A Freudian Reading of Keats's Ode to Psyche

Critical comment on John Keats's Ode to Psyche is a meager trickle compared to the many pages written on the Urn and Nightingale odes; and, unless my experience is atypical, few teachers spend much time on the poem in the classroom. Yet Keats seems to have taken pains with the poem and to have been rather well satisfied with the way it turned out.6 A recent critical biography of Keats1 pointedly expresses the malaise felt by most teachers and scholars in approaching the poem:

The sixty-seven lines of the new poem, an “Ode to Psyche,” have always puzzled readers. It is justly felt that the ode may be something of a prototype for the others that follow it within the next month—that Keats was trying to do something in his first ode that he develops or redirects in the later ones. But, finding the poem so elusive, we return to it only after we know the others far better. If we had hoped to use them as keys, we discover they do not quite fit the lock. Meanwhile they have given us a standard hard to equal. Hence we either feel a disappointment about the Ode to Psyche or else, remembering the care Keats supposedly gave it, we once more put the poem aside for future consideration.

This study will attempt to show that an integral thesis for the Ode to Psyche, and one that might explain Keats's peculiar attitude toward it, might be discovered by applying to its interpretation Freud's theory that in the mythology of the unconscious Psyche is a death goddess and is hence symbolic of the death wish. More specifically,