A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Psyche; or, The Wreath’d Trellis of a Working Brain

102 Psyche; or, The Wreath’d Trellis of a Working Brain Keats begins “Ode to Psyche”with an invocation that is also an apology: 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 ear23 The ode is addressed to Psyche, the goddess Keats would honor. He sings back to her immortal ear her own story, reveals back to her her own secrets.This redundancy contains a threat. He knows that such reverence risks blaspheming the very figure of his devotion, for in speaking to the goddess Keats also speaks to us. He has come to a sense of the poem—and more largely, of poetry—as entwined with fundamental ironies. Inescapable inversions seem a primary consequence of poetry as a phenomenal practice. Poetry, Keats has learned, can keep no secrets; it shows the secret forth. The cost of devotion to a goddess is to keep silent about those mysteries devotion reveals. But a poem keeps no words silent. It forces into appearance all that should remain hidden in the blank page’s nothingness. A poem expressing faith betrays the figure of that faith—it cannot be helped. And so Keats apologizes to Psyche for calling her into being—the very work of agony. Why Keats risks such betrayal, why he speaks of an experience the very expression of which may preclude him from experiencing again (the gods not taking kindly to trespass , see Actaeon, see Pentheus) will occupy many of the Odes, each subtly altering the conditions of its questioning . The questioning condition in “Ode to Psyche” springs out from “Ode on Indolence.” His repose tending toward thoughtlessness that Love, Ambition, and Poesy interrupt 103 1819 with their appearance becomes here a far more difficult state to achieve: “I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly.”24 If not wholly abandoning indolence as a primary creative ground, Keats now suspects he must find an action that can still maintain indolence’s nature—that admixture of mind and body so complete no separation can be meaningfully found. A “thoughtless wandering” enacts Keats’s ongoing critique of poetry of “palpable design.” The requirement for actual discovery is the complete abandonment of that intent which prescribes what the poet will find. The most that can be done, Keats suggests, is to walk into the woods on purpose; but in the woods, purpose dissolves into bewilderment ’s wilder possibilities. Keats must become lost. Thoughts mark a path the mind knows how to follow, paths so well-­ worn they preclude the existence of the forest they cross.Vision begins wheredirection ends, for then one must see the unmarked clearings to move. And what Keats sees is a vision erotic, Psyche and Cupid, in intimate embrace: They lay calm-­ breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-­ handed slumber25 Keats has accomplished a poetic feat he has longed for from his earliest poems: he has entered theverychamberoferotic bliss, witness to what none should witness, save the lovers themselves. Vision is a sacred trespass, and the poet must learn to accept that he is a seer.What he sees, he must speak. And to speak risks revelation—not merely of his own trespassing presence, but revelation of the goddess’s dearest secrecy. Keats offers an insightful critique of the writing habits of Charles Brown, his close friend with whom he occasionally lived, who was then writing a story “of his old woman 104 1819 and the Devil”: “The fact is, it is a Libel on the Devil and as that person is Brown’s Muse, look ye, if he libels his own Muse how can he expect to write.”26 The implied difference is that Keats writes so as to revere his Muse, and his Muse is ­Psyche. The realization is telling. Psyche isn’t simply a figure of the soul. Her mythic ordeal prefigures other key aspects of Keats’s poetic epistemology. Those tests with which Venus torments her—the separation of seeds, the collection of the golden wool, the box of infernal sleep—reveal the way in which soul interacts with the self it animates. Psyche ’s gift—like that of the simpleton heroes of many fairy tales—­ resides paradoxically in her lack of self-­ sufficiency. She...