Namrataba Zala's assignment 2016-2018
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NAMRATABA ZALA
Semester: 1
Roll No.: 27
Enrollment No.: 2069108420170033
Batch: 2016-2018
S. B. Gardi Department Of English
Bhavnagar University
Email id : namratazala2707@gmail.com
Paper no. : 5 The romantic literature
John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) is one of the
most sensuous poets in English, whose poetry is
remarkable for its colour and
imagery. The distinctive quality in Keats is the ability to convey his
vision as a sensuous experience. He
focuses on several sense impressions relating to an object
and thereby gives the reader a full
apprehension of it. His early works (particularly Endymion)
were harshly criticised, but by the
time he was twenty-four, he had won recognition for his-great
odes-On Melancholy, On A Grecian
Urn, To A Nightingale and To Autumn. All these odes
were written in his most creative
year of 1819. Seriously ill with tuberculosis, Keats died in
Rome when he was just twenty-six.
An Ode
An ode is a form of lyric, a poem of
address, of an elaborate structure. Here in these two odes,
Keats is addressing a nightingale
and the season of Autumn respectively. The poetic device he
employs is known as the apostrophe
(a figure of speech in which someone absent or a something
or an idea is addressed as though
present and able to respond to the address). Keats' odes are ten-
line stanzas, with the first
quatrain rhyming abab and the following sestet having a cdecde rhyme
scheme. His odes are remarkable for
their fusion of intensity of feeling and concreteness of detail
and description. They also possess a
dramatic quality for we are made aware of the presence of
two voices engaged in a lyrical
debate.
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale is a poem in
eight stanzas.
Stanza I describes the
poet excitement as he listens to the song of a nightingale.
Stanza II & III expresses
the poet wish to enter into the world of the nightingale and thereby
remain oblivious of the weariness
and fretful stir of human existence. He asks for a draught of
wine that can induce in him a state
of druggedness so that he can fly far away into the blissful
world of the bird.
Stanza IV records the poet
recourse to poetic fancy as an alternative to aid him in his flight
into the realm of the nightingale.
The poetic fancy leads him to the bird in its perch up among the
tree tops where he can see the moon
and the stars. But this does not last long and he wakes out of
it to return to gloom and darkness
on earth.
Stanza V shows the poet
separateness from the bird. This appeal to poetic fancy has not
liberated him from the human world
of pain and misery, but has helped him to respond with
delight to the naturalistic world,
full of colourful flowers.
Stanza VI expresses Keats morbid
impulse to die at that very moment of experiencing an intense
joy and empathy with nature so that
he can cease to experience pain hereafter. The poet says that
it is rich to die in his present
state of heightened ecstasy. But alongside this death wish comes the
still greater painful awareness that
death marks not only severance from the pains of life but also
from the bird and its sweet song as
well.
Stanza VII affirms the permanence of
the bird song in this world. It is not that the bird is
immortal, but its song is. It had
thrilled successive generations in the past and shall continue to
thrill successive generations in the
future.
Stanza VIII shows the poet waking up
from his fancy and becoming aware that the nightingale
has fled and he can no longer listen
to it. The poem concludes with an unanswered question
whether he had experienced genuinely
a heightening of experience or whether it was all just a
vision and a dream.
The movement of the poem is related
to the poet movement
i) from the ideal happy world of the
nightingale to the dull everyday world of pain, misery
and suffering and
ii) from a state of ecstasy to a
state of forlornness (desolation)
The turn of these two movements
comes .at the end of the fourth stanza. The first four stanzas
assert the poet
identification with the bird and its song and the latter four stanzas lay
emphasis
upon the poet separateness
from the bird. The bird is present only in the first section and it is
absent in the rest of the poem.
Poetic Devices
1. This ode is remarkable for its
varied allusions-literary, biblical and mythological, The
references to
"Hippocrene" and "Bacchus" take us back to
ancient literary works. The Biblical
allusion to Ruth and mythological
allusion to "charm magic casements, opening on the foam of
perilous seas, in fancy leads
forlorn" (79-80) reinforce the permanence of the nightingale
song
and juxtapose it with the forlorn
misery of human beings who experience nothing but "the
weariness, the fever and
fret" of existence.
2. Keats craftsmanship is
remarkably in evidence in this poem. He is not a poet of all embracing
sensuousness. He rises from the
sensuous to the ethereal and spiritual dimensions and thus has a
close affinity with the Greek ideal
of Beauty.
In this poem we find keats
skill in word painting and verbal coinage. A god example of this is
seen in the phrase
"full-throated ease" (L.10). The song of the nightingale is
described in visual
imagery. Yet another example is in
the description of the wine in terms of "the blushful
Hippocrene" and
"Purple-stained mouth-where the taste is expressed in visual terms.
Other examples of his skill in
verbal coinage include "leaden-eyed" (28) "Viewless
wings of
Poesy" (33)
"embalmed darkness" (43).
3. Alliteration:
"Deep-delved", "beaded bubbles"
..." the fever and the fret".
4. Diction: Stanza V is remarkable
for Keats poetic diction. You can notice the contrast between
such homely words as "the
seasonable month" and "soft incense", "dewy
win" "embalmed
darkness". Though Keats is
literally referring to the scent of the flowers, these words conjure up
thoughts of luxury and wine.
We can see a similar kind of
contrast in stanza VII between the enchantment and mystery
suggested by
"charm ", "magic",
"faery" and the emotionally . disturbing associations of
"perilous" and
"forlorn". All these are in close link with the homely word
"casements" a word
that returns the poet (and the
render) to reality. In lines 71-72, out of 18 words that Keats
employs, only two have more than one
syllable. The succession of monosyllables is intended to
produce flat, prosaic reality.
Ode to Autumn
To Autumn is
ranked the finest ode by no less critics than F. Inglis, Walter Jackson Bate,
Douglas Bush, Harold Bloom, Leavis
and Robert Bridges. It was written during the sunny
September of 1819. What inspired
Keats to write this ode was a quiet Sunday walk through the
stubble fields near Winchester.
Immediately after finishing the poem, he wrote in a letter to
Reynolds (21 September, 1819):
“Yesterday .... was a grand day for
Winchester .... How beautiful the season is now-How fine the
air. A temperate sharpness about it.
Really, without joking, chaste weather-Dian skies-1 never
like stubble-fields so much
as now - Aye. better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow a
stubble-plain looks warm-in the same
way that some pictures look warm-This struck me so much
in my Sunday walk that I
composed upon it”.
Though it seems generally agreed
that & To Autumn is a rich and vivid description of nature in
as
much as Keats lets the rich store of
sense impressions be absorbed and transmuted in an act of
calm, meditative wisdom in stanzaic
pattern, we can discover that the poem is not only rich in
pictorial and sensuous details, but
that it has a depth of meaning. It is an affirmation of faith in
the processes of life and change.
Only thing is that the affirmation is not made by asserting it, for
that might constitute poetry with
"a palpable design" upon us. It does so by drawing us --
into
experiences - that are
self-explanatory.
The poems runs in 3 stanzas, each
concentrating on a dominant aspect of autumn and bearing
relationship with others.
Stanza 1 describes natural objects
at their richest and ripest stage. However, there is a slight
implication about the passage of
time in later warm days will never cease
and reference to
summer already past.
Stanza 2 adds an imaginative element
to the description in the form of personification of the
season in several appropriate
postures and settings
Stanza 3 presents the paradox of the
season both lingering and passing. While the stanza is
descriptive, its latent theme of
transitoriness and mortality is symbolically dramatised by the
passing course of, the day.
“To Autumn” shares a feature of
development with the “Ode on Nightingale”. Each of these
poems begins with presentation of
realistic circumstances, then moves into an imagined realm,
and ends with a return to the
realistic.
Keats’s genius was away from
statement and toward description, and in autumn he had the
natural symbol for his meanings. ‘To
Autumn’ is shorter than the other odes and less complex in
its materials, it should be
appreciated for its peculiar distinction of great compression achieved in
simple terms.
Summing Up
Keats is known as a poet painter in
words. He has been able to represent nature with the help of
imagery which is sensuous and comprehensive
as also pictorial. Keats distinction lies in his
ability to let sense impressions
flow upon him and the rich store of sense impressions is absorbed
and transmuted into an act of calm,
meditative wisdom. The poet is himself completely absent.
There is no “I”, no suggestion of
the discursive language. The power of self absorption,
identification with things, he
called “negative capability” which he saw as essential to creation of
poetry.
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