Keats quotes

Stamp Collecting

• Fractured and cyclical nature of diasporic memory through free verse and fragmented form.

• “My first travels, transported on those serrated tokens.”

  • Steam of consciousness

  • Introspectively revealing fragmented memories that evoke the tenative and disjointed nature of diasporic experiences.

• “Fingering the face of a youthful Elizabeth pendant over a Chinese junk and slips it home”

  • The unsettled experienced of cultural displacement

  • home is constructed from fragments of the past and how identity is continuously revised.

Ode to a Grecian Urn (1819) 

• Keats revels in art’s ability to free perfection exemplified by the timeless figures who are “forever panting, and forever young.” The anaphora champions the role of art in elevating the soul and offering a realm beyond mortal limits. 

• He successfully captures the essence of art and imagination in the chiasmus, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” celebrating the individual’s capacity to find transcendence through art. 

When I Have Fears that I may cease to be (1818)

• Keats yearns for artistic fulfilment, “before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” where the agricultural metaphor conveys his desperation to immortalise creative thought before death silences in his imagination.

• Through the expansive imagery as he concedes “then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone,” (continue with nightingale analysis) 

Bright Star

• The idealistic power of love through immortality in Bright Star is seen in the pun “still steadfast, still unchangeable,” which pantheistically frames Keats’ individualistic yearning for eternal love, but also the star’s disconnection from the individual.

• Keats’ rhyming couplet “to hear her tender-taken breath/and so live ever - or else swoon to death,” emphasises his reconciliation of love’s ephemerality by demonstrating that he would rather experience love’s mutable passion than solidarity immortality. 

Eve of St Agnes 

• Keats’ reflection on the impermanence of idealised beauty is illuminated through Madeline, who is “paining with eloquence, her balmy side.” The sensual connotations are evoked through her physical form rather than her voice, aestheticising women through the male gaze.

• By serving as a testament of women used as passive vessels for male expression in the simile, “as though a tongueless nightingale should swell,” Keat epitomises the height of beauty and sublime as moments that are inexpressible and beyond language. 

To Autumn

 artistic perception can reconcile humanity’s transience with nature’s continuity.

• Through the tender personification of the season, “sitting careless on a granary floor,” Keats fuses human creativity with natural abundance, suggesting that art and nature share generative power.

•  However, the poem resolves not in despair but in acceptance, as “gathering swallows twitter in the skies” asserting that art’s imaginative vision can find permanence within the cycles of impermanence itself.

Father and Child

“Father, we pick our last fruits of the temporal”