The odes of John Keats were written in a sudden burst of clarity upon the Spring wind--like a flame coming to life, flickering to brightness.  Lines contained within these poems are among the most quoted of Keats, and the most revered, let alone the most critiqued and scrutinized.  These poems, beginning with “Ode to Psyche,” that “he produced during the next four weeks . . . would eventually win him the immortal fame he longed for”  (Motion 382).  The implications are staggering.  In only four weeks, what are considered some of the best verse in the English language were composed.
For these few weeks he stood at a point of perfect balance, confident in his ability to meet the future, able to contemplate his past with calm, and rejoicing in the beauty of the season, the joy of an unanswered love, the delight of a mastered craft--the themes of the odes as well as his incentives to write them (Ward 279).

For a brief moment in his life, it seems that Keats found peace, where he was finally at rest, both physically and mentally.  Here, in the body of the odes, he works out the philosophical musings of his imagination that he had been toying with for years in his letters and minor poetry. The odes, written in such startlingly vivid detail and presicision, were a final refinement of his thoughts; Keats, at last, was able to crystalize his contemplations of negative capability, the imgination, and the art of poetry.  “Contemplating Psyche, examining the Grecian urn, listening to the nightingale, investigating melancholy, analysing indolence, Keats defines his individual self while registering his dependence on surrounding conditions” (Motion 382).
On reading the odes, critics have disagreed about the proper way to consider them.  Some, like Bate and Perkins, argue that Keats’s odes should be considered “as a group, for understanding the ways in which they interrelate with and qualify each other” (Sperry 242).  Although many similiar topics are hinted at, and the odes are no doubt similarly influenced, to examine them as one body is to rely too much on speculation; few agree, with the exception of “Psyche” being first, what the proper order of composition is (Motion 385-6).  “The poems form a sequence which does not quite deserve the name.  They are a fluid narrative of self-definition which, like everything else Keats wrote, depends for its sense of progress on each step forward being questioned, contradicted, and modified (386).
Ultimately the odes have most to tell us when they are taken not only together as a group but as an integral part of Keats’s total achievement, as a mature reflection of the particular concenrns with which he wrestled throughouth his career.  Very broadly, they are best considered as a series of meditations on the nature of the creative process, the logical outgrowth of his involvement with Negative Capability (Sperry 243).

But Sperry also warns that the entire definition of negative capability has changed by this time in Keats’s life “to something more than the capability ‘of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’; it now embraces a set of related premises and attitudes, including even certain questions deriving from them” (243-4).
Keats’s odes have a familiar thread that runs through them, whether it be Classical echoes as in “Psyche” and “Grecian Urn”, or mood and temperment in “Indolence,” “Melancholy,” and “Nightingale”.  To say they compose one long narrative comment would be perhaps too strong a phrase; and yet, the odes hold something brilliant and honest in them.  Although “Keats himself felt some measure of indifference in his odes . . . They explore the relation between conscious and unconscious forces” (Motion 382).  In each poem there is truth, blended with mystery, and tinged with a kind of blunt honesty where the poet bares his soul to the reader.  Perhaps that is why Keats stood at a distance from what some consider his greatest work.  It may have been easier for Keats to stand behind the veil of Hyperion than to stand alone “on the Shore of the wide world”.
The odes can be understood as a ripening of Keats’s poetic skill, at a time of peace, where he could reach back into the chambers of his own imagination and extract ideas he had never fully deveoped, or refined before.  For example, in “Sleep and Poetry” Keats writes:
. . . Therefore should I
Be but the essence of deformity,
A coward, did my very eye-lids wink
At speaking out what I have dared to think.
Ah! rather let me like a madman run
Over some precipice; let the hot sun
Melt my Dedalian wings, and drive me down
Convuls’d and headlong!  Stay! an inward frown
Of conscience bids me be more calm a while. (l. 297-305)

Keats paints  an image of the poet flying toward the sun on “Dedalian wings” and in essence failing,, preferring failure and death, to silence.  If the sun is seen as Apollo, Keats’s early obsession and god of poetry, then  Icarus is the appropriate allusion.  In “Ode on Indolence” there is a passage that is similar, but clearer.
A third time they pass’d by then, 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: (l. 20-24)

Keats’s approach to the subject has changed.  The three he sees--Poetry, Love, and Ambition--are characterized as figures on an Urn (l.  5, 7) and appear almost godlike.  In essence, these three things are like, to Keats, Apollo; theyare his divine inspiration.  But unlike in “Sleep and Poetry,” “Indolence” has a more mature connection to the myth of Icarus.  In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Dedalus, the father of Icarus, gives his son instructions before flying to freedom:
I warn thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keep.
For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of th deepe
Will overlade thy wings with wet.  And if thou mount too hie,
The Sunne will sindge them.  Therfore see bewteene them both thou fly. (VIII, l 273-6)

This is good advice to Icarus and to the poet.  From this middle way, the poet is able to see Heaven and the water at the same time--a kind of impartiality.  But if the poet slips up, and flies too close to either extreme, he will fail.  The poet “aches” and “burns” for wings, but he is conscious that to fly in the face of the sun is to be blinded, and ultimately foolish.  It is as if the poet is tempted by the sun, like Icarus, yet he knows the dangers that are told.  He must choose the way in betweeen.  The poet of “Indolence” seems so tempted that he must rebuke the apparitions of the Urn and toss them aside altogether, and be content only with the after after burn beneath his eyelids.  “His attraction to flight is grounded in his determination to work out a salvation..  His dreams are gorgeous and seductive, but are finally judged to be dangerous or actualy ‘deadly’” (Motion 382).
In a letter Keats wrote to Mary-Ann Jeffery in June of 1819, he reflects this same sentimentality.  If Keats is Icarus, then George is the sea--his challenge.
My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world--Now I find I must buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin a fight--I must choose between despair & Energy--I choose the latter, though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, w hich I once thought was impossible.

‘Nothing can bring back the hour
Of slendour in the grass and glory in the flower.

I once thought this a Melancholist’s dream-- (Cook 476)

Sperry mentions that “Psyche” could be a refinement the earlier “I Stood Tip-toe”, which was where Keats first brought the myth of Cupid and Psyche to life (250).
 In the earlier poem he had, to be sure, touched on the legend only briefly, but it is there closely bound up with his conception of the birth of mythology as the origin of verse.  Indeed it is the same wonder of mythological discovery, the amazement of the poet who first ‘pull’d the boughs aside, / That we might look into a forest wide,’ that Keats recaptures in a far more intense way in the opening stanza of “To Psyche” (Sperry 250-1).

This recycling of previous thought works well to key in the reader to Keats’s ever-evolving mind.  His “enthusiams for Greek mythology” and the “natural association of literature and painting” are still evident in “Psyche” (Jack 202).  Jack also explains that upon examination of the paintings and prints Keats could have been exposed to, the very portrayal of Psyche and Cupid is “‘orthodox’ . . . whether he may be in his religion” (211).
Keats’s odes are not only connected to his past, they are joined together by common images and themes.  This is to be expected, keeping in mind they were written in the same four month period.  For example, in “Indolence” Keats speaks of an Urn, “They pass’d, like figures on a marble Urn,/ When shifted round to see the other side;” (l. 5,6).  This seems to allude to the “Grecian Urn” ode, or at least clues the reader into the mind of Keats at the time these poems were written.
“Ode to Psyche” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have many similarities when put side by side.  Most recognizable is that each poem contains a moment frozen in time.  In “Psyche” it is the goddess and Cupid embracing, yet not kissing (l. 17) while in “Grecian Urn” it is the scene frozen on the sides of the Urn, the lovers who will never kiss (l. 17).  While “Psyche” uses the phrase “happy, happy dove” (l. 22), “Grecian Urn” uses the phrase “happy, happy love” (ln 25 ff).  Perhaps there is a connection between these “happy”  yet unfulfilling states.  If the poet in “Psyche” is Cupid, and the lover of the Urn in “Grecian Urn”, perhaps the “Dedalian wings” of “Indolence” are applicable.  If Cupid is unable to kiss, as the lover is not a ble to, it is then like the figure the Icarus-poet, wishing for wings he knows he cannot have.  He must be content to watch, but not participate.  This could be an outgrowth of the maturing sense of negative capability that Sperry hints at.  Though the situation could be viewed as tragic, there is an underlying  gain.  The poet in each case stands at a distance to the inspiration, being  influenced by, bu t not consumating with his Muse--the same “betweene” mentioned before in Icarus.
In all of Keats’s odes there is a sense of melancholy, named or unnamed, that permeates the verse.  No two poems typify this mood better than “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy”.  In “Nightingale” “the poet attempts to escape the limitations of actuality by projecting himself into an essense outside him, the nightinga’s song . . . but at the farthest limit of his imaginary world he meets a reminder of the unhappiness he is trying to forget; the spell of identification is broken, and he returns to reality again” (Ward 284).  Keats’s world of imagination is at once a blessing and a curse, because even his own mind is confining; he must adhere to the limitations of his own imagination.  Ward notes, “The  nightingale has no imagintion, no individuality, and is doubless happier for it; but, when pushed to the point, man would no sooner give up awareness or identity than life itself--nor, indeed, can he as long as he lives” (285).  Keats is inevitably left alone at the end of “Nightingale”.  “Melancholy” deals with many of the same emotions, but typifies negative capability perhaps more than a ny of the other odes Keats wrote.
It lies in the realization that our moments of most intense joy are inseparable, if only through our awareness of their impermanence, from sorrow, that joyu and sorrw partake of an intensify each other, that after a certain point they become, indeed, indistinguishable . . . Very broadly, ‘Melancholy’ returns to the assertion at the end of the Negative Capablity letter that ‘with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all consideration (Sperry 280).

Melancholy, who is veiled, can be seen by “none save him whose strenuous tongue/ Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” (l. 26-8).  Once again we come around to the n otion that to experience true joy, one must know sorrow.  Keats again uses the image of grapes, or wine, as he did in “Nightingale” and as well in his letter to Fanny Keats written that May.
Joy’s grape--the sour-sweet fruit--is the final taste of life and the conclusive image of the odes: a poingnant beauty achieved through a palpable act of possession, in which taste and touch, the most intimate of the means of sensuous discovery, unite in the final conquest (Ward 287).

What the odes have to give is not a smooth narrative of the mood of a man one Spring  in 1819.  It is a sketch, and a refinining of the thought processes of a man who finally could delve into some of his deepest thoughts and crystalize them into true poetic beauty.  Keats, for a brief moment in time, stood at enough of a distance from his own work to explore himself.  He was at peace, and the odes he wrote were among the most beautiful works of his life.  The odes themselves are linked together by common themes, by mood, and by inspiration, but they are not dependent upon one another.  Most importantly, they give us a window into Keats, a man with an imagination working overtime--suffering for the experience of joy.
 

Ward, Aileen.  John Keats:  The Making of a Poet.  New York:  The Viking Press, 1963
Jack, Ian.  Keats and the Mirror of Art.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
Ovid.  Metamorphoses. Golding, Arthur, trans.  Nims, John, ed.  Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000.
Cook, Elizabeth, ed.  John Keats:  A Critical Edition of the Major Works.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1990
Motion, Andrew.  Keats:  A Biography.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Sperry, Stuart M.  Keast the Poet.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1994.