Keats is justly famed for his late odes and their lyrical beauty. What is not so often recognised is that Keats was also a very funny poet, and that a great many of his poems are parodies, pastiches, and sometimes downright dirty.
I’m afraid there’s nothing titillating about this poem, but it’s a wonderful example of how Keats used parody to expose the limitations of the famous poets of his day – even those he admired greatly. ‘Oxford’ was included in a letter Keats wrote to a friend in which he had a bit of a moan about Wordsworth (who was, all in all, a hero for Keats). He complained that some of Wordsworth’s lines are, in short, a bit dull, “in”, as Keats put it, “the Style of School exercises”. It is of lines like this that Keats says he is thinking:
The lake doth glitter Small birds twitter etc.
This is the prosaic style Keats is poking fun at in ‘Oxford’. He uses mundane images of “Wilson the Hosier” and accurate but unexciting observations such as that “There are plenty of trees” to describe what he elsewhere wrote was “the finest City in the world”.
The University itself is also too tempting a target for Keats the humourist to pass over. Perhaps not too much has changed in the last 200 years. Keats seems spot on with his evocation of city where sublime beauty frames the bathetic spectacle of guzzling academics and pompous jargon. Sweet city indeed.
The Gothic looks solemn The plain Doric column Supports an old bishop and crosier. The mouldering arch, Shaded o’er by a larch, Stands next door to Wilson the Hosier. Vicè – that is, by turns – O’er pale faces mourns The black tasselled trencher and common hat. The chantry boy sings, The steeple-bell rings, And as for the Chancellor – dominat. There are plenty of trees, And plenty of ease, And plenty of fat deer for parsons. And when it is venison, Short is the benison, Then each on a leg or thigh fastens.
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