As one of the most famous poets in the history of English Literature, John Keats is thought to be the epitome of the Romantic poet. He was a second generation Romantic poet along with others such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Most of their works were written in the 1800s and followed the original romantic breakthrough of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Keats’ odes are best distinguished by the combination of opposites such as elation and anguish or bliss and desolation. ‘To Autumn’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ were both written by John Keats in 1819. In the poems ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘To Autumn’ Keats utilises a ballad and an ode respectively, two structures that have been used to a great extent all …show more content…
‘To Autumn’ is written in stanzas and is addressing somebody (the season of autumn which has been personified as a youthful maiden). It also has the customary pentameters of an ode and is very complex. Besides the palpable distinction of a French title, all the essential components of a ballad are found in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. It has visibly shorter lines compared to ‘To Autumn’ and is a quatrain with the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is a good example of Keats putting in his individual approach to the traditional composition. The final line of each verse is considerably shorter than the former three which causes it to become melancholic and …show more content…
The faery who has given the knight so much pleasure and is the most natural thing in the poem as if sucks the life out of him which he is clearly not expecting-‘And there she lulled me/—Ah! woe betide!—/The latest dream I ever dreamt/On the cold hill side’. The knight is spiritually lifeless. The faery as if embodies life and nature itself giving pleasure and then taking it away so suddenly. The faery seems to be unattainable. One can go as close to her as one wants to yet despite all efforts cannot seem to touch her- this has connotations with the concept of romantic agony. No matter how hard the poets tried to express themselves they could not- between the experience and the expression laid the shadow of execution. When the knight did not know of the ‘Belle Dame’ he was content but now that he knows of her existence and has experienced her, he is doomed to craving for her for the rest of his
We then see the farmer’s unrequited ‘love’ throughout the poem where his bride is neglecting the idea of a husband “Not near, not near!’ her eyes beseech” the only words we hear from the bride show begging and trepidation, he notices her androphobia and it seems to impact his emotions when we reach the fourth stanza which stands out as a sensual, admiring description of the wife by the farmer. The poet uses sibilance (‘Shy…swift…/Straight…slight/Sweet…She/…Self.’) to convey the farmer’s whispered appreciation and leads on to compare her to nature ‘ Sweet as the first wild violets,’ strengthening the farmer’s positive opinion of his wife, however, she does not show him the affection he desires, contrasting the predator-prey relationship I discussed in the first paragraph where only the farmer benefited. She is ‘Sweet.../To
More stanzas help convey a bright and joyful tone, while few stanzas convey a dark and sorrowful
In Margaret Atwood’s poem “There Was Once”, Atwood uses irony to point out the societal problems within the genre of fairy tales. Charles Perrault, the author of the short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, writes about fantastic creatures, magic, and love, following the generic conventions of fairy tales. When compared to Perrault’s short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Atwood’s poem both compliments and contrasts Perrault’s. These two texts, although similar, offer different views on the genre of fairy tales. Margaret Atwood’s satirical poem, “There Was Once”, aims to disrupt the generic conventions of a traditional fairy tale.
Death was personified in, “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade” (line 11), to show how even death’s grip, that eventually takes everyone, cannot take away this girl. Death was also personified to show how the girl was so extraordinary and beautiful, even death, arguably the most powerful force on Earth, could not touch her beauty. The imagery in “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” (line 3), is used to show how the girl is calm and simple, unlike the winds of summer which cause chaos and drive people to not enjoy them. By comparing the girl to summer winds, the poet is expressing his love for the girl by showing how much better she is than summer, which many people tend to be fond of.
Moreover, the first stanza is repeated, either in its entirety or the first two verses only.
Starting at line 5 and going to line 8, Keats imagines love as something written on the night sky. He starts by personifying the sky, in line 5 he says “..the night’s starred face,” which allows him to connect the sky to a person or in this case a human emotion. He brings the emotion of love and the concept of romance into his poem in line 6, “..symbols of high romance,” and in the following two lines he shows how unreachable love is if death is to come to him sooner rather than later. By placing the love he, and everybody else, longs for in the night sky, and vast and mysterious place, he makes the journey to finding love a long hard one. A journey that could never be fully accomplished if death was to come too
Mariah Hobbs English 295-014 9 February 2018 Unit 1: Analytical Essay Marie De France's Lanval In Marie De France's short narrative poem, Lanval, she illustrates through her characters how love, desire and fidelity go hand and hand. Lanval is described as, "a very noble vassal" (line 3) of King Arthurs court but soon becomes troubled by desire's temptations. Many of Marie De France's lays contain elements of magic and mystery. In this case, she tells the story of a human and a supernatural being becoming lovers and the connection between the two different worlds.
Ambiguity in John Keats poems Applied to the poems To Autumn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci The following essay treats the problem of ambiguity in John Keats poems To Autumn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Ambiguity is treated by the structuralism school and is presented as an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry. Not only the message itself but also its addresser and addressee become ambiguous.
American Romanticism American Romanticism is a concept that developed in the 17th century. Romanticism is all about emotions, the meaning of life, religion, society, the human form, death, and nature. Romanticism is very diverse and complex because each writer interprets the themes differently and each person who reads the poem can see something different and unique. Two famous and influential romantic poets were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Although Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were both romantic poets they interpreted society and death in two completely different ways.
“A Memory of Youth”: Yeats and Erotic Experience A cloud blown from the cut-throat north Suddenly hid Love’s moon away. The “cloud”—amorphous and obstructing—cuts into the scene, as well as the poem, with a sudden violence, in order to block the image of “Love’s moon”. The cloud itself cannot have definite dimensions, as it exists to only hide the moon, casting the speaker of the poem, his love and the cloud itself in a continuous darkness. It is in this darkness that the speaker of the poem finds his own perception and experiences clouded, indicating his blind submission to erotic love in lieu of a more illuminating, comprehensive “Love”.
Although Coleridge reflects on nature as being that “one Life within us and abroad “in most of his other poem, but coming In “Dejection: An Ode” we see more of the dialects between the imagination’s role in creating perception and nature guiding the soul. In the opening stanzas of “Dejection” the flipside to the romantic celebration of nature –the romantic emphasize on subjective experience, individual consciousness, and imagination. If our experience derives from ourselves, then nature can do nothing on its own. Beginning with the fifth stanza, Coleridge suggests that there is a power –personified joy that allows us to reconnect with nature and for it to renew us and that comes both from within and from without: “the spirit and the power, / Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower / A new Earth and new Heaven” (67–69).
For example in stanza five there are two rhyming triplets. The tone of the poem also changes accordingly to the action in the poem, the rhyme, rhythm and measure. At first skeptical, almost discouraging, but after it gains hope. At a point that hope shatters and the tone becomes grave and sorrow. The poem as well as the charge end quietly in a plain stanza, the last stanza which different but still inspirational.
Maddie Lewis Mr. C G5 English H IV Research Paper The poem I am researching is Ode on a Grecian Urn written by John Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn was written in 1819, the year in which Keats contracted tuberculosis. Keats died of tuberculosis a year later, making Ode on a Grecian Urn his last poem.
There are several interpretations of John Keats’ poem, Ode to a Nightingale. Keats begins his poem with talking about a bird that seems real, but as the poem progresses the bird turns into a symbol. Keats was envisioning how life could be much simpler and he was thinking about the different ways life is troublesome. His reality was taken over by his dream of having a life like the nightingale- worryless and free. He wishes that he could join the bird because if he could escape to the nightingale’s world, he could escape from reality and live a much more uncomplicated and worry free life.
In his works he makes use of Celtic and Irish Landscape, names and music. He was the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism and used to put his own self in poetry. He writes on the themes of love, sex, confusion, religious life, politics, morality, aging, morbidity. It was after meeting Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Yeats turned to