Music and Poetry
The poetry of William Wordsworth initiated the Romantic Era by emphasizing emotion, intuition, and pleasure rather than form and affectation. His poems set the stage for John Keats, a central figure in early 19th century Romanticism. The fundamental themes in the works of both poets include: the beauty of nature; the consanguinity of dreams/visions and reality and yet the tendency of dreams to mask reality; the intense emotions brought about by beauty and/or suffering; and the transience of both sensation and human life. Although William Wordsworth and John Keats wrote poetry with entirely different senses of purpose, they came together in the worship of a song that each found in nature. Both Wordsworth and Keats were able to internalize their own experience and then re-externalize it in a piece of poetry – “The Solitary Reaper” and “Ode to a Nightingale” respectively – describing the effect of a stirring song each encountered in a natural setting.
William Wordsworth’s poem “The Solitary Reaper” reveres the song of a young Highland lass who is “reaping and singing by herself” (3). The poem is written in four stanzas of eight lines each, with a steady iambic tetrameter as its meter. The poem has a fairly steady rhyme scheme of ababccdd, though it varies in the first and third rhymes of the first and last stanzas. The poem has only eight enjambed lines. By making twenty-four of the thirty-two lines of the poem endstopped, Wordsworth allows the reader to read each line slowly. This consequently works to relieve any sense of suspense or moments of tension within the poem. As seen in Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” a lack of endstopped lines can allow emotion to build and inspire a sense of frenzied passi...
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... Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” in crucial aspects. Both poems preserve a moment of intense beauty, allowing readers to experience the impact of deeply beautiful music within the rustic, natural setting beloved by both poets. Wordsworth and Keats preserve the beauty this music, using unforced and expressive language – vox audita perit, litera scripta manet . Thus, each poet’s experience becomes one that is lastingly present in his mind, inspiring a sense of rustic, melodic tranquility. The “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” - which Wordsworth saw as the heart of poetry – stimulated by each poet’s experience, allowed them to pen powerful poems. Both Keats and Wordsworth convey and then amplify the intense emotion that each encountered in his experience, as each poem combines, arguably, the two most powerful forms of communication: music and poetic verse.
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
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 ...
During the 18th century, two great companion; William Wordsworth collaborated together to create Lyrical Ballad; one of the greatest works of the Romantic period. The two major poems of Lyrical Ballad are Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Even though these two poems contain different experiences of the two speakers, upon close reading of these poems, the similarities are found in their use of language, the tone, the use of illustrative imagery to fascinate the reader’s visual sense and the message to their loved ones.
We must look for guidance from the emotions…not the mind. This romantic philosophy is portrayed in the works of both John Keats’s "Ode to a Nightingale" and E. E. Cummings’s "Since Feeling is First." Each poet addresses the complex relationship of following one’s emotion and passion as opposed to one’s thought. Whereas Cummings supports living life fully in order to escape the confines of thought, Keats suggests death as the only possible means of overcoming this human consciousness.
Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
...s the speaker in the ode. Thus we see he became inspired to write this song of praise to autumn. He shows that anything can inspire someone to write, not just the beauty of spring. Thus we see the imagery Keats employs move from the scenic and joyous picture portrayed in the first stanza, to the harvest time in the second and finally we are confronted with the melancholy images in the last stanza. One realises, Keats was inspired by many things to complete this ode. Thus, we see influences of the Pastoral period, Greek myth and nature. Keats challenges the idea that spring usually inspires music, by showing the reader all the different places one draws inspiration from. Thus anything can inspire music or a musician if he allows it too. In addition, Keats believed that music does not just have to invoke feelings of joy, but it is still music if it makes one feel sad.
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
In Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse in 1818 he mentions that “…it is not itself, it has no self, it is everything and nothing, it has no character”. This quotation correlates with the “Ode to a nightingale” because Keats is able to keep his personal life out of this poem by establishing an identity that could be anyone but himself. It can be also interpreted as negative capability as everything and nothing both contradict against each other within the concept of
In order to experience true sorrow one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions. In this poem, the speaker tells of how to embrace life by needing the experience of melancholy to appreciate the true joy and beauty of
With its emphasis on the imagination, idealism and individualism, Romanticism emerged as a response to the discouragement with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. In his poems, the Romantic John Keats explicitly shows an occurrence of feeling and creative energy instead of insight and reason. Keats use of strong imagery ranges among all our physical sensations such as sight, hearing, touch and smell, and Keats combines these senses into one image to produce a sensual effect and shape our interpretations of his Romantic poems. Keats opens to others to the world and the immortal subjects of Love, Death, Time, and Loneliness. Certainly, this intensity of feeling, the transcendence to
Examining the definition of “ode,” there is a strong connection between song and poetry—an ode being “a poem intended to be sung or one written in a form originally used for sung performance”--, and within both poems the inspiration of each narrator is described in terms of creating poems meant to be sung. Essentially, Keats’s poem plays with the concept of the poetic form of an ode on a couple of different levels. Firstly, the nightingale, in stark contrast to the narrator’s feelings of despair, is presented as a “light-winged Dyrad of the trees, / In some melodious plot / … Singest of summer in full-throated ease” (“Ode to a Nightingale 7-8, 10). By introducing the nightingale in this manner, and by referring to it twice with musical adjectives—referencing its “melodious plot” and how the bird “singest of summer”—establishes this element of song as the focal point of the nightingale. Similarly, the goddess Psyche is first introduced by means of song, as the narrator begins “Ode to Psyche” by singing, and asking her to hear “these tuneless number” (Ode to Psyche 1) and to “pardon thy secrets should be sung” (3). The musical references to Psych continue in the third stanza, as the narrator laments the inclusion of Psyche into the Greek pantheon, he reveals
“Ode to a Nightingale”, is more of a poem of feeling than one of concrete thought. As is usually the case in “Negative Capability”, this poem surrounds the reader with feeling of uncertainty and a constant wonder of what is and what isn’t. When Keats concludes this poem, the speaker and the reader are both left wondering whether this poem or, life for that matter, is a dream. There are no definitive answers and Keats embraces the nightingale’s beauty on an unconscious level. Thus, the reader can see that in order for Keats to create true poetry, he maintains in a constant state of internal conflict, never reaching for facts or reasons, producing poetry consistent with his identity as a poet of “Negative Capability”.
The form of a poem can be understood simply as the physical structure. However, there are various aspects that make it up that contribute towards the goals of the poet. I find that the sonnets “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”, by John Keats, and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, by Wilfred Owen, make efficient use of their formal elements to display the depth of the situation of their poems. Keats uses a Shakespearean sonnet structure to organize his thoughts being displayed throughout the poem and to construct them around the speaker’s fear that is the central focus of the sonnet. Owen’s sonnet is a Petrarchan sonnet, although it has a rhyme scheme similar to a Shakespearean, which allows him to display a contrast between the images the
In “Ode to A Nightingale,” a prominent significance to Keats is his idea of the conflicted interplay in human life of living and death, mortal and immortal, and feeling versus the lack of feeling or inability to feel. “The ideal condition towards which Keats always strives because it is his ideal, is one in which mortal and immortal,…beauty and truth are one” (Wasserman). The narrator plunges into a dreamlike state when hearing a nightingale sing. As the nightingale sings, he shares its elation and feels the conflicting response of agony when he comes down from his dreamlike ecstasy and realizes that unlike the nightingale in his imagination, “Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird,” his life is finite (61). “Where palsy shakes a few, sad last gray hairs, where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (25-26).
William Wordsworth has respect and has great admiration for nature. This is quite evident in all three of his poems; the Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey and Michael in that, his philosophy on the divinity, immortality and innocence of humans are elucidated in his connection with nature. For Wordsworth, himself, nature has a spirit, a soul of its own, and to know is to experience nature with all of your senses. In all three of his poems there are many references to seeing, hearing and feeling his surroundings. He speaks of hills, the woods, the rivers and streams, and the fields. Wordsworth comprehends, in each of us, that there is a natural resemblance to ourselves and the background of nature.