keats & campion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCKihTzJp3s&list=PL-lKzlv8IRtbes-o0bEAqY9M7SbDJ3yz5&index=1
https://www.projectacademy.nsw.edu.au/year-12-guides/exemplar-keats-x-campion-bright-star-essay
ode: a celebratory address to a person, place or thing
quote technique verb effect
bright star
key concepts: Romantic preoccupation with nature, humanity, love
context: written in 1820 on train to Rome. Inspired by leaving Fanny Brawne
structure:
- sonnet (14 lines, major theme for 8 lines, minor for 6 lines)
- follows a Shakespearean sonnet rhyme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (three quatrains and a couplet)
- iambic pentameter (unstressed and then stressed)
symbols:
- star: illusive, unearthly beauty (like his lover). star is constant (used as marker for boats), but inaccessible
- snow: the bright star doesn’t see dark parts of human life, but purity/innocence
analysis:
| quote | technique | explanation |
|---|---|---|
| “bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” | apostrophe: address to a personifed object/person that isn’t present (found throughout poem) | emphasises inaccessible nature of starspeaker professing love for star indicates they need to confess feelings, but dont feel comfortable directly addressing lover (tension in relationship) |
| simile | suggests speaker wants to be as steady and constant as the star | |
| “bright” and “I” | assonance | sonically links speaker and star, justifies speakers desire to emulate star |
| "Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,” | metaphor | giving the star ‘lids’ personifies and implies eyes that watch the Earth |
| “lone” “splendour” “aloft” | consonance | "L” sound links, implying the star is only beautiful because of its distance |
| “Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite” | metaphor/simile | eremite = hermit, emphasise lonelinessmetaphor/simile personify star, making it easier to sympathise |
| “Bright star” = spondee“would I were sted-fast” trochee | Spondee: Two stressed syllables. Pyrrhic: Two unstressed syllables. Iamb: One unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Trochee: One stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable | indicates speakers instability |
| “moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth’s human shores,” | similie, allusion | moving waters allude to religious ablution/ritual washing for religious purposes. the waters of the world are washing the boundaries of human civilisation to purify |
| “ablution” “human” | assonant '‘oo’ | connects 2 words, ablution is disticntly human |
| “Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors” | metaphor/personification | mask is a metaphor for the snow covernote that snow is “soft-fallen”presence of mask implies face beneath, personifyingsuggests star is far away and can’t see reality of earth |
| enjambement | stresses word ‘mask’ | |
| lines 1-8 | pre volta | paint star as beautiful, distant, steadfast (which spekaer wants to be like). speaker wants its stability withougt loneliness |
| sestet | last six lines of sonnet | |
| “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast” | metaphor | wants to lie on his lovers breast |
| “To feel for ever its soft fall and swell” | alliterative “s” and “f” | alternate like the rhythm of breath, create imagery |
| “No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable \n | alliterative consonance ‘st’ | emphasise speakers passion for the embrace |
| “No-” | caesura | Splitting the line in two, the speakeremphasizes the dual, contradictory character of his or her relationship to the star: he or she wants some of its characteristics but not all of them. |
| “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever - or else swoon to death” | repetition/epizeuxis (repeat phrase in rapid succesion) | emphasise speaker’s desire to remain locked in an embrace with his lover forever |
| “ever- or else swoon” | caesura | sets up stark choice. either remain in embrace forever or die |
| “so live ever- or else swoon to death” | suggests simplicity and stability of bright star may not be an option for complex human life |
when I have fears that I may cease to be
key concepts: written in 1818, speaker’s anxiety about dying before being able to achieve their aspirations. written before keats is recorded to have met brawne. tragic as poet died 3 years after publishing. fears no longer being in love, being unable to write poetry, feels lonely. preoccupation with mortality, question of art’s purpose, despair that accompanies love
structure: sonnet, ababcdcdefefgg rhyming structure (shakespearean sonnet), iambic pentameter. 1st quatrain: harvest metaphor, 2nd: night sky, 3rd:love
- lines 1-8: speaker will not fulfill himself as a writer
- lines 9-12: he will lose his beloved
- lines 12-14: unimportance of love and fame
techniques:
- anagnorisis: suddenly in last 2 lines pronounces desire for vocational/romantic success are worthless. ‘turn’ makes readers question sincerity of Keat’s final pronouncements
- mis-en-scene: imagery of his ambitions as ‘high piled books’ help to characterise the speaker
- exclamation marks: rare but effective usage of exclamation marks communicate the anguish that accompanies any experience of romantic longing
- first-person narration: inspires our sympathy, making it easier to relate to the plight of the narator
- personification/symbolism: pen symbolises Keats’ writing and his passion for writing
analysis:
| quote | technique | explanation |
|---|---|---|
| When I have fears that I may cease to be | ||
| Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, | enjambment | spilling over to next line, establish sense of anxiety |
| “before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain” | emphasis | speaker fears a lack of life, rather than death |
| “gleaned my teeming brain” | metaphor | image likens pen to a scythe. harvest thoughts from speakers teening brain |
| “before'‘ “when” | words related to time | temporal aspect of poem, sense of urgency |
| “fears” “cease” “be” “before” “gleaned” “teeming” | assonance/repeated internal vowel sound | first appears in word fear,embodies constant prevalence of speakers fear |
| perfect iambic pentameter | gives a sense of control | |
| Before high-plied bboks, in characteryHold like rich garners in the full ripened grain: | imagery | focus speakers attention on literature. suggests speaker feels as if they could write extensive amounts |
| ‘before’ | anaphora | both lines 2 and 3 begin with ‘before’continued awareness to role of time in speakers anxieties |
| ‘full ripened grain’ | extended metaphor | extended metaphor of readers mind = grain suggest that there will be a right time/season for poetry = speaker's view of time as pivotal/root cause of the fear of death. |
| When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, | anaphora | ‘when’ repeated lines 1 and 5 continues attention on timealso implies frequent fears/view night sky |
| ‘face, Huge’ | caesura, personification | pause draws attention to night’s starred face, personifying sky and speaker’s awe of it |
| ‘symbols of a high romance’ | concrete imagery with abstract ideals | speaker finds particular inspiration in natural world eg. clouds, night sky |
| And think that I may never live to traceTheir shadows with the magic hand of chance: | speaker fears not being able to live long enough to translate the inspiration they find in the natural world | |
| ‘live to trace’ | metaphor | opposed to previous harvest metaphor, draws direct line from speaker’s interest in life and literal practice of art |
| lines 7-8 | enjambement | as if ‘trace’ is running after’shadows’ , trying to keep up before speaker’s time on earth runs out |
| ‘huge cloudy symbols’ | personification | speaker is only able to trace celestial shadows = step apart from celestial ideas |
| “live to trace”“magic hand of chance” | Whether or not the speaker will be "live to | |
| trace" the sky, in other words, depends on the "hand" of | ||
| fate—which is beyond the speaker's control and therefore a | ||
| source of fear. | ||
| And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,That I shall never look upon thee more,Never have relish in the faery powerOf unreflecting love- | caesura | pause to focus on first time speaker definitively describes how they actually feel |
| other fears in poem= dying before famefear of death in the case of love = never appropriate time to die | ||
| ‘faery power’ | love is transformative/imm=aginary/illusory | |
| ‘unreflecting love’ | lack of reciprocity. love speaker most desires is enchanting, yet impossible | |
| quatrains | cut short by dash, indicate time is literally running out | |
| ‘faery power’ | flips iambic (unstressed-stressed) to trochee (stressed-unstressed) | focus on ‘never’shows power of ‘faery power’ |
| then on the shoreOf the wide world I stand alone, and think | caesura | severs image of speaker on shore from rest of poem, as speaker feels severed from the world |
| ‘wide’ ‘world’ | /w/ alliteration | makes wideness of the world especially noticeable, drawig attention to speakers loneliness |
| ‘shore’ ‘world’ ‘alone’ | assonance of /o/ | evoke anguished cry of howling wind =despair, solitude |
| ‘on the shore/OF the wide world."‘ | hyperbole | not literally alone, describes drastiic fears |
| another change in meter | speaker’s feeling of rupture | |
| and thinkTill love and fame to nothingness do sink. | link | love and fame are linked for first time. speaker wants love for them and their work |
| speaker not only wants to write heaps, but receive ‘love and fame’ in return | ||
| ‘love and fame to nothingness do sink’ | love and fame are impossible, even if attained will sink upon death | |
| return to iambic pentameter | speaker has regained control of poetic craft, perfection possible even in face of death |
La Belle Dame sans Merci
key concepts: knight meeting an enchantress, taken as semi-autobiographical for Keates’ and Brawne’s romance. medieval setting fits Romanticism, that human condition couldn’t be explained by rational scientific methods. reverse gender roles: knight in distress.
Form: ballad (medieval poetry that tells story in short stanzas). Keates ‘riffs’ on this. three tetrameters followed by final truncated line. unusual syntax/language strange express knight’s disorientation.
La Belle Dame sans Merci is a 12 stanza ballad, each stanza a quatrain (four lines), each quatrain having three lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a single line of iambic dimeter. The second and fourth lines are in full rhyme, so the rhyme scheme is abcb.
| scene | technique | analysis |
|---|---|---|
| O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has withered from the lake,And no birds | tone of lament | ‘O’ tone of meditation, inquiring, archaic. Middle Ages |
| ‘knight-at-arms’ | monosyllabic, caesura, end-stop | knight is separated from rest of the action. tension between the expected composure/wallowing of this particular knight (who has emotions). reflects the knight's alienation from his context |
| ‘alone and palely loitering’ | repetition | out of context, alone, pale/reminiscent of death |
| ‘has withered from the lake’‘no birds sing’ | perfect tense | withering has completed, but recentlywinter is coming |
| o WHAT can AIL thee, KNIGHT-at-ARMS? | ballads, quatrains, iambic tetrameter (unstressed-stressed) | establishes poem’s meter |
| O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full,And the harvest’s done | sceond stanza confirms much of the first stanza | |
| ‘O what can ail thee’ | refrain/anaphora | Line 5 is repetition of line 1nod to traditional balladic form, gives stronger voice to speaker, no longer disembodied voice but also has character |
| ‘haggard’ ‘woe-begone’ | imagery | image of knight deepens, choice of words also indicates speaker’s inner state, speaker commiserates knight |
| ‘squirrel’s granry storehouse of nuts and seeds for the winter’ | metaphor | images of fall, humans also preparing for the winter |
| “I see a lily on thy brow,With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading roseFast withereth too.” | stanza 3 speaker focuss specifically on knight, grasps general features of knight’s problem, contains some key images | |
| ‘I’ | speaker and knight are both part of the same physical world, gist that speaker is worried about knight. knight's brow is pale/beaded with sweat like a dew drop flower | |
| presence of the lily | symbol/metaphor | lily generally represent death. white healthy living thing = death and the beauty of lie are inseparablelily growing on brow = reincarnationfever-dew hyphenation indcates lily’s symbolic duality |
| ‘fading rose’ | metaphor | colour fade, becomes white like lily. one type of delicate beauty substituted for another (rose for lily). inseparability of beauty and death |
| ‘withereth’ | five syllables | line 12 hybrid of two lines that came before it |
| enjambment of line 11 | gives sense that time is running out/ the deteriorating knight must get on with his story, risk of oncoming poor weather | |
| I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful - a faery’s childHer hair was long, her foot was light,And her eyes were wild. | stanza 4 marks beginning of the knight’s story and images of the Lady | |
| ‘i met a lady’ | simplicity belie the unique complexity of this relationship? lady is dominating image from which the rest of the story will develop. knight’s story will be about love and loss (foreshadowed by knight standing alone) | |
| ‘in the meads’ | meadow seen as refuge when travelling alonestanding in the meads, the Lady becomes the knight’s centre of attention, remaining that way until the end of the poem | |
| ‘Full beautiful - a faery’s child’ | emphasis, casesura | knight responds out loud to the speaker, emphasising Lady’s total control of his attentionthe em-dash represents leap of expression from physical world to imaginary, knight grasping correct words‘faery’ one of many references to Lady’s supernatural |
| ‘her hair was long, her foot was light,/And her eyes were wild,"‘ | description | grounds her in the real world, but elevates her above average.compares her to a wild animal (she is woven into the landscape) but is also unlike anyone he’s ever seen |
| ‘and her eyes were wild,’ | monosyllabic | locking w eyes = locks knight obsession, characteristic final line begins emotional journey |
| I made a garland for her headAnd bracelets too, and fragrant zone;Ahe looked at me as she did love,And made sweet moan. | stanza 5 physically joins the knight with the Lady. foreshadows something more than we’re being told | |
| knight dresses her from head (garland) to hip (fragrant zone)sensual feel, knight trying to relive the momentknight’s creative acts (dressing her, describing her) give him false sense of controlby accepting advances, Lady lulls knight into sense of secuirty | ||
| ‘she looked at me as she did love.’ | inferred love, due to power he is allowed over her | |
| ‘and fragrant zone;’ | caesura, end-stop | phrase stands apart due to caesura and semicolon, causing readers to ponder it |
| ‘sweet moan’ ‘language strange’ | how does lady communicatemoan (like lily) can be pleasure (affirmation of living world) /pain (inevitable death). | |
| I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long,For sidelong would she bend, and singA faery’s song | stanza 6 knights obsession with Lady deepens.she comes alive as character, language grows more suggestive | |
| ‘I set her on my pacing steed’ | innuendo | steed comes from old english ‘stallion’ (horse in full possession of its sexual organs)contributes to knight enhancing self-image as a strong, masculine ‘knight-at-arms’ |
| i SET her ON my PA cing STEED | steady iambic pentameter | sense of control, mimic trotting of the horse |
| ‘nothing better but her all day long’‘for sidelong would she bend’ | the Lady’s physical movements are hypnotic | |
| ‘sings A faery’s song"‘ | polyptoton - a figure of speech that involves the repetition of words derived from the same root (such as "blood" and "bleed"). | example of possibly indecipherable mode of communicationcreates hypnosis, knight get stuck in loop of song |
| ‘all day long’ | knight’s obsession with Lady never ends, he can’t rid her from his mind | |
| She found me roots of relish sweet,And honey wild, and manna-dew,And sure in language strange she said-‘I love thee true.’ | stanza 7. the knight clinches the Lady’s love and Lady seals the knight’s fate. Knight is at his most vulnerable | |
| inarticulate expression of love, first sign of explicit returning feelings | ||
| ‘she found me roots of relish sweet’ | alliteration and sibilance | /r/ intimate earthly and tenderly rough quality.relish verb refers to act of enjoyment‘sweet’ opening /s/ picks up where relish left off, but hard /t/ ending |
| ‘honey wild’ | wildness of lady is mysterious, hides her intent. knight is aware of potentially dangerous origin, but lets lust for Lady override him. eating the food = becoming one with the Lady | |
| ‘manna’ | allusion | substance that God feeds the Israelites on their 40-year journey from Egypt to Canaan,. reflects the knight's accepting mysterious provisions. In Exodus, manna = God's protection of the Israelites. It keeps them alive. in the New Testament, in the Gospel of John. Jesus reminds the Jews that though the Israelites fed off the manna, they eventually died. howeer, if they accept Jesus's bread—faith in his divinity and word—they will receive everlasting life. even deepest pleasures run out = death. deeper pleasure = more painfull downfall |
| ‘language strange she said-’ | knight can’t fully understand the lady | |
| end-stop | end dash represent prediction of what lady will say | |
| ‘I love thee true’ | knight takes words at face value and surrenders fully to the Lady | |
| She took me to her Elfin grot,And there she wept and sighed full sore,And there I shut her wild wild eyesWith kisses four. | stanza 8. lady distracts the knight from signs of mounting danger by behaving in a way that convinces him of her love, leading him into false sense of control | |
| ‘elfin grot’ | taking relationship to next level, puts an action behind sow of love. by taking him, lady now controls the situation | |
| ‘wept and sighed full sore’ | sudden change in behaviour, Lady opening up.stanza 4 = capture beautystanza 8 = pain dominates her appearance | |
| ‘wild wild eyes’ | epizeuxis: a form of repetition in which a word is repeated immediately for emphasis, enjambment | by shutting her eyes, knight blocks reminder of danger, condemning himselfepizeuxis draws attention to ladys’s danger enjmabment further augments sense of Lady’s wildness |
| dramatic irony | reader understands knight in danger | |
| ‘and there’ | anaphora | serve ass introduction for nightmare state knight is about to enter |
| ‘kisses four’ | four lines in stanza, four syllables in line | |
| And there she lulled me asleep,And there I dreamed- Ah! woe betide! -The latest dream I ever dreamtOn the cold hill side. | stanza 9: knight’s world turns upside down, line between fanstasy and reality blurs | |
| ‘she lulled me asleep’ | indicates switched power dynamic, she is in control | |
| ‘and there’ | anaphora | imitates knight’s mounting horrorcrystallises memory of cave as the site of traumacalls into question of ‘there’. where is knight really?? (actual cave, lakeside, dreamspace, with the Lady) |
| ‘-Ah! woe betide!-’ | caesura, end stop | phrase is skewered and shocked. knight goes rigid with fear |
| ‘The latest dream I ever dreamt.” | polyptoton | dream replaces Lady as the sole object of truth, as he learns her betrayal |
| ‘on the cold hill side’ | enjambment | the line of dream is separated from line of reality, but without punctuation they flow into each other (there is little separation between the knight’s fantasies and realities) |
| I saw pale kings and princes too,Pale warrior, death-pale were they all;They cried - ‘La Belle Dame sans MerciTthee hath in thrall! | stanza 10: justifies connection between deathly knight at start, and the vigorous passionate knight of the story | |
| ‘pale’ | repetition/diacope (separated by few intervening words) | ghostly, Lady’s former victims, double stress of pale kings indicates density of the crowdinclusion of warriors indicates infinite line eg. back to greeksknight sees himself reflected |
| ‘warriors’ | additional syllable line 38 | extended line = unending nature of knight’s experience |
| ‘they cried-’ | caesura | recalls knights pained cry in previous stanza, sharp leap emphasises title. The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy lady mercilessness as she shows joy and then disappeared, not actually evilKnight should have realised all love can disappear in instant |
| ‘thee HATH in THRALL!’ | alliteration, consance | thhh makes hissing like a snake, which represents love, lust, terror and emotional collapsesharp iambs emphasise hath (Lady’s possession of the knight) |
| I saw their starved lips in the gloam,With horrid warning gaped wide,And I awoke and found me here,On the cold hill’s side. | stanza 11: knight transitions from dream world back to realisty, but brings ,uch of dream with him. contain suggestive phrases that alter way the reader might imagine the knight’s final emotional state | |
| ‘gloam’ ‘gaped | world simultaneously opening and closing (gloam= light fades) (gape=unending darkness, victims mouths represent gates of hell) | |
| ‘starved lips’ | imagery | 2stressed syllables, emphasise horrific imagery, victims reduced to a body part (helpless flaps of flesh) |
| ‘'starved’ | literal hunger, hunger for love | |
| ‘warning’ | odd choice of word as it’s far too latemaybe knight is indirectly warning speaker about falling into similar trap | |
| ‘here, on the cold hill’s side’ | endstops line | here- originally seems to be dream, but later revealed to be hill (both dream and physical world are part of knight’s reality) |
| ‘the cold hill’s side’ | repeats line 36, slight modification to indicate whole hill is now cold | |
| And this is why I sojourn here,Alone and palely loitering,Though the sedge is withered from the lake,And no birds sing. | final stanza: repeats speaker’s opening comments, confirming his fate to cycle through memory of Lady until he withers away like the sedge and rose’ | |
| ‘soujourn’ | means temporary journeymay describe a type of limbo: emotionally dead due to LAdy, awaiting lily-white blankness of death. until then can only repeat story | |
| ‘alone and palely loitering’ | uses speaker’s words to describe himselfadmits this experience has destroyed his soul, by borrowing speaker’s language admits exhaustion. he only has words for Ladythis physical world barely real to him | |
| ‘though the sedge is withered from the lake’ | over course of poem these lines (describe withering decay) have fresh meetingfragrant zone and manna-dew are examples of plant lie that endure despite the destruction they caused | |
| ‘no birds sing’ but speaker and readder have memory of ‘faery song’ | once again reminds central problem: beauty and death inseparaably bound together. such difficulty inescapable | |
| Perhaps in | ||
| this poem he suggests that, unlike the knight, who must always | ||
| return to the past, one can find beauty even in a physical setting | ||
| as deathly as the lakeside. |
Ode to A Nightingale
50-55min into movie, referenced
context: composed in summer/autumn of 1819. intense meditation on the contrast between the painful mortality that defines human existence and the immortal beauty found in the nightingale’s carefree song. craves wine, having recently lost his brother Tom to tuberculosis
structure: regular ode. All eight stanzas have ten pentameter lines and a uniform rhyme scheme.
| scene | technique | analysis |
|---|---|---|
| My heart aches, and a drowsy numbeness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains | media res | opens in the middle of action, speaker listening to nightingale’s song |
| mood compared to ‘drows numbness’ full of ‘aches’ and ‘pains’ | simile | compares speakers mood to the intoxicated feeling that comes with ingesting hemlock or ‘opiates’ |
| /m//n/ /s/ /l/ | consonance, /d/ allitertion | give the opening four lines a drunk and drowsy atmosphere |
| first stanza | establish themes | psychic pain, intoxication, natur, allusion to Lethe (river in Ancient Greece, drinking water annihilate the drinker’s memory) |
| ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,But being too happy in thine happiness,-That thou, light-winged Dryad of the treesIn some elodious plotOf beechen green, and shadows numberless,Singest of summer in full-throated ease. | ||
| ‘being too happy in (the nightingale’s) happiness’ | paradox | anticipates tension elsewhere in the poem. the speaker is delighted and emotionally moved by the nightingale’s song, also troubled and anxious |
| ‘through’ ‘thy’ ‘thine’ ‘that’ ‘thou’ | alliteration /th/ | represent ‘light-wnged(ness)’ of the bird |
| ‘Dryad of the trees’ | allusion | tree spirits in Ancient Greece, notoriously elusive (like nightingale) |
| ‘numberless, singest of summer’ | enjambment | allows poem to flow lyrically, without interruption |
| ‘trees’ ‘beeches green’ ‘ease’ | assonance /ee/ | tuneful, give reader somewhat distant but important feel for presence of birdsong |
| O, for a draught of vintage! that hath beenCool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,Tasting of Flora and the country green,Dance, and Proncal song, and sunburnt mirth! | longing for intoxication (wine), long to possess the depth andpurity of the nightingale’s song | |
| ‘O, for a draught of vintage! that hath beenCool’d a long agein the deep-delved earth’ | assonance, generally drawn out vowel sounds | suggests a long stretch of time, anxieties about passing of time |
| ‘Flora’ | allusion | capitalisation = Roman goddess of flowers |
| ‘Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth’ | caesurae | create a bounce that evokes dancing. speaker isn’t craving wine, but an ideal state of mind |
| O for a beaker full of the warm South,Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,And purple-stained mouth;That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: | continues poem’s focus on imagined fine wine | |
| ‘beaker full of warm South’ | synthesia | mixing up of senses |
| ‘beaker FULL of the warm South/FULL of the true…’ | diacope | emphasises fullness of imagined wine, shows extent to which this is an idealisation |
| ‘Hippocrene’ | allusion | Greek mythology. Hippocrene is a mountain spring, drinking waters would bring poetic skill and inspiration. underlying speakers discussion is the urge to cpature experience in poetry/to create art worthy of the beauty in nature |
| ‘Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,And purple-stained mouth;’ | onomatopoeic | |
| ‘that I might drink and leave the world unseen,And with thee,fade away into the forest dim’ | pre-empts speaker’s appeal to death in the sixth stanza | |
| Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forgetWhat thou among the leave hast never known,The weariness, the fever, and the fretHere, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy hakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; | beauty in art vs in nature. the nightingale seems more pure because it exists beyond words, human conscioussness, human language | |
| caesura throughout | make lines awkard and ponderous, represent idea of ongoing human struggle | |
| ‘fade far’ ‘forget’ | soft /f/ alliteration | links words, distances nightingale from human consciousness |
| ‘youth grows pale’ | personification | overall concerns about beauty, time. youth already a sickly figure, haunted by the inevitability of aging and death |
| Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs,Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow | juxtaposition | contrast between the ‘over there’ of the mysterious nightingale‘here’ of the human world, with tiredness, misery, death |
| ‘leaden-eyed despairs’ | auditory repetition | thudding /d/ shows heaviness, contrast with nightingale’s light song |
| ‘Beauty’ ‘her lustrous eyes’ no ‘new Love’ | personification | personifies love as a fading figure. both love and beauty are cursed in that they can’t last (a common theme for Keates) |
| ‘sorrow’ ‘tomorrow’ | rhyming | indicates sorrow is ongoing nd perpetual |
| Away! away! for I will fly to thee,Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,But on the viewless wings of Poesy,Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! | fourth stanza picks up the pace | |
| ‘I will fly to thee’ | apostrophe | speaker suggests he will join the bird (in its world of mystrious and lasting beauty0 |
| ‘away!' away! | epizeuxis | emphasises big leap. speaker has momentarily travelled a long intellectual and emotional distance |
| ‘Bacchus and his pards’ | allusion | Dionysus god of wine and revelry |
| ‘wings of Poesy’ | poesy = poetry | These "wings" of poetry are |
| "viewless" because poetry, like the nightingale's music, does not | ||
| have to be a visual medium. That is, it can be consumed through | ||
| the auditory sensory realm alone. | ||
| ‘dull brain perplexes’ | unlike song, poery dependant on language, which is cumbersome | |
| tender is the night,And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;But here there is no light,Save what from heaven is with the breezes blownThrough verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. | ||
| ‘Queen-Moon’ | night is tender, suffused with fantasy, rare instance in the poem of peacefulness and calm | |
| ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’ | make forest seem labyrinthine, suggesting complex journey into world of imagination | |
| alliteration, assonance, consonance | lines are thick with sound,emphasising how far speaker has travelled | |
| I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,But, in embalmed darjness, guess each sweetWherewith the seasonable month endowsThe grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; | cycles of beauty nature constantly creates and replaces through the seasons | |
| /s/ /m/ /b/ /w/ and /th/ consonance | alternately soft, resonant, and humming sounds depict the care and intensity of the speaker's imagination. | |
| White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;And mid-May’s eldest child,The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. | different examples of nature’s beauty, specific to May | |
| consonance, alliteration, assonance | ||
| ‘fast fading violets’ | different flowers demonstrate the variety and range of nature’s beauty, but even these are tied to the speaker’s anxieties about time and impemancemusk rose haunted by numerous flies | |
| Darkling I listen'; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath; | frank discussion of death, shift from focus on beauty to focus on death darkling = to grow dark, or something that is characterised by darkness, applies to speaker | |
| ‘half in love with easeful Death’ | personification | Romantic tendency to focus on death, but half lamenting the fact that beauty can’t last |
| Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroadIn such an ectasy!Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-To thy high requiem become a sod | consciousness/being human is the root of suffering, not ‘richer’ moent to die than while listening to ectasy of nightingale’s song | |
| ‘midnight’ | relates to world of fantasy and folklore of fourth stanza | |
| ‘while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad’ | assonance of open vowel sounds | 'full-throated ease in which nightingale sings its song. untroubled from human conscious, but this also makes unrelatable. whole poem has therefore been built on impossible communication between speaker and bird |
| ‘to thy high requiem become a sod’ | speaker rethinks death wish: if so nightingale would keep thinking but speaker couldn’t appreciate | |
| Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!No hungry generations tread thee down;The voice I hear this passing night was heardIn ancient days by emperor and clown: | ||
| ‘not born for death, immortal Bird!’ | hyperbolic, apostrophe, caesura | bird separated from death by caesuraspeaker believes nightingale to be immortal, but humans to be born for death, which causes anxiety throughout |
| ‘no hungry generation tread thee down’ | bird isn’t immortal, instead Keates’ projecting. one reason may be world of literature is competitive and full of cynicism, which the bird doesn’t have to worry about | |
| ‘in ancient days by emperor and clown.’ | in the nightingale’s song, the speaker hears a small victory of beauty over time and impermanenceheard by rulers and the lowly | |
| ‘hear/heard’ | repetition | suggests continuity through the ages |
| Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,She stood in tears amid the alien corn;The same that oft-times hathCharm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. | ||
| allusion | imagines nightingale’s song reaching happiness to Ruth when widowed. unusual allusion for Keats | |
| ‘self-same song’ | alliteration | tune has remained the same for centries |
| ‘the same that oft-times hathCharm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’ | alliteration, cosonance, assonance in almost every syllable | mirrors the purity of the birdsong one last attempt, adds fantasy feel |
| Forlorn! the very word is like a bellTo toll me back from thee to my sole self!Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so wellAs she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. | ||
| ‘forlorn’ | anadiplosis (word at end of one stanza repeated at start of another) | pulls the reader back to the sole self of the speaker |
| ‘sole self’ | final admission that the nightingale’s song ultimately can’t answer the speakers questions and worries | |
| ‘like a bell’ | fitting the poem’s focus on sound, bells often mark solemn eventsspeaker finally feels physical and psychological distance from the bird | |
| ‘like a bell/To toll…’ | enjambement | means word bell rings out |
| ‘adieu’ | appears in almost all Keates’ odes. speaker resigns can never match nightingale’s song or capture its beauty | |
| ‘deceiving elf’ | personification of human imagination | enchanting, but based on falsehood |
| Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fadesPast the near meadows, over the still stream,Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deepIn the next valley-glades:Was it a vision, or a waking dream?Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep? | flying away =inability to find satisfactory answers to the poem's main problems and anxieties—human suffering, the relentless march of time, death, whether human art can match up to the natural world | |
| ‘adieu! adieu!’ | epizeuxis | like the ringing of a bell, ringing out to mark the separation of the speaker and the nightingale and indeed to toll the poem's ending. |
| ‘plaintive’ ‘the near meadows’ ‘over the still stream’ ‘up the hill-side’ | caesura | song no longer happy, but sad and mournful as it fades away caesura makes seem increasingly distant |
| ‘was it a vision, or awaking dream?Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?’ | rhetorical question | fled = everything has now well and truly left the speaker the speaker’s consciousness is now disrupted, leaving them unable to tell what is real |
To Autumn
expresses Romantic values: appreciation of the natural world. personifies autumn. ‘autumn of his life’ as Keats knew he was dying of tb.
demonstrate Keats’s inability to conceive of an end to natural growth as his imagination seeks to fill ours with its endlessness; he imagines the natural life of the countryside to be a free-growing bounty like the Garden of Eden
structure: three stanzas, variable rhyme scheme. each stanza in 11 lines long, metered in relatively precise iambic pentameter
| line | technique | analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; | personify autumn, characterise contradictory nature (hints at main theme of beauty, life and death) | |
| apostrophe | chracterise autumn, explicity addressed in each stanza | |
| ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ | mist makes autumn mellow, but also conceals. Behind autumn’s mellow fruitfulness hides death | |
| ‘fruitfulness’ | season’s fruitfulness has reached its peak, in next stanza will begin to rot | |
| ‘the maturing sun;’ | end-stop | marks the transition into a new thought |
| Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; | further emphasise autumnal contradictions, continued autumnal imagery | |
| ‘conspiring’ | shares meaning with the mists | |
| ‘with the fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run’ | inverted syntax | demonstrates the interwining it describes |
| ‘with fruit/the vines/ that round/ the thatch-/eaves run;’ | iambic pentameter | natural metric order of nature |
| ‘thatch-eves run’ | mention of human beyond personification | |
Campion - Bright Star
https://figuringfiction.net/2020/08/27/jane-campions-bright-star-the-difference-between-a-sentence-and-a-sewn/ analysis of film imagery
tree= motif, on pillow, through out, poetry does not come as naturally as leaves on a tree
versimilitude: trying to be true/real
boardwalk=heartbeat/iambic pentameter, nightingale
keates is nightingale in tree
| scene | technique | analysis |
|---|---|---|
| close up of sewing (intro, after interaction w keates) | tight, macro close up, of fabric like skin | - self referencing gruesome earlier works- sewing: motif of fragility of the human body- marks passage of time |
| distant framing of entry to town | distant framing, invoking pastoral imagery | - frames characters from afar to reduce stature and hence significance within the context of the totalizing natural world- human activity against backdrop of visual repetition (insignificance of mortal endeavours)- particularly relatable ‘To Autumn’ due to imagery |
| windows when visiting mr keates | window within a window | stylistic of campion style |
| woman sits on swing in forest | deep focus (both foreground and background in focus) | contrasts the youthful exuberance of background against the brooding couple in forground. With age, youthful energy only declines |
| siblings play and run through flowery fields | bucolic imagery, motif of the seasons | remind us of Romantic preoccupation with the beauty of the natural world motif of the seasons, as evident in “To Autumn”, contains temporal signifiers |
| Keats climbs tree to find nightingale nest | actor performances | evinces the poet’s human neurotic and brooding tendencies. captures how his creative brilliance comes from observance of his worldparticularly relevant to ‘To Autumn’ and ‘Ode to Nightingale’ |
| ballroom dancing scene | choreography | demonstrate the rituals of courtship of the context the young lovers must navigate through. help us understand effort which peopl will put themselves in in pursuit of love |
| fanny looks through window onto keates and brawne | mis-en-abyme | further draw attention to the peripheries of the frame itself, commentating on the film’s relationship to its original source material by arguing for the enduring influence of artistry |
| throughout | costume design | keats = dark attire to reflect his brooding and intro spective tendenciesbrawne = bright colours like red, a literary motif for seduction/desire to reflect her more outgoing interest in Keats at the start |
| Keats storming away angrily, cuts suddenly to him traversing a fair distance | montage | editing of a film and pace of shots can tonally affect a filmunexpected cut = brief moment of comic relief |
| people at various stages along the riverbed | staging, creates a tableau (a group of models or motionless figures representing a scene from a story or from history; a tableau vivant.) | staging can have significant impact on scene’s meaning and mood. In this instance, creates that references the Romantic images, also in painting too, contemporaneous to Keats |
| curtain billows over Brawne | symbolism | the billowing curtains symbolise the uncertainty and inner turbulence that Brawne likely feels in this moment, see the attentive rumination of her gaze. (particularly relatable to ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ for focus on turbulent effect of love) |
| Location/setting throughout | use of setting | setting reveal an interplay and coexistence of the natural world and the built environment, recognising the impossibility of the latter’s independence |
| John Keats standing on shore from perspective on Brawne, later flips to Keates seeing Brawne in the snow | POV shots, communicated by the out of focus | endows viewer same perspective as that of the character in question, improving capacity to relate to the romanctic longings that motivate respective stares. (relatable to Ode to a Nightingale, Bright Star! for assuming varying perspectives to evince different meanings) |
| Fanny and John playing as they walk back to picnic | dramatic irony | knowing something in a film that characters don’t. In this case, younger Brawne not being aware of Fanny kissing Keats. Purpose of this irony is humour, imbuing their courtship with gaiety. |
| collecting butterflies, close ups | close-up of nature | Romanticism’s interest in the natural world, inclusion of this shot can be interpreted as a critique of Romanticism. Keats (as a Romantic poet) try to document the world in their work, but ultimately it is only by experiencing the emotions Keats writes of first-hand that we may attain the truth he so profoundly seeks (relatable to Ode to Grecian Urn, as it posits a counterargument to equation of beauty and truth that Keats offers) |
| Brawne and Keats embrace in the garden,amidst family | distant framing | lovers framed a distance amidst other members of their family, to suggest the universe (from a third-person, disinterested perspective, like that assumed by Campion) doesn’t distinguish their particular love for one another any differently to the rest of the world. They all occur simultaneously and are subject to the same conditions of time’s finitude. |
| Brawne sitting and reading letters/poems/moments throughout movie | stark backlight | Campion periodically lights her characters almost entirely from behind. filmic convention from noir genre. in this film shrouded in darkness during moments of introspection, when their inner emotions are beyond reach, and we are left to infer them by consolidating what occured just prior. |
| Brawne and Keats lie together, saying goodbye | muted lighting | Campion uses muted lighting to conjure the sense that there is something ill-fated about their courtship/to foreshadow the dark tradgedy that concludes the film. secrecy that Capion characterises their relationship to be in, hiding from forces of time and nature, the ultimate conspirators to the undermining of any human connection (relatable to ‘When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be’ for complicating Keats’ conclusion that lasting repite can be found in a lover’s embrace, as even that is finite) |