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  • Essay / The use of Romanticism in John Keats's Ode to the Psyche

    This poem illustrates Romanticism through passionate imagery, “Halfway, flowers with fresh roots, with fragrant eyes/Tyrian blue, white silvery and budded,/They lie, breathing calmly, on the bedded grass” (Keats 191). The speaker saw or dreamed that he saw the winged goddess Psyche while wandering in a forest. Keats personifies flowers and gives them breath. He also calls them “pose,” which is an atypical description of the flowers because they grow upwards from their roots. Keats gives body and breath to these plants, while also touching the senses of smell, sight and touch. The flowers are sexualized, like a woman's body, when they lie on the ground. These images reinforce the scene imagined by the speaker, which is “two beautiful creatures, lying side by side/in the deepest grass, under the ring roof” (Keats 191). He is capable of arousing the images and sounds of humanity, through nature, which he masters from an early age. The roof is also personified by speaking softly. He places the human qualities on objects like the roof and the flowers, instead of the two creatures, which gives the poem a greater dimension.