Write a note on Keats sensuousness with special reference to The Eve of St. Agnes.

Ans. According to Milton, poetry should be simple, sensuous and impassioned. That is to say, all poetry is sensuous in as much as it appeals to us through one or the other senses. But Keats’s poetry like that of Marlowe and Spenser, before him or Tennyson and D. G. Rossetti, after him, is sensuous to a remarkable degree. Keats himself longed for a life of sensation rather than though and there is a good deal of truth in Garrods assertion “Keats is the great poet only when the senses capture him”. The German critic Brandes rightly considers him to be a poet of all embracing sensuousness. According to Arnold, too, Keats is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous.

It was a physical sensation which served to compel him to the mysterious doors leading to universal knowledge. Keats loved sense of perception, but had no illusion about their infallibility.

For Keats the luxury of the food is connected with and in a sense gives place to the luxury of sensation. The best known example of this, is the table spread with “dainties” beside Madeline’s bed in “The Eve of St. Agnes”. And in that famous sense the whole paraphenalia of luxurious felicity, the invoked warmth of the south, the bland and delicate food. The privacy of the bed and the voluptuousness of the sexual encounter, are made to glow into an island of bliss, into the ultimate dramatic purpose of making fully apparent the cold surrounding darkness, it is the infinitude of not being. As an image of man’s life it has the force of vulnurable.

Beds apologies of the spanus, that flew out of the night of winter storm through the warmth and light of the Kings palace-help and out again into darkness.

The word “Sensation” implies the grandification of the five physical senses. While every poet is endowed with extraordinary organic sensibility and can perceive more than an ordinary person, there are some distinctive manifestation of the acute sensibility of the senses, which mark out Keats from the other poets. This extra sensitiveness to the senses like touch-is abundantly present in the poetry of Keats. Keats is sensuous in the sense that he delights and luxuriates in all those objects which please the senses-the eye, the ear, the tongue and the touch. He longs for “A life of sensation rather than of thoughts”. He feasted his eyes with every thing that was beautiful. He loved the principle of “Beauty” in all things. Beauty enraptured and intoxicated him everywhere in women, in natural objects, scenery and everything. The soft silken touch of a lovely maiden or the leaning breasts of a woman thrilled him as much as the soft petal of a newly blossomed flower. He revelled in the physical enjoyment of all sensory delights. And his poetry abounds in description of all types of sensuous experience. The descriptive description, for example, of Madeline when she undresses herself in bed, ignorant of the presence of his lover, Porphyro, lying hidden in the same bed chamber.

She loosens her fragrant bodice by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees

Half hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

This scene is seemingly unsurpassable for its sensuous appeal and suggestive charms. The senses of touch, smell, sight, and hearing are all gratified. He is the poet of light foot, dark violent eyes, and parted hair, soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast. Both the senses of touch and smell are gratified by the perfume of fruits and syrups which he lovingly enumerated in “The Eve of St. Agnes (XXX-I)”.

Though Keats was gorgeously sensuous, he never allowed his sensuousness to degenerate into sensuality. C. L. Finny remarks in “The Evolution of Keats’s poetry” that Keats was never much more than a poet of sensuous beauty. He was a thinker, a critic and an interpreter of life.

Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous. According to Keats, thought by itself makes no poetry at all. Sensation gives elevation of deepest truth through concrete perceptions of Keats’ the paradise of sensation over the mind.

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