A Phenomenological
Approach to Keats's Ode "To Autumn," in Phenomenology,
Structuralism, and Semiology, (Associated University Press; Cranbury, New
Jersey: 1976), Volume 22, No. 2, Bucknell Review, pp. 37- 47.Citation
by Thomas Pison
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JAMES DICKEY'S
casual remark that "poetry is the only non-manipulative enterprise
around" formulates a posture basic not only to the creation of poetry but
also, currently, to some of the best criticism of poetry. That the creative
moment is one of alert passivity is at least as old as Keats's "negative
capability," but that the critical experience should exhibit a similar
unassertive receptivity is as new as twentieth-century phenomenology. Just as
the phenomenological philosophers have obliterated the Cartesian dichotomy of
subject and object, so the phenomenological critic abjures the poem-as-object
for the poem as an event that is essentially a dialogue between two subjects,
the poet and his reader. In order to construe "how it is" with the
poet and thus participate in the being there which grounds the poem, the critic
must divest himself of his will-to-power, rhetoric which would master the poem
through the perfected use of the intellect and its sophisticated tools. This is
to say, in terms of critical history, that the phenomenological critic
preserves from the New Critics the primacy of the literary text, but discards
the New Critical analysis of the poem as categories of structure and texture.
Instead, the poem becomes an occasion for a human encounter between critic and
poem. Assuming the impersonality of the artist, the New Critic countered it
with the assumed objectivity of the critic, and the two never met over the body
of the poem. The phenomenological critic, to the contrary, does not wish to
learn what the poem is or how it means, but through the poem, what it means to
be. John Crowe Ransom's ontology gives way [p. 37]
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to Edmund Husserl,
as the being of the poem is subordinated to being as such.1
The
phenomenological approach to literature, however, does not go "beyond
formalism" in the same sense as sociological or psychoanalytical criticism
attest. Both tend to process the literary work as a confirmation or rejection
of theories formulated within their disciplines. It would be more to the point
to say that phenomenology seeks to go "beneath" formalism -- to a
significance transcending text and which can be only imperfectly encompassed by
written language. The phenomenological critic works through language in order
to establish the primacy of poetic experience transcending language, i.e.,
Being on the other side of silence, to use George Eliot's apt phrase.
The phenomenological critic's method is that of Husserl: "To the things
themselves!" And his critical question is that of Martin Heidegger:
"How goes Being ?" All answers are as relevant for art as for life,
because they have simultaneous reference to the life lived by the poet in
common with all humanity and to the unique creative moment at which the poem is
engendered. In other words, the point at which the poem clears for the critic
will be the identical point where the poet, expressing his own being, is most
expressive of all human being. The phenomenologist, therefore, concerns himself
with the broadest and most basic horizons within which Being discloses itself.
Searching for the constitutive factors of human existence -the ontological
"within which" everything must happen - the phenomenologist uncovers
the essential significance of time and space. A summary view of two diverse
phenomenological descriptions of time and space will ease the way for their
ontological disclosure within Keats's poem.
Martin Heidegger is
preeminently a philosopher of time. From the 1927 publication of Being and Time
(Sein und Zeit), Heidegger constantly refined his initial formulation -- that
to be in the world is to be in time. Dasein, or human being, finds one's self
thrown into a world that is already an ongoing process; thus, without consultation,
Dasein is given a past which has
1 In
according poetry a privileged place as "the founding of truth,"
phenomenological criticism is distinguished also from the instrumentalist
enterprise, which places language-as-object at its center, with the result-as
Gérard Genette has observed - that "literature is now defined as a dialect
and its study becomes an annex of dialectology." Quoted in B. Jean and T.
J . Lewis, "Structural Linguistics and Literature in France," Journal
of The British Society For Phenomenology, 2, No. 3 (October 1971), 27-36. See
also Martin Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet," In Poetry, Language,
and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971) .
[p. 38]
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shaped and defined
him. Existence discloses itself to us as a project, offering us the possibility
of redefining ourselves and transforming our world by projecting ourselves
forward into a uniquely personal future.
Dasein must always
resist the universal tendency to exist as mere existence in a meaningless
present, for that would be to alienate oneself from the powerful pull of the
future, that aspect of time that enables existential being to achieve
self-definition. Our present must therefore be the field of explicit
intentionality wherein the factuality of the past is continually being
transformed into an existentiality for our future.
While the German
phenomenologist argues that man is constituted in time, a French
phenomenologist reveals that man dreams of space. Gaston Bachelard, in The
Poetics of Space (La Poetique de l'Espace, 1957), tenderly records the various
images of valorized space which the human imagination has created.2
To the oneiric imagination Bachelard attributes the cosmic power of
origination; far beyond a mere reproduction of reality, and to its images, all
newness and fidelity to Being, far beyond the employment of metaphor as a
literary convention. The freshness and authenticity of the image is directly
dependent upon the poet's receptivity to his childhood experiences for
childhood, by virtue of its being the place of human origins preserves the most
suggestive shaping, powers for the imagination. And what the child knows is
that space is protective: one is not "cast into the world" (as
Heidegger's term, "geworfenheit," insists), rather one is "laid
in the cradle of the house." The child's first experiences are of the
non-I enclosing and embracing the I. Cellars. attics, and corners all make
daydreaming a safe activity; and a lifetime of daydreaming, the poet's occupation,
will make of the universe a great cosmic house that is totally habitable. For
Bachelard, the fulfillment of human being is achieved whenever the intensity of
the imagination within touches, and is touched by, the full immensity of space
without. This interpenetration of interior and exterior space, of the concrete
with the vast- this "transaction between two kinds of grandeur"-
receives its fullest ontological statement from Karl Jaspers: "Jedes
Dasein scheint in sich." (Every being seems in itself round.)
2 The
Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1971), p. 3. Hereafter
cited in the text as S. Hereafter cited in the text as R will be The Poetics of
Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon, 1971).
[p. 39]
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Only the purest
sort of phenomenological meditation can dream beyond the images of roundness of
Being to the plumpness of spatial plenitude, to its global abundance, and to
the consequent generosity and reciprocity of all things within a space that is
full: yet this illumination is basic to human being when it is being truest to
its concrete origins.
Both Heidegger and
Bachelard share the phenomenological quest for the subjective reality prior to
all the objective systems created by abstraction; therefore, just as human time
is authentic for Heidegger -- as clock time is not -- so for Bachelard,
"Inhabited space transcends geometric space" (S, p. 7).3
The similarity of their aim and method aside, there are between them rank
oppositions of reverie and reality, art and life, space and time as the mode
and circumstance of the ontological revelation. Furthermore, it would appear
that the glorification of space is accompanied by a detemporalization of time,
that a sense of space as full carries with it a sense of time as retarded,
compressed, or stopped. On the other hand, Heidegger's emphasis on time,
especially in its future aspect, implies that being achieves its potential only
by divorcing itself from protective space and thrusting itself into time.
It is not to our
point to dispel these oppositions through a false reconciliation, nor to
strengthen them in positions of mutual exclusion that would be contrary to
logic and sense. As human beings live and daydream, we experience both
Heideggerean time and Bachelardian space. It is to our point to discover the
nature of the transition which one makes between these two modes of response.
Keats's great ode, "To Autumn," records such a movement from art to
life and from space to time. It is as profound a temporal experience of life as
it is an artistic evocation of praiseworthy space, for Keats both preserves and
transcends apparent polarities. Any sensitive reader of "To Autumn"
knows that it speaks at once of a filled space and a fulfilled time. The character
of the transition of this shift in consciousness, which reconciles poetic space
with lived time, is the ontological disclosure revealed through the poem.
3 Quoted
in The Poetics of Space, p. 232, from Karl Jaspers, "Von der
Wahrheit." In quick succession, Bachelard quotes three other statements in
his inquiry into the Phenomenology of Roundness.
Van Gogh:
"Life is probably round.'
Joseph Bosquet:
"He had been told that life was beautiful. No! Life is round."
La Fontaine: "A
walnut makes me feel quite round."
[p. 40]
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A phenomenological
description of this temporal transition is offered by Hans-Georg Gadamer in an
essay first delivered at a colloquium for Heidegger. In "Concerning Empty
and Full-Filled Time," Gadamer argues that the human experience of time is
determined by the characteristics of its transition. Human time neither flows
nor is it a series of moments linked together. It is, instead, the recurring
moment of leave taking. For Dasein to be able to have the Heideggerean future,
one must have "the ability to bid farewell." Only he "who can
leave what lies behind him of what is removed from him beyond his reach, who
does not cling fast to what is past as something which he can not relinquish"
is enabled to move through time to his temporal destiny. 4 Within
human experience, departure and dissolution are inseparably bound to beginning
and to new creation. Although Heidegger's emphasis upon the power of the future
may suggest that time is without content until Dasein fills it with deeds, time
is never empty. Rather it is at its fullest in that moment when human being is
ready to move on to the next moment, for that is when we perceive most keenly
all of the past in an intense present that will give way to a desired future.
In the imagery of
Keats's poem, the poet experiences the transitive moment when Autumn's spatial
fullness is emptied out and the deceptive timelessness of the season yields to
temporal linearity. The poet's voice is as consoling as it is resolute. It is
this voice which intrigues and delights the phenomenological critic, for it
tenderly expresses the consolation that human being needs to accompany the
difficult resolution to depart. The poetic imagination permits human experience
its sanity, but lovingly preserves for the strider-into-the-future a sense of
all that ever was space and time. A careful reading of each of the ode's three
stanzas will disclose the poet's intuition of Bachelardian space, Heideggerian
time, and Gadamer's moment of transition.
Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend
of the maturing sun:
Conspiring with him
how to load and bless
With fruit the
vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples
the moss'd cottage-trees.
and fill all fruit
with ripeness to the core;
to swell the gourd,
and plump the hazel shells
4
"Concerning Empty and Full-filled Time," Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 8 (1970), 351-52.
[p. 41]
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With a sweet
kernel; to set budding more,
And still more,
later flowers for the bees
Until they think
warm days will never cease,
For Summer has
o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
A critical reading
of "mists" as "cold, spectral, disembodied" ?5
Surely not, for they are too intimately co-present with "mellow
fruitfulness." Although existing before and after and beneath sunlight,
with the sun they have made possible this great bounty on earth. Blessings are
both rained and sunned upon the earth by the heavens. "Mists" are
benevolent moisture, a gift which Keats gratefully recalls elsewhere as
"the feel of the clouds dropping fatness." 6
In this same sense, the heartfelt "close bosom" friendship of autumn
and the sun speaks a vertical harmony within space, a conspiracy of generous
receiving and giving between the low and the high, the base and the zenith.
Just as the sky gives to the earth, so the earth's gift to the rest of the
universe is its vegetative abundance. On earth itself, this embrace of loving
reciprocity unites the things of man and the things of nature. The cottages,
which human being builds for his protection and comfort, are further protected
and comforted by "the vines that round the thatch-eves run," and by
the enfolding proximity of "moss'd cottage trees."
It is as if the
vines of nature were so embracing of human being that they would make a nest
for him of their own greenery. The enclosure expressing love is in the trees'
sheltering of their apples, the hazel shells harboring the "sweet
kernel," and the fruit, holding within its own ripeness, the flower's cup
of nectar "for the bees." The care of outside for the inside,
expressed by enclosure, is met by the fondness of the within for the without,
expressed through the filling of interior space which confers perfect roundness
upon the formerly empty outer coverings. The conferring verbs indicate the
force of love that produces roundness from an interior void: load, bless, bend,
pull, swell, plump. The apple trees are without identity until they are bent
with apples, shells are hollow nothings until they are plumped, and the fruit
is but its core until it is fulfilled with ripeness. Space is incomplete and
merely profane, until it is blessed with a sacred destiny of fullness.
5 See B.
C. Southam, "The 'Ode to Autumn,'" Keats-Shelly Journal, 9 (1960),
93. 6Letter to John Reyno1ds, April 9, 1818, in Selected Letters of
John Keats, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 103.
Hereafter cited in the text as L.
[p. 42]
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We are not within
time's processes so much as at their termination. There is only the slightest
bit more time and space for surplus, for an excess of love between earth and
sun to squeeze forth an overabundance of "more. /And still more, later
flowers," and of oozing honey cells. The whole world is quiescent and
laden, lulled in the curve of space in a satiety which is both the end and
fullness of time.
A world dreamed in
its roundness reveals being nested in cosmicity. Almost motionless (the bees in
their easy circles and the vines that "run" only "round"
really go nowhere), plumped space seems to sign a motionless time. But not
quite. Somewhere beneath this full consciousness, the poet has cautioned
himself that once summer was here and is here no longer, that the bees are
mistaken in assuming warm days will never cease, and that after the maturing of
the sun will come the decline of its warm strength.
Who hath not seen
thee oft amid thy store.
Sometimes whoever
seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair
soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
or on a half-reap'd
furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the
fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next
swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like
a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden
head across the brook;
Or by a
cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the
last oozings hours by hours.
The critic who
questioned parenthetically whether Autumn might be masculine 7
receives a firm negative from both Keats
and Bachelard. A prose confession of the poet prefigures the delicate
care which he tenders to the feminine personification of Autumn: "When I
was a Schoolboy I thought a fair Woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest
in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not" (L, July 18-22,
1818, p. 153,). The poetic image
is born out of the entirely feminine fecundity of silence and space in the
state of reverie. Bachelard accepts Jung's picture of the human psyche as
androgynous in its primary nature, containing anima and animus; and in
discussing the time of the feminine anima, he closely approximates the sense of
time which the poet - and his Autumn -
7
See Leonard Unger, Keats and the Music of Autumn," in The Man in the Name:
Essays on the Experience (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 21.
[p. 43]
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experience in this
second stanza: "The clock of the feminine runs continuously in a duration
which peacefully slips away. The masculine clock has the dynamism of
jerks" (R, p. 60). In her incarnation as a girl of the countryside, Autumn
is an extension of Keats's essential self.
In this stanza the
earth is a full storage place, its plenitude a direct consequence of Autumn's
friendship with the sun. Heaven confers possession upon Autumn with "thy
store," as the natural world becomes the realm of a goddess or the home of
a mother. "Amid" her store, she is bodily present at the place of
man's work (the granary floor, the cyder-press), man's tools (the hook) in her
hand. Yet her consciousness is muted in a reverie dreamed against the processes
within time. Almost wholly nonparticipant in the labor of the season, she seems
caught up in the infinity and eternity of the cosmos, her substance somewhere
above the earth and caught by the element of air: "thy hair soft-lifted by
the winnowing wind." "Sound asleep," she leaves the furrow only
"half-reap'd," and "drows'd" in an opiate reverie, she
"spares the next swath." Why this somnambulistic lack of concern? It
arises from her feeling of being already done, finished, completed, full.
Swollen with repletion and immense in her repose, she resists the fall into
temporal linearity.
At most, the poet
allows a sense of a slow time, almost no time at all, a time that is emptied of
its urgency because space is so full. By the cyder-press, round with the
wholeness of the pregnant and still, Autumn is the time that does not pass, or
march, or consume, but oozes "hours by hours" like the sweet cider
from the overripe apples. Still, while dreaming within the passivity of fecund
space, Autumn is nevertheless the "gleaner" of purposeful labor, the
means by which time empties out her realm, steadily and irreversibly:
"like a gleaner thou dost keep/ Steady thy laden head across a
brook." And in that "steady" there is a thrust forward into
future time or, perhaps more apposite, a resolute pull upon the present from
its own future. This temporal movement receives its completion – and space, its
final denudation – in the last stanza of the ode.
Where are the songs
of Spring ? Ay, where are they ?
Think not of them,
thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds
bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the
stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in wailful
choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river
sallows, borne aloft
[p. 44]
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Or sinking as the
light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown
lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn,
Hedge-crickets
sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast
whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering
swallows twitter in the skies.
Autumn – and with her, the reader and the poet –
must be taught "the ability to bid farewell." We have all been lost
in a dream of space that misplaced the reality of time, and for this beautiful error
we are to be consoled. In giving Autumn her sounds, the poet jerks the sleeper
awake to her temporal destiny, his images all declaring death, departure, and
dissolution. Autumn's own sounds are bearing testimony to her death: her day is
dying, the light wind dies, the insects "mourn," and the
"croft" reverberates in its archaic sense of "erupt." This
is a scene of termination, after all. Autumn's great abundance has been
devastated. A most striking image, the "stubble-plains," the fact of
their leftover garbage-waste-refuse quality, the reduction of all that plumped
space to these harsh remains – this is what shocks and grieves. We need to be
consoled for the kind of temporal inattentiveness that permits us to ask, quite
sincerely, "How could anything so perfectly full be so totally empty ? How
does abundant life contain death ?"
Yet the poet uses
his art to ease the pain of leaving behind the beautiful, the qualification of
the images of emptiness being his own generous gesture of consolation to us. How
small is the threnody, really, how diminished the mourning. All that could
produce irrevocable despair at its ending is lightened by what is preserved
with it: The day dies "soft" and yet "blooms," the
stubble-plains retain a "rosy hue," the small gnats not only sink but
are "borne aloft." It is as if the poet's human care for Autumn
caused him to share the tenderness of roundness and convey it back to her. By
constituting time's process as being as gentle, hesitant, and unobtrusive as
possible, the poet himself is bringing to consciousness a spirit of generosity
and reciprocity within valorized space. At the moment of transition, when the
season and the poet must be resolved in order to depart, time is at its fullest
because the past dream of spatial cosmic care, which has governed the space of
the poem, has been preserved with love. Unalarmed, we can now be reconciled.
What evokes the poet's tenderness is the realization that time is as real as
space, and that everything which happens within the one happens within the
other.
[p. 45]
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What has emerged
for us during this reading of the ode is a certain consciousness of time and
space, which may belong to universal human being but which, we would like to
insist, certainly belonged to John Keats. Since the argument, forward from the
image to an ontological disclosure and back to the poet's consciousness, is new
and may seem tenuous to some readers, two additional utterances of
corroboration by the poet are put forth.
The first is a
letter from Keats to Jane Reynolds, written in the autumn of 1817. In it, Keats
shows himself fully aware of the consolations of space and of the
interpenetration of the vast and the concrete when universe and man touch in
"a transaction between two kinds of grandeur." Keats knows also of
the ways in which space can be played against time, and how the antidote of
spatial generosity may be applied to the "evil Spirit" of temporal
anxiety. Keats writes:
Believe me, my dear
Jane, it is a great Happiness to me that you are in this finest part of the
year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard World-in truth the great
Elements we know of are no mean Comforters-the open Sky sits upon our senses
like a Sapphire Crown-the Air is our Robe of State-the Earth is our throne and
the Sea a mighty Minstrell playing before it- able like David's Harp to charm
the evil Spirit from such Creatures as I am - able like Ariel's to make such a
one as you forget almost the tempest-cares of life. (L, September 14, 1817, p.
25.)
Keats was also
preoccupied with time in its two aspects of damnation and salvation: He refers
to the time which ends all human possibilities as "cormorant devouring
time," but he places it in close conjunction with the time which blesses
all potentiality with fruition, which permits "that Honor . . . which
shall make us heirs of all eternity" (L, May 10-11, 1817, p. 13). Much
attention has been directed to Keats's fear of death as the ultimate temporal
reality, but none, I think, to his imagery of death as the temporal depletion
of interior space. This inverse relationship - of time beginning to move as
space empties out- we have seen operating on the cosmic level in the last
stanza of the ode. A similar temporal-spatial schema in the initial and closing
lines of Keats's "Sonnet" suggests that it was a prevailing element
of his consciousness:
When I have fears
that I may cease to be
Before my pen has
glean'd my teeming brain,
[p. 46]
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Before high-piled
books, in charactery,
Hold like rich
garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon
the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols
of a high romance,
And think that I
may never live to trace
Their shadows, with
the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel,
fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never
look upon thee more,
Never have relish
in the faery power
Of unreflecting
love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I
stand alone, and think
Till love and fame
to nothingness do sink.
Like the exterior
space of the ode, the human interior is imagined as a storage place. The
expansion of the poet's powers is the providence of plenitude conferred upon
the mental void, and the works of the poet will "plump" previously
empty covers. Yet all his careful nurturing will become
"stubble-plains," for time threatens with a harvest that is the
poet's own "cease to be." Even the thought of this temporal motion
has the power to empty a whole world of its content, and it leaves the poet
isolated "on the shore," beyond the protective curve of space.
The challenge, of
course, is to leave one's space and have it too. "All really inhabited
space bears the notion of home," writes Bachelard. In "To
Autumn" John Keats has his home, for even at the moment of temporal
transition, when he bids farewell to the space of the imagination in order to
insert himself once again into the time of life, his great art ensures that a
cherished universe will endure, beyond the contingencies and caprice of time.
[47]
