Throughout the poetry of his early life, Keats offers the reader a joyful exploration of the flora and fauna of his imagination and experience, using his skill as a ‘poet of the senses’. Yet he does not confine himself to the world of a nature poet, but through the medium of nature poetry, also presents us with his strong views on the state of the human condition.

Some of Keats’ poetry does stand alone as a celebration of nature, and this appears to fall into two main types. The first type relies upon pleasant descriptions to convey the importance of nature and the joy it brings to humans. One notable example of this type is the extract from “I stood tip-toe upon a hill” written in 1817. We are told to “Linger awhile upon some bending planks . . . And watch intently nature’s doings”. This creates an immediacy, making the reader imagine that they are actually watching the summertime scene Keats plays out for us. It enhances the description he gives us, and encourages the reader to share in his joy of the river, linking with his synaesthesic personification of the fish which “taste the luxury of sunny beams” and “wrestle/With their own sweet delight”. In line 87 Keats shifts the emphasis from the fish to the goldfinch above, and his use of the word “golden” links to the “silver bellies on the pebbly sand”; the connotations of valuable metals underlining the richness of nature. Despite the fact that Keats calls nature “gentle”, there is a strong sense of movement in the poem, created by phrases like “golden flutterings” and the sibilant “hurrying freshnesses”, which emphasises nature’s vibrancy. There are several references to human activity in the poem, such as the simile of “good men in the truth of their behaviours” and “Why, you might read two sonnets”, yet these do not detract from the focus on nature. By contrasting the life of fish, birds and rivers with human life, Keats creates an immediacy which emphasises his celebration of nature. Using rhyme for emphasis, he even shows us nature’s ability to recover from human interference using his description of fish:

“If you but scantily hold out the hand,
Not one will remain;
But turn your eye, and they are there again.”

This links to his second type of nature poetry; it is less pleasant in its descriptions, but we can still call it a celebration of nature because of the sense of awe Keats creates in his diction, emphasising the indomitable power and steadfastness of nature. In “On the Sea”, for example, he describes the elemental state of the ocean. The poem begins with the mysterious personification of the sea in the onomatopoeic word “Whisperings”; “Eternal” immortalises the sea’s spirit and “shadowy” adds to the sense of mystery. The awesome sense of power is enhanced by the “mighty swell”. Above all, Keats urges his readers to “feast” upon the expanse of water, creating a sense of indulgence despite the “desolate” nature of the sea. He presents the power of the sea as something to be enjoyed and wondered at, causing the reader to “start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!”. Therefore these poems are clearly a celebration of the world of nature.

However, much of Keats’ poetry conveys other themes which are important to him, using nature poetry as a medium. It is not surprising that one of Keats’ themes is that of writing poetry itself. He sets his poem “Fancy” in the “Spirit of a winter’s night”, yet also describes “the early April lark” of spring, “All delights of summer weather” and “the heaped Autumn’s wealth”. Several literary devices add to the effect of the language, such as the alliterative “rustle of the reaped-corn”, and the onomatopoeic “Acorns ripe down-pattering”, as does the trochaic foot which adds emphasis to certain words. The poem, however, is not only a description of the four seasons. It shows how the imagination, the personification of “Fancy” which is emphasised by the simile “She will mix these pleasures up/like three wines within a cup”, causes Keats’ mind to wander, presumably giving him the inspiration for his poetry. The structure of the poem emphasises his message that we should “Let the winged Fancy roam” for creativity; the ideas of his poem are disorganised and the one break in the continuous lines appears towards the end, creating a sense of imbalance. Therefore, he has used his celebratory thoughts of nature to illustrate what the imagination can do.

“On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” is similar to “On the Sea” in that it describes the elemental nature of the oceans and the planets. However, Keats takes the description further here, using the extended metaphor of travel to describe himself as a literary adventurer, summing up his excitement at discovering new poetic ideas on reading Chapman’s version of Homer. He uses two analogies, saying that he felt:

“like some watcher of the skies
when a new planet swims into his ken;
or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
he star’d at the pacific-”.

Another poem which gives us a good insight into Keats’ feelings as a poet is “Lines written in the Highlands after a visit to Burns’s Country”. Keats uses some masterful imagery to show us the strength of nature he sees as he strolls in the highlands. For example, he describes how “Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks;/Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks”. As in “On the Sea”, he creates a sense of mystery with the mention of “Druids old” and the ambiguity of the word “charm” at the opening. However, he adds a touch of personal opinion to this poem, saying that the influential power of the landscape could overcome his inner strength and cause him to forget his origins. This is an unusual view, reflected by his uncommon use of iambic heptameter which suits the sense of continuity reflective of walking.

Another of Keats’ works which addresses the theme of poetry is “When I have fears”. Here Keats combines both the pleasant and elemental forms of nature writing in order to show us his fear that he may die before he can write about all that he wants to. We see the alliteration of “glean’d”, “garners” and “grain”, the link letting us into the secret of the formation of his poetry: the idea, like a seed in line two, metamorphosised to a ripe crop by line four, with the “high-piled books, in charact’ry” as a catalyst. Having talked of the seed of the earth in the first half of the octet, celebrating the fruitfulness of autumn and comparing to the poetry he aspires to write, he moves to the heavens for the second half of the octet, personifying the sky as “the night’s starr’d face”. This also reflects his desire to create wonder in his poetry, therefore emphasising his fear that on death his ideas will die with him unexpressed. Therefore, through his celebration of nature, we gain a clear understanding of Keats’ thoughts and intentions in his poetry.

One of Keats’ principal themes is that of love, and he explores this by making extensive use of nature poetry. In the octet of “Bright Star”, Keats refers to the wondrous “splendour” of the star, describing it, with some effective visual images, eternally watching the oceans “at their priestlike task” and the “snow upon the mountains and the moors”; these are clear images of nature. In the sestet, he develops the idea he introduced in the opening line by saying that his love, perhaps for Fanny Brawne, is as “unchangeable” as the star. Therefore, the poem is more than a nature poem, but the references to nature are an integral part of its argument.

Keats wrote “Endymion” in a similar, though more complex, way. In the extract from Book I, he creates some very pleasant images, such as:

“ Yellow girted bees
Their golden honeycombs; our village leas
Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn.”

The rhyming couplets emphasise the colour of these visual images, and the enjambement and caesura causes the poem to run on, matching the sense of activity created by the bees, and the sense of expectancy stemming from the aural image of the linnet waiting for its young to be born. Later in Book I, Keats presents an argument for the importance of love, calling it an “orbed drop of light” which underpins the earth’s very existence. Illustrating his point well with an effective simile “of Earth”, Keats describes the nightingale which “ne’er conceives/How tiptoe night holds back her dark grey hood”. This visual personification of the night is not itself a celebration, but contributes to the effectiveness of the simile: just as the nightingale is unaware her song is protecting her, so men are unaware that love is at the heart of the nature surrounding them. Keats’ poem “Stanzas” is a good illustration of Keats’ point about nature, for it uses the metaphor of the coldness of winter for being out of love. Therefore, Keats does not merely give us descriptions of nature, but uses nature to present one of his striking arguments.

Keats extends the elemental and indomitable spirit of nature to explore the question of a human afterlife. In “Ode - Bards of passion and of mirth”, Keats gives us his view of heaven. It would appear that this is beyond the realms of nature poetry, yet Keats assumes that heaven is an extension of the nature he finds on earth, and so the poem still celebrates nature. He combines the senses to describe the “spheres of sun and moon;/With the noise of fountains wondrous”, and the sibilant “whisper of heaven’s trees . . . Where the daisies are rose scented”. Through these descriptions, he presents his message that poets live on earth in their work, yet also live in heaven once they have died. There is a strong contrast between the pessimism of “When I have fears” and the optimism for the double eternal life outlined here! We can never tell whether Keats has a soul in heaven, but it would be safe to say that portrayed through his nature poetry, the themes that were important to him have found their own eternal life.

Keats explores his view of Hell in his poem “On a Dream”, yet surprisingly this is also optimistic. The octet address a tale from Greek mythology, something which obviously interested Keats as it is frequently mentioned throughout his poetry, and the sestet relates this story to his own experience - a dream in which he visits Hell. It is harder to call this poem a celebration of nature, because despite Keats’ apparent contentment shown by the alliterative “fair the form I floated with”, he describes a “melancholy storm” and a “flaw/Of rain and hail-stones”. Also, the fact that he seemed to get more pleasure from the “fair form” than from the “flowery treetops” (which he mentions in his letter of 16th April 1819 but not in the poem) seems at odds with the way he usually concentrates on natural images. However, this links to one of Keats’ principal themes, that of dream and reality. The fact that he found these more depressing elements of nature so contenting emphasises the way dreams can alter our perception of things.

One of Keats’ longest poems of his early work was “The Eve of St Agnes” which also questions the relevance of dreams. It is in this poem about love that Keats’ reputation as a ‘poet of the senses’ seems most justified, and his use of nature poetry tackles complex themes. He makes frequent reference to the moonlight, using it to create both a sinister feel, “with silver taper’s light”, and also a romantic feel, “in pallid moonshine”; he uses nature to link themes of romance and possibly death as suggested by “the sculptured dead . . . Emprisoned in black purgatorial rails”. Fruits are also used to create images of taste in the eroticism of the consummation scene: “candied apple, quince and plum . . . tinct with cinnamon”. For the most part, however, the poem is a narrative of the feelings and actions of the two lovers Madeline and Porphyro, in which Keats uses love as an analogy for the theme of the dream world versus reality. In stanza fifteen, Porphyro cries at the thought of “those enchantments cold/And Madeline asleep in the lap of legends old”. This is a tactile image, both in the sense that he feels sorry for Madeline because he believes her dream cannot be as good as the reality of being with him, and also in the sense that he calls her dream “cold”. The irony is that when Madeline wakes, she calls Porphyro “pallid [and] chill”. By ignoring reality, Madeline is only setting herself up for the “painful change” from “the blisses of her dream so pure and deep” to the disappointment of the real world. It seems we should follow Porphyro’s example and aspire only to what can be achieved in reality.

The “poetry of Earth” is more obvious in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, although the majority of the poem is not joyful, and the work has a plethora of themes and interpretations. The poem is written in the style of a ballad, though Keats has adjusted the ballad meter so that line four has just two stresses instead of three, giving emphasis to his references to nature. He underlines the fact that the “harvest’s done” by ensuring the rhyme scheme leaves these two words most clearly in the reader’s mind, emphasising the sense of desolation created by the language in the first two verses. There are several references to “fading”, withering and coldness in the setting. This is difficult to describe as a celebration of nature because it is not joyful, and the setting is subservient to the theme of death. Other themes are suggested by the language. The references to elves and fairies, such as “she took me to her elfin grot” suggest a theme of witchcraft. Another possible theme is that of feminism. This would hardly have been an issue in Keats’ day, but as modern readers we almost wince as the knight takes possession of the woman by putting her on his steed. However, the woman also has power: she is able to charm the knight and lure him back to her grotto. At the end, the knight is just as lonely as before. Here we also have a reprise of the theme of dream and reality. Like Porphyro in “The Eve of St Agnes”, it appears that the knight sees reality as better than the dream world: “I dream’d”, he says, “Ah! Woe betide”. Therefore, this poem is less of a celebration of nature because other themes dominate, yet the references to wintry desolation in stanza one do mirror the knight’s “haggard” feelings. It seems that Keats could not help including nature, however briefly, in all of his works; the “poetry of Earth” acts almost as a yardstick with which to measure the mood of each poem.

Overall, Keats’ work engenders a love of nature which encourages his readers to celebrate the charms and wonders of the world around them. Keats is more than a simple nature poet. We discover many of his personal views about the life and death of a poet, and he builds upon his nature poetry to portray themes concerning love and the realms of dream and reality, themes which continue to be appropriate today. But without the rich background of nature surrounding much of his poetry, I doubt that his work would be so effective in portraying his important themes. Because of Keats, “The poetry of Earth is ceasing never”; in fact it is “in warmth increasing ever”.

SOURCE:
Anstey, S. (Ed.) (1995) Keats: Selected Poems & Letters. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers.