Poetry's Ecosystem: Keats' Poetic Assimilation into the Environment.

by Edith Critchley 

It is not at all ground-breaking to say that Keats was one of the greatest of the Romantic poets. I feel that, today, this is simply an accepted fact, despite Keats himself going to his grave never fully believing himself to be a success.

Yet, even when reading his poetry in the knowledge that he is an extremely talented poet, I am still, each time, struck by how seamlessly poetry, emotion and the natural world seem to blur into one another. We might take a very Romantic approach and suggest that poetry is, in itself, the seamless expression of pure emotion. If, as George Eliot argues (in one of my favourite quotes in Middlemarch), to have the soul of a poet ‘knowledge must pass instantaneously into feeling’, this relationship between the poem and the environment can be fully expressed in Keats' own words.

When Keats writes to his brother, George, on September 21 1819 that he is not certain how he ‘should endure loneliness and bad weather together’, we can see, in essence, a symbiotic relationship between how Keats feels, his poetry, and the world that exists around him. They are somehow both independent of one another yet interfused to create a similar effect.

This interlinking of relationships can't help but make me think about ecosystems, defined by Britannica as "a complex of living organisms, their physical environment and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space". Perhaps Keats poems themselves act as enclosed ecosystems, a particular unit of space, in which emotion, the poet, the environment and the poem itself all exist in a poetic ecosystem. How powerful are these environments within the poems they inhabit? Where do they come from and how are they created?

In one of the most enduring of Keats' great odes, ‘To Autumn’, he praises the season and laments the beautiful pain within the passing of time. Yet it is within this ode that the assimilation of the poet into an ecosystem is at its most clear. There is no ‘I’ of a poet (present in many of his other odes); instead, an omniscient narrator views the passing of autumn and watches the season personified as sitting statically on a granary floor. The narrator views autumn in purely sensory terms instead of attempting to describe it as a poet would conventionally; we are not experiencing a description of autumn, but Keats' experience of autumn itself. This interlinking of human and environment is continued through the blurring of culture and animal within the poem. The final stanza is a symphony of natural song which seems to mimic human cultural music: the ‘small gnats mourn’ in ‘wailful choir’ as humans would, as do crickets with ‘treble soft’. ‘Treble’ and ‘choir’ connote the human categorization of music and not the natural and lawless song of a season. Yet the metaphor of animals participating in human melody is symptomatic of the combination of humanity and the environment within this poem. A relationship between the two of them is created that blurs the line between human and not-human, a full ecosystem between humanity and nature to which they both belong and in which they both participate.

The intensity of the ecosystem within this poem seems also to affect the poem itself, so that it becomes part of the ecosphere that it creates. As critic Jonathan Bate writes in Song of the Earth, Keats manages to make ‘metaphors seem like metonymy’ that makes the ‘links’ between description, ‘load’ and ‘bless’ for example, seem natural creating what he calls ‘naturalization’. The poem begins to become a natural system in which all its language works in harmony and not in resistance to one another to create surprise. The poem becomes both a vehicle for this environment to be created and becomes part of the environment itself, the enjambed line and flowing structure resembling something wild and unrestrained. Hence, Keats' poem creates an ecosystem that fully encloses poet, nature and the poem itself, at mercy to the nature which it creates. The ecosphere holds a power of the poem and the poet to conform.

Likewise, the slightly earlier ‘Ode To Nightingale’ has a powerful sense of an environment dominant over the poet. Yet, contrastingly, the poem remains detached from nature. It is instead used as a lens through which its power can be marvelled at. 'Nightingale' begins with the establishing of a poetic figure separate from the nature he observes around him through the repeated pronouns ‘my’. Keats writes’ my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense’, a narrator already more fully formed and individual than within the whole of ‘To Autumn’, able to feel their own emotion. We are then also distinctly reminded of the narrator's mortality, that they could drink hemlock and die. As the poem progresses, the narrator is so detached from the birdsong which he describes that the whole poem becomes an apostrophe to the bird. The narrator is able to talk to the nightingale as a separate entity, lacking the blurring of man and environment in 'To Autumn'. Despite this clear separation preventing the poem becoming part of the bird's ecosystem, its environment remains largely powerful in the eyes of the poet. The bird's song is that of an almost mythical creature, a ‘winged dryad of the trees’, that is almost immortal, unlike the poet. The bird song and the separate environment it exists in persist over the fluctuating of man's culture, which Keats seems to identify with. He writes, slightly paradoxically, that the bird ‘was not born for death’ that ‘the voice I hear this passing night was heard/in ancient days by emperor and clown’. The birdsong seems to have a mythic power that transcends time and the bounds of class. The gulf between both the standing of clown and emperor create a stretch of seemingly impossible proportions, suggesting the bird to be all-encompassing in its reach, the environment that it exists in, and that the poet it is separate from, being transcendent of human culture.

However, the narrator repeatedly seems to desire the integration into the nightingale's world that he will later present himself as experiencing in ‘To Autumn’. He wishes to both ‘drink and leave the world unseen’ and ‘with thee fade away into the forest dim-/ fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget.’ What first appears as a suggestion that Keats wishes to die, could arguably be instead the desire to assimilate entirely with the environment around him, into the woods with the nightingale. The repetition of ‘fade’ and the use of ‘dissolve’ create a magical sense of transition that perhaps mirrors the mythos created around the nightingale. However, the disjointed short clauses, although suggesting the narrator to be panicked and excited about this transition, is another reminder of their separation from the bird's natural world, as they conflict with a sense of melody and song. Therefore, unlike the environment of ‘To Autumn’ in which the distinction of man and its environment are blurred to create one ecosystem, in ‘Ode To Nightingale’ a distinct separation seems to remain. The ecosystem being prevented from having the same structural pressure upon the poem itself as it remains part of a separate environment. Yet, it is within this earlier poem that Keats longs for the assimilation he ultimately achieves in his slightly later work, 'To Autumn', the pull of the ecosphere already acting upon him.