Study Questions
What are some of the recurring motifs that appear throughout the six odes?
Given the chronological problems with the usual ordering of the odes
("Indolence," often placed first in the sequence, was one of the last odes
to be written), to what extent do you think the odes should be grouped as
a unified sequence?
Taken together, do the odes tell a "story," or do they simply develop a
theme? Do you think the speaker is the same in each ode?
How does the "Ode on Indolence" anticipate the themes and images of the
other five poems? Given the speaker's later confrontations with Love,
Ambition, and Beauty--as well as with such themes as mortality and the
creative imagination--does the conclusion of the Indolence ode seem
ironic?
In what ways is "Ode to Psyche" different from the other odes? How do
these differences affect the poem's attempt to describe the creative
imagination? Why might the speaker want to use his imagination for
Psyche's worship?
From Psyche's bower to the nightingale's glade to the warm luxury of
Autumn, the odes contain some of the most beautiful sensory language in
English poetry. But many of the odes intentionally limit the senses
they inhabit. With particular reference to "Nightingale" (which suppresses
sight) and "Grecian Urn" (which suppresses every sense but sight),
how do the odes create an abundance of believable sensation even as they
limit it?
The odes are full of paradoxical and self-contradictory ideas--the
attribution of human experience to the frozen figures on the urn, for
instance. But the "Ode on Melancholy" builds its entire theme on an
apparent paradox--that pleasure and pain are intimately connected and
that sadness rests at the core of joy. How does the language of
"Melancholy" strengthen that sense of paradox? What does it mean for
trophies to be cloudy, pleasure to be aching, a lover's anger to be
soothing, and "wakeful anguish" a thing to be desired?
On its surface, the ode "To Autumn" seems to be little more than
description, an illustration of a season. But underneath its descriptive
surface, "To Autumn" is one of the most thematically rich of all the odes.
How does Keats manage to embody complex themes in such an apparently
simple poem?
