Compare And Contrast Keats And Sailing To Byzantium

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

​Torn between two worlds, Keats battled his own personal life between his engagement to Fanny Browne and the death of his brother. Also the poem was written approximately two years before he died. These life changing events resulted in Keats writing one of his most famous poems, Ode to a Nightingale. This poem is an escape from reality in trying to find a happy place such as the singing of the Nightingale (Fiero 9). The poem is a parallel to Keats thoughts and desires, which are directly connected to his reasoning for writing the poem, its connections to understanding nature as well as its reflection of the human consciousness and natural environment.

Literature often reflects real life. The world of imagination is a euphoric release from the world of actuality but paradoxically this world of imagination makes the world of actuality even more painful than what it is. Human life is often full of conflicts for example, the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness or lack of feeling, life/death, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection. In the poem “Ode to a Nightingale” written by John Keats, the poet seems to be praising the nightingale for its melodious tune but upon further investigation it is revealed that he is actually using the nightingale and its song as a means of escaping the realities of human life. This poem is about the intense feelings the poet has about the transience about the nature of reality.

With these thoughts of his existence, the Seafarer suddenly starts to become conscious of his very own being, and realizes more about human nature. The speaker recalls of being pulled toward the suffering, being drawn toward his isolation that he is in. This could be a psychological aspect of the speaker in which his subconscious mind tries to punish the speaker for what he has done in the past. It could also be his mind interpreting the fact that if he goes through this suffering, he will find something greater. It is thus a paradox, then, when the seafarer says he is “seeking foreigners’ homes” (Raffel 19), because as he searches on and on, he is isolated more and more from the values that seek as a representation of these homes. The speaker introduces themes centric to the poem, which are stated as: “pride, greatness, boldness, youth, seriousness, and grace” (Raffel 19). The speaker then asserts that these virtuous themes will disappear one day, when one must rely on God’s judgment, and God’s mercy. With the implications of God, come the attributions the speaker asserts toward Fate, and the influence that Fate conjures in the lives of people. The speaker

Keats, like all the other poets of this time found inspiration in nature except he dug deepen and found not only nature’s beauty as inspiration but its sounds as well. While reading Keats poems, I found that a lot of the things he was describing symbolized music. For instance in “ode to a Nightingale” Keats states: “Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird” (61). The bird can be seen a representation of life. Birds create the music of nature when they chirp and fly around. Keats takes this and compares it to life and death. I kind of see this as an idea that when you find a passion and focus on it, it can take you away from your problems. I can relate to this because I am a musician. When I am sad or frustrated we turn to the things we love

The sages represent the father-like figure that hold to power to life, which the aging man requests from sages. As Simon O. Lesser, author of “Sailing to Byzantium”-Another Voyage, Another Reading, states, “In this poem, it appears to be widely believed, Yeats triumphantly confronts and liquidates his fears of aging and death…. [H]e discovers that engrossment in poetry is the only, but a sufficient, recompense for the privatizations of old age” (291), which Yeats’ reasoning for writing this poem: to spread the message that anyone can live forever through their art. While the narrator in the poem never officially possess a proper name, the poet Yeats writes this poem to express his lack of fear for death after discovering that his memory continues to live through all his poems. William Butler Yeats knows that he lives forever through all those who continue to read and understand his poems, because his works lives on in others. While Yeats never explicitly states this, the idea that poems keep the poet alive forever derives from philosophical thought and reasoning, similar to the aging man that visits the mosaic painting. Similar to the aging man in the poem, Yeats searches for the sage-like figures that provide the answer to death that

Primarily, Keats’s use of this theme shows the importance of human life. As Keats states with his line, “Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, / But Death intenser -Death is Life's high meed,” (), life has many intense elements, but death ultimately serves as the highest point of life. Because of the intense questioning of death by Keats’s narrator, Keats shows the importance of living life before the finality of death inevitably hits. Keats also allows a certain amount of personal freedom through his use of the glorification of the ordinary with the way that he begins his poem. As the poem begins, Keats tells that, “No God, no Demon of severe response, / Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell,” (). This line intends to show the complicated nature of religion and the mute lips which it comes from. Keats essentially throws religion out the window with this line, and he states that there are more important elements in life than religion such as the importance of living itself. In relation to this statement of life’s more important elements, Keats does acknowledge death’s ability through lines such as, “Why did I laugh? I know this Being's lease, / My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;” (), and “Yet would I on this very midnight cease,” (), but he also places a heavy importance on living life simply because it is to be lived rather than dreaded or pondered. Lastly, Keats provides a final layer of depth by implying that his narrator laughed because of life and death. Keats shows this through his constant questioning of life and death in the context of laughing. By providing a satire to both life’s purpose and death’s inevitability, Keats shows us the greatest example of glorification of the ordinary which he has to offer throughout his poem by illustrating that death should be disregarded and life should be lived in

Keats is known for his distinct odes that signify his achievement and accomplishments as a poet. The opposing ideas surrounding the poets causes them to contemplate and understand the world within them.

One of the important themes in William Butlers Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” and Audre Lordes poem “Coal” is their explanation of different transformations and transitions.Each challenge that they faced was embraced to help them face any challenges they faced.In both poems the person seeked for changes in their life.Each poem also showed how certain items were significant to each author.Both proved how the specific items helped each have a reason for the changes each person wanted to make.

Time is the one constant in life that one cannot change and both Humbert Humbert and Keats try to evade it by trying to stop time. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, resembling John Keats, Humbert Humbert envies the past youth and innocence that transforms overtime into a relationship of distrust and disillusion. One can see through textural evidence that Humbert craves the innocence of a past relationship that was uncompleted though his desire to replicate this relationship with Lolita. Humbert wants to keep this perfect image of youth and innocence alive through his desires just as Keats wants to be a perfect image that never changes on a Grecian Urn so that time never passes.

The poem is again talking about mortality and aging. Just as the part above, you can tell that the author doesn’t want to age. To the author, aging is a horrible thing and he fears it, which makes the reader feel sad and remorseful towards the author. I think this part of the poem really shines on the idea that once you get older people start thinking about you less and less. People always pay most attention to the youngest ones in a family. For example: things such as a newborn baby, a kid’s first day of school, high school graduation, prom, and even marriage seem to be more important than an aging

Conversely, in another of Keats’ poems “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, he describes a piece of art that is spoken of in admiration. Keats believes that art as beautiful as this or any art for that matter is forever. This artistic expression transcends death itself. “When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe” (Keats). While everyone around grows old and eventually passes away this art is untouched by the hands of death. The works people leave behind are immortal and will withstand the test of time. Whether it be a sculpture or a poet’s work. Keats is not the only one who sees a death as an opportunity though. In “On Death”, another of Keats’ poems he speaks of death as a chance to let go of the suffering in this life and find peace in another. In the first line of this poem Keats creates an idea that when we are living, or awake, we are dreaming. “Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?”(Keats). I believe he’s saying that we are living in a dreamlike state, where we go by in our everyday lives and every

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written through the power of eternity, beauty and truth regardless of existence, as Wordsworth showed likewise. Keats illustrated his poem through love in its sublime. For example, in the first stanza he says, “What wild ecstasy?” (Keats 930). If ecstasy is a huge feeling of

Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though