Keats and the Vale of Soul-Making

In Manfred, Byron wrote, “Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life” (10-12). Keats shares a similar view of the necessity of sorrow, death, and knowledge, but for Keats sorrow works for an ultimate purpose: to make a soul. In Keats idea of the Vale of Soul-making, the world is like a school that teaches children to read, but here intelligence is not enough. The world teaches our intelligence and makes it a soul. In his view the world is “a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.” Sorrow is knowledge that makes the soul.

In his “Ode on Melancholy,” Keats warns not to kill yourself and “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” (10). Since soul-making requires pain, it would be counterproductive to try to drown your pain. Instead, flood your senses with Nature (15-17).

In the final stanza he explains that within every wonderful thing lies melancholy. Beauty must die (21). Joy always leaves (22). Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine in the very temple of Delight (25-6). Only those who relish joy and bite into it will find the sadness within joy (28-9). That sadness is the knowledge that makes a soul.

In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats fantasizes about immortality. The images on the urn, frozen in time, enjoy eternal spring and summer. They exist outside the realm of the Vale of Soul-making. He tells the lover chasing the maiden not to grieve, because even though he will never catch her, she will always be beautiful, inferring that the lover will never know the pain and disappointment of death and aging (15-20). The “happy, happy boughs!” will never lose their leaves (21). The piper will always pipe new songs and never tire of them (24). The lovers will always be “panting, and forever young” (27). They will never know the “burning forehead, and a parching tongue” that inevitably ensues (30). They will never make their souls.

Keats’ isolation of only the “happy, happy love” without human sorrow tells us how silly we are to not take suffering in stride. Life comprises joy and sorrow and no one has only joy. Making a soul cannot come without sorrow.

When he turns to the sacrifice in the next stanza, he has already turned melancholy. He dwells on the poor cow led off to slaughter (33). She will always be facing death. The little town from which the people came will always be “silent,” and “not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return” (38-40). While the other side of the urn is frozen in happiness, this side of the urn is frozen in silent desolation and death. Nothing gets better, and nothing gets worse. Neither side reflects the real world in which souls are trained from sorrow.

“Ode to a Nightingale” depicts a person in the midst of soul-making. His heart aches, but the nightingale’s singing alters his senses as if he had taken an opiate or sedative. Nature inebriates him. He would like to drink wine (11) and forget the world (19-20). He wants to forget “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” (23). Young people get sick and die, and old age brings misery and death (24-6). Beauty and love fades (29-30). Knowledge is sorrow.

However, wine will not take him where he wants to go, but poetry will (31-3). At this point he delves his senses in Nature. Though it is too dark to see the flowers, he smells them and imagines what they might be. He thinks about how many times death has appealed to him, and now that the bird’s song has made brought him peace, he could die peacefully. The bird would continue singing eternally when he had returned to dust. Like the figures on the Grecian urn, the bird is beyond the Vale of Soul-making. He is eternally “pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy” (37-8). The bird links the poet to immortality in a way because he hears the same song that the ancients heard.

The word, “forlorn” brings him back from his reverie. His sorrow makes a soul.