Despite the cold reception, Keats continued to write extraordinary poems, including “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and the epic poem “Hyperion.” This creatively fecund period was also happy in other ways: In October 1819, Keats proposed to the writer Fanny Brawne, whom he had met a year earlier. None of the odes were particularly appreciated by the prominent critics of the time. It is in this period of mourning and solitude that Keats composed five of his six great odes, the poems he would be most known for: “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode on Indolence.” The sixth ode, “To Autumn,” was composed later, in September 1819. Eager to get away from London, Keats moved to Wentworth place, the green estate of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. Tom died of tuberculosis on December 1, 1818. Keats and his other brother George began caring for Tom, even though Keats himself was suffering from ill health. Outwardly a poem celebrating nature’s beauty, as symbolized by the nightingale, the poem is a deep dive into the contradictions of human existence: where beauty and pain coexist, and life is always hounded by the threat of disease and death.įamily tragedy struck again when Tom, Keats’s younger brother, contracted tuberculosis. The speaker’s tone is simultaneously euphoric and melancholic, which gives the poem its unique, bittersweet edge. The poem is narrated by an unknown speaker, who for all purposes is identified with the poet himself (this study guide, therefore, uses “he, him” pronouns for the speaker of the poem). Brown later recalled Keats spent several hours under a tree in the garden, composing the poem as he listened to the nightingale’s song. It is inspired by an actual encounter with a nightingale: In the summer of 1819, Keats was living at the Hampstead estate of his friend Charles Brown when a nightingale built a nest near the house. The lyric poem, structured in eight stanzas of 10 lines each, follows the rhyme scheme ABABCDECDE, and its metrical composition is largely iambic pentameter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |