Conjecture

On Keats's "Indolence"

The “Ode on Indolence” takes its epigraph from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew that counsels not to seek worldly glory, but to await future reward. The poem itself echoes, not the Gospels, but John Milton’s “Lycidas”—which, indeed, embeds a message somewhat similar to that of Jesus’s parable of the lilies in the voice of Apollo, when he advises the e…