John Keats Flashcards
cows making low deep sounds
lowing
Elizabethan playwright and poet well know for his translations of the Illiad and the Odyssey
George Chapman
collected gradually bit by bit
gleaned
a rustic; one who lives in the forest
Sylvan historian
storehouses; granaries
garners
deserted; dismal
desolate
literary and cultural realms
realms of gold
branches; limbs of trees
boughs
a lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, usually praising it, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter
ode
overflowing; filled fully
teeming
region or domain
demesne
the Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the turn of thought or turn in the argument.
volta
a fortress high upon a hill that serves as protection for a city
citadel
excessively sweetened with sentiment
cloyed
a beautiful valley in Greece sacred to Apollo that has become a symbol of rustic beauty
Tempe
“Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain”
alliteration
the scenes on the urn
deities and mortals; a mad pursuit, a struggle to escape; pipes and timbrels; wild ecstasy; a young person chasing his lover amidst a setting of trees and piping musicians
Keats’s encouragement to the lover
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
why the lover is grieving
because he cannot catch up to her
Keats fears that he will die before he can express in writing all that he has in his mind and imagination.
“Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”
“Beauty is truth …”
truth beauty”
This poem turned out to be ominously prophetic for Keats.
“when I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
places Keats has traveled in his readings of Homer
realms of gold; goodly states and kingdoms
Keats’s closing imagery of famous explorations and discoveries
Cortez, the Pacific, Darien
“When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows …”
Keats beholds the mysterious expanse of the world and nature (and their underlying truths and meanings), and wishes he would be around long enough to write about it.
