'O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell' - John Keats

Form:

• Petrarchan Sonnet → 14 lines

  • octave = wanting to be in isolation

  • nature is even better → wants company

  • Iambic pentameter →

“O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell”,

Ecphonesis → exclamatory emotion

Solitude = personified, as a muse

“dwell” = there is a lingering, and persistence to the encounter

also immediately…ironic? if solitude is personified, then how can the speaker be in solitude…?

personifies solitude

“Let it not be among the jumbled heap”

Spondee = jumbled → weightiness + disorder to modernity

“Jumbled” = impurity? Heap → seems like rubbish → opposed of innocent mind

“of murky buildings; climb with me the steep, —”

caesura → separation between murkiness + impurity of modernity + nature

ending on a dash = creates a pause in nature, mirroring the refuge of actual nature?

murky = Rousseauian impurity?

“Nature’s observatory — whence the dell,”

Nature’s observatory → binary opposite, enforcing modernity onto the natural world? a high hill = observatory

separated from the observatory → opposite of observatory, rather than looking up at the sky, the speaker can look down at nature around them

“its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell”

anaphoric asyndeton produces a melodic quality

“slopes” and “swell” both indicates growth, or development

“crystal” → supernatural + mythic?

“may seem a span, let me thy vigils keep”

span v keep → expansive imagery vs. hushed, protective imagery?

religious bliss and isolation

“‘Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap”

“boughs” = of a tree → nature’s tree without actually having any stone or brick or anything

temple of Solitude → magical solitude beneath it?

enjambment enacts this transition between “leaping” => constant movement + free-flowing, like nature

“Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell”

“wild bee” → life + creation

foxgloves symbolises the duality of beauty + danger, healing and harm = name ‘foxglove’ comes from ‘folk’s gloves’ → CONTAIN A CHEMICAL WHICH CAN BE USED TO HEAL THE HEART, BUT IS TOXIC IN EXCESS!! DR. KEATS PROBABLY KNEW THIS,

and keats knew about folklore → had read ‘The Faerie Queene’

“But though I’ll gladly trace these scene with thee”

volta → start of the sestet

turns away from vigils to the company he’d prefer

“trace” = could be in company, or leaving a physical reminder of the nature (e.g. a poem → this poem)

lots of contractions in this poem, allowing…

for metrical abidance → insistent on keeping it a Petrarchan poem about dissent

“Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind”

Rousseau + innocence

the beautiful nature is a manifestation of the mind’s purity → uncorrupted

“sweet convserse” = not necessarily silent, but causes discussion?

“Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d”

something striking about the idea of words as images → the job of words is clearly to translate hidden-away thoughts into things that a person can share

"thoughts refin’d” → thoughts that are cultivated and curated? careful selection?

“is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be”

metaphysical joy in solitude → provider of certainty?

caesura → creates a physical break between nature + metaphysical wonderings?

“almost the highest bliss of human-kind, “

‘almost’ → not quite the best though…?

“When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.”

ensures that this is an apostrophe, as if to a muse

“flee"[ing]” the jumbled heap of modern ciy + impurity

2 key juxtapositions of ‘O Solitude’

1. city v nature

   1. solitude v company

which lines of ‘O Solitude’ use metrical deviation?

7 and 8 → as the deer is startled, so is the meter

line 7 has…

an extra syllable!! → excess + abundance of nature