John Keats: Permanance Vs Temporality

It seems that a recurring theme in writer John Keats' odes is the idea of permanence versus temporality. They investigate the relationships, or barriers to relationship, between always changing human beings and the eternal, static and unalterable forces superior to humans. In John Keats' poems, "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn" Keats longs for the immortality of the beauty of the season and of the song of the nightingale but deep down he knows he can not obtain it.

In the ode "To Autumn" author John Keats longs to have everlasting cyclic life such as that of the season, but he knows when he dies he can never come back. Firstly Keats praises Autumn for its beauty describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom.

Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom- friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit...

To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells...

And still more, later flowers for the bees...

Keats knows the same beauty he is observing is the same one generation before him observed and generations after him will observe because the unique beauty of each season will forever be the same. Secondly, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair "soft-lifted" by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. Keats personifies Autumn in an attempt to make it more human but, even on a human level Autumn is still the most beautiful thing in the world. "Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too." The persona tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the "small gnats" hum above the shallows of the river, and "full-grown lambs" bleat from the hills. Crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies. Autumn's song is just as stunning and powerful as the other seasons. The subject of "To Autumn," being a season, is no less immortal than any of the other seasons or aspect of nature. It is all pervasive and year after year, it comes back unchanged at the appointed time, "Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?" In the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire mortal human condition. The permanence is in the cycle of life. Autumn will return next year but the speaker knows he may not.

In the second poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," the transience of life and the tragedy of old age are set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale's flowing music. The speaker opens with a description of his own degradation. "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk." In an attempt to free himself from the pain he loses himself in the song of a nearby nightingale. He is "too happy" that the nightingale sings. In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: "the weariness, the fever, and the fret"

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