"They toil not, neither do they spin."
1One morn before me were three figures seen,
2With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
3And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
4In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
5They pass'd, like figures on a marble Urn,
6When shifted round to see the other side;
7They came again; as when the Urn once more
8Is shifted round, the first seen Shades return;
9And they were strange to me, as may betide
10With Vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
11How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not?
12How came ye muffled in so hush a Masque?
13Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
14To steal away, and leave without a task
15My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
16The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
17Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
18Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
19O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
20Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?
21A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd
22Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
23Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd
24And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
25The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;
26The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
27And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
28The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
29Is heap'd upon her, Maiden most unmeek,—
30I knew to be my demon Poesy.
31They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
32O folly! What is love? and where is it?
33And for that poor Ambition—it springs
34From a man's little heart’s short fever-fit;
35For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
36At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,
37And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
38O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
39That I may never know how change the moons,
40Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!
41And once more came they by;—alas! wherefore?
42My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams;
43My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
44With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
45The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
46Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
47The open casement press'd a new-leaved vine,
48Let in the budding warmth and throstle's lay;
49O Shadows! 'twas a time to bid farewell!
50Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.
51So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
52My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
53For I would not be dieted with praise,
54A pet-lamb in a sentimental Farce!
55Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
56In masque-like figures on the dreamy Urn;
57Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
58And for the day faint visions there is store;
59Vanish, ye Phantoms, from my idle spright,
60Into the clouds, and never more return!
"Ode on Indolence" is (probably) one of the earliest of John Keats's great Odes, a sequence of six poems he composed between the spring and autumn of 1819. In this poem, a speaker (who has more than a little in common with Keats himself) wakes up one morning to find he's being persecuted by three symbolic figures: Love, Ambition, and Poesy. Dressed in Grecian robes, this trio marches back and forth across the speaker's vision, demanding that he get up and make something of himself. He resists, though, preferring "honied indolence"—sweet laziness—to bustle and action. This poem suggests that receptive, contemplative being is as important a part of artistic creation as active, energetic doing. Keats never published this poem; it first appeared in the posthumous collection Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848).
I awoke one morning to see three figures hovering before my eyes. Their heads were bent; they held hands and all looked to one side. They walked calmly in a line, dressed in elegant sandals and white robes. They went past me, moving like images on an ancient marble vase do when you turn it around to see the other side; then they came back, just as the images come back when you turn the vase around again. They seemed unfamiliar to me—which can happen, if you know more about ancient Greek statuary than you do about urns.
How could I have thought I didn't recognize you, you strange specters? Why did you turn up disguised, like actors in a silent, secretive play? Were you scheming to creep away and leave me with nothing to do? The sleepy morning was delicious as a plump fruit; my eyes were delectably clouded with summery laziness; my heart beat slower and slower; I wasn't troubled by either pains or pleasures. Oh, why didn't you go away, you ghosts, and leave me haunted by nothing but—well, nothing?
The figures came by again. This time, they turned to look at me. Then, at last, they faded away; I longed to fly after them because I did know who they were. The first one was the beautiful girl named Love. The second was Ambition, with his thin cheeks and tired, watchful eyes. The last one (whom I love all the more when people say bad things about her), a bold and demanding girl, I recognized as Poetry, my presiding spirit.
They vanished, and, good lord, I wished I had wings to follow them. What foolishness! What's the use of love, after all, and where can you find it even if you wanted it? As for paltry Ambition, it's just a tremor that shakes a guy's heart during his short and insignificant life. And as for Poetry—no... no, she doesn't offer any pleasures (at least in my opinion) as delicious as sleepy afternoons and evenings drenched in sweet laziness. Oh, if only I could live a life so untroubled that I'd never know that time was passing or be pestered by the little concerns of everyday life!
The figures came by again. But why? My sleep had been richly decorated with mysterious, half-seen dreams. My soul had been a green meadow full of flowers, moving shadows, and dappled sunlight. The morning was cloudy, but the rain wasn't falling, though you could see that a May shower was on its way. The open window pressed against a vine with fresh new leaves and let in the warmth of spring and the song of a thrush. Oh, ghosts! I wanted to say goodbye to you then. I wouldn't have mourned your disappearance.
So goodbye, you ghosts! You can't get me to lift my head up from its cool and pleasant bed in the grass. I don't want to live for acclaim, like some cosseted lamb in a treacly, embarrassing play. Fade away, ghosts, and return to your place on that imagined marble vase. Goodbye! I still have dreams to dream in the night, daydreams to dream in the day. Go away, you ghosts; leave my imagination, disappear into the clouds, and don't come back!
This poem's speaker—a voice for John Keats himself—is pestered one morning by a persistent vision. Just as he awakes, he sees three personified figures representing his motivations: Love, Ambition, and most alluring of all, Poesy (or poetry). This trio walks past him over and over, making pointed eye contact, silently pressuring him to get out of bed and make something of himself. At first, the speaker feels eager to do just that. Ultimately, though, he rejects action in favor of "honied indolence": sweet, delicious, daydreamy laziness. Dreamy inaction, for this speaker, offers deeper rewards than worldly success can.
When Love, Ambition, and Poesy first show their faces, the speaker doesn't want anything to do with them. He wishes that they would "melt" and leave him "unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness." In other words, he's been having a perfectly lovely time in the world of sleep, where neither "pain" nor "pleasure" has any power over him. Sleepy oblivion seems preferable to waking life, during which he’s always being goaded by "the voice of busy common-sense"—the little voice that tells him he really must get up and do something useful with himself.
Still, the speaker feels a spike of anxiety at the three figures' appearance, wishing he could rush after them as they slowly fade from his sight. Quickly, though, he brushes that longing aside. Pursuing Love, Ambition, and Poesy, he says, is a fool's errand. Love is always tricksy and evasive, Ambition is just the egotistical longing of a puny mortal's "little heart," and Poesy… well, Poesy is delightful, but not so delightful as "honied indolence": sweet, sweet laziness.
None of these motivations, in other words, can offer the speaker the same pleasures that lounging can. Lying in bed doing nothing, he can enjoy the quiet of his inner life, in which his soul becomes a grassy lawn "besprinkled" with flowers and dappled sunlight. He's also free to appreciate the world outside his window, paying dreamy attention to the "new-leaved vine" that pushes its nose over the sill, the warm clouds of a grey spring morning, and the sound of birdsong.
Choosing this quiet, receptive, observant attitude over the noisy rewards of "praise" and success, the speaker makes a case for passivity over activity, the private world over the public world, and being over doing. Perhaps simply being alive is enough of a reason to live.
Of course, the very fact that this poem is, well, a poem suggests that the speaker doesn't reject Poesy for good, no matter what he claims!
When this poem's speaker is visited by three beckoning spirits—Love, Ambition, and Poesy, his great motivations—he can't decide whether he wants to rush after them or to banish them forever. Though he settles on telling them to clear off, his ambivalence about his spectral visitors suggests that he can't banish them for good. Yet he can't just get out of bed and chase them, either. Making art, this poem suggests, means balancing the desire to act and achieve something with the passive, quiet reflection and contemplation that give artistic visions room to take shape.
When the three figures of Love, Ambition, and Poesy first appear to the speaker, he can't decide what makes him more uncomfortable: the idea that they're there to lure him out of his 'honied indolence" in bed, or the idea that they’re conspiring in a "deep-disguised plot" to "steal away" from him and leave him "without a task" to occupy his time—in other words, to creep away and leave him without anything to do. As uncomfortable as these figures make him, they're also important to him. Part of him wants them to go away and leave him alone; part of him "burn[s]" to follow them.
A big part of the speaker's difficulty with these figures is that he's afraid they’ll lead him astray. If he gets up and runs after fame, fortune, and love, he worries, he'll put himself in danger of becoming a "pet-lamb in a sentimental Farce"—a ludicrous figure who strives only for cheap external rewards, "dieted" (or fed) with hollow "praise" for his second-rate art. If your art comes only from actively rushing after your "Ambition," these words suggest, it won't have been worth making.
Instead, the speaker turns toward "indolence," a passive, lazy, dreamy receptivity. He rejects an urge to go out and do things in favor of gazing idly out his window at a "new-leaved vine" poking its nose over the sill and a sky on the verge of releasing a gentle spring shower. These images of fresh springy potential—of things that are about to happen—symbolically suggest that the speaker will indeed follow his "three Ghosts," but that doing so will be more like patiently watching a plant growing than like springing out of bed to do his chores.
Poetry, this Ode suggests, doesn't get built like a wall; instead, it sprouts like a new leaf. Poets need something more than willpower and ego. They need a quality that Keats once called "negative capability," the ability "to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts," patiently watching and waiting without rushing to a conclusion, letting an artwork take shape in its own sweet time. Ambitious activity on its own won't cut it; indolent contemplation is just as important a part of the work.
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble Urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the Urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen Shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With Vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
The "Ode on Indolence"—a hymn to laziness and passivity—begins, fittingly enough, with a dreamy scene. The speaker wakes up one morning to see "three figures" walking past him. Appearing in profile, holding hands, dressed in "placid sandals" and "white robes," they seem to have stepped right off a "marble Urn," an ancient Greek vase.
They move like they're on an urn, too—or, more precisely, as if they're on an urn that's being slowly rotated, so the figures on it move past, disappear, then reappear as their side of the urn comes round again. Take a look at the way the speaker describes their motion:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble Urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the Urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen Shades return;
The repetitive language here evokes the dreamy, steady circling of the imagined urn as the figures pass before the speaker's eyes once and again. The figures' inexorable return—and the fact that the speaker refers to the figures as "Shades," ghosts—make this vision feel haunting. These shades, no matter how "serene" and peaceful they look, seem to have ghost-like business with the speaker.
Still barely awake, the speaker doesn't even do anything so active as see the figures: rather, he says that "one morn before me were three figures seen," as if someone else might almost have been doing the seeing. And as the figures pass him by once and again, they seem "strange to [him]," unfamiliar—an unfamiliarity he justifies by saying he's well-versed in "Phidian lore," not in vases. The "Phidian lore" the speaker alludes to is a knowledge of ancient Greek sculpture: Phidias was the legendary sculptor to whom the Parthenon Marbles were attributed.
The speaker thus seems to say: What do you want from me, urn-figures? I can't identify you, I'm no expert, I know more about Greek statuary than I do about vase-people like you.
Next to the speaker's precise image of a Greek urn being spun around for examination—and the substantial knowledge of Greek art implied by the very words "Phidian lore"—this sounds like a weak excuse, a kind of 19th-century "new phone, who dis?" The speaker does sort of recognize these figures. He just doesn't want to. These shades want something from him, and he'd rather stay in bed.
The fact that these shades appear "like figures on a marble Urn" gives some hint at what exactly they might want. Keats, fascinated by ancient Greece, often used its enduring artworks as a way to explore the powers, mysteries, and limits of art itself. If three Grecian urn-figures are haunting this very Keatsian speaker, they probably have something to do with his artistic destiny.
The poem's epigraph ("They toil not, neither do they spin") thus feels like the speaker's preemptive argument against the shades' creative demands. Those words come from no lesser authority than Christ: they're a quotation from the parable of the lilies, a story Jesus tells in the biblical Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In this story, Jesus tells his followers not to worry or strive, but to learn from the "lilies of the field," which don't do a lick of work but are still dressed more beautifully than King Solomon himself. Such lily-like indolence, this poem will argue, is both delicious and mysteriously creative.
How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a Masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days?
Unlock all 341 words of this analysis of Lines 11-15 of “Ode on Indolence,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?
A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd
And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap'd upon her, Maiden most unmeek,—
I knew to be my demon Poesy.
They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition—it springs
From a man's little heart’s short fever-fit;
For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!
And once more came they by;—alas! wherefore?
My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press'd a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle's lay;
O Shadows! 'twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.
So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental Farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy Urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms, from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return!
When the speaker drowsily looks out his open bedroom window, he notices all sorts of things that are just getting started, just coming to life: a "new-leaved vine," fresh and green; a sky that promises a warm "shower," but isn't raining yet; a "budding warmth," opening like the petals of a flower.
All these images of imminent growth or release symbolically suggest that the speaker's art, too, is just on the verge of blossoming—a state that demands he embrace indolence over action. The speaker's view hints that poetry doesn't grow through effort or willpower any more than a vine does; it must come in its own time.
The three figures who process before the speaker's drowsy eyes aren't just symbolic but also allegorical, explicitly personified representatives of abstract ideas. Each has its own personality: "Love" is a beautiful (if evasive) girl; "Ambition" is a weary, tense, and sickly youth; and "Poesy" is a "maiden most unmeek"—a bold, demanding lady whom the speaker feels particularly connected to (and persecuted by).
Besides personifying these ideas, the figures reflect the speaker's desire for artistic immortality. By presenting this trio as robed figures like those you might see on the side of a "marble Urn"—an ancient Greek vase—Keats connects them to the kind of art that lasts. More than once, Keats used classical art to represent the teasing, ambivalent power of art in general, which can reach beyond human limitations to outlive its makers by centuries, but can never quite equal life, no matter how close it comes.
The figures also symbolize the active part of creativity, as opposed to the passive, indolent, woolgathering part this poem celebrates. Pacing back and forth before the speaker's eyes, these energetic "shadows" beckon the speaker to follow them—to leap out of bed and do something with himself. The speaker's ambivalence about these figures suggests that he knows he'll have to respond to them one time or another. But for now, he resists, knowing that creativity requires receptivity as well as action.
By personifying his three great motivations—Love, Ambition, and Poesy—the speaker suggests that he has a close relationship with these ideas, as well as certain insights into their nature.
The three figures who appear before the speaker as he awakes one morning look "like figures on a marble Urn"—a simile that suggests they have something to do with timeless themes, ideas that have been around since ancient Greece. When they finally reveal their identities, they're indeed old as the hills:
These depictions reveal something about how the speaker sees his motivations—especially when he gets into his reasons for turning away from these "Shadows":
The speaker is pretty quick to wash his hands of Love and Ambition (though, as the poem makes clear, he can't banish them for good). But he's more ambivalent about Poesy: he loves her all the more when people criticize her, and he admits that she does offer "joy," even if he claims to prefer the joys of indolence.
By presenting these motivations as figures he can interact with, the speaker suggests that he knows them as you'd know a person: they're his long-time companions. He also suggests that the three have a relationship with each other. After all, Love, Ambition, and Poesy walk hand in hand.
Unlock all 244 words of this analysis of Apostrophe in “Ode on Indolence,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
The poem's epigraph quotes a parable that appears in the biblical Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In this story, Christ tells his followers not to fret and strive, but to learn from the lilies, which don't weave clothes but are nonetheless more beautifully "dressed" than King Solomon himself.
"Ode on Indolence" is likely one of the earliest of Keats's great Odes (though critics bicker about what got written when). This was a series of six poems in which Keats would explore art's relationship to life, death, and time. Like all odes, these were addressed to particular subjects, from a Greek vase to a nightingale to autumn; "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode on Melancholy" were the only two in the sequence addressed to abstract concepts.
Some critics have seen "Indolence" as the greenhouse in which ideas for the other odes sprouted. A lot of the images that appear in this poem—the open window, the bird's song, the figures on a Grecian urn—reappear in the other odes, or even take center stage as those odes' addressees.
"Indolence" uses a form of Keats's own invention and one that he would return and return to. When Keats wrote "Ode on Indolence," he'd been thinking a lot about meter and poetic form and experimenting with new shapes for sonnets. The rhyme scheme he uses here draws on those experiments: he fuses elements of Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms to create a brand-new 10-line stanza shape. "Indolence" is built from six of these 10-line stanzas. This steady, unhurried, you might even say indolent stanza form offers plenty of room for meditation.
"Ode on Indolence" uses a quiet and unobtrusive meter: good old iambic pentameter, the rhythm of Keats's heroes Shakespeare and Milton. Every line of iambic pentameter is built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 11:
How is | it, Shad- | ows, that | I knew | ye not?
Iambic pentameter is a traditional and popular meter for a reason: spoken English easily falls into a roughly iambic rhythm. Iambic pentameter is flexible, too, allowing for easy and natural-sounding variations. Listen to the difference in line 13, for instance:
Was it | a si- | lent deep- | disgui- | sed plot
This rather paranoid line begins with an urgent trochee—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm—that suggests a needly stab of artistic anxiety. (Note, too, that in this poem Keats gives words ending in "-ed" the full Shakespearean pronunciation: not "dis-GUISED," with two syllables, but "dis-GUY-sed," with three.) Small variations like this appear throughout the poem, adding interest and emphasis.
"Ode on Indolence" uses the following weaving rhyme scheme:
ABABCDECDE
Here, Keats is poaching and recombining rhyme patterns from two kinds of sonnets: the Shakespearean or English sonnet, which starts out with alternating rhymes, and the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, whose closing sestet often uses a CDECDE pattern. At the time Keats wrote this poem, he'd been thinking a lot about the limitations of each of these rhyme schemes on their own; this new 10-line pattern, which he reuses in a number of his other great odes, was the fruit of his meditations.
The movement from the quick back-and-forth rhymes of the first four lines to the slower interweaving of the closing six creates a pulsing, sweeping pace, like waves rushing to shore and then falling back.
By all indications, this poem's speaker is a voice for John Keats himself. Many of the images here—from the "pet-lamb" the speaker scorns in the last stanza to the vision of three allegorical shades processing past like figures on a Greek urn—first appear in letters Keats wrote in 1819, in and around the months when he was composing his six great Odes.
The speaker's ambivalence about Love, Ambition, and Poesy and his championing of indolence are certainly Keats's own. In a March 1819 letter to his beloved brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, he described a morning when he lay in bed until 11 a.m., relishing, as he put it, "a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of faintness" that he felt was "a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind."
But this languorous pleasure in simply being has a creative value, too. Keats famously wrote that greatness in literature demands a quality he called "Negative Capability"—the ability "to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Art-making, in other words, requires a kind of patient receptivity that doesn't rush to a conclusion. A "delicious diligent indolence," as Keats described it in another letter, was part of the pursuit of Poesy, not opposed to it.
The poem is set at once in the speaker's bedroom and in his imagination—and sometimes in between the two. When the speaker wakes up, he's in his own bed, looking out the open "casement" (or window) to see a low, soft sky and a little vine poking its nose over the windowsill. But he's also not far from a world in which the "lawn" (or linen fabric) of his bedspread is also a lawn of the grassy variety, a dream-meadow in which his soul can rest at ease, untroubled by worldly suffering or worldly ambition.
In fact, the speaker's soul doesn't just rest in this visionary meadow, it is this visionary meadow: he imagines both that his "soul had been a lawn" and that his head is "cool-bedded in the flowery grass" of that lawn. In his indolence, in other words, he can live inside himself, in a private paradise.
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius: in an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Keats seems to be working out some of his complex feelings about such artistic ambition in this poem—likely one of the earliest in the immortal six-ode series he wrote between the spring and autumn of 1819. Perhaps this poem was the testing ground for some of the images that would haunt Keats all through 1819: the urns, casements, and dreamy Greek apparitions here would play a prominent role in other odes. Keats might have thought less of this ode than the others (though he did write to a friend about how much he'd enjoyed composing it). At any rate, he never tried to publish it, and it first appeared in print in the posthumous collection Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848).
Keats met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics, but never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, for instance, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the granddaddy of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Keats wrote the "Ode on Indolence" at a turning point in both his life and his artistic career. The germs of this poem (the image of Love, Ambition, and Poesy as three figures on an urn, for instance) start turning up in his letters around March 1819. By the summer of that year, he had embarked upon a project that would secure his place "among the English poets": a series of six odes that many consider to be some of the world's greatest poems.
The winter before he began writing these odes, Keats nursed his younger brother Tom through the last months of a fatal case of consumption, a deadly disease we now know as tuberculosis. Consumption was horribly familiar to Keats already, not just from his medical training (he studied to become a surgeon) but from his childhood: the disease claimed his mother when he and his siblings were still small. It would claim Keats, too. He was only 24 when he began writing his odes in 1819; he would die little more than a year after he completed them.
Alongside grief, Keats was grappling with complicated feelings about having fallen deeply in love with the literal girl next door: a young woman called Fanny Brawne whose family rented the other half of the house where he lived. Though head over heels for her, Keats also felt more than a little uncomfortable about how completely his love absorbed him, as well as worried that a penniless poet wouldn't make a very appealing prospective husband (at least in Fanny's family's eyes).
This very personal poem's reflections on the persistent noodging of Love, Ambition, and Poetry and the appeal of painless "nothingness" might thus reflect both Keats's grief and his overwhelm in a sea of powerful feelings. The speaker's commitment to an indolence that lets art take shape in its own time reveals Keats's courageous patience: his refusal to rush heedlessly after his ambition even in the painful knowledge that life is short.
The Keats-Shelley Museum — Learn more about Keats through the museum housed in his final home in Italy.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a performance of the poem.
Keats's Legacy — Read five contemporary writers reflecting on what Keats means to them to honor the recent bicentenary of his death.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Keats's life and work (and check out some of his manuscripts) at the British Library's website.