John Keats was an English romantic poet in the early 1800s. One of his best works “To Autumn” is beautiful and lyrical, the words creating an entire scene painting a picture in our minds of great imagery through words that create color, tone, and environment. The poem means much more than just the description of the season. While some critics have considered it a static poem, there are others who disagree with that assessment. The poem discusses time and the seasonal nature of life. The poem can sometimes be thought of as symbolizing a life that has reached its peak and is drifting towards the sleep of winter. The construction of the poem as a piece of language art has been done with skills that are surprising and inventive. While it is easy to interpret the poem from a static point of view, the deeper meanings open the poem to different interpretations that are delightful and surprising from multiple points of view. The nature of the poem might seem to be merely a description of autumn, but when read closely the poem discusses more about the cycles of life and about movement forward through time. The poem is a descriptive and beautiful translation of the way in which life is renewed. The imagery in the poem is beautiful and mentions parts of the other seasons. He writes in a way that is makes autumn feel real and close to the reader. The first four lines discuss the life cycle relationship of the sun to the vines, the ripening of the apples creating a feeling of the crisp air of the autumn as the sun is dampened by the mists. The description continues as the produce ripens with Keats using words like “swell”, “plump” and descriptions of vines that “bend with apples”. He is describing the end of the cycle as it reaches the... ... middle of paper ... ...bolism that it shares with the life cycle of man and also in its use of language. The use of language is artfully constructed as Keats defies modern English writing in order to show his skill. While some critics have looked at the work as static, without poetic hints to inspire the reader’s mind, there is evidence of a subtlety of meaning that the reader can find within the work. Keats designs a piece of artwork through language that bring imagery to mind, but through a deeper reading reveals much more about the human experience. Works Cited Nemoianu, Virgil. “The Dialectics of Movement in Keats's "To Autumn" PMLA. 93.2 (March 1978): 205-214. Patterson, Annabel M. “How to Load and …Bend”. PMLA. 94.3 (May 1979): 449-458. Sheats, Paul D. “Keat and the Ode”. Wolfson, S. J. (2001). The Cambridge companion to Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
The theme of John Keats? ?To Autumn? is to live your life actively until darkness consumes your body. The time frame, imagery, and diction of the stanzas prove this. The time frame shows that life is progressing, while the imagery is paralleled to life being taken away from the individual. The diction proves that the person is active during childhood, passive during adulthood and slightly active during the elderly years of life. The proofs clearly show what the theme of the poem is, proving every part of it thoroughly. This was a wonderfully written poem, and it gives a great message that everyone should learn and live by.
...agery artistically to creatively examine, whether death really is the end of all humanity or whether life was merely purgatorial, a period of time allocated on earth for the purpose of atoning for our sins just like the ‘purgatorial rails’ in this poem. Alternatively it can be argued that religion is not life affirming and only death reveals, the indoctrinatory nature of religious teachings. For example the ‘sculptured dead’ were ‘imprisoned in black’ connoting everlasting torment. It almost contradictorily argues that faith on one hand is a sufferance gladly taken by citizens so they may reap their rewards in the afterlife but on the other hand Keats is demonstrating how religion is restricted and there is really no life after death. This is interesting because it controversially subverts conventions of the time that he was writing in.
The poem, “Field of Autumn”, by Laurie Lee exposes the languorous passage of time along with the unavoidability of closure, more precisely; death, by describing a shift of seasons. In six stanzas, with four sentences each, the author also contrasts two different branches of time; past and future. Death and slowness are the main motifs of this literary work, and are efficiently portrayed through the overall assonance of the letter “o”, which helps the reader understand the tranquility of the poem by creating an equally calmed atmosphere. This poem is to be analyzed by stanzas, one per paragraph, with the exception of the third and fourth stanzas, which will be analyzed as one for a better understanding of Lee’s poem.
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The poet writes these poems to express her strong feelings and tells a story of a beautiful garden. She has used many elements in her work to express her emotions and story in a very beautiful and imaginative way. The use of these elements do not bore the reader and emerge them into a story of creation, life and death, rebirth, and the recovering of innocence. These are the reasons why the poem collection is highly successful and why I enjoy reading these poems and highly recommend them to anyone who enjoy reading poems or any sort of
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
To conclude it has been firmly established that Keats had a profound ability to use literary techniques. Throughout his all his Odes he uses a variety of different devices, bringing forth our senses of taste, sight, smell, hearing and touch, creating an overall unique sensual experience. In reading his poetry I have gained a new found adoration and insight to the world of poetry. Reading deeper into the use of certain words and images has demonstrated that each word is as important as the previous, or next in this establishment of arousing ones senses. The world of sense has truly been evoked throughout Keats masterpieces.
Keats, John. John Keats – The Major Works. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
These three metaphors exemplify beauty, but also an end to nature and life. Death is slowly creeping up to him and taking over his life as realized in this comparison of him to nature. The poem shows the need to seize the moment in life before death. The last couplet talks about the topic of love and the power of it. Love lasts through the struggles in life, and the changes of seasons. Love of life keeps us from realizing that an end will eventually come. “This thou perciev’st, which makes thy love more strong.” Encompasses the idea that although everything comes to an end, love still fuels everything within a person. He realizes everything will come to an end and death is inevitable but the passion is still
The first stanza of “To Autumn” describes the way in which autumn is able to support life. On the one hand, its about ripeness as things grow older as the year is approaches its end, and helped by the “maturing sun” (l. 2), autumn has to “fill all fruits with ripeness to t...
In the poem “To Autumn” the initial impression that we get is that Keats is describing a typical Autumn day with all its colors and images. On deeper reading it becomes evident that it is more than just that. The poem is rather a celebration of the cycle of life and acceptance that death is part of life.
The poem as a whole is to prove that autumn was a great season. It