`` Mezzo Cammin `` By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow And When I Have Fears

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.

While both Keats and Longfellow often reflect on their own unfulfilled dreams and impending deaths, the poems however contrast on their own dispositions towards death and the future. Here, Keats expresses a fear of not having enough time to accomplish all that he believes he is capable of doing, but as he recognizes the enormity of the world and his own limitations of life, he realizes that his own mortal goals are meaningless in the long run of things. On the other hand, Longfellow speaks of a regret towards his inaction for allowing time to slip away from him in his past and is at a crossroads for the ominous future that looms ahead of him. Through the use of light and dark imagery, and personification, Keats and Longfellow similarly yet also differently, reflect on their own ideas for death and the futures that lay ahead of them.

The second essay, titled Brenda Gutierrez (2013), also speaks about Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 30” and Millay’s “Sonnet”. Gutierrez’s essay and Similarity and Differences in Shakespeare and Millay Sonnets, talk about the same theme, making it easier to see the similarities and differences between the two essays. The common idea of the two essays is that the speaker in “Sonnet 30,” “does not rely on something like time to end his sorrows but rather the simple thought of his ‘dear friend’”. Gutierrez’s idea that both speakers, “mention their troubles though one goes into more detail than the other” is defended clearly in the essay through the meaning and theme of “Sonnet” and “Sonnet 30”. Gutierrez's essay shows once again the absence in quoted material to support the claim and the absence in the ability to see things in a new and bigger perspective.

As one of the most frequently used themes, death has been portrayed and understood differently throughout modern history as well as by poets Christina Rossetti and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Remember” and the “Cross of Snow.” It appears in literature as the preeminent dilemma, one that is often met by emotions such as grief, hopefulness, depression, and one that can encompass the entire essence of any writing piece. However, despite Rossetti’s “Remember” and Longfellow’s “Cross of Snow” employing death as a universal similarity, the tones, narratives, and syntaxes of the poems help create two entire different images of what the works are about in the readers’ minds.

As people near the time of their deaths, they begin to reflect upon the history and events of their own lives. Both John Keats’ “When I have Fears” and Henry Longfellow’s “Mezzo Cammin” reflect upon the speakers’ fears and thoughts of death. However, the conclusions between these two poems end quite differently. Although both reflect upon Death’s grasp, Keats’ displays an appreciation and subtle satisfaction with the wonders of life, while Longfellow morbidly mourns his past inactions and fears what events the future may bring.

In the two poems, “When I Have Fears” by John Keats and “Mezzo Cammin” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both of the poets deal with the death that they believe is quickly approaching them and think back to their regrets in life. Keats during the time when this poem had been written had just seen his brother die of tuberculosis and due to this he believed he too would soon die. Longfellow at the time writing his poem had been 35 and due to this was most likely experiencing a mid-life crisis. Similarities between the two poems include the poem’s theme and the thoughts of death that the two men are dealing with. The main

For instance, the poems, “To Helen,” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Helen,” by Hilda Doolittle write about Helen and her beauty, but are actually written in two completely different ways. Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” has many characteristics of American Romantics literature because he values nature, individuality and the authors sense of emotion to express his love and admiration for Helen. In the first stanza of the poem, Poe was comparing Helen’s beauty, in the form of similes and metaphors, to nature, “Like those barks of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,” (Poe 1 - 3) to express the traveler’s essence for Helen. Throughout the rest of the poem Helen’s beauty is seen as a way home or, “The light at the end of the tunnel,” to guide the traveler back home. Helen and her faultless beauty are the traveler’s hope and savior, but are far from that in the eyes of

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

Tone and figurative language are used in both poems to contribute to the connotations associated

It is certainly implied that both of these poems are concerned with the ideal of true love, but we have seen that they differ quite dramatically with the authors' mindset and themes which they are attempting to portray. Both poems revolve around the consistency of love, whether existent or not, though their discrepancies are valid, it is these discrepancies, which provide readers with the conception and comprehension of what true love really is.

Both the poems Love song: I and thou and The Cap and Bells explore different representations of love. Each of the poems, however, present love in very different ways. Where Alan Dugan displays his view on marital love in an unromantic manner within his poem Love song: I and Thou, Yeats' The Cap and Bells differs by showing the readers a view on a romantic or obsessive love which is unlikely to be requited, due to the difference in social rank in their society.

This is expressed by the multiple examples of old men whom regret certain aspects of their lives and defy death even when they know their time is up. The speaker is urging his father to fight against old age and death. The meaning and subject of the poem influence the tone and mood. The tone is one of frustration and insistence. Thomas is slightly angry and demanding. His words are not a request, they are an order. The mood of the poem is is serious and solemn due to the poem focusing mainly on the issue of death. This mood and tone is created by words such as “burn”(2), “Grieved”(11) and “rage”(3) along with phrases such as “crying how bright”(7), “forked no lightning”(5), “near death”(13) and “fierce tears”(17). The insistent feeling is also created by the repetition of the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night”(1), and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”(3). The figurative language used also affect how the meaning, tone and mood are interpreted.

Literature has a way of speaking to us. Its timelessness allows us to relate and connect with people from centuries before ours. John Keats’ When I Have Fears, discusses a topic that most people have thought about at least once in their lives; the fear of death.

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

This chapter is a continuation of the exploration of sympathy in Keats: the previous chapter has analyzed the language of Keatsean sympathy in his letters, and from this chapter onwards the critical examination is going to be with reference to his longer poems (Thesis statement of the chapter). This chapter, by critically investigating the evocation of Keatsean sympathy in Endymion, makes the point that Keats modifies his Romantic idolization of beauty with empiricism--an immediate selfless but sympathetic experience of the real.