Free Close Reading Of Ode To Psyche Essay Sample

John Keats’ poem Ode to Psyche can only be understood in the context of its allusion to the Greek myth of Psyche. This poem is as much an ode to Psyche as it is an entreaty that Psyche forgive the speaker for his praise of her. Rather than praising the subject, Psyche, as is customary in an ode, Keats in this poem stretches the form of an ode to include an emblematic wink at the camera, so to speak. The poem not only addresses a high praise of Psyche, but in doing some becomes self-referential in its praise and allusion. These lines of Keats are a representation of the speaker’s mind, or the “real of one’s imagination (Norton, 902). The poem not only becomes self referential but starts to mimic the text itself. Psyche is a god that is rarely praised, but Keats uses her to represent the imaginative mind in form and narration.
The poem operates on a form that varies the lines and rhyme scheme. The most frequent rhyme scheme used is ABAB, but there are many places where the poem changes this form. The loose form is an indication of form being secondary to function, and function relying on content and theme rather than a strict adherence to any particular poetic conventions. The model of language that the mind operates under is using symbols and semantics to create meaning. The irregular structure of the poem can be seen as a comparison for the random, yet focused, pathway of thinking in the mind.
The speaker begins by addressing Psyche directly, and asks that she pardon her for the ensuing praises, “And pardon that they secrets should be sung / Even into thine own soft-conched ear” (Keats, 3-4). The speaker admits though that the intrusion is because the speaker is convinced of having glimpsed Psyche with “awakened eyes.” Keates uses bucolic imagery to create a setting of a speaker relating to Psyche the physical environment of his surroundings. Everything in nature though, most especially birds, are leading the speaker back to the contemplation of Psyche. “The winged boy I know / But who was though, O happy dove? His Psyche true?” (Keats, 21-23). The splendor of the speaker’s surroundings invokes in the speaker imagery from ancient Greek. The speaker mentions, “Olympus’s faded hierarchy, Pheobe’s sapphire-region’d star, and the Virgin-choir” but then says that none of these things, “no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet” can compare. The speaker in the second stanza muddles through a half dozen allusions to Ancient Greece, but then is stopped by the realization that the culture that created Psyche has ceased to be.
The poem is an ode, but it is of a confessional nature. The speaker is trying to reconcile the beauty of his present with the lost beauty of the splendors of Ancient Greek. Psyche is an apt character from psychology to represent this internal struggle. In her myth Psyche was unable to look at her lover, and could only enjoy him blind-folded. The poem is self-referential because it addresses Psyche in both her mythical context and her representational context and also alters her meaning from a particular concept to a universal. The speaker is not just praising the past; he is lamenting its loss. In doing so, it is participating in the art form that it bemoans being lost. Some of this is likely beyond the original intentions of Keats in composing “Ode to Psyche.”
The speaker ends thinking that the “shadowy thought can win.” In most retellings of Psyche’s myth, she was reunited with her lover cupid, and the speaker in the poem ends the poem by deciding to view the loss of the past, the limitedness of the present in all of it’s advantage. For though looking upon her lover would cause her to loserhim, Psyche chose to risk that loss for the chance of a fuller vision, which is the perspective that the speaker of “Ode to Psyche” also adopts. As the poem develops, the depth increases. It begins by addressing Psyche the mythological figure, but by the end of the poem the meaning of Psyche has changed and the narration seems directed back to the speaker.