著者

阪田 勝三

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.45, no.1, pp.39-48, 1968

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<p>The Janus-like imagination of Keats seems to show a kind of dilemma of romanticism itself, for, more than any others, romantic artists almost deify their personal imagination as universal truth. Though Keats affirmed the truth of imagination as strong as other romantic poets, he was, on the other hand, so much afraid of "sickly imagination", the arbitrariness of imagination, that he always tried to judge his inner vision by opposing objective reality. The Janus-faced attitude was inevitable for him as imagination's stepping toward truth. Poetry for Keats, therefore, may be said to be the relation between two contrasting images. When these two images were fused into one, his personal imagination would be identified with universal reality. Though he knew well that "it is impossible to prove that black is white," he never stopped his imagination flying, though promised failure, for this impossible aim. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" was the deepest, immutable longing through his life. It was not because of his dreaming Elysium, but of his actual feeling of life's brevity. His longing for the eternal joy never means his escape from time and reality, but, on the contrary, it shows that he was confronted with the fugitiveness and uncertainty of life. The relation between two contrasting images is, in this regard, the relation between time and eternity. The nightingale, which is called "immortal bird" in the Ode, is, seen objectively, nothing but a helpless bird no less than human beings. This transformation from a mortal bird to an immortal one, from a bird within time to the one beyond time, is the essence of his vision and the heart-ache and pain of the beginning symbolize the violent struggle of time with eternity, like Lamia's brilliant anguish in her transfiguration from a serpent to a fair lady. In the nightingale's earthly paradise, "embalmed darkness," he feels the eternal joy of the nightingale as his own and is "half in love with easeful Death." From his earlier poems Keats has been interested in the Eternal Present of the natural scenes, as Perkins ingeniously researched in The Quest for Permanence. But the very fact that Eternal Present prevails in his poetry indicates that beauty and joy was always ephemeral for him. But in the pastoral scenes it does not stir the tragic sense of life. With his bitter recognition of "an eternal fierce destruction" dominant in the world, his innocent joy in the Eternal Present was mercilessly destroyed and he had to seek desperately for the eternal joy by his imagination. He was convinced that Negative Capability and "intensity" were the ways to unite imagination with truth, time with eternity. In the Pleasure Thermometer passage of Endymion the chief intensity, the crown, of "enthralments far more self-destroying" is made of love and friendship. Love and imagination are the same for Keats, or at least two different aspects of the same thing. In this famous passage Keats mentions the nightingale's "passionate breath" as an example of earthly love's magical power, "making men's being mortal, immortal". As in the love letter of Hawthorne, the nightingale's affection (and in Keats imagination, too) "diffuses round us eternity". "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of imagination making us "feel that we live above time and apart from time". But this feeling of happiness was too short-lived as it was in almost all the poems of later years, for Death, one of two luxuries to brood over for him beside his sweet-heart's Loveliness, was realized in a moment to be "nothing" worse than those pains of life. The longing for eternity in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is not a vain dreaming like "one eternal pant" in "To J.R.", nor an</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>