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John keats as a poet of nature assignment
Romantic elements in john keats's poetry
Keats ode to a nightingale text
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"Ode to A Nightingale" is a poem in which Keats uses detailed description to contrast natural beauty and reality, life and death. In the opening verse, the writer becomes captivated by the nightingale's peaceful song. Throughout, the song becomes a powerful spell that transcends the mortal world of Keats. Interwoven throughout the poem are his thoughts about death. It is important to note that Keats' father & mother died when he was young and his brother had recently died of tuberculosis, which probably accounts for this focus.
In the first stanza, Keats' mood is low and depressed but the nightingale's song creates a state of euphoria in him that allows him to escape reality. He is not envious of the bird's happy "lot" but is comforted by the nightingale's singing which lifts him from his unhappy state. Unencumbered by thoughts of "the weariness, the fever, and the fret," mentioned in stanza three, Keats is impressed by the nightingale's ability to sing happily and easily "in full throated ease" (L 10).
The second stanza weaves the visual fiber of the poem around the natural beauty of the nightingale's song. Keats yearns for "a draught of vintage (wine) ...the country green, / Dance and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth,/ ... the warm South" (L 11-15). This can be taken literally, or, figuratively to mean that he would like to enjoy the comforting things in the world. He wishes to "drink, and leave the world unseen" (L 19), thus avoiding the negative aspects of reality. At this point, he would rather "with thee fade away into the forest dim" (L 20), where he doesn't have to think and, in fact, live. This may reflect a desire to die or the desire to be done with death since it has been a strong force in Keats' life. Th...
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... Again, the impression of loneliness is created. He speculates that poetry "cannot cheat so well" (L 73) the way he feels the nightingale's song can. Poetry is a "deceiving elf" (L 73), but is still only a poem. The nightingale's song fades away leaving Keats to wonder:
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music-Do I wake or sleep? (L 79-80)
Such a powerful and dramatic ending to such a poem leaves the reader to wonder: first; what is meant, and second; which does he do. A vision or a waking dream may be asking whether he has been inspired or just "out of it." Wake and sleep could be used synonymously with life and death. But does the poet question he is awake or asleep or whether he should wake or sleep? The impression in this poem, where death is such a prevalent factor, is that Keats seems to question which direction to take: to live or die.
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
Everything links back to the beginning of the poem, causing us to think that time stood still like the knight. is unsure of what to do. Throughout the poem, 'Keats' appeals to our senses. Keats also uses repeated 'O' sounds in the poem like 'alone', 'long', etc. 'moan', 'done', etc.
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 ...
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.
Keats presents his feelings on how he no longer wishes for impossible goals, and how it is much more preferable to enjoy life as much as possible. It is of no use longing for things we cannot have, and so we must learn to live with the myriad of things we already have, of these one in particular appeals to Keats: the warmth of human companionship and the passion of love.
In Keats “Ode to a Nightingale” we see the sense embodied through a variety of different literary techniques and in particular his use of synaesthesia imagery. The dejected downhearted nature of the poem promotes emotion in the reader even before noting poetic devices at work. The structure of the meter is regular and adds to the depth of this poe...
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
Along the lines of stanzas, no pun intended, the poem creates a circle. Since the first and last stanza have a matching rhyme scheme, the poem revolves and then comes back to the beginning with a whole new perspective. In the first stanza it is being accepted that the urn is beautiful yet mysterious and in the fifth stanza, after a closer look, it is realized that it is not as ‘perfect’ as Keats first believed. One possible interpretation of why Keats crafted the poem int...
or the poet himself, he said. He chooses no casual settings or circumstances. for these two poems. For Coleridge the mind cannot take its feelings from nature and cannot imbue nature with its own feelings, as in the Nightingale poem. Coleridge shows us that human feelings and the forms of nature are mainly separate from the.
This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...
This allows for a smooth transition in his description of the ritual that marks a soldier’s death. To draw attention to the tears “in their eyes”, which could be in the eyes of the dead soldier or of their brothers at war, they are connected to the “glimmer of good-byes”, to represent the quick mourning for the soldiers (10-11). The connection here is furthered with the use of enjambment at the end of the tenth line; with no grammatical separation, the thought smoothly transitions from one line to the other. On the other hand, Keats uses the exact Shakespearean rhyme In the sonnets “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”, by John Keats, and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, by Wilfred Owen, the poets’ use of formal elements create distinctions to mark the speakers’ thoughts and build upon the situation.
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).
He envies the timelessness of the figures on the urn and the happiness those figures seem to enjoy. Keats also envies the nightingale in “Ode to a Nightingale” and its natural happiness that is only possible because it transcends time. Trapped in time, Keats believes that he can only ever be happy through intoxication, which provides an escape from the real world. Until he wrote “To Autumn”, Keats considers immortality and timelessness as the keys to experience happiness and the beauty of the world. However, in “To Autumn”, Keats remains in reality, far from the improbable ideas of eternal life, and seems to both accept death and find the intrinsic beauty death can bring to life.
The poem is in essence, an ode to love itself; Keats is completely enamored with a goddess of love but Keats does not want Psyche as his lover, he merely wants her to enter his being and empower him with love. This turns every praise of Psyche into a praise of love itself. Keats wants to “let warm love into his mind.