The Sense of an Ending: Poetic Spaces and Closure in Keats’s 1819 Odes

Following Frank Kermode’s distinction, in The Sense of an Ending, between the stability of myth and the changeability of fiction, Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’ offers an understated self-conscious presentation of myth and fiction in comparison with the Nightingale and Grecian Urn odes. All three of these odes invest in mythologies as much as they remain alert to their own poetic frames and the fictive nature of the fictions behind them. This poetic self-awareness reconnects Keats’s odes with the reality of death behind the mythic figures of nightingale, urn, and indolence. Such subtle, shifting, self-awareness is also the hallmark of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ and the poetic legacy it bestows to Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Autumn Refrain’, and ‘The Woman in Sunshine’.