Sensuousness

Evaluate Keats as a sensuous poet with reference to the poems on your syllabus.
Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing,

touching, smelling and tasting. The term “sensuous poetry” denotes poetry which is
devoted, not to an idea or a philosophical thought, but mainly to the task of giving delight to
the senses. Keats said, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.” John Keats is pre-
eminently a poet of sensations, whose very thought is clothed in sensuous images. Keats is,
as Matthew Arnold says, abundantly and enchantingly sensuous.
Keats’s sensuousness is not confined merely to the theme of love, nor is it of a light
and sportive nature. It is serious, comprehensive and full-blooded. Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale” is one of the finest examples of his rich sensuousness. The lines in which the
poet expresses his passionate desire for wine really appeal to both our senses of smell and
taste. The idea of its taste is really intoxicating:
“O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene……”
These lines bring before us a delightful picture of province with its fun and frolic, merry-
making, drinking and dancing. Similarly the beaker full of sparking, blushful Hippocrene is
highly pleasing. Then there is the magnificent picture of the moon shining in the sky and
surround by the stars. This is really a delight for our senses. The poet cannot see the
flowers in the darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers:
“Fast fading violets covered up in leaves

And mid May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine
The murmurous haunts of files on summer eves.”
In “Ode to Autumn”, sensuousness gives life to Autumn. Here the poet is not
decorating; he is catching the sensuous impact of autumn. In this poem, the bounty of the
season has been described with all its sensuous appeal. The whole landscape is made to
appear fresh and scented. The vines suggesting grapes, the apples, the gourds, the hazels
with their sweet kernel, the bees suggesting honey— all these appeal to our senses of taste
and smell:
“To bend with apples and moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruits with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later floers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
Here autumn has been personified as a winnower, a reaper, a gleaner and a cider-
presser. She is in the field busy in winnowing operation while the soft breeze ruffles her
locks of hair. She may be seen in shape of a reaper girl, reaping corn but who in course of
her work is so overcome by the sleep-inducing smell of poppies that she dozes off. She is
imagined as a gleaner walking along steadily with load of grains upon her head, crossing a
stream. Finally autumn may be seen in the figure of a woman crushing the ripe apples in
wooden press to obtain their juice while she sits by the press and watches the oozing
patiently. Autumn also has music that appeals to the ear:
“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft
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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft
An gathering swallows twitter in the skies”
However, Keats’s poems are saturated with sensuousness. All the five senses of
sight, ear, smell, touch and taste are enchantingly put together in his poems. It was beauty
alone, which inspired him and made him create the objects of exceeding beauty. It was his
sense impression that kindled his imagination which made him realize the great principle
that “Beauty is Truth Truth Beauty.”
The poem is rich in sensuousness.

Sensuousness

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Evaluate Keats as a sensuous poet with reference to the poems on your syllabus.

Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing,

“O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been

“Fast fading violets covered up in leaves

“To bend with apples and moss’d cottage-trees,

“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

The poem is rich in sensuousness.

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