Summer hangs, and summer lulls. Lay in the park, smoke in the dark, as the song goes. Its lush grass and leaves and flowers and cushioning warmth brings with it particular sluggishness, a wading. The days are slower, the sun is hotter, and the air is thick and saccharine like molasses, slowing down the traffic of our thoughts and of our discourse. The season’s circular shoegaze marks for us a lens of the mind with which we are familiar; in our youth and not, between chores and shifts, our minds hang, freely detaching themselves from the surrounding world as they see fit. In our off hours, we wake up, we stroll about. We go for a light lunch before coming back to the raggedy armchair on our porches to get back to finishing House of Leaves or …show more content…
It is possible to conclude that the aforementioned adjectives describing indolence, in combination with these questions, means that in this elimination of pain and dulling of pleasure leaves the sublime, a universal truth of pleasure, so to speak, to lie beneath both senses as he normally would know them, to be only accessed by this sloth. For lines 37-40, he describes the evenings as plunged into “honied indolence,” that is, he compares indolence to a food sweet and succulent like honey in order to demonstrate the beauty it has to him, a common trope in Keats’s poetry. Furthermore, not only is the speaker-poet shielded from both pleasure and pain, again reiterated with “shelter’d from annoy,” in which “annoy” means “discomfort,” but also from daily duties and from others, perhaps the reason that guides this world. Perhaps he was not even being that specific, and merely meant that whatever is going on outside is blocked off from the speaker-poet by this frame of indolence; it is his …show more content…
He desires to remain in his own world, free of any obligation to anything outside, his own physical senses, or anything that is not the serenity of ignorant bliss, really. And that is just rest of us in the end do, in a way, poet or otherwise. He casts out the personified love, ambition, and even poetry in the end, to stay there. Or, perhaps, not even—maybe indolence is, at least for the speaker-poet, is actually a gateway to productivity. That is, a gateway to return to poetry, nagging him as the figure did. It comes alive and is unearthed from within. He exists in a world where ideas and responsibilities and “should” come to pull him out, but would rather exist with in a world where his wants, the writing, the poetry, come to him first. Or maybe this work is the creative brainchild that stemmed from Keats’s desire to move away from his skilled profession as a surgeon. The speaker-poet, the art itself, dreams and visions—they all interlock their fingers, standing together under indolence’s