O solitude! if i must with thee dwell

Question 1

Summary/ surface meaning of the poem

Answer 1

the speaker express his desire in the intial octet that if he must live in solitude, then he would rather be alone in nature than in the squalid ugliness of a city.

Question 2

When was this poem written (year and stage in Keats’ life)

Answer 2

October 1815- this was just after Keats had joined Guy’s Hospital as a surgical pupil

Question 3

Why was this stage of Keats’ life so influential for his poetry- especially ‘o solitude’

Answer 3

when he first joined Guy’s Hospital he was obliged to move from Edmonton to Southwark which was an area south of the Thames which was dirty, rough and insanitary where there were high crime rates. Furthermore in his job he saw daily disease and suffering and death which pushed him into a deep depression which is reflected in the poem

Question 4

Structure and versification

Answer 4

• Petrarchian sonnet which the rhyme scheme ABBA, ABBA, CDDCDC,
• Volta after line 8: signalled with the ‘But’
• endstop after ‘dwell’- creates a sense of entrapment

Question 5

use of nouns and the effect of this

Answer 5

the amalgamation of concrete (river, dell, bough, foxglove) and abstract (sweet converse, thoughts refined, souls pleasure, highest bliss) nouns encapsulates the omnipotence of nature to prevail in both the physcial and pyschological realm- supports the romantic conceot of the importance of bith nature and the imagination

Question 6

Depiction of the city (phonetically, structurally, through punctuation and linguistically)

Answer 6

Punctuation:

• exclaimation mark after the apostorophe at the beginning evokes a pleading tone
• sense of entrapment due to the comma at the end of line one-> oppressive nature of the city
• enjambment of line 2: reflects the entropic nature of urban life, complements ‘murky buildings’ and ‘jumbled heaps