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Tag Archives: John Keats

Those unheard are sweeter

02 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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John Keats, Literature, Peom, Poetry

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. 

John Keats

1. Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
 Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
 What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

2.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

3.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

4.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. 

5.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats, Ode on Melancholy

02 Saturday Apr 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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John Keats, Ode on Melancholy, Poem Analysis, Poetry Analysis

This poem is fascinating in its development. The first stanza is a warning: When you fall into “melancholy”, do not seek to end the pain by forgetfulness (Lethe, the river of forgetting). Do not seek to end the pain by poison, suicide (nightshade). The solution here is not trying to drown and stop the painful emotion.

In fact he sees something here to not lose, For shade to shade will come too drowsily/And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. That wakeful anguish is something keep. But why?

1.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
10

Wolf’s Bane

Instead of running from the pain (which falls suddenly, like a storm), find something beautiful. The pain at first hides beauty (“hides the green in an April shower”), but do not let that dissuade you. “Glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.” And if your love is angry with you, even in that see her beauty.

This seems strange: We have not answered the question, “Why?”

2.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes
. 20

Why should you not not run from sorrow, or look away from beauty? Because “Beauty … must die.” Sorrow dwells with Beauty. But not merely Beauty will die, Joy, and Pleasure. Pleasure will turn to poison in the time it takes for a bee to sip at a flower.

And even in the Temple of Delight, Melancholy has a powerful presence, a “sovran shrine.” But this knowledge of the deep sorrow which lurks in the Temple of Delight and dwells with Beauty is only known by someone who is willing to accept Joy. The one who can truly taste Joy and see Beauty, will also be the one who can know the true nature of melancholy.

Keats is pointing to a manner of life, which goes beyond mere breathing and existence. Rather, he is seeking to know what is actually taking place in this world: A world of unimaginable Beauty, a world under a curse. In this we can see the turn of Romanticism, which sought to restore human feeling (not just emotion) to a culture which was praising a rather mechanical reason.

It is also interesting in comparison to our culture which treats sorrow or melancholy as a disease (and certainly there are people who suffer brutally with extreme bouts of depression. But we treat even the normal sadness which is part of life as something which must be avoided at all costs. And so, Keats’ poem is inexplicable in our culture.

3.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

John Keats: Poems Published in 1820 .

John Keats, Analysis, When I Have Fear that I may Cease to be

23 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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John Keats, Literature, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry, When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,         5

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,               10

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

 

This is a Shakespearian sonnet of three quatrains and a couplet. It follows the typical development, of three major propositions and a conclusion based upon the whole. The overall theme is a meditation on death: First, he thinks of the work and fame which he will not obtain by his early death. Then he considers the greater loss, which is the loss of his love (Fanny Brawne). He in fact died at age 25 in 1821.

 

He concludes with the realization that neither art nor love will be sufficient to stop the loss of all. In the end, there will be only “nothingness.”

 

First Stanza:

 

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

 

The first line introduces the theme: When I contemplate my death and what will be lost. Being an ambitious young man with prodigious talent, his first thought comes to his poetry. He uses the imagery of farming and harvest: His pen “gleans” from his brain. Books of his work are like barns filled with grain. There is a harvest of his imagination to be had.

 

There is an interesting meta-view of the whole: he is busy “gleaning” by writing this poem on gleaning. And so his fear of loss creates the gain.

 

Second Stanza:

 

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,         5

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

 

In this stanza he makes use of the Romantic epistemology: the world is both objective and subjective: the meaning of that world is produced in my imagination working on the raw materials of the creation. As Shelley has in Mont Blanc:

 

My own, my human mind, which passively 

Now renders and receives fast influencings, 

Holding an unremitting interchange 

With the clear universe of things around; 

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings 

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest 

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, 

In the still cave of the witch Poesy, 

Seeking among the shadows that pass by 

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, 

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast 

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there

 

The sky and clouds are filled with potential tales. But these things will never be revealed if he, the poet, does not live to

 

live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance

 

 

Third Stanza:

 

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,               10

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

 

He then looks upon his love. She also transient: “fair creature of an hour!” And he will never more have the joy of looking upon her.

 

But there is something different here. In his work of creating, he is making something from world about him. And, if he does not make it, it will not come to be. But this which comes from her is not some creation of his imagination. She radiates “the faery power/Of unreflecting love!”

 

A “faery power” would be something profound, preternatural. It is the sort of power that he seeks to lay hold of in his imaginative work, “cloudy symbols of a high romance.” His work only reaches toward those things. But, in this woman before him who loves, that which would seek to achieve is given to him.

 

This love given to him is more than the goal of all that he would desire.

 

Couplet

 

The couplet is interesting, because Keats does not make a clean break from the third stanza. It is as if the contemplation of the one he loves has not merely superseded his art, it has derailed his poem.

 

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think   

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

 

And then he ends with the conclusion of vanity. Neither his art nor even her love are sufficient to stand before death. The only fitting reference here is Ecclesiastes. Keats would have known the Bible merely by normal exposure in his age (and from references in his work). Thus, a concept from Ecclesiastes being behind his work would not be a stretch:

 

Ecclesiastes 1:1–8 (AV)

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 3 What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. 5 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. 6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. 7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. 8 All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

30 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, poem, Poetry

Poem by John Keats, 1819

la_belle_dame_sans_merci_crane

Walter Crane – La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1865
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!’

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.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

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  • Study Guide: Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot.1
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