Themes 631y5z

I´m going to talk about the themes that Keats uses in his Poems. It would be true to say that the odes of Keats are the product of certain inner struggles or conflicts. The principal stress in the most important of these odes is a struggle between ideal and actual. They also imply the opposition between pleasure and pain, imagination and reason, fullness and privation, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream. Many of John Keats poems contain the themes of the effects of time, change, life vs. death, the mortality of human life, suffering, and beauty. Conflicts in Keats's Poems: •

ion / enduring art

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dream or vision / reality

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joy / melancholy

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the ideal / the real

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mortal / immortal

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life / death

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separation / connection

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being immersed in ion / desiring to escape ion

For example "Ode on a Grecian Urn" • In "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Keats talks about a esthetic beauty and perfection. Themes: - The efffects of time: • Time might change many things but it does not change art. The love for the art does not die, which is why it says "Forever piping songs forever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love!". - Art:

• concern.

Art is undisturbed unlike life. It is eternal and eternity leads to loss of

• Art, the urn, represents beauty. Beauty is truth and so art also represents truth. Another example: "When I have Fears that I may cease to be" This poem is an example of and English sonnet. Themes: - Death: • As the title of the poem implies the speaker of the poem fears what might happen when he dies. • The speaker wants to have an effect through his writing so that he some how lives on even though he is gone. The speaker sees death as the End and so he wants to do something before that.

Now i´m going to explain two more themes of this author The Inevitability of Death

Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to understand—and sur—the work of his predecessors. Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the mournful 1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”

The Contemplation of Beauty

In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), books (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” [1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” envies the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful. The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and eventually dies.