Form and desire

1“That which is creative must create itself.” Keats wrote this sentence in October 1818 in a letter to J.A. Hessey, his publisher (Letters I:374), where he justified the amount of time he had devoted to writing his Endymion the year before (about seven months), whatever the imperfections of the poem. What Keats meant by the sentence was his feeling that even if creative writing was indeed a matter of inborn power and could by no means be acquired “by law and precept” or by seeking advice, it was nevertheless no sheer gift: it had to quest for itself, to generate itself in the very process of its work. This retrospective view, referring to the 1817 poem, was also an unwittingly prophetic statement on his poetry to come and more particularly on his odes—of course not his early, fairly conventional odes, but the ode form he was to create at the acme of his lyrical writing in 1819, between April and September, from the “Ode to Psyche” to “To Autumn.”

2For this ode, as it fully emerged in May, was not a given form; it is not inherited from any of the forms that this polymorphic poetic genre had assumed, in English poetry, in the course of time. If we leave aside the prestigious Pindaric ode (with its intricate ternary pattern of strophe/antistrophe/epode) which had attracted seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets but had fallen into disuse at the turn of the nineteenth century (Shelley’s “Ode to Naples” was an exception), the English ode, in Keats’s time, coursed along two main streams: on the one hand that derived from the so-called “Horatian ode” (going back to the Latin poets), a poem of uniform stanzas, whatever the stanza and the metre, every poem having its own design; on the other hand, a form without a design: a stanza form freely reshaping itself as the poem progressed, in length, in metre and in rhyme scheme. And this Protean form had become part of the English tradition under the name of “irregular ode”—an irregular ode which was, needless to say, pre-eminently illustrated by Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and by Coleridge’s “Dejection. An Ode,” both poems composed in 1802 and well-known, no doubt, to the young Keats.

3In this literary context the Keatsian ode is a highly original form. It differs widely in metre and music from the irregular ode, with its strict stanza design of ten pentameters phonically distributed by a fairly stable rhyme scheme into a quatrain and a sestet. And what makes the form still more unique is, so to speak, its immutability, its inevitable recurrence, in Keats’s lyrical writing, in ode after ode, from May to September—let alone a few variants: the shorter eighth line of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” a trimeter; and, chiefly in “To Autumn,” the additional line, a striking departure indeed, but which still underscores the reiterative pattern it transgresses. There is something compulsive, I should say, in Keats’s ode writing during his annus mirabilis. It looks as if whenever he felt what Derrida would call “le moment du vouloir-écrire” (Derrida 24), the moment of the urge-to-write, he was inhabited by this form. Whatever the theme, the mood, the figures of the peculiar ode, he cannot but reproduce the shape he has wrought in the inmost experience of writing—which he has wrought, therefore, under the force of some persistent desire. As T.S. Eliot observed in his essay on “Music and Poetry,” “a form grows out of the attempt to say something” (Eliot 37).

Fragments of a lover’s discourse

4The object of this study is to enquire into that “something”: the “thing” that could not be said so far in Keats’s lyrical discourse, that “thing” unspoken that called for a hitherto unheard form to be written. Now except for the early autobiographical poems in blank verse, the poetic form that had been closely associated with Keats’s lyricism, from the beginning until April 1819, was the sonnet, at first the “Petrarchan” (or Italian), then from 1818 the “Shakespearean” (or English) type as well. This was of course no self-created form, although it is remarkable how Keats’s lyrical “I” appropriated it, turned it into a field to unfold a language of his own, a “style” in the deeper sense of the term, as Roland Barthes defined it, namely “a self-sufficient language […] which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology” (Barthes 1967, 16). I would like to offer a brief analysis of this deep-rooted language through a rereading of two sonnets that pre-eminently exemplify it. The first, written in October 1816, is “On first Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a sonnet about which Leigh Hunt, who published it at once in The Examiner, later perceptively said that it “completely announced the new poet taking possession”; and the second, “On the Sea,” was written by Keats in April 1817, somehow as a rite of entry, as he had just arrived in the Isle of Wight to compose his Endymion.

5The first sonnet expresses the young Keats’s delight at discovering Homer’s Odyssey in the pithy English version of Chapman; in the second he gives utterance to a reverie aroused by the sound of the “eternal whisperings” of the sea that surrounds him in the Isle of Wight: two poems, then, that refer to, and describe, two moments of experience which are thematically unconnected. But what is being written in the two texts as text—as a field and play of signifiers—is essentially akin: desire, a movement of desire that carries the subject (“I” in the first line of “On First Looking,” “ye” opening the sestet of “On the Sea”) to a sudden moment of encounter lived as an intensity beyond words. “A poem moves only towards its own end which is the last line,” as Dylan Thomas observed (Thomas 297). In both poems the last line climactically inscribes a moment of being beyond language, a jouissance, in which the subject—the subject of language—is thus dying, a dying in the full polysemy of the word. As the subject, “I,” finally turns metaphorically into the figure of Cortez, the explorer, on his discovering the unknown ocean,

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7“Silent”: the sonnet’s climax is not so much in the poem as in the real silence that follows it, as the voice dies. The end towards which the sonnet moves is thus indeed a ravishment: the subject’s ecstatic ravishment as he “stares” at an image—the mesmeric sea—at an object which exactly meets his desire. The moment is no other than what French calls “le coup de foudre” (love at first sight) as Roland Barthes defined it in his fine book entitled Fragments d’un discours amoureux (trans. A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments): “A hypnosis. I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, paralysed” (Barthes 1978, 189).

8In “On the Sea” the experience projected by the final line is similar; it is aural instead of visual; but it is equally sudden and hypnotic:

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10What ravishes here is a sudden singing voice, all the more ravishing as it is a sheer voice without the distancing mediation of the signs of language, the Sirens’ abysmal voice. A moment whose body language—“ye start”—connects the Keatsian fantasy to the scenario of the mythic love story, always endowed with a ritual beginning which is the upsetting moment of the first meeting: let us remember the “moment” of Dante’s encounter with Beatrice, as he relates it in his Vita Nuova: the “violent trembling” that seized him; and from that moment, he adds, “Love quite governed my soul” (Dante 547-48).

11The two sonnets are thus at bottom, underneath their patent significance, love poems. They are truly, we might say taking up Roland Barthes’s title, “fragments of a lover’s discourse,” but a fairly strange discourse in which the lover never speaks to the beloved, a discourse which never turns the loved object, or more precisely, here, its metaphors—the fascinating image of the sea, the ravishing sound of the nymphs’ voice—into an addressee through an invocation such as, later in the odes: “Season of mists […] Thou hast thy music too” (“To Autumn,” ll. 1, 24). Here in the sonnet the love object is never turned into a “thou,” the signifier that would capture it within the poem’s space and include it grammatically in the reversible “I-you” (“I-thou”) relation characteristic of love poetry (which Roman Jakobson [357] has defined as “poetry of the second person”): let us think of “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day…?” No “I… thee” in the language of Keats’s lover’s discourse, as if to make all “I love thee” unthinkable. The sonnet gorgeously displays the desire while withdrawing the object of desire. It only evokes it through referents which remain referents—the sea, the voice—thus assigning them the status of the so-called third person which modern linguistics, notably Émile Benveniste, defines as “no-person,” in other words “he [or she] who is absent” (Benveniste 228, 256).

12The true object of love, so says the language of the Keatsian lover through its uninscribable “Thou,” is in essence foreign to the subject. It is the Other, in the absolute sense of the term, which I am writing with a capital O to introduce the Lacanian term, namely “the absolute Other of the subject […] to be found at the most as something missing” (Lacan 1992, 52): a Thing prohibited by the Law—not only the moral law, but more fundamentally the law of language which establishes an unbridgeable distance between “I” and that Other, “the prehistoric, unforgettable Other that later no one will ever reach” (53). Prehistoric because prior to the history of the subject (which begins only through its insertion into the world of language); and unforgettable because it remains, in spite of the Law, “the sovereign Good which is […] the mother, the object of incest […], a forbidden Good, although there is no other Good” (70).

13This foreclosure of the second person which excludes the love utterance will persist in Keats’s sonnets as a grammatical feature of the lover’s discourse, even after the 1816 and 1817 sonnets: witness the fascinating sonnet—of the Shakespearean type—“A Dream,” written on 16 April 1819, only a few days before the “Ode to Psyche” and the May odes, “A Dream” being thus, we might say, the last “fragment of a lover’s discourse” before its transformation in the odes. Keats writes the poem as an echo of the dream he has just had after reading Dante’s evocation, in the “Inferno,” of “the second Circle of sad Hell,” which is that of the transgressive lovers condemned to be whirled about in an eternal hurricane. The “I” is caught among them, together with a “fair form”—here patently feminine—in a dance-like whirlwind, though still, I should say, within the extreme limits of the Law, since it embraces the fair form in sheer silence, without the least utterance that might capture it into a “thee” and release the genuine but impossible address:

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15As third person, the “form” remains no-person in the eternal dance. In the space of the sonnet the Other remains the Other.

The ritual of the “Ode to Psyche”

16It is the need to inscribe the uninscribable Other, to turn the no-person into the “thou” of the lover’s discourse, that fundamentally motivates the creation of the new form: the transformation of the sonnet’s “narrow chamber” into the ode’s open sequence of stanzas which makes it possible, as a larger field, to work out and bring into play the new poetic grammar. The formal transformation is thus correlative to the grammatical one (and to the new enunciation it generates). The two are the two modes of the same metamorphosis originating in the same desire.

17The first of the great odes, the “Ode to Psyche,” written on the eve of May, is this metamorphosis in the making, enacted repeatedly—as if ritually—in each of the four stanzas where the body of the earlier form (the sonnet’s fourteen lines) is still visible while being in the process of being delivered of the new body. Reading the poem is witnessing this birth.

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19It is true that one may be surprised—in the context of my study—to discover as soon as the opening invocation (1-4) the straightforward inscription of the impossible “Thou,” which straight off opens the way to the prohibited “I love thee”; all the more so as the next sentence (line 5) introduces the”I” (“Surely I dreamt to-day […]”): as if the prohibited phrase wrote itself out, scattered but to be overheard, like a poem within the poem.

20But if the phrase is virtually inscribed on the threshold of the ode, it is to be positively crossed out. For the second sentence where the “I” first appears, “Surely I dream’t to-day, or did I see […]” (5), excludes the initial “thee” (referring to Psyche) by turning the Goddess into a described figure, thus a “she” or a “her,” a no-person. One should be attentive to Keats’s stage-setting (from the fifth line of the stanza), to the way he not only excludes Psyche from the space of enunciation by turning her into a no-person, but includes her into another space, that of the love scene between “her” and “him,” Eros, a powerful God:

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22In the long ekphrasis that follows, down to the end of the stanza, Keats reproduces the traditional painting (by Renaissance painters) of Psyche and Eros, but also transcribes the picture into a scene seen (“did I see”), a scene unexpectedly come upon by a stunned subject (“on the sudden fainting with surprise”): a scene in which today’s post-Freudian reader can recognise a “primal scene”—the parental love scene witnessed or fantasised by the child in the position of the excluded third. It is this “primal scene” that shows through in Keats’s transcription of the traditional painting, thus disclosing beneath the mythical Other (here the Goddess) the mother figure, the mother belonging to the God, “His psyche true!” (l. 23).

23This opening stanza is thus indeed a ritual, a writing ritual which paves the way for a new love-discourse by ceremoniously situating “I” and “thou” (the “thou” introduced by the initial invocation) in two separate scenes, which definitely estranges them and excludes all erotic relation. “Thou,” in this new grammar, is no longer the erotic love object but the Other as Other, acknowledged as unreachable. And it is this grammatical trope of the second person (“thou” signifying the no-person, the absent) which enables the poem to unfold in the following stanzas and take shape as the first of the great odes. What the ritual establishes, after all, is that the Other is definitely lost to the subject; but that in this sense of lack, desire originates; desire which creates its own forms in the field of the signifier, in the “wreath’d trellis” (l. 60) of words and their semantic music. Desire cannot reach its true object, but this failure ceaselessly renews it, causes it to flare up in ever new creations.

24This relation between lack and creation is the central term the ode hinges upon, the hinge operating the reversal that takes place between the two central stanzas (2 and 3). On the thematic level the reversal describes the historical view of the revolution of the sacred in European civilisation as it passed from the worship of the ancient gods, conceived as external, cosmic figures, to an internalisation of those gods now experienced as mysterious forces in the human psyche. But beyond this patent historical meaning, it is the reversal itself, as a figure (in the rhetorical sense), featured as it is in the poem’s centre—like a smaller ode within the ode—which is significant. The figure is, literally, a palin-ode in which the emphatically negative utterances of the first stanza (st. 2) are repeated while reversed into their opposites in the second stanza (st. 3) through the deletion of their negations: “Though temple thou hast none […] Nor virgin choir […] No voice, no lute […]” (ll. 28-35) reversed into “So let me be thy choir […] Thy voice, thy lute […]” (44-49). In negation (in absence, in lack) originates production (presence, richness, enjoyment), the figure says. Privation (in the Real) generates creation (in the Symbolic). On the poetic level, needless to say, the correlation between the two stanzas is not diachronic (as on the historical level), but synchronic, dialectic. What it asserts is that the sense of lack (st. 2) nurtures the song (st. 3). I can celebrate Thee in my song in so far as Thou art the unreachable Other.

25It is the creation of this song which is adumbrated in the final stanza where the poem thus becomes metapoetic. It describes its own making (to come) through the image of the “fane,” projected as a metaphor of itself:

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27The fane is thus metaphorically the poiesis, the poem to be made. And it is also, latently, being consecrated to the Goddess, a metonymic image of her, and of her as a “fane,” an enclosing locus to be in, a topophilic inside which features it somehow as a fantasised dwelling, the primal dwelling, “the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (Freud 245)—and the fantasy may work its way into the text in the ultimate phrase, “To let the warm Love in!”—although the “place” here celebrated by Keats’s ode is not something to go back to in some regressive dream (like that of the Knight in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in his quest for the Elfin Grot). It is something to create in thoroughly new terms:

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29The lost dwelling will be wrought out of words, in the texture of language which asserts and maintains the distance between “I” and the Other. And it is this assumed distance which allows the Other to be turned into “Thou,” a fundamentally ambiguous “Thou” which (literally) in-vokes the Other, makes it present in the voice, while positing it as absent. I may love Thee if Thou art (in my new ritualised language) a no-person, thoroughly withdrawn into another scene. I will sing of my desire in full-throated ease, if it can never be fulfilled.

30The installation of this “Thou” introduces the new mode of the lover’s discourse and thus lays the foundation for the poetics of the ode. The poetics of the sonnet was a poetics of fantasy: the poem moved, as we have seen, towards a fantasy of ecstatic dying, a dying into the Other, to be heard only in the silence that followed the sonnet. (And it is true that this poetics will eventually return in one of the very last sonnets Keats was to write, thus after the odes, the magnificent “Bright Star” which climaxes in the lover’s “swoon to death.”) The poetics of the odes, on the other hand, will be a poetics of desire: desire as elaborated by modern psychoanalysis, namely as “eternally stretched forth towards something else” (Lacan 1977, 167), in other words for ever at work because forever unsatisfied, and forever unsatisfied because its true object, the Other, is beyond the law of the symbolic order, beyond the “wreath’d trellis” of words that writing brings into play. Every writing thus calls for another writing, every “fane” for another, different “fane”: a poetics of desire penetratingly defined by Keats, in the final stanza of this first great ode, as the “gardener Fancy […] Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same” (ll. 62-63). Desire, “eternally stretched forth towards something else.”

Magical shapes

31The amazing succession of the May odes, with its prolongation in September, is this writing of desire. Writing the odes was to Keats—if I may borrow a phrase from a poem by Yeats—“Ego Dominus Tuus” (Yeats 180), “still tracing […] Magical shapes”: “magical shapes” that may capture the “Thou”—the ambiguous “Thou”—introduced by the ritual of the “Ode to Pyche”; “still,” that is ceaselessly tracing shapes since none of them will ever offer a body to the Other. It will always be “something else”: after Psyche, night (“Night-ingale,” “Tender is the night”), form of beauty (“Grecian Urn”), veiled idol (“Melancholy”), season goddess (“Autumn”), all those shapes being latently—sometimes sensuously—feminine.

32And while tracing the “magical shapes,” every ode will stage the impossible contact with the Other they symbolise. The desire which is at the poem’s core is organically linked to the Law and the prohibition of the Law, thus a prohibition which is also at the poem’s core: which explains, I think, a remarkable feature of the grammar of the odes, and thereby of their enunciation, which is the impossible co-presence of the two persons. [1] The inscription of “I” excludes the introduction of “Thou” (that is of “Thou” as referring to the Other). This is the case in the “Ode to a Nightingale” (“My heart aches […], as though of hemlock I had drunk,” ll. 1-2) and in the “Ode on Melancholy” which is the discourse of a self-speaking “I” in which “thou,” therefore, does not refer to the Other but is a mere double, or mask, of “I” (“Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,” l. 15). In the two odes, the status of the Other is that of the “no-person,” of the absent: “Tender is the night” (l. 35), “She dwells with beauty” (l. 21). And conversely when the Other is in-voked as “Thou,” as in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Thou, still unravished bride of quietness,” l. 1) and in “To Autumn” (“Who hath not seen thee oft […]?” l. 2), the ode admits no introduction of “I,” however intense the presence of the subject of enunciation in the ode. Whatever the magical shape, the language of the ode is governed by the same grammatical law: the impossible coexistence of two signifiers, “Thou” and “I,” within the same textual field, as if to rule out all magnetic attraction.

33Keats’s ode writing, it might be said, replays the Orphic myth: it reinscribes in its grammar Pluto’s prohibition to Orpheus of all contact with Eurydice, the lost Other (in his attempt to bring her back from the dead). But the Keatsian ode replays the scenario in reverse, since it conforms to the Law. The Keatsian Orpheus thus comes back from the dead not with the Other, but with a song, a poem, and the “magical shape” the poem elaborates, thereby turning Orpheus’s failure (to retrieve Eurydice) into the enchantment of his song. Every ode amounts to such a latent re-enactment and transformation of the myth.

34One of them in particular re-enacts it almost patently: it is the “Ode on Melancholy,” which features the journey into the underworld in its very first verb, “go,” going to Lethe, negated though it is by the threefold negation of the extraordinary opening line, “No, no, go not […]” and its incantatory repetition throughout most of the stanza, which reveals the power of the drive which it counteracts, of the temptation to “go,” Orpheus-like, into the underworld to be reunited with the lost Other, “to be kiss’d / By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine” (ll. 2-3), the queen of the dead, the dead queen. The drive—in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, the death drive, which recalls the “dying” fantasies of the sonnets—is thus spectacularly displayed throughout the opening stanza, but it is, as well, to be fully exorcised by the negative incantation which cancels the delusional quest at the close of the stanza and releases, in a counter-movement, the rich sequence of images unfolding in the second stanza—from the “morning rose” to the mistress’s “peerless eyes”—images which are substitutive creations of desire, as many “magical shapes” in place of the irretrievable Other.

35The “She” which appears at the opening of the final stanza, “She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,” is the ultimate of those shapes created along the path of desire:

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37“Veil’d” screens her body from the hero’s amorous gaze—still in conformity with the Plutonian prohibition. But more essentially the “veil” that drapes the goddess’s body is indeed its very substance because its texture is woven of words by a “strenuous tongue”: the goddess, the initiation says, is

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39The “tongue,” the organ of taste, is also, sublimated, the organ of speech. What the Keatsian Orpheus finds, as he enters the secret shrine at the end of the journey, is no lost Eurydice, no unforgettable Other to be retrieved, but a shape to be made out of words. What he “goes” to is the locus of his own creation.

40In this replay of the Orphic drama the “Ode on Melancholy” is exemplary of the ode as Keats created it: as an in-vocation capturing the Other in the “magical shapes” created by the tongue, together with the indissoluble awareness that those shapes are, as words, as symbols, the very inscription of the Other’s absence. The beautiful shapes on the sides of the Grecian Urn—metaphors of the poem’s own words—overlay the Urn’s interior void, the void beneath the “Thou,” the ode’s initial word which is already a mise en abyme of the whole poem as a signifier that calls but contains nothing, as an invocation that addresses a “silent form” (l. 44). This profound ambiguity, this self-conflicting sense of symbolic presence and of insuperable lack is the fundamental affect—which Keats calls “melancholy”—generated by the odes, by the bitter-sweet music of their semantic counterpoint.

41The Keatsian Orpheus, in moments of self-analysis, attempted to define it through oxymoric phrases like the “pleasant pain” experienced in the building of the “fane” consecrated to Psyche (l. 52) or again, in the “Ode on Melancholy,” the fusion of “joy” and of “sadness,” the “aching pleasure” (l. 23) in him who enters the shrine of the veiled goddess to create. Should we lay stress, in our contrapuntal listening, on the “joy” tune and take “joy” in the higher sense it often has in romantic poetry, that is an extreme mode of delight—“jouissance” would be the French word—then “joy” points to the “jouissance de l’écriture”: the intense moment when writing, “tracing” the shapes, delights in its own performance, whatever the real it designates or implies. In such intensity of creative writing, the object of desire becomes not so much the “Thing” the shapes are originally meant to symbolise as the shapes themselves; not so much the intangible Other as the shapes in their literal and sensuous bodies. Orpheus in love with his musical phrases; Keats in love with language, with the word-shapes he creates out of it, in what the “Ode to Psyche” calls “the trellis of a working brain” (l. 60).

42This displacement of desire, this transmutation, this sublimation of love, though unsaid, is to be heard in the contrapuntal music of the odes. Did not Orpheus besides—did not Keats—designate it plainly as he wrote to his friend, Benjamin Bailey, in a letter of August 1819, thus between the May odes and the last one in September: “I look upon fine phrases like a lover” (Letters II:139)? And in this “love,” we may guess, thinking of his life, John Keats found his own salvation.