• 5. ―On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer‖
– Keats was so moved by the power and aliveness of Chapman's translation of Homer that he wrote this sonnet--after spending all night reading Homer with a friend. – The poem expresses the intensity of Keats's experience; it also reveals how passionately he cared about poetry.
– Stanza 3 describes the world from which Keat
longs to escape, a world full of sickness and
sorrow. He alludes to his brother’s death: "youth grows pale, and spectra-thin, and dies." – Stanza 4 begins with the cry "Away!" Keats rejects wine and prefers to travel by means of the imagination on the "wings of Poesy." He imagines that he is already with the nightingale in the dark sky.
John Keats (1795-1821)
• 1. Life and Career
– Born in London, the son of a livery-stable owner
– Educated at the Clarke’s School where his first inclination toward poetry was initiated – His father died when he was nine and his mother died when he was fifteen. – Apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary and studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London
―Ode to a Nightingale‖
Nightingale
• 6. ―Ode to a Nightingale‖
– Stanza 1 begins with the poet's expression of a feeling of dullness. The poet feels as if drugged by the "full-throated east" of the bird's song. – In stanza 2, the poet calls for a drink of wine, creating images of the warm south of France, where wines are made. He gives a detailed description of how the wine looks as one drinks it. Wine, he says, might allow him to escape from the world into the dim forest realm of the nightingale.
John Keats
– Griefs and troubles crowded in upon him:
• his dearly loved brother, Tom, died; • he was in trouble about money;
• he became ill with tuberculosis;
Keats’s grave in Rome
• 2. Points of View
– Keats is a moderate radical, has great sympathy for the poor. – He believes that poetry is a release from misery, a vehicle to paradise. – The mission of poetry is to work for the welfare of the people. – The message carried in his poetry is the lasting power of beauty and its union with truth.
Odes
• • • • • • Ode on Indolence Ode to Psyche Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode on Melancholy To Autumn
• 4. Special Features
– The mythic world f the ancient Greece and the English poetry of the Renaissance period provide Keats with the most important imaginative resources.
– From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation. – The third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820. – Keats went to Rome to seek a warm climate for the winter in the fall of 1820 – He died there on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
– In stanza 5, the poet, "in embalmed darkness," lets his imagination tell what flowers surround him. He feels isolated from the grief of the world. – In stanza 6, the feeling of being embalmed becomes a wish for death. The poet has longed for death before. This seems to be the perfect moment to die, while the nightingale is singing. But, having reached this point, the poet realizes that, once dead, he could no longer hear the bird's song. He would be merely "a sod," a clump of earth without feelings.
– In stanza 7, Keats turns back to the idea of life. The nightingale seems to live eternally because its song is the same now as it was in ancient days. Perhaps the biblical Ruth, for example, heard the nightingale's song as she gathered grain in the fields. – In stanza 8, as the nightingale's song fades in the distance, Keats again becomes aware of his own situation. The imaginative escape is over, he evaluates what has happened, asking, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?"
– His poetry is characterized by:
• exact and closely knit construction,
• sensual descriptions, and
• the force of imagination,
– His poetry gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.
• 3. Major Works
– ―On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer‖ (1816) – Endymion (1817) – Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) – The Fall of Hyperion
Homer
– As a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" falls into two parts—an octet (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octet describes Keats's reading experience before reading Chapman's translation and the sestet contrasts his experience of reading it.