The Existence of Absence in Keats' "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time"

Although the lovers remain silent, "The wind's incomplete unrest / Builds and disperses clouds about the sky", which symbolizes first an eternal yearning for something deeper than is there, and secondly a "clouded," obscure vision of what this something may be. The previously mentioned yearning is shown also by a definition of clouds as "a type of the fleeting or unsubstantial" (Oxford English Dictionary). Whatever it may be that is being searched for cannot be found by lying inert letting time pass by. While this second stanza contemplates the apparently unattainable, the final two seem to convey a feeling of hopelessness in knowing that the clouds may never subside.

Reading a piece of literature, whether it be a novel, poem or short story, can provide a sense of excitement, or allow the reader to experience a whole new world. The sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, written by John Keats, describes his feelings of discovery and delight after reading Chapman’s translation of the works written by a very well-known and legendary Greek poet, Homer. Through tone and figurative language, Keats is able to convey his opinion and feelings towards these translated works of literature.

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.

The visual’s background is formed by a dark and starry night sky; stretching across the image and transitioning into a sunny day sky. This is a representation of the passage of time, life, death, and the power of memories. The nighttime depicts ageing and adulthood, whereas the daytime represents youth and life. In the poem, the narrator describes the sky, ‘Ambiguous night, ambiguous sky,’ which is symbolic for the transience between adulthood and childhood. An ambiguous sky is a sky which is unclear or undecided. The faded transition from the night sky to the day sky reflects this notion and the uncertainty of memories; displaying how the poem

When life gives people lemons, they either make lemonade or get terrified and run. In a way, that is how Negative Capability works. People can either accept fate and make the best out of what life hands them, or they can crack under pressure and run away from their problems. According to John Keats, Negative Capability is the capacity to remain certain in the midst of doubt and uncertainty. This idea is especially exemplified through the literary works of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie and “An Open House” by James Hughes. These pieces of literature exhibit characters who both, possess Negative Capability or lack it. Consequently, they show that in times of adversity, those who do not possess Negative Capability are unable to successfully cope with disappointment in contrast to those who do have this characteristic.

From the beginning of time, humans always create some relic of theirs that they believe with immortalize their life. The ancient wonders of the world prove to be the most remembered age-old remains. Yet, all of these famous monuments have been destroyed over time, save the great pyramid of Giza, and even that has lost its former glory, the beauty it once possessed when first constructed. Nothing man-made can survive the test of time and the ordeal of nature; the western civilization only accepts nature’s true power in the 19th century. Percy Shelley, a romantic poet, wrote his sonnet, Ozymandias, with the statue of Ramses the Great that he saw in the British museum in mind.

His imagery of “there hung a darkness” and “no familiar shapes remained” parallels  the complete emptiness he feels in his soul. The speaker once again refers back to the environment when he uses “no pleasant images of trees”, “of sea and sky”, and “no colours of green fields”. He uses this environmental imagery to show that his life is now devoid of all color. He closes this excerpt with “like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day, and were a trouble to my

In “Ozymandias”, the sculpture is destroyed with sections buried in sand. However, the pedestal near the statue remains intact with the words inscribed, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Ozymandias idealized that his statue would remain eternally and that his work would live on. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats describes how the illustrations painted on the urn are everlasting. The men will never kiss the women, the pipers will always play, and the cow will never be slaughtered.

In order to describe the nature of the world, the lyrical subject of the sonnet uses dark and negative metaphors, which present the world as a "painted veil" (l. 1) and as a "gloomy scene" (l. 13). This symbol of

Nothing remains but a set of legs and a lone shadow (Smith 1-3). In 1818 the arrival of the head of Ramses’s II statue sparked the idea into the head of Percy Bysshe Shelley to write the sonnet “Ozymandias”, vibrantly describing the site of where Babylon once stood. Horace Smith wrote a similar poem, with the same name, that not only depicted the sight of forgotten Babylon but also the ideal that the same fate is destined for London.

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

Both the poets believe that it is only art which can give solace and contentment in life. The impermanence of all the earthly and living things has been contrasted with the permanence which art bestows on them. According to Keats, the work of art is more vivid than the actual life as it has its own life; Keats touches on this in the third stanza of the poem. Like Yeats, Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” also talks about imagination and music:

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

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

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