Using ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and one other, examine how Keats uses language to explore his muses Keats In ‘Ode on Melancholy’ Keats accepts the truth he sees: joy and pain are inseparable and to experience joy fully we must experience sadness or melancholy fully. The first stanza urges us not to try and escape pain; stanza two tells us what to do instead - embrace the transient beauty and joy of the nature and human experience, which contain pain and death. Stanza three makes clear that in order to experience joy we must experience the sorrow that beauty dies and joy evaporates. The more intensely we feel happiness, the more subject we are to melancholy. The poet's passionate outcry not to reject melancholy is presented negatively – “no,” “not,” “neither,” “nor.” The degree of pain that melancholy may cause is implied by the ways to avoid it, for example “go to Lethe” and “suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed by nightshade…” The first two words, “No, no,” are both accented, emphasising them; their forcefulness expresses convincingly the speaker’s passionate state. In the first stanza, the language used presents “the wakeful anguish of the soul”. Keats speaks of “yew-berries” which are generally associated with mourning; the mood of the stanza is joyless which mirrors the subject it speaks of. However, Keats describes the “anguish” as “wakeful” because the sufferer still feels and so still has the capacity to feel happiness. The language used in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ is highly appropriate – the clouds are “weeping”. Much of the effectiveness of this poem derives from the concrete imagery. Throughout the poem, Keats yokes elements, which are ordinarily regarded as incompatible or as opposites. These ... ... middle of paper ... ...e him unable to hear it anymore and therefore feel anguish. In the end of ‘Ode on Melancholy’, we see the reward of the “wakeful anguish of the soul”. The possessor of the wakeful soul “shall taste the sadness of her might”. The change of tense from present pleasure to future melancholy expresses their relationship – one is part of and inevitably follows the other. Keats concludes that the wakeful soul will be the “trophy” gained from melancholy. However, the trophies are described as “cloudy,” which has negative overtones keeping the muse of the poem constant throughout. Keats explores his muses using language of both happiness and despondency. Each of these feelings characterise the poems and therefore the use of imagery is relevant. The language used enables Keats to convey his emotions and experiences to the point where the reader can feel them too.
Edgar Allen Poe is known for his dark yet comedic approach toward the his theme of his stories. Likewise, Poe’s themes have gathered many fans due to his impression of reasoning in his stories. The author uses thinking and reasoning to portray the theme. Poe’s unique diction comprehends with the theme of the story. Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery, and terror, and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from, surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words.
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
A writer by the name of Thomas Hardy, was born on the second of June
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 ...
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.
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.
Yeats remote and classicist poetic arrangement, in its regular rhyme and meter, is an effort to permanently preserve the “beauty” of the “swans”. These “nine-and-fifty swans” as metaphors and images of the “mystical and beauty” were symbols of permanence to Yeats. However, Yeats inclusion of “autumn” and “October twilight”, as symbols of change, suggest though the swans are “still” in repose, they bear the instinct of flight. Yeats transition from the imagery of “still”, picturesque swans, to the opposing “clamorous” and “broken” image of their “mount” results in an interplay of tensions between permanence and transience. Through Yeats careful combination of tetrameter, trimeter and pentameter he evokes a sense of stillness, his poetic structure, however rigid cannot contain the aesthetic moments which “suddenly mount”, “above” and “away”. Through an interaction of imagery, tension and structure, perception is presented as transient and prone to flux, unable to be permanently fixed. Despite the fact that “all's changed”, Yeats has attended his “nineteenth autumn”. This combined with the circularity of the poem which returns to swans on the lake and metaphoric cyclical nature of “broken rings” demonstrates the continual change of perceptions that are resultant from discovery and
John Keats employs word choices and word order to illustrate his contemplative and sympathetic tone. The tone could be interpreted as pessimistic and depressing because the majority of the poem focuses on Keats’ fear of death. However, if the reader views the last two lines of the poem in light which brings redemption, one might see that Keats merely wants to express the importance of this dominant fear in his life. He does not desire for his audience to focus on death, but to realize that man does not have control of when it comes. The poet uses poetic diction, a popular technique of the early nineteenth century. The poem also demonstrates formal diction that Keats is often known for. Although Keats meant for most of his words to interpret with denotative meanings, he does present a few examples of allusion and connotation. His connotations include “teeming,” defined as plen...
death were all part of a cycle that was necessary for new life to be
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...
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 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
and have as much power as men . When this poem was created, women were
A poet Ezra Pound, by translating 15 Chinese poems written by Li Po into English, made a great contribution to the Chinese literature becoming famous in the Occident. The name of the collection was Cathay (1915), and The River Merchant’s Wife was one of those. The original version of it, 《长干行》 by Li Po will be followed first before the English translation of Ezra Pound.
Romantic poetry is often regarded as the largest artistic movement of the 18th century. Its presence could be felt across the globe and in most artistic disciplines of its time. The birth of romanticism can be seen as a reaction against the political events, neoclassicism, or anything else considered "orderly" of that time. Romantic poetry opposes rationality. Romantic poetry largely uses nature is to express individuality on an emotional level. One poet from the Romantic Movement is John Keats. John Keats ' poems To Autumn and Ode to a Nightingale, reveal himself while using a writing style that creates beauty.