His beautiful images of the sky during the day in ‘To one who has been long in city pent’ (‘the fair/ And open face of heaven’), at dusk in ‘To Autumn’ (‘barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’) and at night in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (‘the Queen-Moon is on her throne,/ Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays’) are vibrant celebrations of the natural world. The beauty of the sky is also celebrated in ‘Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art’, where Keats describes how the North Star appears to ‘hang’ in the sky: ‘in lone splendour hung aloft the night’.


The quintessential colour of nature, green, often dominates Keats’ exploration of the beauty of the living world. His eloquence makes it easy to imagine the lushness that he evokes so powerfully in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘In some melodious plot/ Of beechen green ... Tasting of Flora and the country green’. In ‘To Autumn’ he layers green upon green to create a palpable sense of nature’s vibrancy: ‘To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees’.


An interesting and original aspect of Keats’ exploration of nature is how he sensuously recreates nature’s sounds, such as the hum of flies in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves’ – or the buzz of gnats in ‘To Autumn’: ‘in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn/ Among the river sallows’. He evocatively conveys the sounds of birds, from the nightingale’s plaintive anthem in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to the ‘whistles’ of a robin redbreast and the ‘twitter’ of swallows in ‘To Autumn’. In ‘To Autumn’ he explains that, although birdsong is usually associated with spring, autumn ‘hast thy music too’. He proves this by helping us to recall sounds such as the ‘bleat’ of ‘full-grown lambs’ and the singing of crickets.


Nature is something we interact with sensuously with our senses of sight and sound, which Keats explores evocatively, but also with our senses of taste, touch and smell. Many poets neglect the latter three senses in their treatment of nature, but Keats fully immerses us in his poetry by appealling to these neglected senses. The taste of vintage wine is conveyed in ‘To a Nightingale’ – ‘Tasting of Flora and the country green’ – while the aches and pains of illness and old age are graphically described: ‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’. The fragrance of a natural forest, thriving without cultivation, is celebrated in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. In the darkness, the speaker cannot see the flowers or ‘what soft incense hangs upon the boughs’, but in the ‘embalmed darkness’ his knowledge of nature allows him to ‘guess each sweet’ smell: ‘the fruit tree wild:/ White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;/ Fast fading violets ... The coming musk- rose, full of dewy wine’.


Although Keats admires the scenes of nature carved expertly on the urn in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, he famously describes them as ‘Cold Pastoral!’ because they are two- dimensional and flat. They may be immortal, but it is nature’s constant flux, its transience, that makes it such a worthy subject of exploration for Keats.


482 VERSE 2022


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