¶ … Keats and Hemingway
Although the literary texture John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and Ernest Hemingway's "A Very Short Story," have profoundly different tones, given that one was written during the Romantic period of the 19th century in England, and the other during the modernist period of 20th century American literature, both works have similar tales and attitudes towards love -- a military man seeks beauty and solace in the arms of a woman. Yet the man's love comes to naught because of a woman's faithlessness.
The Keats has a distinctly 'unreal' or crafted poetic tone, in contrast to the Hemingway attempt to have the quality of ordinary speech and life. Keats' poem is a ballad in the modern style. Hemingway's reads almost like a newspaper story in its quiet, factual description of its characters. Keats' poem is about a fairy queen, rather than an attempt at capturing reality, while the Luz of "A Very Short Story" is always recognizably human. But both show that romantic love is a false ideal, because it only exists in the knight or soldier's mind -- the men do not see their women for what the women really are like, they only see dreams.
The knight of the Keats poem falls in love with the queen of the title. She carries him away to a fantasyland. But then, after the experience of being in love with the fairy queen and reaping her treasures and rewards for a night, the man is cast off and nothing seems as wonderful as it did in the past, before he knew the ecstasy of a woman's love. Thus, although love may seem sublime when one is in love, when one is out of love, the poet suggests, the nature of love renders this casting-off almost too harsh to bear -- it drives the knight to despair and makes the Hemingway protagonist ill. Both thus, tales begin with beauty, and comforting a man of the world with feminine tenderness, and end with even more despair than when they began.
As is the case with the sonnet form, this sonnet is in fourteen lines. The rhyme scheme may vary in different tyes of sonnet, and Keats her uses a scheme of ABBA CDCDCD. The Shakespearian sonnet would normally end with a couplet, but Keats does not do that, effectively using two quatrains followed by a six-line conclusion. The meter for the sonnet is iambic pentameter, with variations that emphasize words
John Keats: A lyric Poem compared to a narrative one The poetry of John Keats: Common themes in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Both poems by John Keats "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" have a common theme: the transient nature of human desire. The poems reflect common Romantic preoccupations: exotic settings, art, and mysterious powers that serve to underline the limited
" The final line of the ballad, "And no birds sing" reinforces the idea of loneliness and emptiness, and creates an invisible link with the beginning of the poem, more precisely the first stanza which ends with the same line. At a closer reading, one notices that the roles of the knight and the lady change throughout the following stanzas, with each of them being successively dominant over the other. In
John Keats and Melancholic Delight: To Autumn To Autumn by John Keats is a testimonial of the Romantic Era. The poem is filled with the importance of individual fulfillment at the behest of societal decline. The stoic nature of Keats's To Autumn is viewed by most as despairingly melancholic. However, when looking for hope one finds an eternal hopefulness amongst his opining. Autumn is used to symbolize the dichotomy in existence of
John Keats The most widely respected source for the history of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, records as early as Chaucer in the fourteenth century a meaning for the word "star" used (as the OED puts it) "with reference to the pagan belief that the souls of illustrious persons after death appear as new stars in the heavens." This metaphor seemingly takes a long time to devolve to
poetry of John Keats inspires readers because of their lyricism, accessibility, and imagery. Many of Keats' poems focus on beauty as subject and theme, for beauty is a source of inspiration. Flowers and other natural objects like birds, trees, and supernatural creatures appear frequently in the works of John Keats to convey the theme of beauty. As one of the threads tying Keats' poems together, the theme of beauty
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