Ode to Psyche Summary & Analysis
by John Keats

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The Full Text of “Ode to Psyche”

1O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

2          By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

3And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

4          Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

5Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

6          The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

7I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,

8          And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,

9Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side

10          In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof

11          Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran

12                    A brooklet, scarce espied:

13'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

14          Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

15They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;

16          Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;

17          Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,

18As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

19And ready still past kisses to outnumber

20          At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

21                    The winged boy I knew;

22But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?

23                    His Psyche true!

24O latest born and loveliest vision far

25          Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!

26Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region’d star,

27          Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

28Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,

29                    Nor altar heap’d with flowers;

30Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

31                    Upon the midnight hours;

32No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

33          From chain-swung censer teeming;

34No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

35          Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

36O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

37          Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

38When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

39          Holy the air, the water, and the fire;

40Yet even in these days so far retir'd

41          From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

42          Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

43I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

44So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

45                    Upon the midnight hours;

46Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

47          From swinged censer teeming;

48Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

49          Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

50Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

51          In some untrodden region of my mind,

52Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

53          Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

54Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees

55          Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

56And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

57          The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;

58And in the midst of this wide quietness

59A rosy sanctuary will I dress

60With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

61          With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

62With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

63          Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

64And there shall be for thee all soft delight

65          That shadowy thought can win,

66A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

67          To let the warm Love in!

  • “Ode to Psyche” Introduction

    • "Ode to Psyche," one of the earliest of Keats's famous odes, was published in 1820, appearing in his final collection, Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. In the poem, a wandering speaker finds Psyche (goddess of the soul and mind) asleep in the arms of Eros (god of love). Awestruck by Psyche's beauty, the speaker vows to build her a temple—not from stone, but from his imagination. Through visions of the rich worlds inside the speaker's own mind, the poem celebrates the imagination's awesome and mysterious creative power.

  • “Ode to Psyche” Summary

    • Oh, Psyche, goddess of the mind and soul! Listen to my unmusical verses, squeezed out of me by a delightful force outside my control and by fond memories. And please forgive me for singing songs about your mysteries into your own shell-like ear!

      I must have been dreaming today—or did I really see the butterfly-winged goddess Psyche while I was awake? I was out meandering absentmindedly through a forest, when I was startled to see two beautiful figures sleeping next to each other in the deep grass, lying under quietly rustling trees and flowers, which were next to a little stream I could hardly see through all the foliage.

      Among quiet, cool flowers with sweet-smelling centers—flowers that were blue, silvery, and deepest purple—these two figures lay gently asleep in the grass. They had their arms and their wings around each other. While their lips weren't quite touching, it seemed as if they'd just been kissing, as if sleep had gently separated them—they would be ready to start kissing again as soon as love opened their eyes like a new dawn. I recognized the boy with wings (as Eros, the god of love): but who were you, you lovely dove-like creature? Eros's faithful bride Psyche, of course!

      O Psyche, you are the youngest and most beautiful of all the old Greek gods. You're lovelier than the moon itself, or than Venus, that passionate firefly of the night sky; you're lovelier than them even though no one ever built you a temple or piled up flowers on an altar for you; even though no virgin priestesses ever worshiped you with gorgeous midnight chants; even though no one played music for you, burnt incense for you, dedicated sacred places to you, or became an entranced prophet in your service.

      O, most shining goddess! It's too late now for anyone to believe in you or worship you with musical prayers, since the world has moved past the days when everything was believed to be sacred and magical. But even in these modern times, so far from ancient religion, I can see your luminous wings beating among the gods—I can see this with the inspired power of my own imagination.

      So let me sing gorgeous midnight chants to you; let me be your music and your incense; let me be your sacred place, and let me speak for you like an entranced prophet.

      Yes, I'll be the priest of your religion, and build you a shrine in some remote part of my own mind, where thoughts, which cause me delicious suffering as they grow, will branch like trees. Those thought-trees will spread over the wild mountains of my mind like feathers covering the wings of a bird. And those forests will be full of gentle spring breezes, little rivers, birds, and bees, which will soothe the forest spirits into a peaceful sleep in their beds of moss.

      Right in the middle of this quiet landscape, I'll decorate a rose-covered temple for you, draping it with the growing vines of my active mind—with flower buds, bells, and unknown stars, and everything else that the gardener of my imagination can invent. (And my imagination never makes up the same flower twice!)

      In this temple, you'll find every pleasure that I can think up: there will be a shining lantern for you, and a window open at night so you can let your beloved Eros in.

  • “Ode to Psyche” Themes

    • Theme The Power and Beauty of the Imagination

      The Power and Beauty of the Imagination

      In “Ode to Psyche,” a wandering speaker stumbles across Psyche (the goddess of the soul and the mind) sleeping in a forest, and vows to build a temple to her. He won’t build it with his hands, though: this temple will be all in his imagination. That doesn’t make it less beautiful or less real, the poem implies. To this speaker, the mind’s creative power is an awesome force, worthy of worship in itself. The poem uses the power of the imagination to praise the power of the imagination, building an inner temple to the goddess of the inner life.

      Even before the speaker encounters Psyche, he’s traveling through his own imagination. Imagination, he suggests, is sometimes an even stronger force than reality: dreams can feel just as real as the outside world!

      Wandering “in a forest thoughtlessly,” the speaker stumbles across Psyche and her lover Eros asleep, and asks: “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?” His uncertainty suggests the intensity of his inner vision: his imagination is so powerful that he just can’t be sure whether he’s imagining what he’s seeing.

      The speaker’s imagination is also so powerful that it’s able to bring vanished gods back to life, and to transform the speaker himself into many different forms. Marveling at Psyche’s beauty, the speaker laments that no one truly believes in gods and goddesses anymore. He, however, can worship Psyche anyway, making her real with the power of his imaginative vision: “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.”

      To worship this goddess, he won’t just find her a nice altar and a grove and a prophet; he’ll use his imagination to become these things. “So let me be […] thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet […] Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle,” he says, suggesting that he’ll imaginatively inhabit all of these things and give them life.

      At last, the imagination becomes both a place and everything within that place. In short, it becomes a whole rich world. In the last stanza, the external “forest” reappears inside the speaker as “some untrodden region of my mind,” where thoughts grow like trees. Here, the speaker can decorate a gorgeous temple for Psyche with the help of the “gardener Fancy”—his own personified imagination.

      In fact, the imagination is so powerful that it can even out-nature nature. The speaker notes that his imagination "will never breed the same" flowers, meaning that he will never run out of creative steam when it comes to thinking up new ways to envision and honor Psyche's beauty. In other words, the speaker’s visions can outstrip the outside world in creativity and variety.

      With this incredibly powerful imagination, the speaker completes a temple that houses Psyche herself. This means that Psyche (who is a symbol of the mind and soul) can live in a beautiful temple built by the speaker's mind—a temple that stands in a forest that also represents the mind!

      In the end, then, this is a poem that uses the power of the imaginative mind to praise the power of the imaginative mind. This means that “Ode to Psyche” is also, in some ways, an ode from Psyche. When, at the beginning of the poem, the speaker apologizes to the goddess for singing her secrets into her “own soft-conched ear,” he’s perfectly right to blush a little: here, the creative, imaginative mind is singing in praise of its own beauties and joys.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ode to Psyche”

    • Lines 1-4

      O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
                By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
      And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
                Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

      The speaker of "Ode to Psyche" begins with a passionate cry: "O Goddess!" This direct apostrophe lets readers know that this is an ode—a poem of praise addressed directly to its subject. The subject, in this case, will be Psyche, the classical goddess of the soul; the speaker intends to treat her with all the ceremonious respect a "Goddess" deserves.

      He seems to have learned his manners from the poetry of her world. This first passage of the poem works a lot like an invocation, the little prayer to a god or a muse (a goddess of art and inspiration) that often appears at the beginning of an ancient Greek or Roman poem. (The Odyssey, for instance, famously begins, "Sing to me, Muse!") Here, though, the poet isn't asking Psyche to sing to (or through) him, but asking her to listen while he sings his "tuneless numbers"—a song without music—to her.

      But he seems a little sheepish about asking her to listen! In fact, he begs Psyche's pardon:

      And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
      Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

      Why on earth would this singer feel like he has to apologize for singing Psyche a song of praise about herself? The clue is in what she's the goddess of. As the goddess of the soul and the mind (one can find her name even today in words like "psychology"), she's the guardian of the inner life—and, as the reader will see, this speaker is going to celebrate the inner life using all the powers of his inner life. In other words, he's using his own "psyche" to praise Psyche! Maybe he's right to blush a little.

      The speaker vividly expresses his closeness to his subject in a moment of vivid imagery. He's not just singing this song into Psyche's ear, but whispering it into her "soft-conched ear." Here, he imagines that the ear looks like a shell, with whorls like a conch—but it's also soft. It's as if he's so close to Psyche that his lips are brushing her ear as he speaks. The gentle assonance of "soft-conched," and the sibilance of "pardon that thy secrets should be sung," heightens that feeling of whispery closeness even more. This will be an intensely intimate poem of the imagination.

    • Lines 5-6

      Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
                The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

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    • Lines 7-12

      I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
                And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
      Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
                In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
                Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
                          A brooklet, scarce espied:

    • Lines 13-20

      'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
                Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
      They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
                Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
                Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
      As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
      And ready still past kisses to outnumber
                At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

    • Lines 21-27

      The winged boy I knew;
      But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
                          His Psyche true!
      O latest born and loveliest vision far
                Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
      Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region’d star,
                Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

    • Lines 28-35

      Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
                          Nor altar heap’d with flowers;
      Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
                          Upon the midnight hours;
      No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
                From chain-swung censer teeming;
      No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
                Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

    • Lines 36-43

      O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
                Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
      When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
                Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
      Yet even in these days so far retir'd
                From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
                Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
      I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

    • Lines 44-49

      So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
                          Upon the midnight hours;
      Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
                From swinged censer teeming;
      Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
                Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

    • Lines 50-57

      Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
                In some untrodden region of my mind,
      Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
                Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
      Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
                Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
      And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
                The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;

    • Lines 58-63

      And in the midst of this wide quietness
      A rosy sanctuary will I dress
      With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
                With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
      With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
                Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

    • Lines 64-67

      And there shall be for thee all soft delight
                That shadowy thought can win,
      A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
                To let the warm Love in!

  • “Ode to Psyche” Symbols

    • Symbol Psyche and Eros

      Psyche and Eros

      This isn't the only poem in which Psyche and Eros symbolize the mind/soul and love, respectively. By alluding to these classical figures, Keats draws on a long symbolic tradition.

      The story of Eros and Psyche (which you can read here) suggests that Keats is using these two gods not just as symbols for the soul and love, but as a picture of how the imagination helps fulfill the soul. By imaginatively housing Psyche in a beautiful temple where she can "let the warm Love in" for nightly visits, the speaker creates a fertile connection between the inner and outer world. Somehow, imagination allows the "psyche" to creatively engage with the "love" that only something other than the isolated self can provide.

    • Symbol Flowers and Plants

      Flowers and Plants

      Plants and flowers often symbolize creativity, fertility, beauty, and new life, and that's exactly the role they play here. Flowers and plants pop up twice in this poem: first in the maybe-real, maybe-imaginary forest the speaker wanders through in the first half of the poem, then in the definitely-imaginary "untrodden region of [his] mind" that he explores in the last stanza. In both of these places, the flowers are lush, brilliant sources of delight. And often, they're brand-new ones, "buds" that the "gardener Fancy" has only recently bred.

      The images of flowers and plants in this poem suggest that nature and the imagination have something in common. Both love to create fresh new life. But the imagination might even have one up on nature: when "breeding flowers," it "will never breed the same." Nature, on the other hand, just keeps making the same old roses, whereas the imagination can make an infinite number of new flowers.

    • Symbol The Casement

      The Casement

      The casement (or window) at the end of the poem symbolizes the point of connection between the inner and outer world. Keats was fond of using windows to mark a division between reality and imagination. In fact, he invented the most famous "casements" in literature: the "magic casements opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn" that appear in his "Ode to a Nightingale." This poem's casement, like that one, is a point of transition: a place where the "warm Love" can fly in, where the "psyche" (the mind and soul) can come into contact with everything that exists beyond and outside it.

  • “Ode to Psyche” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Alliteration, like its cousins assonance and consonance, gives this poem both music and meaning. Besides simply sounding good, repeated sounds evoke this poem's world and draw attention to important moments.

      For instance, take a look at the sibilant alliteration in lines 3-4:

      And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
      Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

      The alliterated /s/ sounds just like the whispered secrets it describes—and like the softness of Psyche's ear, a vividly intimate image that suggests how close the speaker is getting to the goddess he praises. It's as if his lips are brushing her skin as he speaks.

      Later on, alliterative /m/ sounds follow the speaker as he goes deep into an imaginative trance:

      So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
      Upon the midnight hours;

      That repeating /m/ makes the speaker's words sound like a chant—and links that "moan," the sacred song, to the "midnight," so that the song and the night both seem enchanted.

      Since it sounds a little different than everyday speech, alliteration can also direct the reader to meaningful moments. That "pale-mouth'd prophet" who turns up at the end of the third and fourth stanzas is already an unexpected, striking image—and the repeated /p/ sound draws even more attention to him.

    • Allusion

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    • Apostrophe

    • Assonance

    • Caesura

    • Enjambment

    • Imagery

    • Personification

    • Metaphor

    • Repetition

    • Rhetorical Question

  • “Ode to Psyche” Vocabulary

    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.

    • Tuneless Numbers
    • Wrung
    • Enforcement
    • Remembrance
    • Thy, Thine, Thou, Thee
    • Soft-Conched Ear
    • Psyche
    • Thoughtlessly
    • Couched
    • Brooklet
    • Scarce Espied
    • 'Mid
    • Fragrant-Eyed
    • Tyrian
    • Bedded
    • Pinions
    • Bade Adieu
    • Disjoined
    • Eye-Dawn
    • Aurorean
    • The Winged Boy
    • Olympus
    • Hierarchy
    • Fairer
    • Phoebe's Sapphire-Region'd Star
    • Vesper
    • Amorous
    • Virgin-Choir
    • Make Delicious Moan
    • Lute
    • Incense Sweet From Chain-Swung Censer Teeming
    • Oracle
    • Pale-Mouth'd Prophet
    • Antique
    • Fond
    • Lyre
    • Pieties
    • Lucent Fans
    • Olympians
    • Fane
    • Fledge
    • Zephyrs
    • Dryads
    • Sanctuary
    • Wreath'd Trellis
    • Fancy
    • A Casement Ope at Night
    Tuneless Numbers
    • "Numbers" here means verses, and refers to poetic meter, with its countable beats. If these verses are "tuneless," they might be silent, not set to music—or perhaps the speaker is just being modest about the quality of his "singing"!

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode to Psyche”

    • Form

      The "Ode to Psyche" is—surprise!—an ode, a poem of praise written directly to its subject, as if the speaker were talking to the person or thing the poem celebrates. Keats wrote a famous sequence of six odes that honored everything from a Greek vase to his own desire to lie around and daydream. "Ode to Psyche" is the first of this sequence, and its address to a symbolic Greek goddess aligns it with the content and thematic material found in many traditional odes.

      Odes often experiment with form and use intense, heightened language—and this one is no exception. The poem is made up of five stanzas, and they're all a little different. The stanzas slowly expand as the poem goes on; the last stanza, in which the speaker visits the wild, enchanted forests of his own mind, is considerably longer than the first. The fact that the stanzas slowly stretch out mirrors the way the speaker sinks deeper into his own imagination. (More on the poem's experiments with shape and sound in the "Rhyme Scheme" and "Meter" sections.)

      But this ode isn't just innovative in the way it changes, but in the way it repeats itself. A chanting, mysterious passage from the end of the third stanza appears again, slightly altered, at the end of the fourth, marking an imaginative transformation. First, the speaker thinks of all the beautiful forms of worship that no one ever offered Psyche. Later, he imagines himself not just giving her offerings, but becoming those offerings. The return of this passage shows just how powerful and flexible the speaker's imagination—and the shape of the ode—can be.

    • Meter

      "Ode to Psyche" plays creatively with meter. The poem's mixture of longer and shorter lines tracks the speaker's movement from enchantment to surprise—from dreaminess to awe.

      In general, each stanza starts out in iambic pentameter—that is, lines with five feet that go da-DUM. This is one of the most common meters in English poetry; Keats learned it from reading Shakespeare, whose plays are mostly in iambic pentameter. Take a look at the first lines to get a feel for how it sounds:

      O God | -dess! hear | these tune- | less num- | bers wrung
      By sweet | enforce- | ment and | remem- | brance dear,

      For the most part, the early parts of each stanza are in perfect, steady iambic pentameter. But towards each stanza's end, the meter changes. The lines get shorter, dipping into iambic trimeter (three da-DUMs), or even dimeter (two da-DUMs)! Sometimes those short lines make it sound as if the speaker is surprised, like this:

      The wing- | ed boy | I knew;
      But who | wast thou, | O hap- | py, hap- | py dove?
      His Psy- | che true!

      (Note that the speaker is using old-fashioned pronunciation in this poem, giving words that end in "-ed" an extra syllable: wing-ed. When he wants a word ending in "-ed" to be pronounced without that extra syllable, he cuts the "e," as in "touch'd.")

      Sometimes, though, these shorter lines, mixed in among lines of pentameter, sound like a chant or a magic spell. Consider, for example, lines 46 and 47:

      Thy voice, | thy lute, | thy pipe, | thy in- | cense sweet
      From swing- | ed cen- | ser teeming;

      Caught up in the trance of his imagination, the speaker breaks his rhythm and leaves a brief, enchanted silence. Controlling the rhythm of the language thus enables the speaker to play with the poem's tone and emotionality.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      Like its meter, the poem's rhyme scheme plays with familiar forms—and then breaks them in surprising ways. The speaker of this poem doesn't fit his visions into a rhyme scheme, but shapes his rhymes so that they mirror his visions!

      The first few lines of the poem work with a familiar ABAB CDCD rhyme scheme—the same that readers would expect to see in a sonnet. But at the end of the stanza, everything gets peculiar. The first stanza in its entirety runs like this:

      ABABCDCDEFGE

      That G line (which doesn't actually rhyme with anything) comes out of nowhere, disrupting the neat, familiar back-and-forth pattern that readers have just settled into. And that makes a lot of sense—just as the rhyme scheme gets strange, so does the scene. The speaker has stumbled across a pair of sleeping gods, which is surely enough to throw anyone off their rhyme scheme.

      But in the second stanza, some of those strange dangling rhymes begin to build new patterns. The first line of the second stanza rhymes with the final line of the first stanza ("eyed" and "espied"), and line 14 reaches back to line 11 ("Tyrian" and "ran"). Of all the rhymes in the first stanza, only "roof" dangles alone without a partner. It's as if the stanzas are twining into each other, like the "cool-rooted flowers" and foliage they describe.

      But then, as the speaker looks at Psyche and Eros entwined in the grass, the poem starts to use rhyming couplets—"too" and "adieu," "slumber" and "outnumber." This, too, makes sense: if the speaker is describing a loving "couple," a "couplet" seems like a pretty appropriate form!

      All through the poem, the speaker doesn't adhere to one rigid rhyme scheme, but changes his rhyme to match what he describes: couplets to describe a couple, a strange break in a pattern when a strange sight interrupts a forest stroll. While this rhyme scheme is unpredictable, it's always meaningful: it grows like "branched thoughts" out of the beautiful images the speaker envisions.

  • “Ode to Psyche” Speaker

    • While the speaker of "Ode to Psyche" doesn't say much about himself directly, he bears a more than passing resemblance to Keats himself—so much so that we're calling him "he" in this guide. Reflective, dreamy, and enthralled by the creative power of his own mind, this speaker revels in visions of gods sleeping in the woods and "pale-mouth'd prophet[s] dreaming".

      He seems to have fed his imagination on Greek and Roman mythology, and it's made him a little wistful: he longs for a mythical golden age when the world was imbued with magic. But he has plenty of internal magic to keep him company. His own mind is rich with "all soft delight / That shadowy thought can win," full of sensuous pleasures and gorgeous visions.

  • “Ode to Psyche” Setting

    • The "Ode to Psyche" is set in a forest—but a forest of the mind. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker leaves readers uncertain about whether he's wandering through the woods or only through his imagination. But by the end, he's certainly exploring a forest deep inside himself, a place "in some untrodden region of [his] mind" where thoughts grow like trees.

      Real or dreamed, the forest is a magical place, haunted by sleeping gods and lush with gorgeous flowers. The fertile, mythological mystery of these enchanted woods suggests the richness and power of the speaker's mind and soul.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Ode to Psyche”

      Literary Context

      Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) wrote some of the most beloved poetry in the English language. "Ode to Psyche" was the first in his series of six major odes, all of which were published in his final volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. This collection came out in 1820, the last full year of Keats's life; readers and critics either ignored or scorned it, and when Keats died of tuberculosis at 25, he believed he'd left no permanent mark on poetry. But, as he prophetically said in his youth, he would be "among the English poets after [his] death."

      Keats, along with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, was a member of the so-called "Second Generation" of English Romantic poets, who followed in the footsteps of old-school Romantics like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Keats was deeply influenced by Wordsworth in particular, picking up on the older man's interest in folklore, nature, and the power of the imagination. But Keats brought his own expansive, generous personality to these interests, eventually rejecting what he thought of as Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime" in favor of a quality he called "Negative Capability": the capacity to "be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." That embrace of the mysterious is on full display in the shifting mind-forest of the "Ode to Psyche."

      While Keats died in obscurity, he didn't stay there for long. The Victorians rediscovered him, and artists like Tennyson championed his poetry until he was one of the best-known and best-loved of all English poets. Recent commemorations of the 200th anniversary of his death show that he's still influencing readers and writers to this day.

      Historical Context

      When Keats wrote "Ode to Psyche," his interest in Greek and Roman mythology wouldn't have seemed too unusual. Classical myth was an important part of any English schoolchild's education at the time—and even the young Keats, a lower-middle-class kid going to a local day school, would have had a grounding in the poetry, stories, and languages of ancient Greece and Rome.

      But though Keats was educated (and brilliant), he found it hard to get ahead in the world he was born into. Nineteenth-century England was a place of intense class divides, not just between the wealthy and the poor, but between those with "noble" ancestry and those considered "common." And commoners were not expected to be artists. Keats's detractors loved to snobbishly insult him and his friends by calling them "Cockney poets"—that is, folks from the wrong side of the tracks in East London.

      But England was changing. George IV, a wildly unpopular and self-indulgent king, was destabilizing the monarchy, and the American and French revolutions made the downtrodden English commoners feel that a better and more democratic world might be just over the horizon. And while another revolution didn't come to England, the 19th century was indeed the last in which English monarchs were anything more than figureheads.

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