Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and the aesthetic state of mind

by Meg Harris Williams

The following chapter will form part of my forthcoming book The aesthetic development: Bion, Meltzer and the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis (Karnac 2009)

Introduction

Although Kleinian theory has always been concerned with aesthetics, this has focussed primarily on the ethical or psychological advance that is associated with improved symbol-formation in the patient (Klein, Segal). It has not been explicitly concerned with the aesthetics of the process itself, except in the work of Bion and Meltzer, who have in their individual ways and languages paid special attention to the nature of the psychoanalytic process as aesthetic object, and who both emphasize that in the psychoanalytic consulting room, two minds are being educated simultaneously under the aegis of some higher realm of knowledge, beyond the confines of either person as an individual. Thus they take seriously the Platonic or theological viewpoint. Bion points out that the greatest aid the analyst will encounter in his quest for self-knowledge is the mind of the patient; Meltzer borrows Plato’s Cave metaphor in ‘watching the shadows on the wall of one’s mind’(--).

I would like to start by recalling Roger Money-Kyrle’s explanation of how he came to adopt the Kleinian viewpoint in psychoanalysis: not to dismiss that of other people or schools, but because it seemed to him the ‘most advanced’ at the time. In a similar way, I would like to use the juxtaposition ‘Bion-Meltzer’ not to advocate allegiance to a particular school of thought but because it seems to me that within this combination lies the most advanced vision of the psychoanalytic process – one that is in line with aesthetics and in particular with the implicit philosophy of the great English poets.

Psychoanalysis has worked its way round by its own clinical route to seeing the relevance to analytic process of considerations that have always been fundamental to art and its philosophy. These considerations include questions about the nature of aesthetic contemplation and the aesthetic attitude; problems of the ‘otherness’ of the aesthetic object -the relation between subjective appreciation and the formal qualities embodied in objects that stimulate an aesthetic response, and the paradox of universality versus the observer’s idiosyncrasy; other questions linking emotion, perception and cognition: indeed the very nature of coming to know supra-sensuous or abstract values such as Truth and Beauty, by means of the sense-based phenomena that are implied by the very word ‘aesthetic’. Such questions can now be considered to have their counterpart in the psychoanalytic exploration of psychic phenomena that are real but ineffable. Correspondingly, psychoanalytic understanding of the emotional problems entailed in confronting the mystery of the internal object sheds new light on such traditional philosophical cruxes of aesthetics.

The Meltzerian line of thought includes those who have been deeply affected by the distinctive vision of Adrian Stokes, and some who have also immersed themselves in the formal philosophy of aesthetics and of symbol-formation (Whitehead, Cassirer, Langer). The Bionian is rooted in mathematics, chemistry and in mystical and cognitive philosophy (see Sandler, Grotstein, Bleandonu) and developed increasing links with aesthetics almost unintentionally, by Bion’s own account. Meltzer attributes his own recognition of the supremacy of the aesthetic object to Bion’s thinking, where it had long resided implicitly before becoming explicit (SEM). According to Meltzer, Bion’s vision never essentially changed, nor was it split like Freud’s between the clinician and the theoretician; what changed was his means of expressing and communicating it – he ‘changed his metaphors’ in response to his audience (Dream Life 71, and --).

I. The theological stance of the Bion-Meltzer model of the mind.

In this Bion-Meltzer combined vision, the aesthetic development in psychoanalytic thinking is the logical consequence of seeing the Object rather than the self as the creative force. This is the essential sense in which it is a theological viewpoint. According to Meltzer, who has always maintained Klein’s model to be a theological one, this began with Klein substituting her original theme of ‘restitution’ with that of ‘reparation’. Psychoanalysis follows religion, he points out, in reworking the internal parental situation through transference relationships to objects (and as such is ‘nothing new’); whilst differing from historical religions in locating such objects in the inner world. [Paper on ‘Conflicts…’]. What is new is not the quest but the vertex - psychoanalysis being a new method of exploration of the ineffable territory of ‘mind’.

Meltzer has always been insistent about how the clinical method constitutes the real psychoanalysis and is, inevitably, far ahead of all theories proposed. Theory is secondary and subsequent. This is a function of being a descriptive science. Meltzer writes: ‘Its practice is an art and its findings those of a descriptive science’, and (borrowing a metaphor from Freud): ‘it is in the essential nature of science to be truly rational in its history… the psychoanalytic spirit follows a series of logically necessary propositions as garlands of flowers wind about a wire’ (Kleinian Development). If we consider psychoanalysis as a developing organic entity, in which the psychoanalytic process is the aesthetic object, then it is logical and inevitable that its most forward-reaching philosophical aspirations enter into the realm of aesthetic experience. For Bion, the ‘domain of present-day analysis’ – as distinct from ‘classical analysis’ – is ‘not geographical space, not geocentric space, but this other space – let us call it scientific space, or religious space, or aesthetic space’. Psychic reality has all these qualities, and they each have valencies enabling them to link with one another.

Bion and Meltzer both speak of the creative force that pulls the scientific field forward as the ‘spirit of psychoanalysis’:

' The psychoanalytic spirit …with its depth-stirring qualities… the real psychoanalysis that’s worth preserving for hundreds of years.’ (Bion, TWT)

Bion describes the ‘real psychoanalysis’ as a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ whose buried wisdom is neglected owing to thickets of jargon and complacency of argument and moralistic pronouncement (for morals are ‘lies’ that cover over the inner truth). By contrast with the ‘jargonieurs’ and the ugliness of linguistic or doctrinal games, the psychoanalytic spirit governs the psychoanalytic process by virtue of being an aesthetic object - whether this be formulated in terms of ‘passionate love’ (Bion) between internal objects or in terms of Godhead or the mystical darkness of the Kantian noumenal realm. For the evolution of the psychoanalytic method is itself an aesthetic process of practitioners and thinkers responding to its ‘soul’ rather than its jargon (see Meltzer on ‘knowing about as a defence against knowing’, KD-).

Bion was pessimistic about whether the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis could survive the determined onslaught of people knowing too much about it - both analysts themselves and academic colonisers from outside the field [--]. He wrote many a paean to ignorance and devoted much energy and passionate ingenuity to trying to convey the absolute necessity of ignorance and the feeling of what it feels like. He genuinely believed it to be a completely foreign state of mind to many people, and was well aware that unless this state of ‘universal blank’ (Milton) can be apprehended then there is not much hope of experiencing ‘things invisible to mortal sight’.

Many theorists talk with enthusiastic cynicism about the (phallic) ‘fallacies’ of language. Bion however, focuses on the inadequacy of language – meaning, his own language – to describe the psychic processes that he can ‘intuit’ (‘I can intuit that there is a mind…’). To regard language as inherently fallacious is to collude with the critical language-games that have been so popular in recent decades: to indulge in teasing trickery rather than to explore poetic potentialities. In fact of course, language itself is neutral, and mirrors the mentality and skills of its users. The emphasis by Bion and Meltzer on its inadequacy is a conjuration to seek for meaningful and poetic usage and to eschew the thickets of jargon and tortuosity – ‘definitory caskets’ that prevent the ‘birth’ of ideas (as Bion puts it in the Memoir). Language can be either a claustrum or a container, depending – to a significant extent - on one’s ethical orientation towards the noumenal realm of Ideas.

Creative thinking means the person is the tool of the method: in complete contrast to ‘toolmaking man’ (as Bion wryly defines him) in his cleverness and omnipotence. The aesthetic qualities of the truth can be revealed only when projected, self-generated lies are withdrawn. Money-Kyrle describes clearly how the learning experience consists of ‘introjecting a function of the object, not just its detoxifying answer’ to the particular problem under scrutiny. The ‘answer’ is experienced as ‘re-cognition’ owing to its reinstated contact with the ineffable fount of meaning, the aesthetic object. Each thought that is introjected in this way improves the capacity to think. The mind’s capacity to be shaped by forces beyond itself is an aesthetic function; our sense of meaningfulness is bound up with our sense of Form. Hence Meltzer’s stress on the ‘mysterious compositional qualities’ of the psychoanalytic process (as distinct from its ‘iconographic’ or interpretative, schematic features). (Meltzer on Money-Kyrle). Hence Bion’s stress on the caesura or meeting-point which is where things happen that define something beyond the capabilities of either partner – the ‘O’ that governs the session. This is compositional, aesthetic; it changes the shape of the symbol and the kind of meaning it can contain.

In line with their theological stance, both Bion and Meltzer reintroduce the concept of faith to psychoanalytic vision – Bion through his ‘F’ vertex, Meltzer via his immersion in Kierkegaard who, in his ironic refutation of Hegelian dialectic, pointed out that faith requires the ‘suspension’ of selfhood so that the objects have freedom to perform the ‘movement’; and that ‘the most terrible meaning is not so terrible as meaninglessness’. And faith in the beauty of the method, as something that transcends the existing knowledge of its participating minds, is the prerequisite for the generation of meaning through symbol-formation.

II. Symbol formation and cognition of psychic reality

The pre-Romantics regarded language as being the defining characteristic that distinguished man from other animals. From Romantic times however, with the revival of Platonism, a more fundamental philosophy of symbol-formation began to evolve, which subsumed the idea of language as a faculty necessary for the power to conceptualise. Goethe coined the term ‘symbol’ and Baumgarten the term ‘aesthetics’. From this point the investigation began of existential ‘man as a symbolmaking animal’ (W-), and man’s innate propensity to create symbols of his ideas and emotions became the hallmark of his essential nature. The evolution of language was secondary and derived from song-and-dance symbolic forms.

The philosophers of symbol-formation such as Langer, following in the tradition of Coleridge, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Cassirer, regard this mental function as embodying man’s true being - almost a spiritual correspondence to physical genetics. It is more fundamental than his capacity for love and hate, although it is this very emotional tension that appears to have stimulated man’s capacity to see things symbolically:

Aesthetic attraction, mysterious fear, are probably the first manifestations of that mental function which in man becomes a peculiar “tendency to see reality symbolically” and which issues in the power of conception, and the life-long habit of speech.’ (Langer 110).

Langer’s formulation of the primary emotional network underlying the thinking process is a forerunner to the Kleinian-Bionic L,H.K, whose implications Meltzer encapsulated in is formulation ‘aesthetic conflict’. The artist, according to Langer, is someone who can intuit the significant potential of a form, so who can ‘make things conceivable’ through the ‘comprehension of an unspoken idea’.

Symbolisation precedes verbalisation, and also, supersedes the more mechanical uses of any given language. It heralds the unknown. It is a function of man’s awe in the face of unknown powers beyond himself and is thus bound up with his religiosity: as Bion puts it, ‘our minds are made up for us by forces about which we know nothing’. Such forces impose or imprint a sense of beauty and of awe, invoking love and hate, the awareness of ignorance, and the desire for knowledge. The ‘mysterious fear’ (of death) is a necessary stimulus. Hence the ‘attraction and awe’ that accompany symbol-formation – bringing some new truth about the emotional condition which has an inevitable aura of ‘catastrophic change’ as Bion came to call it. ‘But first a container must be found to hold the experience’ (Meltzer, Dream Life 69). We don’t make our symbols; our symbols make us.

As Coleridge put it, a symbol is the ‘translucence of the eternal in the temporal’. ‘An Idea cannot be known except through a Symbol’. Langer explains that the ‘elements’ of an art-symbol have no existence outside it; they cannot be described except with reference to the structure as a whole. Bion’s ‘alpha-elements’ similarly await organisation into a symbol, tinged as they are with aspects of mind. For a true symbol, as Coleridge describes, cannot be ‘superinduced’ by the self’s willpower or desire; it must be allowed to evolve ‘organically’ according to an inner life of its own. A symbol occurs where ‘truthfulness intersects with the human intelligence’ (Bion): at the caesura between two realms of being, between self and object. Such intersection is accompanied by a feeling ‘that I can only describe as aesthetic’ (Attention and Interpretation). It creates a new thing, whilst implying an increment of meaning to both sides (Meltzer).

There is a very popular notion, posited originally by Winnicott and re-invented subsequently by many theorists, of a (variously named) space which is neither psychic nor external reality: a transitional, third, or potential space created omnipotently by the (infant) self or ego as a buffer-zone against reality. Its boundaries are not shaped by the ‘conversation between internal objects’ that Meltzer proposes but are an invention of the infantile self, with the maternal figure as it were in collusion. This space of relaxation and retreat is designed to protect the infant from the pressures of ‘shared reality’, and Winnicott believed it corresponded to the space of cultural activity and cultural appreciation in adult life. Such a space however (if it exists) is something very different from the way the great poets and artists portray their vocation, which is much closer to psychoanalytic process. The poets are not concerned with shared reality but with ‘eternal forms of truth and beauty reflected in the mind’ (Hazlitt) – with gaining access to those ‘ideas laid up in Heaven’ (Money-Kyrle) which give pattern to our momentary and partial self-knowledge derives, and ‘presenting’ them (Langer) for the benefit of humanity.

Psychic reality, therefore, is not something to be invented or played with or tested, but something to strive toward knowing. The mind cannot be fed by its own products, the ‘fanciful’ (Coleridge) toys of its selfhood, but only by true symbols – described by Coleridge as ‘the translucence of the eternal in the temporal’. A playspace created by the infantile self may be cosy or consoling, but cannot be mind-formative or truly imaginative, since by definition it has self-imposed restrictions. It does now allow for the strenuous listening to the Other that is entailed by what the poets call ‘inspiration’. Melanie Klein said that ‘play is a child’s work’, and the child who is playing as a means to symbolising his internal conflicts is in fact not ‘playing’ in that cosy sense of the term – he or she is working: essentially, working on relations with internal objects. That kind of work may be enjoyable, but above and beyond that, it is necessary.

The creative space described by the great poets is defined and governed by the relation with internal objects – it is not a space in which objects stand back and allow infantile omnipotence free play. It is Bion’s aesthetic-scientific-religious space of psychic reality, and it is where mental growth and development takes place – learning from experience in his particular loaded sense of that phrase. The mind grows only through contact with reality – not shared reality but Platonic reality, whether this be termed ‘Godhead’, ‘O’, the numinous realm of Ideas, or the ‘passionate love’ (Bion) generated in the nuptial chamber of internal objects. The mind really grows; it is a fact and therefore susceptible in principle to scientific observation.

The function of psychoanalysis, like that of art, is to enable symbols to form and so feed the mind’s need to know itself. It is not just an emotional need but a cognitive one. Such knowledge has its own beauty, however ‘terrible’ it may sometimes be (as Milton, Wordsworth, Kierkegaard or Yeats would all agree). The beauty of the psychoanalytic method is that, through the operation of the transference-countertransference, it provides a seedbed for symbol-formation: the means of coming to know the nature of the emotional problem. Symbolic modes are distinct from discursive verbal modes; the latter are limited (‘saturated’) rather than precise, and Bion and Meltzer never tire of emphasizing their inadequacy for conveying mental phenomena. The illusion of precision comes from their imaginative failure, which has no flexibility to allow poetic ambiguity, no developmental aura that can catch a hint of the future’s prophetic shadow.

The symbolic container, on the other hand, is capable of receiving a truth which, to begin with, is known by neither analyst nor analysand: the truth-fulness of the emotional situation. And the container is formed not by the analyst alone but by the ‘fitting together of the analyst’s attention to the patient’s co-operation’ (Meltzer, SEM). It requires reciprocity, a convergence of minds from different vertices, at the caesura of the session (Bion). Analyst and analysand form a congruence that reflects the psychoanalytic process itself as aesthetic object, engaging with a realm of Ideas beyond themselves. This is the kind of experience that is modelled for us by the poets, because it is aesthetic in itself not just in its message or results.

III. The aesthetic state of mind and quality of observation

What is the aesthetic state of mind – is it any different from Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’, Freud’s ‘evenly suspended attention’ or Bion’s ‘abandonment of memory and desire’? I would say no, these are all the same thing. But focussing on the aesthetic qualities of this state of receptivity opens the way to a clearer and fuller description of the identificatory processes involved in this complex type of introjection, [as I hope to demonstrate with the aid of poetic analysis, using Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ as example.] There has always been a debate in aesthetics as to what the aesthetic sense consists of, or indeed whether it does really exist outside utilitarian norms of perception and is not simply fashioned by culture and circumstance. Then if it does exist, whether it can be considered to be the same thing in the context of manmade works as in the context of external sensuous nature – the world, the stars, the universe. Money-Kyrle states the position that underlies the theological Kleinian or post-Kleinian vision, when he points out that owing to man’s anthropomorphic nature he sees the ‘mind of God’ in natural forms of beauty and his identification is always with these aspects of mind-within-the-form. The artist is often described in terms of mediator or midwife between higher realms of reality, abstract ‘eternal Forms’, and sensuous realisations that echo such forms. Anything beautiful is a reflection of a principle of Beauty – which would, in Meltzer’s terms, correspond to the original ‘dazzle of the sunrise’ experienced by the infant at birth (AB-), ‘trailing clouds of glory’ (Wordsworth). Owing to the formulation of the aesthetic conflict, psychoanalysis can now extend this to internal objects as well as external ones. It is the intuited beauty of internal objects that governs a person’s capacity to perceive beauty in the external world and to be affected by its converse – the world’s misery (Keats – ‘and will not let them rest’).

‘What sort of artists can we be?’ asks Bion. Crucial to his quest is his awareness of epistemological pain. Bion stresses that the very process of thinking is difficult, not just its content - however unpleasant that may turn out to be. The discomfort of the conclusion is minimal by comparison with the pain of the journey itself. Bion regards thinking as something forced on mankind by ‘reality’, with which we are not yet equipped to deal, since we have not evolved the necessary mental instruments - or are only in the earliest stages of so doing. ‘How can we stand it?’ he asks – meaning, how can we stand the psychic restructuring required by catastrophic change.

The answer increasingly indicated by both Bion and Meltzer, is that we cannot stand it without the containment provided by an aesthetic state of mind. ‘Catastrophic change’ is itself Bion’s Aristotelian pun on the aesthetic structuring of poesis: it refers to the point of ‘reversal’ in classical drama at which the art-symbol is condensed and the meaning of the action emerges. Suddenly we appreciate the shape of things.

How can we open our minds to ‘the experience of which we might be a witness’? (Meltzer). Bion emphasizes that the first stage is to tolerate and appreciate our ignorance, and he devotes much space to trying to evoke the feeling of this condition, insisting he is himself ‘abysmally ignorant’ (actually a phrase of Emily Bronte’s), and that the analyst at the beginning of the session is like ‘a newborn infant opening its eyes and staring at its mother’. In other words, that each session, each movement of potential knowledge, is a reworking of that original Platonic linkage between preconception and conception. Amongst the morass of material that presents itself for sorting, ‘Who or what chooses or acts or decides as the authority in the person?’ It is Bion’s way of invoking the symbol-making Muse of the situation. He speaks of ‘stray thoughts’ floating around, and of providing ‘boxes’ in case such ‘strange creatures’ should exist and ‘swim into his ken’ (a reference to a sonnet by Keats). All the time stressing that the only thing one can do for oneself is to try to improve one’s capacity for observation, by means of enhanced receptivity.

Meltzer and Bion both emphasize the need to refrain from active searching for knowledge. Bion speaks of ‘the net of my idleness’ and of creating ‘some sort of network in which can catch any thoughts that might be available’. Meltzer speaks of the state of observation as ‘a resting state. I compare it with waiting in the dark for the deer, grazing at night, seen by their flashing tails’. The white flashing tails of these ‘minimal part-object movements’ are potential alpha-elements awaiting their pattern or symbolic container.

Meltzer is quite specific that it is the ‘quality of observation’ that gives us access to this uncharted territory that nonetheless reminds us of our original Mother, the Platonic realm of ideas, and saves our souls from omnipotent games by means of its truthfulness. When we

…eschew metaphysics and approach the problem of Truth, in its inseparable relationship to Goodness and Beauty, a psychological problem, we realize immediately that we are speaking of a mental function, Truthful-ness… The foundation of Truthfulness resides in the quality of observation. (AB 203).

Observation cannot take place (he continues) without an existing explicit model in the back of one’s mind, for without this the unknown cannot emerge into awareness and the model extended (p. 204). Each analysis, session, or moment, demands that the model be revitalised through opening its boundaries for extension, engaging anew with the sleeping spirit of psychoanalysis – the O or ‘central feature’ of a situation. ‘Such is the life, such the form’ (Coleridge).

Any model (receptacle for existing knowledge) needs to be open to things not yet apprehended. Yet neither Bion nor Meltzer mean by ‘abandoning memory and desire’ that one’s tiny amount of painfully acquired knowledge should be jettisoned (Bion says this is a form of contempt). Rather, that one sensitizes its boundaries to the potentialities of ‘things invisible to mortal sight’ (Milton), in recognition of the limitations of the ‘spectrum of reality apprehended by the human sensory apparatus’ (Bion). This is a function of observation in an aesthetic state of mind – giving truthfulness a chance to intersect with the human intelligence.

IV. A model of aesthetic observation: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

[Bion quotes Francis Bacon’s account of the 2 routes to knowledge – by direct intuition, and by slow building of increments. The first is artistic, the second scientific. Bacon thought that the second route was the only true one. Bion and Meltzer however regard them as complementary and possibly even unified. Of the 2 Odes by Keats that we are considering (the Nightingale and the Urn) the first corresponds to the artistic and the second to the scientific way. This is a useful distinction to bear in mind initially, thought ultimately it then needs to be dissolved.]

Bion thought symbol formation (the operation of alpha function) was unobservable – at least, until he fully surrendered to the aesthetic perspective and its usefulness, indeed its necessity; and his psychoanalytic theory merged with his innate artistic appreciation. Meltzer (in line with Langer, Stokes etc) believed that symbol formation is observable within artistic forms provided such forms are ‘lucid’ (Langer) to the observer. They have a deep grammar that is not automatically readable. But, says Meltzer, ‘which comes first, the noticing or the describing?’ Adrian Stokes, because of the evocative quality of his prose, transcended many of the traditional aesthetic cruxes such as whether the ‘aesthetic attitude’ necessarily dominates the art-object, reducing it to the observer’s personal wishes and capabilities. The key is the flexible, reflective nature of the receiving language, and whether it manages to attain a symbolic congruence with the object. There are ways of describing the sensuous manifestations of the aesthetic object that are neither imperialistic nor solipsistic. It is necessary to find a language that can capture the ‘mysterious compositional qualities’ of the object (Meltzer) with its deer-tailed emanations. This is the quest undertaken by psychoanalysts as well as by artists, art critics and philosophers of aesthetics. For it is ultimately aspects of the object that are being ingested, through some particular emotional manifestation, when this achieves compositional harmony. This is the Kantian/Coleridgean ‘immanent transcendence’ in which (as Money-Kyrle put it) the ‘containing self’ is reincorporated along with the detoxified emotional problem. The flickering part-objects are imbued with symbolic potential from the very moment they are noticed and described. At that moment they become alpha-elements indirectly linked to the mind of God, the unspoken underlying Idea, the ‘O’ which is the central feature of the situation. Observing and describing is the most crucial step in symbol-formation; understanding seeps of its own accord into this aesthetic frame of mind. As Stokes put it: it is a process ‘that seems to happen on our looking’.

The sensitivities entailed by this type of artistic observation are nowhere better demonstrated than in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a poem that focuses specifically on the metaphysical nature of an imaginative perception that does not succumb to the temptations of solipsism or possessiveness, but respects the mystery of the object’s mode of being.

‘In any object resides the unknowable, ultimate reality’ writes Bion (AI, 187). The Grecian Urn is such an object: partly in itself, and partly by virtue of its activation by the poet with his quest to understand its significance for humanity. It is a sleeping beauty that requires some kind of intersection with sensuous life before its content can become meaningful; and is a model for the poem to which the same principles will apply when it too has been rounded, completed – as in ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep’ (Shakespeare). The poem is a dialogue with the mind of the sculptor, but not through psychobiography; the relevant processes are contained within the artform with its power to evoke something more abstract - Langer’s ‘life of feeling’. The Urn’s material solidity proves the validity of its approach to the ethereal, but its internal mystery is yet unknown, since the link that both receives and describes has to be established through the poet’s own symbol-formation. Is it a container for charred remains or for spiritual essence? How can its spirit become accessible? The Urn is both complete and expectant, on the verge of maturity, of marriage with otherness, possibly the otherness of the poet’s rhyme:

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

The slow-moving sensuous concentration of the opening quatrain conveys the poet’s cautious, meditative approach, as he takes in the silence of the object – something emphasized by the repeated ‘s’ sounds, that wind about it and bring the passage of ‘slow time’ into musical and visual focus (the ideas of being and becoming). We step into in Plato’s soul-space. The ‘rhyme’ echoes the twistings of the ‘flowery tale’. As the viewer moves around the object, as if to take in all its planes simultaneously, ‘slow time’ is gradually speeded up as the poet begins to demand an answer to its mystery:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

The poet is building up his image and thus his knowledge of the surface of the object, conveying as he does so the loops and rhythmical swirls of its bas-relief. A ‘legend’ is by definition something to be read, and this is a method of reading it. At the same time however the urgency of his demand to know the lines of the story has the effect of losing part of the meaning that lies inside it, within its concrete tracery. Instead of musical assonance we have the light but insistent hammer-taps of ‘What – what - what?”

So the poet-viewer modifies his approach. He now begins to explore the ineffable qualities of the Urn: those elements that are more than the sum or synthesis of its sculpted parts, leaves or figures – Langer reminds us, ‘no such elements exist outside it’). He modifies his own rhyme to pay homage to the ultra-sensuous:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

There is a new music, not of consonants but of vowels (playing on ‘ear’, ‘i’ and ‘on’ sounds), modulating into the high ‘piping’ smoothing itself flatly into ‘no tone’, deadening its echo. It is a paradoxical answer to ‘play on’ yet a kind of reciprocation that acknowledges the abstraction of an inner music that is by nature not accessible to the ‘sensual ear’. The poet’s rhyme, in sympathetic harmony, can echo in material terms this ineffable spiritual music (like Ariel’s) just as it can evoke the visual qualities of the Urn’s surface. It is a preconception of Eliot’s ‘music too deep to be heard’ (cited Rhode), the silent music of human consciousness, the deep grammar that underlies the Urn as art-symbol. A preconception because it is not fully realised as yet.

At this point the poet responds with a new and passionate longing to the Urn’s ‘incantation’ (as Stokes terms the invitation to partake in the life of the object):

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

His observational perspective has changed, become close-up, as he desires to become part of the story and wrap own identity within the leaf-fringed legend on its own terms of existence. In this momentarily merged or adhesive identification, he is himself the Lover outside the ravages of time, and in scale, smaller than the Urn itself. It is the process Stokes calls ‘envelopment’ or ‘enwrapping’ within the borders of the object, under the boughs of the trees, with their suggestion of eyebrows:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

However the highpoint of bliss contains within it the seeds of its own limitations. Natural process and fulfilment has been stopped; the happy-happy brows (of 2 eyes) cannot shed leaf-tears – they are unable to sorrow; the piper as a model for the poet seems unable to listen - the word ‘unwearied’ reminds us of the winding ‘ear’ sounds of the previous stanza but with the added suggestion of un-eared. The repetitions of ever-ever and happy-happy become too insistent, like the hammer-glances earlier. The ideas of ‘ever’ and ‘never’ become interchangeable (‘nor ever’, ‘hast not…for ever’, ‘nor ever bid’, ‘for ever new’).

More happy love! More happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,

For ever panting, and for ever young –

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

By the end of this stanza the poet finds himself separated from his illusion of being either the Urn’s lover or piper. The Urn seems unable to contain his personal feelings and anxieties – being too ‘far above’ his infant-like smallness, where quick ‘panting’ leads to ‘burning’ and ‘parching’ rather than to internal feeding ‘for ever warm and still to be enjoyed’. The Urn retires back to the Platonic realm of Ideas.

At this crucial point, where it seems all might be lost, and the object become his enemy by means of aloofness (the H vertex), the poet is moved by a new inspiration. He has already walked right round the Urn and described the human drama within its leafy frieze. Yet now he writes as though one section of the Urn’s story or legend has only become visible to him at this very moment: in psychological terms, it has only just connected with his ‘attention’ (Bion), his consciousness – only just become available for alpha-function. It is an example of what Stokes describes as a journey ‘beyond identification with realised structure’ – beyond the beautiful surface to the underlying artistic principles:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

He speaks with surprise. Yet there is a certain inevitability that the ‘burning’ starving infant in the previous line (La Belle Dame style) should be succeeded by the idea of ‘sacrifice’. Something needs to be sacrificed to produce the garlands of poetry, the flowery tale. As in the Ode to Psyche the poet now identifies with the priest rather than the piper or lover. At the same time, this is alleviated by the first colour in the poem – the green altar. The ‘s’ sounds rediscover those of the poem’s opening lines, and their evocation of the ‘bride of quietness’; yet instead of the hush of silence they evoke the swish of the procession, a frieze enlivened by present movement and by the swing of ‘altar…leads...lowing...garlands’ (‘l’ sounds). It is different in quality from the frozen ecstasy of the lover’s chase. The coming sacrifice is a new kind of marriage between opposing elements. With the ‘mysterious priest’ comes an opening to the mystery of the Urn and its contents. We are now being led by neither love nor hate but by the quest for knowledge. In tandem with the heifer lowing at the skies, the poet’s vision intersects with the Urn’s surface and opens it up to a sculpture-like scene that exists only in his imagination:

What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

His sensuous vision is transcended; he has moved outside the leafy border with its sculpted solidity. Yet the scene is all the more urgently present to his consciousness: ‘this folk, this pious morn’ – like the ‘Nightingale’’s ‘Here’ this makes an almost physical link with the world of present being: the imaginary townsfolk are ourselves. And the high sharp sounds of the earlier ‘piping’ (an infant’s voice) here gain mellowness, depth, and sonority: a more complex sensuousness than the drier musings of wordplay that knitted together the opening stanzas. In particular the play on the words ‘leaves’ takes on a new poignancy, with the idea of abandonment fully confronted at this green altar of eternity. A new rhyme is introduced: the long resounding ‘o’ in ‘shore-morn-evermore’ magnifies the reverberations within ‘can e’er return’ (picking up ‘ever-never’ from previous stanzas). These words acquire depth and elevation and longevity. They also pick up the ‘forlorn’ bass-note of the end of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ with its implications of tolling the passing-bell (‘toll me back … to my sole self’) – a bell which is also present here in ‘soul-tell-de-sol-late’, full of mournful echoes.

Like the equivalent moment of reversal in the ‘Nightingale’ (Aristotle’s peripateia) however, this awareness of loss is the foundation for a new orientation of the poet towards the Object, as suggested in the revolving vertices of morn-turn and town-urn, which end in ‘ret-urn’. It differs from, yet reminds us of, the observer walking round the Urn at the beginning in order to read its ‘legend’. Now there is a new identification with the Urn and a new sense of purpose for himself as poet. Reading the Urn is ‘a process that happens on our looking’ (Stokes). He is the one to relay the story of the townful of souls to the rest of humanity, Like Ishmael, he is the soul who tells, and thereby relieves the siege of its desolation, the frozen-burning excess of ‘happy happy love’ that could not feed the internal town. Having achieved this point of self-knowledge, the poet withdraws from his close intimacy with the Urn, which returns to its inviolate self-sufficient state:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The much-discussed pun-complex on ‘brede- breed’ and ‘overwrought’ marks the poet resealing the boundaries between himself and the object with gently ironic double-entendre emphasized by the repeated ‘r’ consonants, almost a potter’s finger-pressings (‘brede-marble-wrought-trod-form’). The Urn crystallizes back into a sculpted artefact, not a living world – a ‘shape’, an ‘attitude’, a receptacle for the ashes of the human heart. At the same time, echoing Hamlet (‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’) he reaffirms the passage through to the realm of Ideas that has been established through this ‘intersection’ (Bion). ‘Out of thought/ As doth eternity’ echoes in sound and rhythm ‘evermore/ Will silent be’. But the spirit of the Urn is not lost to the vastness of the ether, the unknown beyond the reach of thinking. It is no longer silent; but speaks in response to the poet’s own symbolic journey. The last two lines read like a sculpted inscription, again requiring to be touched into life before their meaning can be fathomed – but that is the nature of the Urn as ‘friend to man’. It speaks in response to those who themselves respond to its incantation. And the same applies to Keats’s poem, likewise a friend to man (as was the Nightingale’s song when it ‘found a way through the sad heart of Ruth’). The poet himself no longer exists in the way that he did when he engaged in that original close identification as piper and lover. In the powerful line ‘When old age shall this generation waste’, with its surprising development ‘other woe/Than ours’, he experiences his own transience, and transcends it. He realises that the Urn demands different identificatory processes from him. As with the Nightingale’s ‘hungry generations’ he has completed his mediatory task of forging a link between the hungry human intelligence and the cold, ineffable realm of Ideas, the vast spaces of the infinite (as Bion quotes from Pascal - or as Keats put it in an earlier poem, ‘All is cold beauty: pain is never done’.)

The ‘message’ of the Urn is not one of consolation for earthly woes. It is one of cyclical revival and re-entry to the eternal process of learning from the object – of inspiration and internalisation. This is its ‘friendship’, accompanying the continual wasting-and-generating process of living. Starting with the object’s external beauty, the poet encounters its alienness, enters its world and becomes part of it, then moves beyond its realised structure and identifies with ‘a process in train’ (Stokes) – the object in evolution – thereby incorporating something of its function not just its story (what Bion calls ‘the evolution of god the ineffable’, going beyond ‘god the mother’). This results in his own separateness once more, yet at the same time in the creation of his own art-symbol, the poem itself. Just as the Urn holds the ‘feel of a dream that is otherwise forgotten’ (Stokes), the filtered happiness of ancient Greek civilisation, so does Keats’s poem. Yet it is not a recording of a dream so much as a dream in itself, something that has not happened until it is explored and observed. Keats said we need to expand our philosophy not through ‘consequitive reasoning’ but ‘on the pulses’ – by ‘following in the steps of the Author’ (i.e. of the previous artist or guide). It is a truly logical procedure and in that sense scientific – his objection to ‘consequitive reasoning’ is not to the stepwise procedure of building-up knowledge but to the smallmindedness of argument that is out of touch with the facts of feeling and therefore with psychic observation – the ‘palpable design’ that attempts to lead rather than to follow the observed phenomena.

This is the way in which the Keatsian model illuminates the psychoanalytic process. By analogy both analyst and analysand are focussed on the Urn, the O, the underlying feature of the emotional situation, just as composer and instrumentalist are focussed on the ‘underlying musical Idea’ of a musical piece (Langer). As with the ‘Nightingale’, the poet has demonstrated a whole variety of identifications, none of which would serve alone but which together move the argument forwards and mirror the mystery of the aesthetic object: beginning with the surface attack of initial projection (the hammer-questions), the danger of the Urn becoming a claustrum not a container. Yet the insistent demand also helped to shape the rhythmic skeleton of the poem (like Bion’s animal battering its horns against the cage); it helped to create a space for a journey of imagination not illusion – a space in which ‘an idea might lodge’. The aesthetic boundary is real – not solipsistic, self-engendered. The concreteness of this sensuous interchange is necessary for immanent transcendence, for Coleridge’s ‘translucence of the eternal in the temporal’. The aesthetic object is never a mere ‘ideogram’ – a flat, twodimensional representation that is not a true symbol. It can only be known by establishing an orientation towards both its inside and its outside. This is essentially an ethical one of the ‘depressive position’ although that formulation does not seem to sufficiently describe the vitality of the various linkages - the trials and turbulence of the reciprocity to be found between self and object, poet and Urn.