John Keats wrote some very romantic poems. La Belle Dame sans Mercy is about him spotting a woman in a meadow and falling in love with her at first sight. However, at the end of the poem it turns out it was only in his dream. Almost like A Midsummers Night Dream by Shakespeare, the people in the woods think they dream all of what truly happened. I think that this poem is still relevant today because our dreams deceive us sometimes. Some dreams affect us more that others, we can almost believe that it did happen. This poem could also be talking about the Greek Sirens or Nymphs because the couple of poems before this one in the book were about the Iliad.
Keats had a time period where he wrote Odes and they reflected personal, cultural, and political contexts of 1819. He wrote of controversy, drugs, misery, death, and migrating to America. In Ode to a Nightingale it seems like he was in intoxicated when he was writing it:
"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,"
He was taking opium to try to block out the pain he felt from his brothers death and he was trying to cope with all that was going on in the world at the time. There is proof that people have been abusing drugs for a very long time. At the bottom of page 438 it says "in small doses hemlock is a sedative; in large doses, such as Socrates', it is fatal." Hemlock is an opiate that is basically a painkiller. If some of the brightest people are depressed and overdose on drugs then some hope is lost for others.
The first poems in the books by Keats seem happier and more romantic than those towards the end. For example, This living hand and Bright Star are more gloomy. This living hand talked of death and how we can all leave the earth at any time. Bright Star is not as dark as This living hand. It talks of nature and at the end of the poem it talks of the rise and fall of the heart in love. I think that Keats could also be talking of all of life's journeys.
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2 comments:
Good comparison to Midsummer Night's Dream.
You observed that Keats poems progressively lost their dreamlike bliss and reading the introduction biography completely justifies it. He dealt with alot of sickness and loss. Not to mention, he died very young.
Jennifer,
This post has some good remarks about several of Keats's poems, but does not adequately support or follow up on any of them. Try to remember to "say more about less": focus on a single poem (or even a single part of one) and dig much deeper into it in your analysis. You take a step in that direction when you quote the lines from the ode, but you don't investigate that passage fully.
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