'On the Sea'

Form:

Petrarchan Sonnet:

1. Octave = addressing the sea + landscape

2. addressing people who embrace modernity

could be read that even though Petrarchan in form, the ideas are more Shakespearean? No major disagreement, and the thought process is in quatrains?

“It keeps eternal whisperings around / “

“It” = the muse

“eternal” = does not subject to time?

“whisperings” = powerful in the way that it stays quiet - doesn’t need to get loud…?

contrasts temporary industrialisation
enjambment => feels wavelike?

“Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell”

“desolate shores” = rid of human impurity

caesura actually isolates the idea of being “desolate”

“Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell”

Gluts twice = trochee → powerful enough that it can reverse the meter

“twice ten thousand” = dental brevity → force + abundance?

“Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.”

12 syllables → extra iamb on the end → abundance, excess, and potency - elongated line

supernatural + mythic quality

“old shadowy sound” = synaesthesia → combination of senses, as the sea becomes an all-consuming force

end-stopped = sense of finality

“Often ‘tis in such gentle temper found”

“gentle temper” - the sea seems controlled, Machiavellian almost?

“That scarcely will the very smallest shell”

juxtaposes with “mightiest swell” !! complete state of power of the sea

sibilance = softness, as the sea seems manipulative?

soft consonance of ‘l’ sounds seems lullaby-like → but readers know this is a false sense of security?

euphonic sonic texture?

“Be moved for days from where it sometime fell,”

“moved for days” = slowness, almost a stasis to the sea? beginning of the poem, the sea is constantly moving but Keats creates a sense of temporal dilation - of time slowing down - to illustrate the speaker’s intoxication with this potent and natural force.

“When last the winds of Heaven were unbound”,

Aeolus + god of 4 winds?

“winds of Heaven” = Christian imagery, conflated with Hellenistic imagery → the sea is a non-denominational force?!

“unbound” = spondaic??

“Oh, ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired”

delayed apostrophe → “Oh, ye!” - only turns to write poetry later on

“eye-balls” = grotesque? bodily physicality?

“vexed and tired” = synaesthesia

“Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea —”

“Feast them” → gluttony + the sea as a restorative power

dash at the end → forces a pause

“Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,”

“Oh ye!” refrain from earlier → the speaker can’t help but deliver another monologue

“ears are dinned” = noun as a verb → more synaesthesia

“uproar rude” of modernity + impure city

“Oh ye!” - spondee

“Or fed too much with cloying melody —”

more and more dashes at the end of lines → creates fragmented + disjointedness

“fed” → “cloying melody” → cacophonic

“too much” = excess + abundance

“Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth and brood”,

Sit → passive, only needing to be near it

“ye” = archaic diction → timelessness of sea’s power

“brood” = Byronic hero…?

“Until ye start, as if the sea nymph’s quired"!”

music of the sea → supernaturalism

11 syllables → ending on a moment of metrical excess

Tooke’s Pantheon

1698 → works on Greek mythology that Keats read

what year was ‘On the Sea’ published?

1817

when did Keats first see Margate at see?

Summer 1816

Mozart’s opera:

Soave sia il vento (may the wind be gentle) from Cosi fan tutte

no “I” in the whole of the poem

going against Romanticism + individualism

Aeolus

Aeolus gave Ulysses all of the winds in a bag so that his ship would not be controlled or destroyed

Hecate

goddess of magic → controls the tides

when was ‘On the Sea’ written?

This poem was written in 1817, shortly after Keats saw the ocean for the first time. During a visit to Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, Keats reportedly composed 'On the Sea' as a result of his awe when faced with the vast ocean.

who said that Keats belonged in the Cockney school of poets

J.G. Lockhart + J. W. Crocker P

Petrarchan sonnet origins:

Francesco Petrarch → written out of admiration for his lover, Laura → in Canzionere

Romantic rehabilitation of the Petrarchan sonnet:

Wordsworth → The World Is Too Much With Us (1807)

1817 letter to Keats’s brother on King Lear:

“haunted by the line, ‘Do you not hear the sea?’ from King Lear