Keats 'Concept Of Ambiguity In Ode To A Nightingale'

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.

To help Year Twelve students that are studying poetry appreciate it's value, this pamphlet's aim is to discuss a classic poem and a

Many people analyze a poem and desperately try to find the meaning of it. In “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins uses personification, metaphors, and diction to demonstrate that poetry often loses some of its joy when it is over-analyzed for its meaning.

Poetry, what first comes to mind? If your anything like me, poetry can seem somewhat monotonous, rather like a locked door exclusive, complicated, and hard to understand. I think poetry tends to be a big game of “Guess what I’m thinking!” and I hate that game. I’m not a mind-reader. I think a lot of people who get excited about poetry are really pretentious. This possibly comes from believing that they actually can guess what other people are thinking. When we think poetry, we tend to know poetry by it’s traditional forms of having sonnets, ballads, often rhyming (but not always) and they tend to have a specific and symmetrical structure (APA). Throughout this essay I wanted to consider poetry through different explorations and how subverting the traditional conventions of poetry might be an effective way of engagement or in an opposing way of demotivating the reader.

In literature, it is generally agreed that 'The Nightingale invites the beholder to explore something beyond the merely human '. Both Keats and Finch imitate this concept in 'Ode to a Nightingale ' and 'To the Nightingale ' by using poetic form and language to show the qualities of a bird that inspires them to look beyond the physical and in Finch 's case, challenge the confines of human restriction whilst asserting poetry as a human necessity.

Firstly, Hemans provides an unsettling problemization of romantic era characteristics as she deploys the solipsistic narrator technique heavily associated with the epoch whilst preserving a kind of collective voice with the deceased poetess. Crucially, the first word of the poem, following the epitaph dedicated to Tighe, is the first person “I” (line 1) which invokes the contemplative voice that critics have come to expect from early 19th century romantic work. Despite this, the poem transgresses this expectation as the monosyllabic tranquility of ‘The light of song’ (16) is gradually replaced by the ‘deep’ (46) musings on Tighe which suggest an irreconcilability between the ‘mortal

However, the impending death that creates the incapacity to write down thoughts does not detract from the complexity of the thoughts. On the contrary, Keats’ comparison of his imagination to harvestable grain shows confident self-recognition of his own ability, highlighting the awareness of “the poet’s own ripeness in his art” (Grosholz 604). This art “teems” in his brain and is “rich,” and these qualities compel him to pour out his feelings into this one sonnet, despite his belief that this will be the last sonnet he writes. However, his fervent but vain desire to express the entirety of his poetic notions “imparts to [him] the hunger, or poverty, necessary for production, but…also dwarfs whatever [he] has already written” (Hecht 116). Accordingly, by longing to write his unspoken wisdom, Keats rejects any greatness associated with his previous works. This untapped potential consequently creates a paradox for Keats as he is both the field of grain and its harvester (Saksono 97). Thus, he alone is capable of cultivating and sharing his work despite his waning health. The prospect of this work is still tantalizing to him, though, as Hecht states that “‘The high piled books, in charactry’ promise that if they could only be written, meaning would outlive the

John Keats was a well established English poet in the early 19th century. His work is greatly influenced by his family, studies, political views, and life experiences. Keats was born October 31st, 1795 in a stable to his devoted parents, Thomas and Frances Keats (15). Before Keats’s twentieth birthday he would experience many hardships from the passing of both of his parents as well as his grandmother. Thomas Keats died in 1804 after an accident occurred while riding his horse, leaving John Keats as the ‘man’ of the house at the young age of nine. Less than five years passed before Frances Keats fell ill and passed after contracting tuberculosis. At a young age Keats experienced great loss and suffering that would linger with him for the entirety

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

becoming any worse in the future since “a thing of beauty is a joy for

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

In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of

There are a myriad of critical theory lenses that can be applied and utilized to closely observe pieces of literature. One of these theories is John Keats’s Negative Capability theory which consists of an idea of “…when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…” (Keats 968). Ultimately, this signifies that in poetry the emphasis be placed on the significance of inquisitiveness and the asking of questions of the life and scenery around one’s self, rather than placing emphasis on strongly searching for these answers. This theory can be applied to a multitude of works, but for these sakes and purposes what will be critiqued is Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. In a subtle

The diction echos the brush strokes and tiny details within the painting. Both the painting and the poem were created with nature and the effects of human’s hectic and destructive lives on it. The striking blues, purples, and oranges are mimicked throughout the poem by Yeats’s use of illustrative and mood setting words and phrases. When Yeats used personification within the poem he used it to elevate the natural aspects of the poem and the painting. Both the painting and the poem have similar thematic ideas expressed within them. These two artistic pieces reflect the impacts of human developments on planet Earth. They both show how peace can be found within this hectic

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret.” (Keats) In “Ode to A Nightingale,” John Keats is the narrator who is in a state of drowsiness and numbness when he sees a nightingale and then goes on to explain his encounter with the bird. Although the surface level meaning of the poem is a man expressing his thought to and about a bird, there is a deeper meaning that can be seen when you investigate the literary devices used. Keats uses imagery, tone, and symbolism to display the theme of pain and inner conflict between life and death.