Stanley Plumly Convocation "Constable's Clouds for Keats"

Stanley Plumly's poem "Constable's Clouds for Keats"evokes the spirit of the Romantic imagination and longing for nature. In the poem, Plumly speaks about John Constable, the Romantic painter, meeting John Keats. By doing so, he creates questions of one's influence after their death.

The Romantic imagination is evoked throughout the entire poem. The poem speaks of John Constable never having met Keats. The poet is already dead "[lying] in the artist's paradise." While on the other hand, Constable is still alive in Hampstead, living out a dreary existence. For the clouds Constable paints are becoming "darker, more abstract." Constable is still living through the pain in life, while Keats is dead in the grave. However, "dead Keats is amorphous, a shapelessness/re-forming in the ground." This is to say that Keats's influence on the Earth is changing after he is gone. By others remembering him, such as Constable indirectly by upholding the Romantic standard, he is being reinvented. Yet the poem also evokes the hardship faced by Keats in his life. For example, the poem states "[Keats is] there...writing odes...wondering what our feelings are without us." Keats also suffered in life and was able to come to terms with pain through the Romantic imagination. Constable and Keats are thus linked in this regard. Ultimately, the power of art and nature unites us by this relationship these two artists have that never met. In the poem, the clouds stand as an objective correlative for Keats. This is when an object stands in for something else as an almost symbol. Constable's clouds are amorphous and always changing. The influence of Keats is also changing and not steady. Constable's clouds are indicative of Constable's feelings for art and also Keats himself. Thus, the poem asks the question of what is art and what is its function. On one level, it becomes a way to deal with the harsh world around us. But also, Keats and the clouds are symbolic of art's power to unite us, by the similar patterns of two artistic individuals who never met in real life.