On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again Flashcards
Summary
In the poem, Keats fights against his ulterior urge to create in order to indulge in one of his greatest passions: that of re-reading the play, King Lear, one of the most influential of all of Shakespeare’s work. ‘King Lear’ is a play about family and misery, duty and birthright, and about how one’s opinion can lead to tragedy. It is one of Shakespeare’s most revered plays, played constantly over the years to crowds of packed audiences; and it is no secret why the play itself is one of Keat’s favourite. ‘King Lear’ is all about artifice and joy and misery, things that Keats himself saw echoed and repeated in his own life, and tried to echo and repeat in his own work.
First Stanza
Characteristic of Keats’ work, the poem opens by referencing his own work: he calls it a ‘golden-tongued romance with serene lute’, thereby referencing his own classical leanings, knowing full well that the poem. He references the ‘syren’, which were Greek creatures, sea nymphs that played tunes to lure sailors into the water and to their death; they are usually conflated with beauty, and so their inclusion in the opening lines is to show the beauty of his own muse, the beauty of writing poetry, that he is putting aside so that he can focus on the play. He references, of course, the ‘queen of far away’, which might talk about Keats’ own difficulties composing, but without further reference this would be impossible to verify. Largely, the opening stanza is effusive enough to set the scene of what will be a short and brief introduction into Keats’ romantical leanings.
Second Stanza
In the second part of the poem, he talks about what he will do instead of create poetry: he is going to read ‘the bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit’. It is worth noting the way that he says ‘must I burn through’, placing the act of reading ‘King Lear’ as an almost-compulsion, as though it is something that he must desperately get through before the day is over. His feelings for the play are so strong that he is setting aside what John Keats believed to be his calling in order that he could read it.
‘Bittersweet’ fully references the play, as the penultimate tragedy of King Lear is that when he is reunited with his disgraced daughter, Cordelia, and has attained her forgiveness, Cordelia dies
Third Stanza
Shakespeare is the ‘Chief Poet’; it is no secret that Keats greatly admired the great masters of English literature, which included, Milton and Shakespeare, and that there was a resurgence of their work during the Romantic era which led to a greater revalidation of the themes that they wrote about. For Keats, Shakespeare was the master of tragedy and beauty. His plays, even the tragedies, are a show of mastery in the English language, and it is thought that Keats certainly aspired to write some way similarly to Shakespeare, but this would, again, be difficult to corroborate. ‘Albion’ references the United Kingdom, the country where Keats and Shakespeare wrote.
Keats finishes the poem with this musing: he does not want to wander ‘in a barren dream’, which could reference a landscape that he himself has created, a landscape that is barren only because he has not yet written the poem that he was to have written, but that he wants to be ‘consumed in the fire’. It could be taken that Keats himself, although lauding his muse earlier, has no inspiration left to write something that would consume him, and is instead putting it off so that he could read through King Lear, one of his greatest inspirations. The supposition follows on with the final line – ‘give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire’, thereby showing that Keats would like a new variety of muse, a new way of writing, and a better way of viewing the world, all of which he thinks he can attain through a re-reading of King Lear.
