Critical Analysis Of Bright Star By John Keats

In the famous poem “Bright Star”, dedicated to his lover Fanny Brawne, John Keats presents the essence of love in passion and in depth. As its form, a combination of Shakespearean and Italian sonnets suggests, the poem portrays love as a subject full of seemingly contradictive qualities. As a subjective matter, love is active and passive, physical and spiritual, mutable and eternal at the same time. Holding immortal love as the ultimate value of life, the speaker imagines a brave possibility of love transcending life for his romantic belief.

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.

No matter what happens in one’s life, the sun still comes up every day and the stars still shine brightly each night. In “Bright Star” by John Keats and “Choose Something Like a Star” by Robert Frost, both authors compare elements of nature, such as stars, to the things in one’s life. Through soft diction, peaceful imagery, and figurative language such as similes, Keats seeks to convey that people should cherish even the little things in life. In “Chose Something Like a Star,” Frost includes dark imagery, brutal diction, and personification to prove that like the stars, some things remain constant in one’s life.

William Butler Yeats is one of the most esteemed poets in 20th century literature and is well known for his Irish poetry. While Yeats was born in Ireland, he spent most of his adolescent years in London with his family. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he later moved back to Ireland. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and joined the Theosophical Society soon after moving back. He was surrounded by Irish influences most of his life, but it was his commitment to those influences and his heritage that truly affected his poetry. William Butler Yeats’s poetry exemplifies how an author’s Irish identity can help create and influence his work.

Keats’ father Benjamin worked as a waiter at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village and was therefore all too familiar with the struggle to make a better life for you and your family. Although he had a great appreciation for Keats’ work, he discouraged him from making it a career for fear that his son would not be able to support himself. On one occasion he went so far ¬¬ to purchase tubes of oil paint and then gave them to Keats under the false pretense that a starving artist had traded them for a bowl of soup. Fortunately for future readers of his works, Jack was not deterred from his passion for art. When Keats graduated from high school he was awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. In a cruel twist of fate, his father Benjamin died of a heart attack the day before he was set to receive the award. Although his father never saw Jack receive the award, he learned of his support when asked to identify his father’s body. As he checked his father’s wallet after his death he found several preserved article clippings of all of his achievements. His father was proud of Keats and his work and remained a supporter until his last breath.

Yeats works drew heavily on Irish mythology and history, he never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority or Ireland Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to the study in myriad other subjects. The Irish writer’s James O’ Grady and Sir William Ferguson were the most influential. Through his writing Yeats found his voice to speak up against the harsh nationalist policies of the time, his early dramatic works conveyed his respect for Irish legend and fascination with occult. Yeats mother was the first introduce him and his sisters to the Irish folktales he grew to love so much but little did you know that his brother jack and father was also an accomplished artist and they both helped William in his writing and it's the reason he found his own interest in the wonderful arts as he called them. In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. Along with literature, he also loved the theater and wrote several plays. He collaborated with the likes of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore to establish the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. As a dramatist, his successful works included ‘The Countess Cathleen’ (1892), ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ (1894) and ‘The King’s Threshold’

The poem under study was written in 1818 after the completion of John Keats's 4,000-line poem

As seen throughout the Romantic Period, proper description and visualization of setting served as crucial to the overall feel and overtone for a poem. Keats’ masterful composition of “Bright Star” exemplifies his vivid imagery as a star is described to hang lonely in the night and personified as forever awake with “eternal lids apart”. He dreams of lying on his “fair love’s ripening breast... to hear her tender-taken breath.” Keats’ imagery serves to stir emotion within the reader and relate intangible concepts to those that can be related. His depictions of severe circumstances are filled with

While the beginning half of the poem feels joyous and lighthearted, it is masked by a thin facade. This is portrayed by the nighttime setting and the shakiness of the seemingly cheerful terms, such as the verses “while the stars, that oversprinkle / all the heavens, seem to twinkle” (6-7). In the latter half of the poem, the tone becomes openly dark. The speaker probably sees this poem and its four sections as stages in life, which quickly dive from a bright atmosphere to a downright distressing one. Together, they represent the idea that happiness is

The poem was first published May 1819，the time which John Keats had been judged a lot. Even Percy Bysshe Shelley suspected Keats’ death had something to do with the harsh criticism. In 1818, a man called John Wilson Croker wrote a article, in which he accused Keats of using rhymes from working class speech. He also said Keats was unintelligible, rugged, diffuse, tiresome absurd and gratuitous nonsense. Therefore, it was a

Keats mentions the sky to create the allusion of the large and vast wonders compared to one small man. He is fearful that if life ended, opportunities of finding their beloved ones will also come to a stop. By personifying the night by turning its stars into a face, this allows the speaker to effectively interact with it as a human being. The two poems have contrasting rhyme schemes.

Finishing school, in October 1815, Keats was an apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital, London. He work as being and “anesthesiologist” but here was no anesthesia around this time, so they did what they could best with different techniques to try and ease pain.

The poems “Bright Star” by John Keats and “Choose Something Like a Star” by Robert Frost are apostrophes that compare the desired and undesired qualities of a star with an aspect of their lives. The authors use personification, diction, metaphor and allusion and both poems address a theme of steadfastness and perpetuity in love and life. Both poems are apostrophes but differ in to whom the speaker of each poem is speaking to and what each speaker wants from the star its self. In Keats’ poem, the speaker directly addresses the star, “Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--” (1).

Yeats was a confessional poet - that is to say, that he wrote his poetry directly from his own experiences. He was an idealist, with a purpose. This was to create Art for his own people - the Irish. But in so doing, he experienced considerable frustration and disillusionment. The tension between this ideal, and the reality is the basis of much of his writing. One central theme of his earlier poetry is the contrast

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