glove Keats’s lines; the very title of Wordsworth’s poem strengthens my suggestion.

The context also seems to support this suggestion. The nightingale is immortal. (Sapient critics like Bridges and Garrod, as if scoring a point against Keats, say: How is the bird immortal? There is no logical fallacy at all for the simple reason that poetry is not logic. What the imagination seizes as beauty is truth to the poet. Poetry is full of truths felt in the blood, not discovered in the pia-mater.) Its song, which Keats listens to, should have been heard by emperor and clown in ancient times. Nature’s riches, unlike the cinema shows, are for the poor and rich alike. And coming down to later times the song should have solaced Ruth too. The word ‘perhaps’ is significant; Keats is not sure of his facts. Keats imagines that, because the nightingale’s song filled him with a drowsy numbness, it should have given similar happiness to the emperor if uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, (Perhaps Keats is referring to Hans Anderson’s story of the Chinese Emperor and the Nightingale.) to the clown suffering from looped and windowed raggedness, to Ruth in tears in a foreign country, to a princess pining away in a magic palace beyond the perilous seas. Whether it is in far-away countries or far-off times, the immortal bird is there with its full-throated ease. Keats cannot imagine a starved and songless nightingale or a song which tells of far-off unhappy things and battles long ago. The bird is happy; its song is happy; the poet is happy till the world ‘Forlorn’ plunges him again in the weariness, the fever and the fret. The poet is disillusioned.

Disillusionment

The nightingale’s song or the Grecian Urn is a fraud: they cannot be relied upon for long. For sometime they are like an opiate. You forget the leaden-eyed despairs. And then comes reality like a killing frost. It is just like coming out of an air-conditioned room; the moment you step out, the comfort too is gone.

This is what Keats states in these two odes. They are twins with the same soul or content. The nightingale’s ecstasy becomes a plaintive anthem the unravished bride of quietness becomes a cold pastoral. Fancy cannot cheat for long; you do not know if you are awake or asleep. You do not know if it is a vision or reverie. In other words, is it a revelation or a shortlived ecstasy of humbug? In the world of commonsense the nightingale’s song is neither plaintive anthem nor ecstasy. These are, poetic imaginings like the bird’s immortality. It is neither Eliot’s Jug, jug to dirty ears’ nor Milton’s (most musical, most melancholy.’ The nightingale’s song is plaintive not because of the Greek story of Philomela ‘by the barbarous king so rudely forced’ but because of its ineffectiveness in drugging Keats into permanent happiness. The song is a stimulant–that is all: like Huxley’s mescalin or the boozers’ gin or everybody’s coffee. At the height of ecstasy the poet desires to cease upon the midnight with no pain just as Othello turns to his fair warrior and says:

If it were now to die
It were now to be most happy, for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this.
Succeeds in unknown fate

Happy insensibility to the heart-break and misery induced by the brede of marble or the nightingale’s song cannot be a permanent succedaneum if you are living clay and not a sod. One of the wisest remarks of Keats is that the afflictions of Man are as native to the world as man himself; one cannot dream away these afflictions. “Suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot escape destroy its annoyances–they are as native to the world as itself, No more can man be happy...” The happiness induced by the song is so unreal, insecure and fragile that a mere word ‘Forlorn’ dissolves it. That is strange! How ridiculous!

Interior stitching

In a way the Ode is verbally, in addition to being ideationally stitched. The ‘full-throated’ in the 1st stanza takes us to the ‘vintage’ of the 2nd. ‘Away’ in the last line wafts us to the ‘away’ in the 3rd and the ‘aways’ in the 4th, ‘No light’ of the 4th connects with ‘I cannot see’ of the 5th and ‘darkling’ of the 6th. ‘Rich to die’ of the 6th takes us to the ‘immortal’ of the 7th. And ‘forlorn’ of the 7th is just one step to the ‘forlorn’ of the 8th–and the forlornness of Keats and the hopelessness of the shadow of a great rock in a quaking land.

The Poet’s Notebook

It is interesting to note in all the Odes traces or echoes of the same poetic vocabulary as if a lecturer should ring variations on the same lecture intended for more than one class. The ‘drowsy numbness’ of Nightingale is echoed in ‘drowsily’ of Melancholy and Lethe figures in Nightingale and Melanchory; ‘rich to die’ shows itself in ‘rich anger’. ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’ is equated by ‘Beauty that must die’. Nightingale and Psyche have ‘forest dim’ and ‘in a forest’. Moss-lain dryads are matched by light-winged dryad, Bacchus rushes to the Sorrow ode as the sacrifice in the Urn goes to Endymion. The bird is immortal: ‘she’ cannot fade. Hungry generations is repeated in ‘When old age shall this generation waste’. There are casements in Psyche and Nightingale. ‘Many a mused rhyme’ is in ‘our rhyme’. The ecstasy of the Nightingale becomes ‘wild’ in the Urn. Spring in the Urn is questioned in Autumn: Where are the songs of spring? The Urn as a whole reminds one of Indolence ode. ‘Did I dream or see?’ is a repetition of ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ ‘Their lips touched not but had not bade adieu’ is a recasting of ‘Never canst thou kiss’. ‘Happy’ is plural in Psyche and Urn. ‘Midnight hours’ of Psyche is in Nightingale ‘cease upon the midnight’. Pipes and forest boughs are in Psyche and Urn. The bees in Autumn are the murmurous haunt of flies in Nightingale. Psyche, the loveliest vision, is mournful in Melancholy.

Quintuplets

This verbal stitching proves that all the odes from Indolence to Melancholy spring out of the same generative experience, the same notebook, the self-same matrix. Keats is questing for happiness that stays put in this vale where but to think is to be full of sorrow. And happiness eludes the poet. In the Nightingale he realizes Fancy cannot cheat so well; in the Urn the silent form teases him out of thought; even in the Autumn the question is raised: Where are the songs of Spring? ‘Thou hast thy music too’ is like the five-worded statement in the Urn. Does ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ mark the acme of a metaphysical Keats?

Album of Keats’s development

The critics give us an album of snaps of Keats’s spiritual development. They start with a puny and sensual Keats of slippery blisses and sidelong looks of love. Next we have the photo of a mere artist untroubled by a soul. At the third stage Keats is one of flint and iron, not a milksop as pictured by Shelley. Hence Adonais may be great as an elegy; as a picture of Keats it is negligible. Keats’s poetry is a triumph of character. When we consider that the tradition was in decline, the family ineffective, his education inadequate, and the contemporaries uncomprehending we cannot but admire his toughness. Cut up by reviews, separated from George, bereaved of Tom, financially lamed by a loophole in the will, devoured by love, struck down by galloping consumption any other would have collapsed; Keats composed his odes; he is the Alexander of song. The fourth snap reveals Keats as the embodiment of Ripeness is all. Shakesperian vision and comprehension are ascribed to him. Arnold’s He is with Shakespeare, Bradley’s He is of the tribe of Shakespeare, Murry’s Ripeness is all–fill out this picture. Next Wasserman makes out a metaphysical Keats. A plea is made for supplementing the study of Keats’s poetry by a study of his Letters. The Letters are to an understanding of Keats what the Prelude is to an understanding of Wordsworth. But why should we allow ourselves, protest some, to be influenced by the Letters when we discuss the Poems? As we close the album, we are told that in the last analysis Keats’s poetry is unsatisfying. And readers’ interest shifts from magic casements to None can enter here, from elfin grot to the granary floor, from beaded bubbles to globed peonies, from honied indolence to Beauty is truth.

The Odes

In the odes Keats is shuffling off the dreams and the phantoms. He is discovering himself. Poetry is no longer a drug; it is a deed; a cockney becomes a classic; Spenser is subsumed in Shakespeare; Flora and Pan give way to a nobler life, the agony and strife of human hearts. The earlier Keats is poetical; the later Keats is a poet. Hence his remark that poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters one’s soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. Eliot’s well-known statement that the greatest poetry is that which goes behind poetry is partly derived from Keats. In the Odes Keats is trying to steady himself about Art and Life, Beauty and Truth, Change and Permanence, the Actual and the Ideal, Sensation and Thought, the Practical and the Visionary, the Eternal and the Temporal. Keats’s poetical Odessey was from Spenser to Shakespeare, from Endymion to the Odes. Who fished the murex up? The coarse-bred son of a livery stable keeper. Who wrote the Hyperion? The poet of Endymion. Both the facts are astonishing and tease us out of thought.

The Odes are a great lake. They are richly meditative; Hamlet might have written them, says Ian Jack. Here Keats has no master and he leaves no disciple. Out of the song and the Sonnet he has fashioned a galleon-like stanza which moves slow because of consonantal density and strength (as Mr. Bate has analysed). Shelley’s poetry leans forward eagerly (as Dr. Leavis put it excellently) and Keats’s stays put; it is unhasting and unresting; it does not sprint; like a snake which has swallowed a rat it moves slow. Keats believes in loading every rift with ore. Denotative elaboration, always a sign of an amateur, gives way to the economy of suggestion. Gone is the drowsy richness, the voluptuous enchantment, the hot-house heaviness, the dreamy vagueness, the misted opulence, the vapoury dimness though, of course, even in the Urn the repetition of ‘happy’ is a damnable iteration. The Greek spirit tightens the odes; personal suffering makes them meditative; English strength pervades them. Minor talent flowers into a genius of the first order and a versifying pet lamb is something of a philosopher. It is harder, says a critic, to write a great ode than a great drama. We find here

the grandeur of the ode
Growing like Atlas stronger from its load

The odes are a calendar of the seasons. It is the personal ground, the higher thought about beauty and permanence, economy and felicity, a meditative richness that keep these apart in Keats. We are in touch with the mind of Keats here.

The Psyche is an allegory of love and the purification of the human soul. It celebrates cosmic nuptials and is agonizingly alive. Melanchory is Poesque and revises our traditional opinion of melancholy. Autumn is bursting with tumescence and is regarded as the greatest and completest of them all. The personification in the second strophe is said to be the greatest and we forget hey are words at all in this ode. But the two veriest glories are the Nightingale and the Urn. The Nightingale is said to be the most richly representative, a cri de coeur, deeply charged with human feeling: ‘distillation’ is Pettet’s word. But to Blackstone the poem is crippled right at the start and to Wasserman forces contend wildly in the poem not only without any resolution but without any hope of resolution. It is not Keats but Wasserman that bewilders us. The ode to Nightingale can as well be an ode to Death which is life’s high mead and absolute felicity.

Ode to the Grecian Urn

But undoubtedly the most provocative is the Urn. The poem like the silent form teases us out of thought; it is a Hamlet among Keats’s odes. It is the Holy Grail or the Tarpeian Rock of Keatsian criticism. The Urn has nothing to do with Lord Holland just as the Nightingale has nothing to do with Hampstead. The ode is an ode to an imagined Grecian Urn a fragment of auto-biography, a tract on aesthetics, a paper on creative process, a debate on life and art, a discussion of poetry and other arts, an explanation of the poetry of suggestion, a critique on the Timeless and Time, an essay on realism and art for art’s sake. And to state that Nightingale and Urn are ‘escapist’ poetry is to be ourselves ‘escapist’ from criticism and interpretation.

Beauty = Truth

The Beauty = Truth equation is a commonplace to some, to others a New Testament of Dantesque grandeur. According to Bridges the lines save the poem; according to Eliot they spoil the poem. To Quiller Couch they are the reflection of an amateur; to Prof. Bowra they are the last word on a type of creative activity. Some say that with that precision, which great poetry affords, Keats has epitomized in 5 words the doctrine of aesthetics just as in ‘magic casements’ he has expressed the quintessence of romance. It is a pseudo-statement to Richards and meaningless twaddle to others, a commonplace from Plato downwards or is to be found elsewhere in Keats. To some the Urn is a central poem; it gathers to itself all other resonances, urns, pots, jars, vases, concavities, sea grottos, mountain caves; it is the image of the womb, a centre of power, of healing and wisdom. Dr. Leavis debunks this that it need not raise metaphysical tremors of excitement or illumination. No wonder the ode is the most familiar, the richest in texture, the most obscure.

An ode which had led critics of stature to contradict one another should have its argument put down carefully in ordinary prose for the sake of clarity. Keats sees on an urn maidens struggling to escape from a mad pursuit, pipes and timbrels play-struggling under the trees. He then muses: the trees will not lose their freshness, the youth cannot leave his song, the lover cannot kiss, she cannot fade. He sees another scene–the scene of the sacrifice and muses: the streets of the town will ever be silent and none to tell us why the town is desolate or uninhabited.

The idea is that in art things, pleasant and unpleasant, are given permanence. Art gives

To one brief moment caught from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity

In nature the trees lose their freshness; in life the lovers kiss and she fades. ‘For ever wilt thou love and she be fair’–is pleasant; ‘Never canst thou kiss’–not pleasant; a desolate and silent town also is not pleasant. In art nothing grows and decays; we welcome this power of art. But art confers eternity on unpleasant things too. Iago is as undying as Desdemona and Caliban is as alive as Miranda. Then the last stanza bristles like a porcupine with difficulties and scares away the critic. The urn is addressed as attic shape, fair attitude, silent form, cold pastoral. The first two do not trouble us; ‘silent form’ also does not tease us out of thought. The poet seems to say: Well, I have been imagining all these things about the urn and the figures on the urn but the urn itself is silent. It baffles us like eternity. The meaning of the urn is intriguing like the smile of Mona Lisa or the face of the Sphinx.

Merely as a piece of sculpture it seems to preach to mankind of the next generation afflicted by woes other than ours:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know

Now this text is interpreted as the Bible of Keatsian Aesthetic. On the other hand Keats seems to debunk it. It is a cold pastoral, no longer a sylvan historian; the nightingale’s song cools off into a plaintive anthem. Hopes are dupes and fears are not liars. Art gives only temporary respite from the woes of life; art is not a permanent solution or anodyne. Merely to say: This is all ye know and all ye need to know–sounds rather ridiculously pompous and all knowing, if we bear in mind Keats’s negative capability or the power of presenting uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. This is not all we know; we know something more and some of us do not know this. This is not all we need to know; we need other types of knowledge–for instance the knowledge of cooking. Art means selection, selection means exclusion. How then can we say: Beauty is truth...?

Beauty is not the only truth. To the poet it may be so. Truth is larger than Beauty. Poet’s truth is not the only truth; there is the scientist’s truth, the philosopher’s truth, the prophet’s truth, the bricklayer’s truth, the bomb-thrower’s truth. Shakespeare is the largest truth and beauty we have in art. But even a bardolater has to admit that life is larger than Shakespeare and more various. Keats with his ineffable common sense recognizes this higher truth and hence rejects the Urn and its inadequate message announced so pompously, so fanatically, so un-Keatsianly. Did not Keats say: Man should not dispute and assert, but whisper results to his neighbour? (Letter, 19 Feb. 1818)

What follows ‘cold pastoral’ cannot be regarded as the highest reach of Keats’s thought. There is disillusionment in the Nightingale ode; there is disillusionment in the Urn. Can appreciation of art be the be-all and end-all of existence? Can the mad pursuit and the sacrifice solace suffering humanity? Thou shall remain a friend to man in the next generation too, says the poet. You have been our friend, you will be the friend of the next generation too to whom you pass on the same unconvincing and dispiriting message of beauty is truth. Is it not silly and cruel to talk about beauty to groaning man, now or in future? What a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this life! Justas the bird is imagined as immortal, the Urn is imagined as eternal. The bird is no more immortal than the urn is eternal. The bird may die and the urn may be destroyed by a vandal. Hence Prof. Wilson: Keats was struck with the durability of the marble as contrasted with the vanishing beauty of natural life:

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair

But to obtain this durability in marble all motion in time was excluded, a single moment given in fixed isolation from all before and after. Language restores the motion and life of time and also invests the whole truth with a durability outlasting the marble’s...A single accidental explosion could destroy the Parthenon. What accident short of a world cataclysm could destroy the Odessey, multiplied and distributed as it is over the whole earth’s surface? (The Miraculous Birth of Language, p. 184) Language effects the marriage of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The longevity of Tithonus was useless to Aurora; the eternality of the Urn is ineffectual to man. The poet has no doubt that people will take refuge in art but the solace is sawdust and ashes. The Urn is Job’s comforter. Or does the poet exhort the urn to remain a friend to man? After all art is something, if not all. Whether the message is all-sufficing or not, posterity will lean on art. Is the Urn worthy to remain a friend? Is it a pretension on its part? To pose as a friend. In life too many remain as friends, though they are not a help. ‘The better for my foes and the worse for my friends’ as a character says in a play of Shakespeare.

Life and Art

Keats rates life higher than art. To him fine writing is next only to fine doing. I am ambitious of doing some good to the world, he said. The following is a pertinent statement: I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think poetry itself a mere jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance. For although I take poetry to be the chief, there is something else wanting in one who passes his life among books or thoughts on books.

It is unconvincing to state that this Keats–the Keats of the Letters and Hyperion–shouts from house tops Beauty is truth...Those who do not feel the giant agony of the world rot on the pavement of the fane in Hyperion. My contention is Keats rejects the Grecian Urn as he rejects the Nightingale. One has to flow with the currents of life. I think Keats would have blithely agreed with the sentiments of the poet Cleon to King Protus in Browning’s Monologue:

if I paint
Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young?

I can write love odes: thy fair slave is an ode
I get to sing of love, when grown too grey
For being beloved: She turns to that young man
The muscles all a ripple on his

I know the joy of kingship–well thou art king.

To rest in art is to deny life and to pull out aesthetic rabbits out of these lines is far-fetched ingenuity. Bridges’ statement that the poem postulates the superiority of ideal art to nature goes overboard and the interpretations of various critics that here Keats says the last infallible word on art walk the plank. Keats is not the poet to escape the realities of life and seek happiness in a stimulant. He writes Beauty is truth...only to reject it. If at all he approves of beauty it is beauty coupled with truth as explained by Shakespeare in 54th sonnet: Beauty of face is not enough; the goodness of the heart is needed. The young man of the sonnets is affiicted by–economy of the closed heart. The dog rose has as rich a dye as the natural rose but the fragrance of truth is not there. Hence selfish beauty dies to itself. The beauty of the Clod is superior to the beauty of the Pebble. Maugham states roundly: For art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom, and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty but right action. (The Summing Up. p.187)

From a note on Keats’s Ruth we have gone to Keats’s Beauty is truth. Both are central to an interpretation of Keats. You can relate the Nightingale, writes a critic, to other odes, to the rest of his poetry, to the Romantics, to Spenser, and Shakespeare or to itself. The song of the nightingale might have ‘happied’ Ruth–only for a short time as it ‘happied’ Keats; the imaginative participation in the ecstasy of the song is of short duration. The wave of reality destroys the sand castle of happiness. Similarly the warmth of art in the urn cools off. And when we are vexed and harried by woes, is the urn a friend to man? And is not its message a cold pastoral? Is that all we need to know in this strange and changing world that something made static by art is an all-sufficing truth? Does the poet have less common sense than we?

It is a tragic fact that what makes us melancholy is the impermanence of beauty. Indolence cannot cure this; the nightingale cannot eliminate; the Grecian urn cannot modify it; the Autumn cannot blind us to this. Keats states this truth variously and richly.

yet there ever rolls
A vast idea before me.
A Thing of Beauty

Of course Keats does affirm his creed: I cannot live without poetry. To him a thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Thou wast the deep glen–
Thou wast the mountain top–the sage’s pen–
The poet’s harp–the voice of friends–the sun;
Thou wast the river–thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion’s blast–thou wast my steed
My goblet full of wine–my topmost deed:
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonised tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

One has to compare this with Rupert Brooke’s The Great Lover. It is Keats’s religion that the first in beauty shall be first in might. He is attached to the Principle of Beauty, the memory of Great Men, and the Eternal Being. What the imagination seizes as beauty is truth to him. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. He hovers over fine phrases like a lover. He knows that poetry is joy in beauty, that beauty is joy in truth (not philosophical or metaphysical or scientific but poetic), that truth is joy in goodness (not ethical goodness but the unending diversity of god’s creation). O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts, he cries. He is not convinced of the truth of anything unless the holiness of heart’s affections tells him so. His snail-horn perception of beauty dislikes poetry that has a palpable design on us. He disliked being bullied into a philosophy by Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime. A poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. All these seminal remarks fill out the image of Keats the aesthete. But he wanted to be of some help to his fellow men. Scenery is fine, he said, but human nature is finer. He would make the miseries of the world his misery and do good to the world through his poetry: the dreamer and the poet are distinct. If such are Keats’s views is it just to have him, ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ to mere aesthetic doctrine spun out of his lines? We do him injustice if we think of him as a Happy Prince of silken phrases and silver sentences in the Ivory Tower of Aestheticism

Barricaded from the fierce storm of life
So        Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know

is not the Testament of Keatsian Aesthetics; on the other hand the lines are a Note of Repudiation. To preach beauty to suffering humanity is like fighting with windmills. Art is a sad nostrum hawked about by dreaming quacks.

There are more things Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our aesthetics

The lines have always been interpreted as a kind of sutra on beauty. Beauty and Truth are not two but one, two sides of the same thing, synonyms. If beauty is over-emphasized, it leads to art for art’s sake; if truth is over-emphasized, it leads to realism. To a poet no truth is a truth unless it is proved on the pulse of his being,

The passions that build up our human soul

Beauty without goodness is beauty from ashes and cannot be the Pillar of Truth to distressed humanity.

Finally, Keats points out the inadequacy of Imagination and Art to cure the ills that flesh is heir to. A poet should not be a dreamer of dreams but a doer of deeds–in his poetry and through his poetry; they should acknowledge themselves as the legislators of the world. So the Nightingale ode and the ode to Grecian Urn are not a Breviary of Keats’s faith but a melody of disillusionment, a Song of aesthetic heresy. Keats’s conviction is not different from what Jean Paul Sartre states in his words on page 42:

In Beauty my grand-father saw the presense of Truth made flesh and the source of the loftiest aspirations. In certain exceptional circumstances–when a storm broke out in the mountains or when Victor Hugo was inspired–it was possible to attain to the sublime point where Truth, Beauty and Goodness became one.

The Hindus mention the same triad of essentials: satyam (truth), sundaram (beauty), sivam (goodness).