Key points about the poems

Ode on Melancholy

• Ode of Greek verse form

• consonance + assonance

• synonomy/symbiosis of Melancholy and Beauty

• No delight without melancholy - it’s an ever-present part of emotion

• ABABCDECDE 1/2 + ABABCDEDCE 3

• Apostrophic/personification of melancholy

• Vale of soul making - melancholy and pain is a necessity to become a soul

• written after the death of his brother Tom - meditation on grief and maintaining it as a facet of life

Fears

• Shakespearean sonnet - ABABCDCDEFEFGG

  • Mimicking a great writer to emphasise his wish to be a part of that exalted class of artists

  • Iambic Pentameter - uniform meter, Keats is trying to take control of the time he has left

• Worried about dying and running out of time to explore his creativity

• Anaphora of first three lines

• Concrete and abstract imagery mixed

• 1 in 4 died of TB during the industrial revolution

• Keats died of TB in 1821

• when he was writing the poem in 1818 his brother was terminally ill

Drear-nighted December

• iambic trimeter

• 1817 - both parents dead

• Form of Keats’s own design - three eight-line stanzas - ABABCCCD

  • “Feminine” endings - unstressed end syllable on the CCC triplets, creates an air of sadness and of wilting

  • Keats expressed a wish to create his own kind of sonnet, finding the other forms such as Petrarchan and Shakespearean not to his wishes

• Poem is expressing an envy for the indifference of nature, how it does not have the consciousness to experience grief or pain, “Happy, happy tree” repeated epizeuxis - the pain linked with being able to remember

  • different perspective on romanticism where instead of personifying the tree as a fellow sufferer he personifies it as unfeeling yet completely happy

• Winter as an allusion to grief - juxtaposed with “Apollo’s summer look”

Ode on a Grecian Urn

• apostrophe

• horatian ode

To Autumn

• Classical Greek ode form

  • timelessness

• 1819 odes

  • illness

  • Tom Keats

  • romanticism

• idea of the unstoppable flow of time

  • emphasised by regular rhyme scheme

• link to december and darkness

• passing of seasons and what they represent

Ode to Psyche

Chapman’s Homer

King Lear

O Solitude

On the Sea

• petrarchan sonnet

• Timelessness

Bright Star