Assignment Topic – John Keats And Analysis of His Ode.
Name-Khasatiya Reena K.
Sem.-M.A. 2 (2018)
Roll no.-29
Email Id.- khasatiyamili21@gmail.com
Paper No. – 5 Romantic literature.
Submitted To – Department of English MKBU
To Evalute my assignment click hereclick here
About John Keats
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists. While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms , and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times , Keats lived apart from men and from all political measure , worshiping beauty like a devotee , perfectly content to write what was in his heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be. He had , moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics or, indeed , to any cause, however great or small. As he said in Lamia.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel ‘s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air……
Or he said
A thing of beauty is joy for ever
It’s loveliness increases , it will ever
Pass into nothingness; (Endymion)
Partly because of thus high ideal poetry, partly because he studied and unconsciously imitated the Greeks classics and the best works of Elizabethans, Keats’s last little volume of poetry is unequalled by the work of any of his contemporaries. When we remember that all his work was published in three short years 1870 to 1820 and that he died when only twenty five, we must judge him to be the most promising figure of the early 19th century, and one of the most remarkable in the history of literature.
Keats’s life was devotion to beauty and to poetry.
Bitter criticism of his poems in Quarterly magazine Byron : who killed John Keats ? I , says the Quarterly .
He knew no Greek ; yet Greek literature absorbed him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly educated in the schools, he had marvelous faculty of discerning the real spirit of the classics.
The Eve of St. Agnes the most perfect of Keats’s medieval poems , is not a story after the manner of the metrical romance, but rather vivid paintings of a romantic mood, such as comes to all men, at times, to glorify a workday world. Like all the work of Shelley and Keats , it has an element of unreality; and when we reach at the end : “ and, they are gone; aye, gone ages long ago / these lovers fled away into the storm, “ it is as if we were waking from a dream
Three things should be remember about Keats: first that Keats sought to express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal humanity as government or low, and that the higher man climbs in civilization the more imperative becomes His need Of beauty as a reward for his labours. Second , that Keats’s letters are as much an indication of the man as his poetry; and in his letter , which their human sympathy, their eager interest in social problems , their humour, and their keen insight into life ,there is no trace of effeminacy, but rather every indication of a strong and noble manhood. The third thing to remember is that all Keats work was done in three or four years – at 25 his work was as mature as was Tennyson’s 50.
More than any other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of the arts. More than any others he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his Grecian urn, beauty and truth were one and inseparable. Most fitly does he close the list of poets of the romantic revival , because in many respect he was the best workman of them all. He seems to have studied words more carefully than did his contemporaries, and so his poetic expression , or the harmony of word and thought is generally more than theirs. He enriched the whole Romantic Movement by adding to its interest in common life spirit , rather than the letter, of the classics and of Elizabethan poetry. For these reasons Keats is , like Spenser, a poet’s poet ; his work profoundly influenced Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era.
Keats and Romanticism
Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories of literature and life , were drawn to lyrical poetry; they even developed a new form of Ode, often called the romantic meditative ode.
Without doubt , Keats was one of the mist important figures of early nineteenth century Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination , and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are Romantic concerns. The beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering , and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written , their idealist concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations thought at the same time.
The literary critic Jack Stillinger describes the typical movement of the romantic ode. The poet, unhappy with the real world , escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal. Disappointed in his mental fight, he returns to real world. Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because he has not found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of his situation , of the world, etc., his views or feelings at the end of the poem differ significantly from those he held at the beginning of the poem.
Themes in Keats’s Major Poems
Douglas Bush noted that “ Keats’s important poems are related to , or grow directly out of ..inner conflicts, “ For example , pain and pleasure are intertwined in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” , love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in “La belle Dame Sans Merci” , “ The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Isabella; or, the pot of Basil”.
Other Conflict appear in Keats’s poetry
Transient sensation or passion / Enduring Art
Dream or Vision / Reality
Joy / Melancholy
The Ideal / The Real
Mortal/ Immortal
Life / Death
Separation / connection
Being immersed in passion/ desiring to escape passion
Keats ‘s Imagery
Keats’s imagery ranges among all our physical sensations : Sight, Hearing, Taste , Touch , Smell, Temperature, Weight, Pressure, Hunger, Thirst, Sexuality and Movement. Keats repeatedly combines different senses in one image , that is , he attributes the traits of one sense to another, a practice called synesthesia. His synesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings , the oneness of all forms of life . Richard H.Fogle calls these images the product of his “Unrivaled ability to absorb , sympathize with, and humanize natural objects.
Analysis of poem
Ode on a Grecian Urn( Poem)
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 i and tumbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
Critical Summary of the Ode
(lines1-10)
Keats with the means of powerful poetic language , begins the poem in ravishing style. Employing the metaphor of silence , he addresses the vase to a bride if silence who is still unravished, the Urn which still looks virgin. The image stands at a meeting point where the beauty of the Urn is arrested may be Keats in his usual Manner implicitly contrast the human situation. Again he calls child- the child who is nourished by silence and slow time. Silence and time personified here. The words convey the Urn as a symbol of calm repose and beyond the effect of quick succession of time.
Urn is more vocal in telling it’s a story in a better way than it could ever be told by the medium of a poetry. He means to say that the visual details on the vase are more effectively powerful than his own ode which would like to record it story sweetly the poet by asking different questions in a series tries to enter into the experience of the art. The questions tell us of Keats’s own Quest of the nature of art. Tempe and Arcady both the places remind Keats nostalgically of the beauties of Greek.
Perhaps Keats is asking the question from himself as to why does he try again and again to escape into art? what is Joy? the answer or awaits him till the end of the poem.
Lines (11-20)
Keats here is revealing in the pleasure of imagination. He states that the music which is unheard sounds sweeter than the music, we hear by our sensual ears. One can only imagine the music and enjoy though one knows not the tone, or the tune of the songs these lines have not only musical reference but musical structure also.
On the urn there is a scene which shows a young man who is singing a song under the tree the poet tells him that his songs will never finish because it is fixed and arrested in art. The leaves will not know decay this resembles Keats saying in the ode to Nightingale too.
The lover on the Urn is trying to kiss a girl but he cannot, though he is a very near the goal. He is consoled by the Solace of the art which Keats offers to him. In art the youth will always love her and she will always be beautiful. This is though not fulfilled state but this Joy of love will always be there because it is transfixed through art. The beauty of the girl will not be the beauty... which is the medium of art has immortalized these lovers and their Beauty and shall renew their freshness.
Lines 21-30
The time show on the earth is a spring and trees laden with flowers. The bough on the trees are happy boughs. They will always look like that. The vegetative nature in the actual life is in the direct contrast to this artistic representation of it. The music of the piper will also continue the love shown on it will continue forever where is the earthly love turns into a boredom after sometime and finish.
The contrast between the two position is of course these but Keats is not establishing the superiority of art as it is on Urn over the reality of life. According to Patterson this stanza express the poet’s wish that the passion the piping and the painting could be more enduring in actuality, not really in representation.
Lines 31-40
there is another scene on the Urn which shows a procession which is going to sacrifice a calf. It is headed by a priest. Keats here is a again catching his poise
and asks the Mysterious facts about the procession. Why the animal is dressed with garlands? why does the animal cry? The poet in a contrast to himself in the preceding stanza, has kept a distance and design a succession of effects, the initial question who are these coming to the sacrifice? Works both within and without the frame of events in the stanza.
Then Keats gives a picture of the town which the people in the procession has Vacated.
The town is a painted as a situated near the river at the foot of a hill and on the hill top there is a fortress. The town is empty. The town, Keats says will always remain desolate and no one will ever tell its tale.
The vase- he Says only a vase, he remembers at last a shape, an attitude a form empty of meaning till the imagination fills it and the human imagination cannot rest even in a dream of endless bliss. But at this moment, as he turns wearily back to the world of a time, the Urn breaks its silence with a message which we get in the last stanza.
Lines 41-50
The Urn which Keats described in the poem is beautiful object in Greek art. Its surface is carved with many beautiful objects. There are pictures of a man and women on that. It includes the carved patterns of wild branches and the grass which is walk over by these revellers Keats mentions the Urn again as a silent form and sustain the objects former Association in the second line of the poem.
Now the pastoral scene which he has described as a warm and showing ever warm love and forming the surroundings for The ever fresh Love and music to continue for ever, appeared to him as nothing but cold piece of marble carved with pastoral scene Keats is aware of the Imperfection in art. The marble pictures and lifeless it was only the imagination which made it look warm and beautiful. He knows the difference in art and life.
Time will have decaying effect on the on generation after generation life will be spent without leaving any meaning behind the Urn. It will survive all this it will be fresh and unchanging piece of beauty. In the midst of sorrows of passing generation. like a friend to a man the Urn will have a message for the man saying that… whatever is a beauty is a truth and truth and beautiful are identical this is the only essence of thought and knowledge which people should know.
Conclusion
The Urn’s message is not , as it has often been called , a meaningless tautology or at best , a needless appendage to the poem, but rather its dramatic fulfilment and reson for being a glimpse of the Knowledge enormous which made the young Apollo a god of poet the wisdom of Keats’s own widest experience of life.
Name-Khasatiya Reena K.
Sem.-M.A. 2 (2018)
Roll no.-29
Email Id.- khasatiyamili21@gmail.com
Paper No. – 5 Romantic literature.
Submitted To – Department of English MKBU
To Evalute my assignment click hereclick here
About John Keats
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists. While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms , and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times , Keats lived apart from men and from all political measure , worshiping beauty like a devotee , perfectly content to write what was in his heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be. He had , moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics or, indeed , to any cause, however great or small. As he said in Lamia.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel ‘s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air……
Or he said
A thing of beauty is joy for ever
It’s loveliness increases , it will ever
Pass into nothingness; (Endymion)
Partly because of thus high ideal poetry, partly because he studied and unconsciously imitated the Greeks classics and the best works of Elizabethans, Keats’s last little volume of poetry is unequalled by the work of any of his contemporaries. When we remember that all his work was published in three short years 1870 to 1820 and that he died when only twenty five, we must judge him to be the most promising figure of the early 19th century, and one of the most remarkable in the history of literature.
Keats’s life was devotion to beauty and to poetry.
Bitter criticism of his poems in Quarterly magazine Byron : who killed John Keats ? I , says the Quarterly .
He knew no Greek ; yet Greek literature absorbed him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly educated in the schools, he had marvelous faculty of discerning the real spirit of the classics.
The Eve of St. Agnes the most perfect of Keats’s medieval poems , is not a story after the manner of the metrical romance, but rather vivid paintings of a romantic mood, such as comes to all men, at times, to glorify a workday world. Like all the work of Shelley and Keats , it has an element of unreality; and when we reach at the end : “ and, they are gone; aye, gone ages long ago / these lovers fled away into the storm, “ it is as if we were waking from a dream
Three things should be remember about Keats: first that Keats sought to express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal humanity as government or low, and that the higher man climbs in civilization the more imperative becomes His need Of beauty as a reward for his labours. Second , that Keats’s letters are as much an indication of the man as his poetry; and in his letter , which their human sympathy, their eager interest in social problems , their humour, and their keen insight into life ,there is no trace of effeminacy, but rather every indication of a strong and noble manhood. The third thing to remember is that all Keats work was done in three or four years – at 25 his work was as mature as was Tennyson’s 50.
More than any other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of the arts. More than any others he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his Grecian urn, beauty and truth were one and inseparable. Most fitly does he close the list of poets of the romantic revival , because in many respect he was the best workman of them all. He seems to have studied words more carefully than did his contemporaries, and so his poetic expression , or the harmony of word and thought is generally more than theirs. He enriched the whole Romantic Movement by adding to its interest in common life spirit , rather than the letter, of the classics and of Elizabethan poetry. For these reasons Keats is , like Spenser, a poet’s poet ; his work profoundly influenced Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era.
Keats and Romanticism
Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories of literature and life , were drawn to lyrical poetry; they even developed a new form of Ode, often called the romantic meditative ode.
Without doubt , Keats was one of the mist important figures of early nineteenth century Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination , and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are Romantic concerns. The beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering , and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written , their idealist concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations thought at the same time.
The literary critic Jack Stillinger describes the typical movement of the romantic ode. The poet, unhappy with the real world , escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal. Disappointed in his mental fight, he returns to real world. Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because he has not found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of his situation , of the world, etc., his views or feelings at the end of the poem differ significantly from those he held at the beginning of the poem.
Themes in Keats’s Major Poems
Douglas Bush noted that “ Keats’s important poems are related to , or grow directly out of ..inner conflicts, “ For example , pain and pleasure are intertwined in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” , love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in “La belle Dame Sans Merci” , “ The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Isabella; or, the pot of Basil”.
Other Conflict appear in Keats’s poetry
Transient sensation or passion / Enduring Art
Dream or Vision / Reality
Joy / Melancholy
The Ideal / The Real
Mortal/ Immortal
Life / Death
Separation / connection
Being immersed in passion/ desiring to escape passion
Keats ‘s Imagery
Keats’s imagery ranges among all our physical sensations : Sight, Hearing, Taste , Touch , Smell, Temperature, Weight, Pressure, Hunger, Thirst, Sexuality and Movement. Keats repeatedly combines different senses in one image , that is , he attributes the traits of one sense to another, a practice called synesthesia. His synesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings , the oneness of all forms of life . Richard H.Fogle calls these images the product of his “Unrivaled ability to absorb , sympathize with, and humanize natural objects.
Analysis of poem
Ode on a Grecian Urn( Poem)
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 i and tumbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
Critical Summary of the Ode
(lines1-10)
Keats with the means of powerful poetic language , begins the poem in ravishing style. Employing the metaphor of silence , he addresses the vase to a bride if silence who is still unravished, the Urn which still looks virgin. The image stands at a meeting point where the beauty of the Urn is arrested may be Keats in his usual Manner implicitly contrast the human situation. Again he calls child- the child who is nourished by silence and slow time. Silence and time personified here. The words convey the Urn as a symbol of calm repose and beyond the effect of quick succession of time.
Urn is more vocal in telling it’s a story in a better way than it could ever be told by the medium of a poetry. He means to say that the visual details on the vase are more effectively powerful than his own ode which would like to record it story sweetly the poet by asking different questions in a series tries to enter into the experience of the art. The questions tell us of Keats’s own Quest of the nature of art. Tempe and Arcady both the places remind Keats nostalgically of the beauties of Greek.
Perhaps Keats is asking the question from himself as to why does he try again and again to escape into art? what is Joy? the answer or awaits him till the end of the poem.
Lines (11-20)
Keats here is revealing in the pleasure of imagination. He states that the music which is unheard sounds sweeter than the music, we hear by our sensual ears. One can only imagine the music and enjoy though one knows not the tone, or the tune of the songs these lines have not only musical reference but musical structure also.
On the urn there is a scene which shows a young man who is singing a song under the tree the poet tells him that his songs will never finish because it is fixed and arrested in art. The leaves will not know decay this resembles Keats saying in the ode to Nightingale too.
The lover on the Urn is trying to kiss a girl but he cannot, though he is a very near the goal. He is consoled by the Solace of the art which Keats offers to him. In art the youth will always love her and she will always be beautiful. This is though not fulfilled state but this Joy of love will always be there because it is transfixed through art. The beauty of the girl will not be the beauty... which is the medium of art has immortalized these lovers and their Beauty and shall renew their freshness.
Lines 21-30
The time show on the earth is a spring and trees laden with flowers. The bough on the trees are happy boughs. They will always look like that. The vegetative nature in the actual life is in the direct contrast to this artistic representation of it. The music of the piper will also continue the love shown on it will continue forever where is the earthly love turns into a boredom after sometime and finish.
The contrast between the two position is of course these but Keats is not establishing the superiority of art as it is on Urn over the reality of life. According to Patterson this stanza express the poet’s wish that the passion the piping and the painting could be more enduring in actuality, not really in representation.
Lines 31-40
there is another scene on the Urn which shows a procession which is going to sacrifice a calf. It is headed by a priest. Keats here is a again catching his poise
and asks the Mysterious facts about the procession. Why the animal is dressed with garlands? why does the animal cry? The poet in a contrast to himself in the preceding stanza, has kept a distance and design a succession of effects, the initial question who are these coming to the sacrifice? Works both within and without the frame of events in the stanza.
Then Keats gives a picture of the town which the people in the procession has Vacated.
The town is a painted as a situated near the river at the foot of a hill and on the hill top there is a fortress. The town is empty. The town, Keats says will always remain desolate and no one will ever tell its tale.
The vase- he Says only a vase, he remembers at last a shape, an attitude a form empty of meaning till the imagination fills it and the human imagination cannot rest even in a dream of endless bliss. But at this moment, as he turns wearily back to the world of a time, the Urn breaks its silence with a message which we get in the last stanza.
Lines 41-50
The Urn which Keats described in the poem is beautiful object in Greek art. Its surface is carved with many beautiful objects. There are pictures of a man and women on that. It includes the carved patterns of wild branches and the grass which is walk over by these revellers Keats mentions the Urn again as a silent form and sustain the objects former Association in the second line of the poem.
Now the pastoral scene which he has described as a warm and showing ever warm love and forming the surroundings for The ever fresh Love and music to continue for ever, appeared to him as nothing but cold piece of marble carved with pastoral scene Keats is aware of the Imperfection in art. The marble pictures and lifeless it was only the imagination which made it look warm and beautiful. He knows the difference in art and life.
Time will have decaying effect on the on generation after generation life will be spent without leaving any meaning behind the Urn. It will survive all this it will be fresh and unchanging piece of beauty. In the midst of sorrows of passing generation. like a friend to a man the Urn will have a message for the man saying that… whatever is a beauty is a truth and truth and beautiful are identical this is the only essence of thought and knowledge which people should know.
Conclusion
The Urn’s message is not , as it has often been called , a meaningless tautology or at best , a needless appendage to the poem, but rather its dramatic fulfilment and reson for being a glimpse of the Knowledge enormous which made the young Apollo a god of poet the wisdom of Keats’s own widest experience of life.
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