John Keats

The career of John Keats was a lot shorter than those of the poets that we have already covered. He wrote and published poems from 1814-1820. It seems apparent through a lot of his sonnets and odes that he greatly feared aging and dieing. I think this had a lot to do with the fact the he had tuberculosis and was continuously sick. He knew that he would not be around for as long as most other poets and he wanted to be able to leave his mark. These fears are obviously shown in his sonnet “When I have fears” but when reading his work I enjoyed reading about this same idea in his odes, his most popular writings.

In the “Ode to a Nightingale” he shows his audience his fear of death. The first moment that I realized that this was going to be a dark poem is when I read the title. The nightingale is a bird that only sings in the night which is a symbol of darkness. This ode starts out by talking about the grief that the reader was going through and he felt like he had just taken some type of drug. This may have been an actual feeling of Keats because drugs were a common medicine for people suffering from sickness back in the 1800s. The speaker hears this nightingale and seems to have a sort of out of body experience. It was in the third stanza that I really felt like I could see Keats thoughts on death. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/ What thou among the leaves hast never known,/ The weariness, the fever, and the fret.” It is hear that the speaker wants to just leave this mortal world because of all the hardships. He continues by sating that it would be best to die listening to this song and it would also be pain free. I think that Keats was afraid of living in a world where he was sick and he had a lot of troubles. Maybe he was afraid that at the actual time of his death, he would also be in a lot of pain. If he was with this nightingale, he figured he could always listen to this beautiful song and forget about the hard ache that the nightingale knows nothing about. He then says “I have been half in love with easeful death.” I think that this line is a true reflection of how Keats was actually feeling. It is a matter of him coming to grips with the reality that he is going to die and maybe that in a way eases the pain of death. After the speaker talks about wanting to die here, he realizes that even in death he would not be treated fairly because his mortal ears would no longer be able to hear the song; therefore, it seems like it would not be worth it. The speaker thinks to himself that this bird is immortal and just goes around singing this song to the “forlorn” world. It is at this point that the speaker seems to remember that he is from the mortal world and comes back to his body where he does not know if what has happened was a vision or a dream. This is a very powerful poem, filled with emotion that I think directly relates to Keats’s life.

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, I did not feel like he was talking about his fear to death as much as his longing for youth. I think Keats was trying to relay the message that he wanted to go back in time to a place where he was not sick and life was just simple and beautiful. In this ode, the speaker is looking at an urn the whole time and examining all the pictures on it. I really enjoyed reading about the speaker’s reaction when looking at the picture of the piper and his lover. He describes the beauty of the piper’s song even though it is unheard and the beauty of the lover which will last forever in this picture as if it is frozen in time. It seems like Keats is making the speaker jealous of the fake world because he compares the forever lasting love of this boy and girl to mortal love which passes. This poem ends with two very strong line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think this is supposed to reflect the fact that the urn only knows about this beauty and does not have a grip on reality. I feel like Keats is jealous of this urn because I think that he wants the ability to be able to look on the world as a beautiful place and not what it actually is, a place of pain and death.