IN ANALYSING THE POEMS:

 Date and importance

 Links to romanticism
 Subject/issues in the poem
 Form and significance
 Quotes and techniques
 Links to imagination, nature, idealism and individualism.

QUESTIONS YOU NEED TO CONDISDER FOR ALL THE POEMS

 Keats experiences a deep appreciation for the beauty of nature + art. What value does he seem to ascribe to beauty?
 Keats has been called a poet of the senses. To what extent is Keats’ appeal to the senses an integral part of his poetry?
 “The vital force behind all his verse was his power to apply imagination to every aspect of life” (Gittings)  To what
extent is imagination a central concept in Keats’ poetry?
 “He finds melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain”  Do you agree with this view of Keats’ poem?

ODE TO A NIGHINGALE

 Douglas Bush noted that Keats’ important poems are related to or grow indirectly out of inner conflicts  personal
nature of romanticism, inner emotion and psyche of a person.
 We are compelled to imagine something more than we can know or understand  romantic emphasis on inner emotion.
 Written: May 1819
 Ideas: Pain + pleasure are intertwined, links to the joy and pain of life/conflict.
 Brooks notes that the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality but, paradoxically, renders
the world of actuality more painful by contrast.
 A lot of paradoxes  intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling, life/death
 It is important to follow the development from the initial response to the nightingale to the final statement about the
experience.
 Keats identifies the bird as a symbol of freedom from rationalism and order of society etc.
 Starts off as a literal bird and then becomes more symbolic as time goes on.

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,

 Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

 5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;

And mid-May’s eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

7.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

 The same that oft-times hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toil me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep

THE EVE OF ST AGNES – XXIII

 Narrative poem – one that tells a story. Often written in metered verse – does not have to rhyme. The language draws
readers into the lives of characters.
 Some see the poem as a dramatization of the souls ascent to the liberating conditions of immortality through erotic love.
The original publication was graphic and sexual. Publishers feared the public reaction and forced him to tone it down.
 It is a story of love triumphing against the odds – it almost serves as a hymn to moments of life affirming beauty.
  Beauty = life. A sense of empathy with all human beings is created. Bate notes “what strikes us most is [Keats’] capacity
for sympathetic identification. Particularly evident in the physical & emotional awakening of Madeline”.
 St Agnes superstition  if a woman would go to bed in a particular way on this night, she would envisage her future
husband.

CONTEXT

 Porphyro is in Madeline’s room and he hides in her closet so he can watch her.

Out went the taper as she hurried in;

Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:

She closed the door, she panted, all akin

To spirits of the air, and visions wide –

No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!

But to her heart, her heart was voluble,

Painting with eloquence her balmy side;

As though a tongueless nightingale should swell

Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

GENERAL:
 Indeterminacy
 Also – negative capability – he coined this.
o When a man is capable of being uncertain without any reaching for fact/reason.
o Can seek artistic beauty even when it lends to intellectual confusion/uncertainty.
 Paired ideas/concepts evident in this;
o Love and death
 o Temptation and duty
o Dream and waking
o Ecstasy and despair
 Highlights Knight’s predicament
 May 1819
o Awareness of impending death.
o Love for Fanny x
o In love and growing ill.
o Suffering from depression – they were kept apart because of his monetary issues and illness.
 Themes – images of death, love
 Structure and narrative voice
o Stanza 1-3  Unknown speaker who finds a knight and questions him
o Rest of poem  Knight’s reply
o Structure ABCB – slow and steady rhythm
 Ensures the shorter line of each quatrain draws you quickly into the next.
 Ballad significance: Tells a story. Moving away from standard form of poetry, didn’t want it to be lofty and
restrict access  typically a song – rhythm and rhyme scheme gift it harmony.
 Ballad – Q and A answer response typical of this time.

I
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

III
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too. A

IV
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
 VI
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

VII
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

VIII
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

X
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

XI
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

XII
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 BRIGHT STAR! WOULD I WERE AS STEADFAST AS THOU ART-

 Sonnet – English/Shakespearian, 14 lines.

 Typically, in this form in lines 1-12 an issue is presented and in lines 13-14 a couplet is presented which solves the
problem.
 In this poem, the issues is that he wants to be unchanging like a bright star but doesn’t want to be alone. If he had to pick,
he would choose love and death over immortality.
 Rhyme scheme: ABAB (three quatrains). Iambic pentameter why?  link to point from yesterday (lofty)
 Concepts  contrast between beauty and transience (lasting a short time), pleasure and suffering, solitude and intimacy,
eternity and mortality.
 As Watson, in “English Poetry of the Romantic Period” notes, “If love and beauty and delight are the only permanent
things, then human life is unreal and fleeting like a dream and our lives are mysterious… the poet’s duty is to celebrate
these moments of life in which beauty and delight are found.”
 Written – dates vary but around 1819-1820. He was very aware of his impending death. Some say this poem was
addressed to Fanny  link to letter from May 3rd, 1818 to her.
 First 8 lines – octave, next 6 lines – sestet.
 Octave is about the natural and external world, sestet is about the personal world of the persona.
 9th line – a Volta – marks a change in tone

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

TO AUTUMN

 Ode: Lyrical Stanzas – glorifying nature.

 Written 1819 – last poem that Keats ever wrote – as his own life drew to a close, his poetry started to draw to an eloquent
finale.
 While living in England, he would often walk the countryside – inspired by the season, he wrote ‘To Autumn’.
 Letter from September 1819 – “How beautiful the season is now … a temperate sharpness about it … this struck me so
much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
 Important difference from previous poems – no dreamer or blurring between reality + dream.
 No core persona - This is grounded in the real world
 Sights, feels, sounds of autumn at the fore.
 Ideas:
o Abundance, Decline + Loss
o Cycle of life evident in cycle of nature.
o Life = process of ripening, decay, death so too in nature (metaphor)
 Balances the forces of life + death.
 Temporal (time).
 Critics  Motion “the balance in this poem that lends itself to being called his most perfect. Bloom “The most beautiful
of all of Keats’ odes.
 The environment mirrors the mood, this is a typical romantic device.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too —

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.