ASSIGNMENT ON :

Keat’s Concept of
Death

Submitted to SUBMITTED BY
Ms diksha singh DIVYANSHI MISHRA

INSTITUTE FOR EXCELLENCE IN HIGH

EDUCATIon [ 2020-2021]
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that Divyanshi Mishra
of B.A. Honours Psychology 1st year has
successfully completed her General
Awareness assignment on the topic
”Keat’s Concept of Death” under the
guidance of mS diksha singh .

Ms Diksha Singh
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The success and final outcome of this

assignment required a lot of guidance
and assistance from many people and I
am extremely thankful to have got this
all along the completion of my
assignment.
I thank “Ms Diksha Singh“ for giving me
this opportunity to do this assignment
work and for providing me support
which made me complete my
assignment on time.

Divyanshi Mishra
 INDEX
S. CONTENT Page No.
NO.
1 About Author 1

2 Keat’s Concept of 2
Death :
• Death and nature
• Death and love
• Death and rebirth
• Rebirth by knowledge
• Death and Reality
• Fear of Death

3 Conclusion 3-4
 About Author
John Keats was an
English Romantic poet.
He was prominent in
the second generation
romantic poet. He
devoted his short life in
perfection of poetry
marked by vivid
imagery , great
sensuousness appeal
and an attempt to express philosophy through classical
legends
EARLY LIFE--
John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October
1795 to Thomas Keats and his wife, Frances Jennings. He was
the eldest of four surviving children; j ohn Keats received
relatively little formal education. Keats worked as a dresser,
or junior house surgeon . His literary interests had
crystallized by this time, and after 1817 he devoted himself
entirely to poetry
Criticism and his recovery to become a
mature poet-
Keats met Mr. Leigh Hunt the publisher of “The Examiner” ,
who helped him publish his first work Poem by john keats.
And Endymion due to the friendship with “Hunt” he was
exposed to political world where he got criticism from two
publication Blackwod’s Magezine and Quarterly
Magezine.but he already moved on the criticism before the
publishing of Endymion he was reexaminig role of petry in
letter to his friends ; the poem drew its beauty from real
human experience . and developed the concept of Negative
Capability [the idea that humans are capable of transcending
intellectual or social constraints and far exceed, creatively or
intellectually. From 1817he came as a mature poet and
created his most important works.
Death in Keat’s Life-
Death played a large and disproportionate role in the life of
John Keats. When the poet was .but eight years old, his
father died,his mother remarried and left him with his three
siblings in grand mother house , to be followed less than a
year later by an infant brother, Edward, and his grandfather.
In January 1809, Keats lost a favorite uncle; and a year later,
he lost· his mother, perhaps one of the most difficult losses
to sustain. In December 1814, his grandmother Jennings
died; and four years later, Keats 9 watched by the bedside of
his fatally ill brother, Tom.Less than three years after the
death of his brother, " Keats himself was to die from the
same disease which made .... Keats more poignantly and
sensitively aware of the meaning of death, and conversely, of
life.

Main Works-
“Isabella,”, in 1817–18, Endymion, and 1819—“Lamia,” “The
Eve of St. Agnes,” the great odes (“On Indolence,” “ode On a
Grecian Urn,” “ode To Psyche,” “ode To a Nightingale,” “On
Melancholy,” and “ode To Autumn”), and the two versions of
Hyperion. The Eve of St. “Lamia” and apolo , “when i have
fear”

Keat’s Love Life -

Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne Keats . He gave her
the love sonnet "Bright Star "All his desires were
concentrated on Fanny. his went to Rome the trip marked
the end of his romance with Fanny .

Death-
Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to
move to a warmer climate. Then he went to Rome, He died
there five months later of moving there On February
23,1821.
Keat’S CONCePt OF
DEATH
Death & nature
Nature captivated Keats as he incorporated it into
majority of his works, by connecting nature and the
circle of life the author created some of his most
famous poems in connection to death. In his poem “ To
Autumn” which he wrote in 1819.

Personal grief reflected in the imagery. Amongst this

gloominess he had a love for life, represented by the
imaginative style and beauty in his most romantic
pieces. The poem is full of descriptions that appeal to
senses like sight, taste and hearing. One can smell the
“fume of poppies” and hear the “bees, until they think
warm days will never cease”.

Keats describes autumn as a “season of mist and

mellow fruitfulness” after being inspired by a walk near
Winchester. [6] It seems as if the season will not come
to an end, but in the last stanza the previous joy and
colourful description ends. The reader can distinguish
the negative connotations that describe “the soft-dying
day” and the end of autumn. [7] Keats captures the
beauty of dying using vocabulary that indicates the
delicate and romantic ideal that Keats thought death to
have been, my thoughts as the sun sheds a “bloom” of
“rosy hue”. [8] In this poem Keats combines and
contrasts death and life and is able to see the pleasure
in something unlikeable, since they both are inevitable
and merge into one in life. By accepting death Keats
turns it into a positive and normal part of life, the
poem does not remain overly negative, since in the last
stanza in the line “Think not of them, thou hast thy
music too” the author welcomes the end of autumn as
he sees something beautiful in the end as well and
acknowledges that life and death are in harmony.

Death & love

In his letter to Fanny he says: “I have two luxuries to
brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour
of my death. O that I could have possession of them
both in the same minute.” He believed that he could
reach fulfilment by dying and having her at the same
moment.
In a lot of Keats poems there has been speculations
over sexual overtones, for example in Bright Star the
author uses the expression to „swoon to death”- an
orgasm is often compared to dying. Because of its
position as the last word in the poem “death” carries a
great deal of weight in the final effect and meaning of
the poem.” [13] It can be considered as a culmination
and an abeyance after that.

In the Ode to Autumn Keats erects a momentum with

to set budding more, and still more” that peaks with
“warm days will never cease” and releases itself (with
definite sexual undertones) with “For Summer has
o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.” [14] . John Keats
uses love and romantic feelings to form his poems.

Keats has intertwined love and death that formed the

essence of him and his creations. death captivated
Keats as much as love In Bright Star Keats expresses his
wish to be “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening
breast, And so live ever -or else swoon to death” cite
the poem He dreamed of eternity as he was fully
content being in one certain moment but as he knew
that it would pass, Keats preferred to die rather than
leave that particular situation. In Ode to a Nightingale
the author admits that “for many a time I have been
half in love with easeful Death” and finds that “To
cease upon the midnight with no pain” … “In such an
ecstasy!” it “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”.
Poem quotes These examples show Keats fanaticism
towards death. His lover is a “fair creature of an hour”,
in his poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be,
and cannot be for “ever” poem he thinks of death as
the best or even an enjoyable option for him. [15]

Death And Rebirth-

Keats' poem, "On Death," is the first to relate his ideas

of death to the concept of rebirth and dreams. The
poem, written on the occasion of the death of his
grandmother . In this poem, Keats suggests the
paradox that life is a dream, a phantom, a vision, while
death is the state of wakefulness. This is an idea that
was to reappear many times in both his poems and
his letters.
In his• • famous Nightingale Ode, he asks at the end:
"is it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music; --
Do .I wak-e or sleep?"
And in a letter to Charles Brown, as late as September
30, 1820, when Keats was dying• on his way to Italy,
he questioned: "Is there another Life? Shall I awake
and find all this a dream?"
Here in "On Death," death is dissociated from sleep,
and is associated with rebirth or awakening: "Can
death be sleep, when life is but a dream," and "His
future doom which • but to awake. " Death •
preferable to life, which • here "life of h "rugged 11
life where lS "transient pleasures as a vision seem." In
spite of the misery of life, however, there is suggested
in this poem something of the fear and undesirability
of 'death. Keats notes that it is strange for man to roam
on earth which is a "rugged path," while on the other
hand, man dare not "view alone/ His future doom." But
man's "future doom" is •to be awake, presumably after
death, thus assuming a state of immortality or rebirth.

Rebirth by knowledge -

Death, then, , can be viewed in two ways in the

Hyperion poems. Death is, in one sense, the process by
which the poet's rebirth through .knowledge is
accomplished. On the other hand, as evidenced in The
Fall of Hyperion, knowledge is the means whereby the
poet escapes or avoids or overcomes death. Thus
death is again
In his sonnet on the "Elgin Marbles"In that earlier
poem, he had feared that he would die before being
reborn through knowledge: "and each imagin'd
pinnacle and steep/ Of godlike hardship tells me I must
die/ Like a sick Eagle looking at the ,sky." For him, then,
life was a : "Mortality/ Weighs heavily on me lie
unwilling sleep." But it is here a burden only because
mortality is in contrast to . immortality. It is the fact of
mortality, the brevity of life, which here concerns the
poet because it limits the time in which the poet must
be reborn through knowledge. There is in this poem a
dual reference to death--an allusion to a real death.,
which the poet fears, and a sacramental death, or
annihilation of self, a necessary step for the poet-hero
to attain immortality

Escape
Ode to~ Nightingale. the major import of the poem
lies in its emphasis on escape from the harsh realities
of life to the peace which death would bring

Death & reality vs. Fantasy

In his theory of Negative Capability Keats says:”

Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason .
The willingness to remain in doubt is seen in his poetry
in “Ode to a Nightingale” the lines “Was it a vision or
dream? Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?” [17]
form a rhetorical question and confirm that he is
capable of being in uncertainties and does not need
facts or reason in order to understand or enjoy the
situation. Since Keats experienced tragedy in his life, he
felt as if poetry was a way to escape [18] and go
“Away! Away! for I will fly to thee,” “But on the
viewless wings of Poesy” poem so it appears as if to
Keats the migration of birds a positive and beautiful
detail connected to the end of Autumn and the idea of
escape and fleeing reality.

The differentiation between reality and fantasy is

evident in Bright Star as Keats is willing to be „Awake
for ever in a sweet unrest”. The poet accepts that he
could die from pleasure, and contrasts the dream and
reality that he flees from once again.

Keats attributes the qualities of love with something

mystical comparing it to “faery power” as something
magical and beautiful but still remaining a fantasy or an
illusion.
In Ode of Indolence Keats is certain that “Neither
poetry, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as
the pass by me.”This leaves the reader an impression
as if Keats was only standing by as life passed him,
since he could not see anything positive in them at
times and it seemed to him as if there was no
expressions in poetry or love and therefore Keats could
not at times relate to it and only thought of them as a
fantasy.

Death & creation and fear of

death

The fear of dying is reflected in his poems before

the reader could see that Keats was fascinated with
death and even considered it to be something positive,
he still was afraid of death and dying. In When I Have
Fears he admits that ” I have fears that I may cease to
be, Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”, my
thoughts not fully achieving his ambitions as a writer
[21] and that he might die before he could write all he
had ever wanted daunted him.

In order to overcome his fears he “stands alone”,

thinks of the relevance of love and fame and the
insignificance of a single human being by contrasting
himself to “the wide world”. It gives an effect of
loneliness and insinuates to the theme of the poem
that is death and fear of dying. In the final two lines “Of
the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and
Fame to nothingness do sink”. Keats connects the
desire for love and fame, that he has to accept are
unimportant and “to nothingness do sink”, to the
ceasing of fear and yearning. [22]

in the poem On Death. Keats contrasts death and

life, comparing them to sleep and to a dream. Keats
asks „can death be sleep when life is but a
dream”and in Hamlet Shakespeare has posed a
question rather similar to of Keats “For in that sleep of
death what dreams may come”. Both authors think of
death as something unknown but yet intriguing and
possibly something positive and better as the life on
earth. He ridicules people and himself who are
religious and crave for afterlife and live in the pursuit
of it but when it comes down to dying and reaching
their dream, they fear death that leads to it since
„we think the greatest pains to die”.

The last two lines in On Death are addressed on

the subject of being able or daring to view alone his
future doom” that is in fact face death. There is a
change in the last line of the poem, where Keats
compares death to an awakening” saying his future
doom which is but to awake”. The fear of death takes
over once again, using negative vocabulary, the words
„doom”, woe, rugged, alone, pain, roam,” indicate a
dark atmosphere and make the death seem like a final
suffering before the “awakening”. Keats contrasts
sleep and being awake by indicating that waking up is
something negative as he uses the word “doom” and
as if coming out of the fantasy is like dying . The
pleasures of life Keats longed to possess were
“transient” and only a “vision” as he expresses his
thoughts in On Death. But as the author was able to
make peace with death it is not the “greatest pain,
therefore, to die”
 Conclusion
John Keats was greatly affected by death and since he
had to lose many of his loved ones at a young age that
made him even more vulnerable and opened to
creations. In connection to nature, love and creation,
Keats captivates the reader to contemplate on death as
he often did. The often extreme examples of the
fantasy of dying and living in a dream show how much
his short life was full of grief and how Keats was
fascinated by death and dying. The author uses
vocabulary that helps to create a certain atmosphere
or portray an image of what feelings the author
wanted to convey to the reader. The longing to escape
the harsh reality and face the real world seemed like
“doom” for him. His existential thoughts are
represented in his works as he accepts death as a
normal part of life. life. “A poet is not at all poetical. He
is the most un-poetical thing in existence. He has no
identity.”
 REFERENCE
• https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228668409.pdf

• http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1881/death-in-john-keats-ode-to-a-nightingale-and-the-eve-
of-st-agnes