“Identifying the Soul”

‘Ode to Psyche’,” he makes the statement that “the Cupid-Psyche myth may have appealed to Keats because it occasioned a candid gesture of self-definition and a search for a well-developed identity” (6). Therefore, by helping Psyche find her identity as a goddess in his mind, he was able to find his own identity as well. This imagery is parallel to Keats’ own life, which he sees as fading as a result of his failure as a poet. The sensual imagery Keats uses is a reduplication of identical words that describe precise lacks and precise reparations. After all of this, Psyche is not even recognized as a goddess until after the time of Apuleius the Platonist, and consequently she was never worshipped or admired as she should have been (Motion 386). The poem becomes a parallel to Keats’ life because his whole life he struggled to find a place within the world of poetry where he would be accepted and admired.

The defiance of the third stanza makes the reader aware that although the world has not worshipped Psyche, Keats is going to create a place for her. I agree with the claim that Keats uses sensory degradation, particularly in stanza two, however, Bennet fails to admit that in the third stanza all of the things that faded now come back to life.

The second way that Keats describes his longing to identify the soul is through sensual imagery. In the Cupid-Psyche myth, Psyche endures many tribulations in order to be with her immortal lover. Keats use of sensual imagery shows that the failure that one experiences in life will one day be restored. This is necessary to understand the concept of “Psyche” because in his final stanzas Keats discovers that “by the constructive activity of the mind we can assert a victory, complete and permanent, over loss” (Vendler 49). He discovers that, like Psyche, it does not matter if the world admires him as a great poet. Although I agree with Steyaert’s notion that Keats uses Psyche to convey his own search for identity, he goes on to say that, “Keats strips Psyche of all individuality she could possibly possess. Keats sees the myth of Psyche as a failure, just as he sees himself as a failure.