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The Significance of Nature in John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard

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In the modern society, people tend to overwhelm themselves with the stresses involved with everyday life. With these pressures, it is very rare to see people take the time to relate to and sulk in what nature has to offer. However, as we take a look at our Bedford Anthology, there are two authors who use a common theme of nature to illustrate this very significance. Specifically, John Keats whom wrote Ode to a Nightingale and Anton Chekhov, the author of The Cherry Orchard use nature as similes, symbols, and metaphors to represent both the positive and negative emotional states of one’s being. The first common emotional state that is presented through nature is the notion of grief or sorrow. Specifically, in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats uses the nightingale to represent a state of jealousy or depression in the speaker of his poem. Similarly, in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov uses the cherry orchard to illustrate an emotion of misery within his characters. Throughout Ode to a Nightingale, Keats illustrates his speaker’s jealousy and depression multiple times by implying that he wishes and wants to be like the nightingale. The first example is seen in the initial moments of the poem when he discusses an assertion of the speaker’s very own heartache and he pronounces that he feels numb as if he had recently taken a drug. He then relates to this numbness and expresses his jealousy of the nightingale in the second stanza; he states, “Being too happy in thine happiness, That thou

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