Ode on Melancholy commentary

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.

One characteristic embedded in the minds of almost all humans is that of succumbing in pursuit of one’s aspirations, especially with the approach of death. The fear and enigmatic mystery of death at the brink of this shortcoming may cause one who is near death to re-evaluate life as a wasted opportunity or a broken path of dreams because of the inability to find any type of success. The sonnets “Mezzo Cammin” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “When I have Fears” by John Keats examine the thought processes of two people who submit to the struggles of life in a depressed way. While communicating a very similar foundational message and mood in a different way through diction and structure, the speakers in “Mezzo Cammin” and “When I Have Fears” identify their despair through likewise differing literary elements which complement and bring out the message intended by these troubled individuals.

During the romanticism era, Line 1-8 talks about how Keats is afraid that he won’t be able to become a writer. The poem was written during Romanticism where a lung disease, tuberculosis was widespread over Europe. Even Keats mother died from this disease when Keats was a child. Because he grew up alone, he didn’t have anyone to tell about his feelings therefore he started writing poems to express his feelings. He was worried that he may die at a young age with tuberculosis before he could write down all the ideas in his head. Line 9-12 is about Keats fear that he will lose his beloved one. It is normal to lose your beloved ones during your life. However, Keats lost both of his parents when he was still young therefore he didn’t receive the love that he needed when he was young. Because of this, he was very desperate for a love which is another reason why he wrote this poem to show his passion for love. Background of the poet and the era are a significant context which contribute to my

In the early nineteenth century, John Keats and other lyricists entered an era of passionate speculation on the condition of man, art and nature. It is thus no surprise that Keats’ 1818 poem, “When I Have Fears,” is packed with fervent, emotional content. Like many of his poems, “When I Have Fears” has been understood to be about Keats’ justifiable doubts about mortality, having been born into a family beleaguered by terminal illness. This particular Shakespearean sonnet, however, stands out from the rest because it sketches a more nuanced depiction of death. Though death is indeed the root of his anxieties, this poem reveals that the speaker is ironically also able to achieve a kind of perspective on the world through the very nature of his own mortality. An acceptance and understanding of death’s perceived limitations seem to grant Keats an unconscious freedom that allows him to transcend, or overcome, his future uncertainties. Keats demonstrates this freedom in “When I Have Fears” by incorporating elegant paradoxes, imagery and naturalistic metaphors that accentuate the comfort and control that accepting fate can paradoxically provide during times of pain and death.

John Keats’, “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent,” is a Petrarchan sonnet that initially reads as a soft and sweet reflection of the speaker’s love of nature as a means of escaping the draining and claustrophobic city. While Keats draws more attention to the emotionally healing aspects of escaping into nature, he also includes subtle, yet grim images throughout the poem-- suggesting that perhaps this countryside escape is not as lighthearted as it may appear on the surface. In this paper, I will provide an explanation for the importance of Keats’ juxtaposition of the heavenly qualities of nature with the poem’s more muted, hidden images, to not only depict why this poem is absolutely genius as a cleverly disguised dark poem, but to highlight

A brilliant American poet, Henry David Thoreau, once claimed, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination”. This idea that everything can be interpreted differently using creativity is evident in many of John Keats’ poems. However, how does “Ode on a Grecian Urn” reveal the beauty of art? Keats uses different images of melodies, love, and happiness to show that the idea of true beauty of art is within the eye of the beholder.

It was, as we say nowadays, objective; it was concrete; it moved not in a world of philosophic thought and abstraction, but in a world of imaginative realizations. It was purely and truly poetic; and it turned towards the drama as the form which offered the most complete fulfilment of its own nature. We shall find no deeper, nor any more transparent, phrase for the contents of Keats’ ideal poetry than his own familiar words: ‘the principle of beauty in all things.’”(Keats and Shakespeare 75 Murry)

The burdens and assiduous transgressions of humanity often prove to be an unbearable reality for many. However, under no different circumstances and in the midst of death, poet, John Keats, composes some of his most powerful literature. In his “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the persistent mention of immortality demonstrates his struggle with tuberculosis. Keats declares within both poems his desire to escape mortal oppression and illustrates his longing for immortal sanctuary; however, the two explore contrasting means to such an end. “Ode to a Nightingale” expresses longing to escape into the melodious world of a nightingale by utilizing numerous allusions to greek mythology, several metaphorical techniques, and sensory-laden

I have been seeing three new patients recently, all Romantic poets who appear to be suffering from various levels of melancholy. Although each one of these poets is highly successful and influential in the Romantic Movement, each has experienced bouts of dejection, loneliness, and disillusionment with reality. However, this melancholy seems different from cases I have encountered in the past. Strangely, none of these clients show symptoms of the excessive black bile that typically associated with melancholy such as apathy, lack of motivation, and hopelessness (Brady, Haapala). In fact, while all of these clients experience melancholic thoughts, these emotions appear to be more complex than depression as they allow the pleasures of deep reflection and often lead to feelings of sublime joy and inspiration. Instead of suffering from a clinical form of melancholy or depression, these clients appear to be experiencing a complex emotion of joypain which they believe has “the capacity to reveal the infinite powers of the self or the imagination” (Murray, 722). Yet, while all of these poets seem to believe in the importance of melancholy as inspiration for their work, each of these poets also seems to express this emotion in different ways. While one of these poets, Mr. William Wordsworth, often turns his negative ruminations into positive reflections on nature and memory, Mr. Coleridge instead experiences deeper melancholic moments that he cannot dispel quite so easily. Mr. John

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

The Romantic era produced many literary figures. Within this era, people were going against the conversion of agriculture to industrial. The change in lifestyle was so drastic that people began to rebel through literature. John Keats is one of the poets in that era. He writes poetry that is focused around nature. He was one of the many that missed the simplicity of agriculture and found beauty in nature rather than industrial cities. Even though this single topic appears in all of his poems, it is written in a different tone that allows each poem to be seen as on its own. Keats’ passion flows through each line in a different way. Within the contrast and comparison of the following four poems, one can see how Keats’ emotions illustrate the topic of nature differently.

Five months before his first book, “Poems”, was published, Keats was introduced to one of Byron and Shelley’s friends, Hunt, who helped him advance in his writing. His first book was not received to well by the public, neither was the rest of his work. In his lifetime, Keats’ work copped more hate than any other poet of his time. But by the end of the 19th century he was one of the most beloved poets studied. Actually Meg, on his gravestone Keats wanted to write “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” He knew he wasn’t appreciated in his time, and he would be washed away by those who read his name, yet he prophesised he would be appreciated in the years that followed.

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

In the description of historiographies and social theories in the longer poems of John Keats, Kathleen Béres Rogers argues in “John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment” that the "sociological drive of [Keats's] poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment” (Rogers, 2012, p. 163). Here Fermanis tried to trace Keats's working both with and against of Enlightenment legacy and in particular of its progressive, linear model of history. Keats's narrative provoked from a savage, feudal society to an emphasis on sensation and feeling. Endymion was indebted much to the Enlightenment and he used his sensitivity in order to sympathize with human suffering. He found his true love, Diana, only after he used this sympathy in order to love a real

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