The Experience of Reading John Keats’s poems
Part 1 Introduction
John Keats is one of the most distinguished Romantic poets in the history of British literature. Although in his rather short and tough lifetime, Keats received so little financial reward or public recognition, he kept writing. When reading Keats’s poems, I’m completely amazed by his boundless imagination and his incomparably beautiful sentences and now I have a deeper understanding of his attitudes towards life and death.
Part 2 Analysis
(1) His pursuit for beauty
Though Keats lived in a dark period of time and had suffered from heavy illness for quite long before his death, he never stopped his love and pursuit for beauty. And the beautiful realm of nature, life and poetry is the most common theme in the poems that I read.
In the poem Ode to a Nightingale, he describes the nightingale as a light winged Dryad of the trees who “singest of summer in full-throated ease” in “some melodious plot of beechen green, and shadows numberless”. Through these lines, we can almost see her graceful look and hear her nice voice. The night scene that Keats describes is also mysterious and amazingly beautiful with “the Queen-Moon” “on her throne”, “clustered around by all her starry Fays” and all kinds of fragrant blossoms such as the white hawthorn, the pastoral eglantine, the violets and the musk-roses. All of these create a kind of intoxicating beauty of nature.
Keats’s praise for natural beauty can also be found in the poem To Autumn and On the Grasshopper and the Cricket, where he writes about the stunning view of the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and the “poetry of earth” which “is never dead”.
Bright Star is a love song that Keats writes to his lover Fanny Brawne. In this poem, Keats not only writes about the beauty of the bright star, but also writes about his young lover’s “ripening breast” and “tender-taken breath”. From this, we can see Keats’s attachment to the beauty of life and the girl.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer is a sonnet we learned in class. In this poem Keats shows his admiration for the beauty of poetry itself. After reading Chapman’s Homer, he felt “like some watcher of the skies” looking at a new planet or “like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes” staring at the Pacific Ocean. These figures show Keats’s ecstasy reading the fantastic and powerful lines of Homer’s epics.
After my reading experience, I find that almost each pieces of poem written by Keats express his untiring pursuit of beauty, of nature, life, poetry and love. I can hardly imagine how he did it throughout all his misfortunes and sufferings. Maybe the pursuit itself is the motivation that keeps him living, just as he said to Fanny in the movie Bright Star :“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”
(2) Imageries and figures of speech
The most impressive thing is Keats’s peerless and infinitive imagination. The imageries in his poems are a perfect combination of the reality and dreams.
In the poem Ode to a Nightingale, when he describes the feeling of drink the vintage, he uses the visual image “Flora and the country green”, the auditory image “Provencal song”, the gustatory image “tasting” and the kinesthetic image “dance”. These different kinds of images blend together, forming a marvelous and immersive feeling of drinking vintage in the wonderland of Flora.
And in To Autumn, Keats also uses visual images. Such as in the first stanza, “thatch-eves”, “moss’d cottage-trees” and other mellow fruits show the maturity and ripeness of autumn. Auditory images are also perfectly applied. “Gnats mourn”, “full-grown lambs bleat loud”, “hedge-crickets sing”, “red-breast whistles” and “gathering swallows twitter”. The nature’s chorus gives us a perfect performance of the beautiful autumn. Olfactory images like the “fume of poppies” and gustatory images like the “sweet kernel” both add to our desire for the autumn in the wilderness.
Strong contrasts are commonly seen in Keats’s poems. In the poem Ode to a Nightingale, the difference between the nightingale’s ideal world and the ugly real world is obvious. “Happy” and “sorrow”, “mirth” and “despairs”, “singing” and “groan”, “green” and “grey” show the poet’s keen desire to flee the reality to his perfect dreams.
Keats also likes to use quotations of ancient history and myths to create a mysterious or solemn atmosphere. In the poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, the figure of ambitious Spanish adventurer Cortez with his “eagle eyes” appears. In Ode to a Nightingale, the story of Ruth (I searched for it online) shows the eternity of the nightingale’s beautiful songs.
Similes and Metaphors are like the spirit of Keats’s poems. They are so widely used in every poem that I cannot list them.
(3) His view of mortality
It was a sad truth that tuberculosis cut Keats’s life off in its prime time. He was forced to think about death even before the flower of his life bloomed. We can see his view of mortality in some of his poems. It surprised me that he didn’t show any agony and fear in face of death. On the contrary, he was quite calm and sober.
In his opinion, death is an inevitable process of living beings. It is not the fearful end of life, but a sort of return to nature. It even has its special charm. In the poem Bright Star, he expresses his acceptance of fate to “swoon to death” peacefully in his lover’s arms, to return to nature like a steadfast star. And in Ode to a Nightingale, we can see it is not so hard to face death when the real world is a place full of “the weariness, the fever, and the fret”, where “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes”. In the dark, serene kingdom of the nightingale, the poet is almost “half in love with easeful Death”.
However, Keats still cherishes life. The nightingale is the bird of eternity in Keats’s poem, and its songs represent the immortal happiness, which may be in Keats’s dreams. Although the reality is dark and dirty, Keats still finds its beauty through natural scenery, his lover’s embrace, the great power of poetry and his wild imagination. To live is still worth yearning for.
Maybe it’s just like what he said in his epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was written in water.” His life was so fragile that as you wrote, it dissolved. It faded away even before it was finished. But on the other hand, it was never finished. He just went back to nature with water. His name, together with his masterpieces, will always be carried down human’s history by flowing water with dazzling blaze. Beauty makes him immortal.
Part 3 Conclusion
Through the journey of reading Keats poems and watching the film Bright Star, I have a better understanding of this extraordinary poet’s life and mind. My imagination flies aloft with his, and I try to feel his happiness and pain. I begin to know that writing a good poem requires deep perception of life and persistence of seeking truth and beauty. What we need is to read more observe more, feel more, and think more.
Poems I Choose
1. Ode to a Nightingale
2. To Autumn
3. Bright Star
4. On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
5. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket