Keats Flashcards
Biographical context
Mother died when he was 14, and brother died when he was more an adult. He died in 1821 aged 25 due to TB. The loss of his father, mother and brother in his lifetime made him aware of the fragility of life. He had a loving relationship with Fanny Browne
Historical, Political and Social context
French revolution: greeted with enthusiasm by most Romantic poets, War with France from 1793-1815 meant that British society was militarised and lived in constant fear. Time of poverty and hardship.
Romanticism context
Saw the limitations of enlightenment, imagination as the capacity to penetrate reality, emphasis on emotion and imagination and over reason. Beauty of nature = a mirror for the speaker’s emotions and a balm for their soul.
Wordsworth: nature as an entity on its own, it has healing powers and radiates joy
Keats’ ideas/views
Belief in negative capability: a great thinker/poem as someone who is capable of being in a state of uncertainty about the meaning of life.
Believed that sensory experiences were vehicles through which one perceived truth and beauty.
Believed in the power of imagination to create one’s reality and suggests that there is no single truth but only the individual’s perception of reality.
Bright Star
- love & intimacy over purity & coldness
- declaration of love
- “lone splendour”/”sleepless Eremite”/”priestlike”/”pure abolition”
- “love’s ripening breast”/”soft fall and swell”/”in a sweet unrest”
- repetition of “still”: longing of longevity
- volta - focus on intimacy and closeness
- talks about making love his religion
O solitude
- directly addressed to Solitude - paradoxical
- isolation in nature > isolation in the city
- “jumbled heap”/”murky buildings”
- “deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell”
- “thoughts refin’d”/”soul’s pleasure”/”highest bliss”
- Wordsworthian attitudes towards nature
- lived in Southwark and was miserable
Ode to Melancholy
- death imagery in first stanza: “Lethe”/”nightshade”/”yew-berries”/”death-moth”
- “for shade to shade will come too drowsily…” - melancholy as part of everyday life
- melancholy solved by “glut” indulgence in nature
- beauty of nature, but all temporary
- “aching Pleasure nigh, turning into poison” - nectar food of Gods turns into poison, a life of indulgence turns into melancholy
- “can burst joy’s grape against his palate fine…her cloudy trophies hung” - melancholy as the price for an indulgent and happy life
- link yo “A world of troubles..to make a soul”
- Ode structure: to celebrate someone, very emotive in Romanticism
Ode to Psyche
- direct address to Psyche
- finds her embracing Cupid, reflects on his past love
- Psyche as a new goddess
- “Olympus’ faded hierarchy” vs “O brightest” - new and bright compared to Olympians
- “sapphire regione-d star” + “Vesper amorous glow worm of the ski” - admiration and beauty
- asyndetic list: what she lacks
- he’ll build an altar for her in the “untrodden region of my mind” - power of imagination
- “A rosy sanctuary I will dress”/”With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, who breeding flowers, will never be the same” - out natures nature
- Paganism>Christianity
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
- literature and imagination as forms of travel and exploration
- external => introspective, “yet did I never breathe its pure serene”
- volta: “Till” - before: man-made imagery, after: natural
- “watcher of the skies”/”new planet”/”Cortez … Pacific”/”Look’d at each other with wild surmise” - speaker as an explorer, sheer beauty comparable to poetry
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
- medieval genre of romance as lacking inspiration: “shut up thine olden pages, and be mute!”, “!” - sardonic tone
- “impassion’d clay” - human mortality and fragility in King Lear
- directly addresses Shakespeare: “Chief Poet!”, “Albion”
- “barren dream” - lack of inspiration
- “But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire” -> “burn”
- “Bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit”
On the sea
- “eternal whispering”, “desolate shores”, “mighty swell” - personification of sea as conscious and wise
- “gluts” + “dead too much with cloying melody” - hungry and unrelenting
- repetition of ll sound = lulling
- rhyme scheme change from ABBA - rocking waves, to irregular: unpredictability, danger
- “who have your eye-balls vex’ and tir’d/Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea” - city vs nature, synthesesia showcases grandeur and magic of the sea
- allusion to mythology: wiseness and timelessness of sea
To sleep
- sibilance: lulling and shushing sound, silencing his thoughts and consciousness
- sleep as a gentle goddess: “careful fingers and benign”, “shelter from trees” -> reversal of traditional imagery, desires the dark
- “breeding many woes” - his worries personified as something that can multiply
- at the end, sibilance takes a more threatening tone
- “Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul” - protecting your soul from thoughts, sleep as a solution
When I have fears I may cease to be
- “gleaned my teeming brain” + “rich garners full of ripened grain” - his ideas as harvest, thus ephemeral, plants die by their fruit remains - his body dies but his poems remain
- “may never live to trace” … - symbolises the beauty he can lose
- cyclical structure of death: life and and begins with nothingness
- “Of the wide world I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink” - does fame and love actually matter? but in a poem so ironic, juxtaposition between thinking and death
- contemplating oblivion
