John Keats,a Contradictory Unity of Self-abandonment and Self-preservation
John Keats
His first surviving poem— An Imitation of Spenser —comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. In 1815, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy„s Hospital (now part of King‟s College London). Strongly drawn by an ambition inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, but beleaguered(围困) by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered periods of deep depression.
The Protestant Cemetery新教徒公墓，罗马 新教徒公墓 正式地叫 Cimitero acattolico (“非 宽容公墓”)和经常指 Cimitero degli Inglesi (“英国公墓”)是公墓 在 罗马位于近 Porta圣 Paolo沿着 Cestius金字塔小规模埃及样式 金字塔 修造 30BC作为坟茔并且以后合并到部分里Aurelian 墙壁 那毗邻公墓。地中海柏树和其他叶子在公墓 造成它反映在更加豪华的地区看见的公墓更加自然 的样式北欧. 因为公墓的名字表明，它是最后的休 息处非天主教徒 (不仅 基督教教会成员 或 英国人 民). [最早的已知的埋葬是那 牛津学生名为 Langton1738. 最著名的坟墓是那些英国诗人 约翰 Keats (1795-1821)和 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)。 Keats在罗马死了 结核病. 他的 墓 志铭名义上不提及他，是由他的朋友约瑟夫Severn 和查尔斯・布朗： “这个坟墓包含是临死的所有， 一个年轻英国诗人在他的临终，在他的心脏冤苦， 在他的敌人的恶意力量，渴望是这些词在他的坟茔 石头engraven ： 这里说谎名字是命令在水中的一。 “Shelley淹没了 意大利里维埃拉 他的灰是埋葬在 新教徒公墓。
John Keats
born Oct. 31, 1795, London, Eng. died Feb. 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States
The life of Keats
• John Keats was born in London on October 31st,1795. The son of a livery-stable manager （马厩的领班）, he had a limited formal education . When John was eight years old ,his father was killed in an accident .In the same tear his mother married again, but little later separate from her husband and took her family to live with his mother. John attended a good school where he become well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature. In 1810,his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother. In 1814,before completion of his apprenticeship ,John left his master after a quarrel , becoming a hospital student in London . Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke, he devoted himself increasingly to literature . In 1861 Keats became a licensed apothecary（药剂师） ,but he never practiced his profession , deciding instead to write poetry.
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development of his genius. Internally, however, he was afire with ambition and the love of beauty. Even at that, he did not discover his poetic vocation until late, given the fact that he died at the age of twenty-five and spent the last eighteen months of his life in a tubercular decline. His career lasted from 1816, when Keats renounced the practice of medicine, to the fall of 1819, when he stopped working on his last great, though incomplete, poem, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1856). One almost has to count the months, they are so few and precious. In fact, in a single month, May, 1819, he wrote four of his great odes—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and ironically, “Ode on Indolence.”This remarkable and courageous poet, the oldest of four children, was born to keepers of a London livery stable. His father was killed in a fall from a horse when John was eight; his mother died from tuberculosis when he was fourteen. His relatives arranged for schooling and apothecary training so that he might make a living, but the year he received his certificate, 1816, he began to devote himself to poetry. He wrote some good, but mostly bad, poetry, or at least poetry that does not add much to his reputation, until the summer of 1818. His reward was a brutal review of his major early work, Endymion, in a leading magazine of the day. Keats was criticized so severely that Percy Bysshe Shelley speculated that the review began Keats’s physical decline.Actually, the truth was much worse. Keats was nursing his brother Tom, who was dying from tuberculosis, when the reviews came out. Though he was too strong in character to be deeply affected by criticism, especially when he was a more astute critic of his poetry than his readers, a contagious illness could hardly be thwarted with character. In the fall of 1818, Keats also fell deeply in love with Fanny Brawne. They intendedto marry, but his illness soon made their future together impossible. Sadly, the futility of their love and passion offered important inspiration to Keats’s poetry. By late fall, 1819, in the same year that he hadwritten “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the odes, Lamia, and The Fall of Hyperion, his illness was severe enough to arouse his deep concern. In July, 1820, his influential volume “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,”and Other Poems was published. Keats, however, now separated from Fanny, ill, in desperate need of money, and unable to achieve his major ambition of writing a “few fine Plays” in the manner of Shakespeare, was utterly despondent. He later spent a few months under the care of the Brawnes, but left England for Italy in September, 1820, in an attempt to save his life in the milder Italian weather. Joseph Severn, a dear friend, nursed him until his death in Rome in February, 1821.Forever thinking aloud in his letters about the central concerns of existence, Keats once found purpose in this earthly life as “a vale of soul-making”; that is, while every human being perhaps contains a spark of divinity called soul, one does not attain an identity until that soul, through the medium of intelligence and emotions, experiences the circumstances of a lifetime. Thus the world has its use not as a vale of tears, but, more positively, as a vale of becoming through those tears. Keats’s soul flourished as rapidly as his genius, and the poetry is evidence of both.AnalysisLieben und arbeiten—to love and to work—are, psychologists say, the principal concerns of early adulthood. In John Keats’s case, they became, as well, the dominant themes of his most important poetry. The work theme includes both the effort and the love of creating beauty and the immortality Keats longed for as recompense. Once, perhaps exaggerating, Keats wrote that “the mere yearning and fondness” he had “for the Beautiful”would keep him writing “even if [his] night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them.” Not passing, however, was the tenacity of his ambition: “I would sooner fail than not to be among the greatest.” Keats’s quest for immortality takes several forms: It appears openly, especially in the sonnets and in “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode to Psyche” as the anxieties of ambition—being afforded the time, maintaining the will and energy, and, not least, determining the topic, or territory, for achievement. It includes a metamorphosis fantasy, whereby the young poet, whether immortal as in Hyperion: A Fragment(1820) or mortal as in the revised The Fall of Hyperion, becomes deified or capable of immortal poetry through absorption of divinely granted knowledge. The ambition/work theme also takes a self-conscious turn in The Fall of Hyperion, questioning the value to a suffering humankind of the dreamer-poet’s life and work. The love theme explores dreams of heterosexual bliss, but it also moves into the appropriate relationships to be had with art and nature. The imagination is the ally of love’s desires; reality and reason are their nemeses. In “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a better lover, in Lamia, a better place, are dreams which dissipate in the light of reality and reason. “Ode to a Nightingale” attempts a flight from reality through identification with beautiful song rather than through dream, but the result is an intensification of distress. “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” however, suggest perspectives on the human condition, nature, and art that can be maintained with honesty and deeply valued without recourse to dream. One could say that Keats’s love theme moves toward the understanding and acceptance of what is.Concomitant with the maturation of theme and perspective is Keats’s stylistic development. Like most poets, Keats went through phases of imitation during which he adapted the styles and themes he loved to his own work and ambitions. Leigh Hunt, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and always Shakespeare, provided inspiration, stylistic direction, and a community of tradition. Regardless of origin, the principal traits of Keats’s style are these: a line very rich with sound pattern, as in “with brede/ of marble men and maidens overwrought,” which also includes puns on “brede” (“breed”) and “overwrought” (as “delicately formed on” and as “overly excited”); synaesthetic imagery, or imagery that mingles the sense (“soft incense,”“smoothest silence”); deeply empathic imagery (“warmed jewels,” “all their limbs/ Locked up like veins of metal, crampt and screwed”); stationing or positioning of characters to represent their dramatic condition (so Saturn after losing his realm, “Upon the sodden ground/ His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,/ Unsceptered; and his realmless eyes were closed”); the use of the past participle in epithets (“purple-stained mouth,” “green-recessed woods”); and, of course, as with every great writer, that quality which one can only describe as Je ne sais quoi—I know not what—as in the lines from the sonnet “Bright Star”: “The moving waters at their priest-like task/ Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”Themes of ambition and accomplishment inform many of Keats’s sonnets. The claiming of territory for achievement is the focus of “How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Great Spirits Now on Earth Are Sojourning,” and the great “Ode to Psyche.” In “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for example, Keats recounts the discovery of Homer’s “demesne.”The extended metaphor of the sonnet is narrator-reader as traveler, poet as ruler, poem as place. The narrator, much-traveled “in the realms of gold,” has heard that Homer rules over “one wide expanse,” yet he has never “breath[ed] its pure serene.” During the oration of Chapman’s translation, however, he is as taken as an astronomer “When a new planet swims into his ken” or as an explorer, such as “stout Cortez,” when “He stared at the Pacific—and all his men/ Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” The complementary images of the distant planet and the immense ocean suggest both the distance the narrator is from Homeric achievement and its epic proportions. His reaction, though, represented through the response of Cortez, is heartening: while lesser beings look to each other for cues on what to think, how to react, the greater explorer stares at the challenge, with “eagle eyes,” to measure the farthest reaches of this new standard for achievement.Following the lead of his contemporary William Wordsworth, though with a completely original emphasis, Keats’s territory for development and conquest became the interior world of mental landscape and its imaginings. Wordsworth had defined his territory in his “Prospectus” to The Recluse (1798) as “the Mind of Man—/ My haunt, and the main region of my song.” Whereas Wordsworth believed that mind, “When wedded to this goodly universe/ In love and holy passion,” could create a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, Keats initially sought to transcend reality, rather than to transform it, with the power of the imagination to dream. “Ode to Psyche” explores Keats’s region and its goddess, who was conceived too late in antiquity for fervid belief. While Wordsworth asserts in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)that “something far more deeply interfused” could sanctify our experience with nature, Keats locates days of “holy . . . haunted forest boughs” back in a past that precedes even his goddess of mind. The only region left for her worship must be imagined, interior. As priest, not to nature, but to mind, the poet says he will be Psyche’s “choir” to “make delicious moan/ Upon the midnight hours,” her voice, lute, pipe, incense, shrine, grove, oracle, her “heat/ Of pale-mouthed prophet” dreaming in “some untrodden region of [his] mind.” Inthe “wide quietness” of this sacred microcosm, “branchèd, thoughts, . . ./ Instead of pines shall murmur inthe wind”; a “wreathed trellis of working brain” will dress “its rosy sanctuary”; the goddess’s “softdelight” will be all that “shadowy thought can win.” In keeping with the legend of Cupid as lover of Psyche,a casement will remain open at night “To let the warm Love in!” Keats’s topic becomes, then, how the mindis stimulated by desire to create imagined worlds, or dreams, rather than, as in Wordsworth’s case, how the mind is moved by love to re-create its perception of the real world.HyperionBesides finding his territory for achievement, Keats struggled as well with the existential issues of the artist’s life—developing the talent and maintaining the heart to live up to immense ambitions. It is to be doubted whether poets will ever be able to look to Shakespeare or to Milton as models without living in distress that deepens with every passing work. The “writing of a few fine Plays,” meaning Shakespearean drama, remained Keats’s greatest ambition to the end. Yet the achievement of Paradise Lost (1667) haunted him as well, and the first Hyperion was an attempt in its mold. Keats became more critical of Milton’s achievement during the course of composing Hyperion, however, for it was, “though so fine in itself,” a “curruption [sic]of our Language,” too much in “the vein of art,” rather than the “true voice of feeling.” In fact, Keats gaveup Hyperion because Milton’s influence weighed so heavily that he could not distinguish the poem’s excessively self-conscious artistry from its true beauty derived from accurate feeling.Aesthetic considerations aside, a recurring theme in Keats’s works of epic scope was the fantasy of poetic metamorphosis. The sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” introduces the wish for transformation that will enable the poet to reach Shakespearean achievement. The metaphor is consumption and rebirth through fire, as adapted from the Egyptian legend of the phoenix bird, which was said to immolate itself on a burning pile of aromatic wood every five hundred years to engender a new phoenix from its ashes. The narrator-poet lays down his pen for a day so that he might “burn through” Shakespeare’s “fiercedispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay.” To “burn through” must be read two ways in the light of the phoenix metaphor—as reading passionately through the work and as being burned through that reading. He prays to Shakespeare and the “clouds of Albion” not to let him “wander in a barren dream” when his long romance, Endymion, is concluded, but that “when . . . consumed in the fire” of reading King Lear, he may be given “new phoenix wings to fly at [his] desire.” Out of the self-immolating achievement of reading will arise a poet better empowered to reach his quest.The transformation theme of Hyperion exceeds the passionate wishfulness of “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” by stressing the need for “knowledge enormous,” as befits the poem’s epic ambitions. Hyperion is a tale of succession in which the Titans are supplanted by the Olympians as the reigning monarchs of the universe, with focus upon Hyperion the sun god being replaced by Apollo, the new god of poetry and light. It has been suggested that Hyperion becomes Keats’s allegory for his own relationship with his poetic contemporaries, especially Wordsworth. Keats had said that Wordsworth was Milton’s superior in understanding, but this was not owing to “individual greatness of Mind” as much as to “the general and gregarious advance of intellect.” Hyperion embodies this hypothesis of progress in its succession and transformation themes.The poem opens with Saturn, who was the supreme god of the Titans, in a position of perfect stasis—the stationing referred to above—stupefied by his loss of power—“His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,/ Unsceptered.” Thea, the bewildered wife of the as-yet-undeposed Hyperion, visits to commiserate. Sheinforms Saturn that the new gods are wholly incompetent; Saturn’s “sharp lightning in unpracticed hands/ Scorches and burns our once serene domain.” The question is: Why, with the world running perfectly, was there a need for change? Saturn, an image of pomposity and egotism, perhaps inspired by Wordsworth’s character, knows only of his personal loss:I have leftMy strong identity, my real self,Somewhere between the throne, and where I sitHere on this spot of earth.“Thea, Thea! Thea!” he moans, “where is Saturn?” Meanwhile, Hyperion is pacing his domain in the region of the sun, wondering: “Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?” In his anxiety he overreacts, attempting to wield more power than he ever possessed by making the sun rise early. “He might not,” which dismays him tremendously. The first book of this unfinished three-book epic ends with Hyperion sailing to earth to be with his fallen peers.At the same time, Saturn and Thea also reach those “regions of laborious breath” where the gods sit Dungeoned in opaque element, . . .Without a motion, save of their big heartsHeaving in pain, and horribly convulsedWith . . . boiling gurge of pulse.The Titans receive their deposed king with mixed response—some groan, some jump to their feet out of old respect, some wail, some weep. Saturn, being unable to satisfy their need to know why and how they have fallen, calls upon Oceanus, the former god of the sea, for not only does he “Ponderest high and deep,” he also looks content! Oceanus then reveals a law of succession particularly appropriate for the early nineteenth century: “We fall,” he says, “by course of Nature’s law, not force/ Of thunder, or of Jove.” Blinded by sheer supremacy, Saturn has not realized that, as he was not the first ruler, so he will not be the last. Nature’s law is the law of beauty. Just as heaven and earth are more beautiful than chaos and darkness, and the Titans superior in shape and will to heaven and earth, so the new gods signal another significant advance in being; “a fresh perfection treads,/ A power more strong in beauty, born of us/ And fated to excel us,” Oceanus explains,“as we pass/ In glory that old Darkness.” In short, the eternal law is that “first in beauty should be first in might.”On Apollo’s isle the important transformation is about to begin. Apollo, as a good Keatsean poet, can make stars throb brighter when he empathizes with their glory in his poetry; yet he is inexplicably sad. Mnemosyne the muse seeks to assist her favorite child, who aches with ignorance. She emits what he needs to know and he flushes withNames, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,Majesties, sovran voices, agoniesCreations and destroyings, all at oncePour[ing] into the wide hollows of [his] brain.Apollo shouts, “knowledge enormous makes a God of me” and “wild commotions shook him, and madeflush/ All the immortal fairness of his limbs.” It is like a death pang, but it is the reverse, a dying into life and immortal power. The poem ends incomplete with Apollo shrieking, Mnemosyne arms in air, and the truncated line—“and lo! from all his limbs/ Celestial * * *.” No one has been able to conjecture to the satisfaction of anyone else where the poem might have gone from there, although the result of Apollo’s transformation seems inevitable. He would replace Hyperion, effortlessly, in this pre-Darwinian, pre-Freudian, universe where sons, like evolving species, acquire power over the earth without conscious competition with their fathers. As Oceanus indicates, the Titans are like theforest-trees, and our fair boughsHave bred forth . . .. . . eagles golden-feathered, who do towerAbove us in their beauty, and must reignIn right thereof.However timorously, it would follow that Keats, bred on Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, would have to live up to, if not exceed, their accomplishments.This myth of progress would necessarily still require the superior poem to be written to support its prophetic validity. Keats knew that he needed deeper knowledge to surpass Wordsworth, but there was not much he could do about it. Though it was an attractive imagining, no god was likely to pour knowledge into the wide hollows of his brain. “I am . . . young writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness,” he wrote with characteristic honesty, “without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of anyone opinion.” Ironically, his dilemma brought out the strength his modern readers prize most highly, his courageous battling with, to use his favorite phrase of Wordsworth’s, “the Burthen of the mystery.” Caughtin this impasse between noble ambition and youthful limitation, Keats’s spirit understandably failed in weaker moments. His self-questioning was exacerbated when he reflected upon the frailty of earthly achievement. Such is the torment in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” the Grecian ruins brought to England by Lord Elgin.The narrator opens feeling “Like a sick eagle looking at the sky” in the face of the magnificent architectural ruins. Ironically, they are only the “shadow of a magnitude” that once was, an insubstantial image emphasizing how much has been lost rather than how much was once achieved. Human achievement wasted by time brings the narrator a “most dizzy pain” born of tension between body and soul over committingone’s life to mortal achievement. In “Ode on Indolence,” Keats enjoys a temporary respite from his demons—love, ambition, and poetry—in a state of torpor in which the body temporarily overpowers spirit. One morning the shadows come to him: love the “fair Maid”; “Ambition, pale of cheek,/ And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye”; and, “the demon Poesy.” At first he burns to follow and aches for wings, but body prevails: even poetry “has not a joy—/ . . . so sweet as drowsy noons,/ And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence.”The victory is transitory outside the poem; within it, a respite from ambition, love, and work is accepted.The Fall of HyperionAll of these issues—the quest for immortality; the region of quest as dream; the transformation essential to achieve the quest; the spiritual weakness inevitably felt in the face of the challenge to be immortal; and, beyond all these, an altruism that seeks to distinguish between the relative value of humanitarian works and poetry in behalf of suffering humanity—are melded in Keats’s second quest for epic achievement, The Fall of Hyperion. Following a brief introduction, the poem moves to a dream arbor reserved for the dreamer, who“venoms all his days,/ Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.” Remnants of a feast strew the ground; the narrator eats, partakes of a draft of cool juice and is transported through sleep and reawakening to a second dream kingdom. He finds himself this time amid remnants of an ancient religious festival. These dream regions represent Keats’s aspirations to romance and epic respectively. Off in the west, he sees a huge image being ministered to by a woman. The image is Saturn; the minister is Moneta, Mnemosyne’s surrogate. Moneta’s face is curtained to conceal the immense knowledge her eyes can reveal to those worthy of receiving her immortal knowledge. She challenges the narrator to prove himself so worthy by climbing the altar stairs to immortality, or dying on the spot. Cold death begins to mount through his body; in numbness he strives to reach the lowest step—“Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold/ Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;/ And when I clasped my hands I felt them not.” At the last moment, he is saved; his “iced feet” touch the lowest step and “life seemed/ To pour in at the toes.” He learns that he has been saved because he has felt for the suffering of the world, though he is only a dreamer, without hope for himself or of value to others. True poets, Moneta tells him, pour balm upon the world; dreamers increase the vexation of humankind. Although in his letters Keats gave precedence to “fine doing” over “fine writing” as “the top thing in the world,” the poem does not clarify whether humanitarians are above the poets of humankind, though both are unquestionably above the dreamers. The poem then moves to the metamorphosis that will make the dreamer a poet through the acquisition of knowledge. Moneta’s bright-blanched face reveals the immortal sorrow she has endured for eons; her eyes hold the narrator enthralled with the promise of the “high tragedy” they contain, for their light and the sorrowful touch of her voice reveal deep knowledge. He begs to know and she relates the fall of the Titans. The revelation begins the narrator’s transformation: “Whereon there grew/ A power within me of enormous ken./ To see as a God sees.” His vision opens with the “long awful time”Saturn sat motionless with Thea at his feet. In anguish the narrator sits on a tree awaiting action, but the pain must be endured, for knowledge does not come easily or quickly, not even in a dream. The narrator curses his prolonged existence, praying that death release him from the vale, until Saturn moves to speak and the narrator witnesses scenes of the beginning of things from Hyperion. The poem continues but this version also ends incomplete, with Hyperion flaring to earth.It is a poignant fact that Keats never believed that his poetry, his work, had come to anything, his epic endeavors left incomplete, no “few fine Plays” written. Writing to Fanny Brawne in February, 1820, he said that he had frequently regretted not producing one immortal work to make friends proud of his memory. Now frighteningly ill, the thought of this failure and his love for Fanny were the sole two thoughts of his long, anxious nights. Quoting Milton’s lines on fame from “Lycidas,” Keats wrote to her: “Now you divide with this (may I say it) ‘last infirmity of noble minds’ all my reflection.”Their love had earlier spawned his most important love poems, though he refused his created lovers the bliss of unreflecting love. It would seem unfortunate that dreams do not outlast the act of dreaming, but Keats’s romances, “The Eve of St. Agnes” and Lamia, approach wish-fulfillment more critically. “The Eve of St. Agnes” permits a love dream to become flesh to provoke a dreamer’s response to the contrast between dream and reality, though they are, in person, the same; Lamia permits a too-ordinary mortal to enter the love dream of a lovely immortal to elicit the likely response of the nondreamer to the experience of continuous, in this case, carnal, perfection. Together the poems serve to show that lovers cannot have it either way: Either reality will not be good enough for the dreamer, or the dream will not satisfy the extra-romantic desires of the nondreamer.“The Eve of St. Agnes”“The Eve of St. Agnes” presents an array of wish-fulfilling mechanisms that seek to alter, control, or purify reality—praying, suffering, drinking, music, ritual, dance, and, at the center, dreaming. This poem with a medieval setting opens with a holy beadsman, “meagre, barefoot, wan,” praying to the Virgin in the castle’s icy chapel. Though he is fleetingly tempted to walk toward the music dancing down the hall from a partywithin, he turns to sit among “rough ashes” in recompense for his and others’ sins. Among others praying this frigid night is Madeline, who follows the ritual of St. Agnes: If a maiden refrains from eating, drinking, speaking, listening, looking anywhere, except up to heaven, and lies supine when she retires, she will be rewarded with the vision of her future husband. The irony of the patron saint of virgins inspiring a heterosexual vision is lost on the young girl, panting as she prays for all “the bliss to be before to-morrow morn.” Meanwhile, Porphyro, her love, is in reality racing across the moors to worship his Madeline. As Madeline works on her dream, Porphyro will act on his desired reality—getting into Madeline’s bedroom closet where “he might see her beauty unespied,/ And win perhaps that night a peerless bride.”The lovers’ stratagems provide a weird culmination, though they move in complementary pattern. While Madeline is undergoing her ritualistic deprivations, Porphyro is gathering, through the assistance of her wily old nurse, Angela, a banquet of delights to fulfill deliciously her sensual needs; while she undresses, he gazes, of course, unseen; while she silently sleeps, he pipes in her ear “La belle dame sans merci.” When she awakens to find the man of her dream at her side, however, the seemingly perfect solution is shattered. Madeline’s dream of Porphyro was better than Porphyro and she tells him so: “How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!” She implores that he return to her as the dream. Porphyro arises, “Beyond a mortal man impassioned far/ At these voluptuous accents” andlike a throbbing star. . . . . . .Into her dream he melted, as the roseBlendeth its odor with the violet—Solution sweet.The moon of St. Agnes, which has been languishing throughout the poem, sets as Madeline loses her virginity. Madeline, however, comes out of the experience confused; she wanted a dream, not reality, and apparently she could not distinguish between them at their climax. Now bewildered, and feeling betrayed and vulnerable to abandonment, she chides Porphyro for taking advantage. He assures her of his undying devotion and the two flee the sleeping castle into the storm, for he has prepared a home for her in the southern moors. The drunken revelers from the party lie benightmared; Angela soon dies “palsy-twitched”; and the loveless beadsman, after thousands of Aves, sleeps forever among his ashes.A skeptical reading of the poem has found Porphyro a voyeur and (perhaps) a rapist, Madeline a silly conjurer whose machinations have backfired; an optimistic reading has Madeline and Porphyro ascending to heaven’s bourn. The language, imagery, and structure allow both interpretations, which is the way of complex ironic honesty. The dream experience, for example, has two parts: the first when Madeline awakens to find Porphyro disappointingly imperfect; the second when the two blend into “solution sweet.” It would seem that dream and reality have unified in the second part, but the first part is not thereby negated. Rather, the lovers are lost in sensory intensity, which, according to Keats, makes “all disagreeables evaporate.” Whether the moment of intensity is worth the necessary conjuration before or the inevitable disillusionment afterward is a judgment on the nature of romance itself, down to this very day.LamiaLamia provides the nondreamer, Lycius, with much more than the two ordinary lovers of “The Eve of St. Agnes” are permitted; but the question is whether more is better. T. S. Eliot wrote that humankind cannot stand very much reality; Keats suggests in Lamia that neither can we bear very much dreaming. Lamia, as imagination incarnate, provides her lover Lycius with a realized dream of carnal perfection that extends。
英国浪漫主义时期的主要诗人和他们的代表作
On Major Poets and Masterpieces of English RomanticPeriodChapterI:the background of the rise of English Romantic PeriodThe French Revolution of 1789 (French Revolution) brought hope to the future of human,and it impacted on British Society ,too. The British Industrial Revolution not only created wealth, but also intensifyied the contradiction between labor and capital. The transformation of the social structure and changes in the relationship between people and the traditions, man and nature promoted intellectual differentiation. Then, a group of better educated people felt confused about the society and they were at a loss what to do .In this context, the British Romantic literature rose.It originated in the end of the eighteenth century and became prosperous in the first half of the nineteenth century.ChapterII:the classification of poet in English romantic period2.1 the pioneer of English romantic literatureThe pioneer of romantic literature is poet Robert Burns who lived in late eighteenth century and William Blake. Burns draw nourishment from the folk songs in Scotland, ("Poems, chiefly in Scottish dialcet") is his masterpiece, specializing in Lyric and satire ; Blake's "songs of innocence" and "songs of experience" ,which describe the ideal society order,are creative and fresh,full of originality.2.2 the two schools of British Romantic literatureTwo opposing schools were formed in the formation of the romanticism.They are active romanticism and passive romanticism. Active romanticism is a positive trend of progress.Active romantic poets dare to face up to reality, criticize the social darkness and lead people to look ahead.Passive r omanticism is a reactionary countercurrent negative trend, it takes a negative attitude to escape, against the status quo, cling to the past and leads people to look back.2.2.1 the representatives of Active RomanticismThe emerged poets put forward the British Romantic literature to a climax.The representative poets are Byron, Shelley and Keats,they are active romanticist.Unlike the lake poets, they put more fighting consciousness and politic trends in his works. Shelley (1792 - 1822) is the most concentrated romantic poet and a British Utopian.Inhis poem "Queen Mab" ,filling up with fantasy and allegory, reflects the religious and private ownership of condemnation and change of social desire. The long poem "the revolt of Islam" criticizes the tyranny and bloodshed made by autocratic oppression to people and praiseds the struggle anti feudal made by revolutionary. He also wrote "Cenci family", "Ode to the west wind", "to a Skylark" and "song of freedom" and a large number of poems and dramas, as well as the famous paper "a defence of poetry". Drama "Prometheus Unbounded") is the representative work of Shelley, based on the ancient Greek Rome myth which is about the inevitable fate of the oppressed people and the suffering of the tyrant and predicted that the revolution will surely come. In his poems Shelley expressed opposition to authoritarian tyranny, sang the praises of struggle and prospected ideal social political environment which is filling up with freedom and happiness. Byron (1788-1824) is a famous romantic poet during the first half of nineteenth century. He traveled from place to place so his poems are full of exotic. His representative works "Don Juan" is a search on the capitalist system, leading people to think. Keats (1795 - 1821) was a talented poet, once under the impact of Wordsworth and others. He wrote the famous poem "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", indulging in the pastoral scenery of the ancient world.1:Posey Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)Posey Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is a poet and politician who is as famous as Byron in the British Romantic Literature. Engels called him "a gifted prophet", Marx called him "a true revolutionary socialist," "daring vanguard". At the age of 19 Shelley wrote "necessity of atheism “and 20 finished “the book to Irish people " and other two political works.All the books aroused big waves in the British at that time. The representative work of Shelley is his drama "Prometheus Unbounded" which made new fiction of the Greek mythology story.He added some symbolic image and changed the end that Prometheus and Zeus compromised to another one that Heracles freed Prometheus and overthrew Zeus’s tyranny. Prometheus is portrayed as a champion of the refuse to be cowed or submit images. Works with mythical form describes the inevitable end the suffering of the people and the tyrant's oppression, predicted that the revolution will come and the final victory; and also a detailed description of the beautiful scene after the victory of the revolution. The whole drama is full of great momentum and quite infectious.Shelley's poems with rich political color are the "Queen Mab" and "the revolt of Islam". In these poems, Shelley exposed and condemned the feudal tyranny and the church's sin, denied the oppression and exploitation of all forms of propaganda, ideaed of freedom and equality, called on the people to struggle. These poems artly reflects the passion, great momentum and the texture of the metal through the force. Shelley is also known to the world because of the lyric poems. His lyric masterpiece are"Ode to the west wind", "cloud" and "Skylark" etc.. These poems developed traditions that Wordsworth created about describing the nature, often reflects thepoet’s meticulous observation of nature.The feelings are sincere, shining with brilliant ideas.The style is untamed, sometimes melodious, the language is full of music and symbol images2 :KeatsJohn Keats (1795-1821) is known as the "one whose name was written in water of the people", Shelley called him "the most active, most young poet", "a flower dew bred". His representative works are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Grecian song", "", "Ode to the autumn” “katydids and crickets" and "bright star"which sh ow the love of the eternity of natural beauty and negation of the vulgar reality,permeating with the spirit of freedom. Keats's poems have the beauty of painting in art (color) and sculpture beauty (stereoscopic), show the aestheticism tendency. His five years of writing career achieved brilliant in the British Poetry artistry.3 :ScottWalter Scott (1771-1832) is the founder of the European historical novels, but also the romantic poet and novelist.What laid his status in the history of literature is a series of historical novels known as the "Scotland style", in which "Ivanhoe" is his masterpiece. This work was based on Britain in the end of the twelfth century, Ivanhoe ,a Saxon noble descendant , adventure protagonist, descring the contest, the castle, the knight love, grand Greenwood life scenes.It reflects the contradiction between Norman the conqueror Saxon nobles and the noble and reproducted of the twelfth century British ethnic conflicts, ethnic customs and each class life.Scott's historical novel adopted the romantic and realistic combinations of tactics, which have made three contributions for t he later historical novels’writing: one is to put the custom description into the historical novel, two is to set the main character as ordinary people in a historical novel, three is to mix historical novels with the distinctive atmosphere. These factors greatly influenced his contemporaries and later many American novelist.2.2.2 the representatives of Passive RomanticismBritish first true romantic masters are three poets known as the " Lake Poet” ,they are also representatives of Passive romanticism. The poet William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) and Robert Southey (1774 - 1843) lived in Cumberland lake ,northwest England, and has many similarities in wrting theory and ideas and thoughts, so they are known as the "Lake poets". Lake sent three poets in Medieval and patriarchal rural life, is a representative of romantic literature in the gentle qingli. The poet embrace contradictory attitude of the French Revolution, the capitalist industrial civilization and city civilization of disgust, to eulogize is patriarchal rural life and nature, like description of mysterious and bizarre scene with exotic scenery. Wordsworth is the greatest achievement of the lake poets, he and the "Lake Poets" another poet Coleridge published "Lyrical Ballads", become the foundation of British Romantic Literature works. Poems included in the poetrymostly done for Wordsworth, but Coleridge's poem "the ancient mariner" and "Kubla Khan" .which is full of illusion and strange imagery ,is also in it.1:WordsworthWordsworth is the greatest achievement of the lake poets, he and the "Lake Poets" another poet Coleridge published "Lyrical Ballads"which become the foundation of British Romantic Literature works. Poems included in the poetry mostly done for Wordsworth, but Coleridge's poem "the ancient mariner" and "Kubla Khan" also in it which,. Wordsworth's poetry described a landscape of lakes and mountains and pastoral life, singing the beauty of nature.Its style is simple, fresh and natural,so Wordsworth has been called the "poet laureate".Besides, Wordsworth's most important works of this period is the long poem "prelude".2:ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) is the main representative of British Romanticism, but also an important theorist and criticist. Coleridge’s representative work is "the ancient mariner", describing a strange voyage of an old seaman. The poem is a story full of magical beauty . It is to explore the life of crime and punishment, poet combined the Pantheism Thought that love all things in the universe with Christian thought, putting foeward love and Christian atonement thought. The true value of this poem is not the story itself or the philosophy it contains, but in a magic painting marine picture that author created for readers accuractly .The poetry of Coleridge represents a romantic mystery and fantasy and also explored the beauty of music in poems technically. His creative practice and construction of theory not only influenced his contemporaries, also affected Byron, Shelley and Keats who against his political opinions.Besides it still have important reference value to today's poetic art explorer.3: SoutheyRobert Southey (1774-1843) is the "Lake Poets" and a "poet laureate" in the title of the poet. In life, he is a great guy. But in literature and political popularity, he is more suspicious to be a hack writer.On the British royal family special ceremony he is supposed to write a poem. He wrote a lot of lyric poetry, based on middle societies and exotic which are mysterious His representative poem "the vision of judgment" sing the praises of George III and is to please the British royal family,which was mocked by Bryon.ChapterIII:conclusionThe British Romantic movement made its creation free from the bondage of ration. The traditional describing nature, focusing on the ration having changed to describe the inner world and paying great attention to the expression of emotion,centering on the "self" to build self romantic world are the three outstanding features of British Romantic Literature and the world. In the creative practice, the British Romantic writers hold high the banner of "back to the Middle Ages", absorbing a large number of nutrients from the Medieval Folk Literature so as to get rid of the shackles of classicalism.They began to play a free imagination ,to express a strong emotion and to attempt new reform s in the aspects of the context, language, form and etc. All these contribute a unique artistic style to British Romantic literature.。
JohnKeats英国诗人济慈市公开课一等奖省赛课微课金奖PPT课件
– From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation.
– The third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820.
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– In stanza 7, Keats turns back to the idea of life. The nightingale seems to live eternally because its song is the same now as it was in ancient days. Perhaps the biblical Ruth, for example, heard the nightingale's song as she gathered grain in the fields.
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John Keats 5/36
– Griefs and troubles crowded in upon him:
• his dearly loved brother, Tom, died; • he was in trouble about money; • he became ill with tuberculosis; • he fell in love but could not marry the one
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Odes
• Ode on Indolence • Ode to Psyche • Ode to a Nightingale • Ode on a Grecian Urn • Ode on Melancholy • To Autumn
5.4 济慈John Keats
Stanza 3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowfuland cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Analysis
Stanza 5: came back to the urn as a whole,reflecting the well-organized structure of the ode.Finally,the poet point out the relation between art and reality:Beauty is truth,truth beauty. What should be emphasized here is that :the poet felt the beauty by heart,and imagination plays an important role in this process.
对小镇的描写是非常富有现实意义的。小镇是这队祭祀行列的出 发点，又是这些村民们劳动生活的中心，通过对它们的联想，一 幅幅社会风俗画就会展现在我们面前。古瓮的图案不可能描绘小 镇的荒芜和静寂，但诗人的想象力却看到了这一点。村镇被遗弃 了，这不单是因为出走的人个个被禁锢在瓮上，也是因为那镇上 的人早在很久以前就消失了，唯有这古瓮上雕刻着的还栩栩如生。 这样，诗人又一次表明了他的信念：艺术是不朽的。
英文诗歌鉴赏对比研究-夜莺颂（济慈）和我孤独地漫游-像一朵云（华兹华斯）
IntroductionThe names Wordsworth and Keats are to a certain extent tantamount to Romanticism, especially from the perspective of modern academics.John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" seem to have been written with the intention of describing a moment in one's life, like that of the fleeting tune of a nightingale or the discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake. Within each of these moments a multitude of emotions are established, with each morphing from one to another very subtly. What are also more subtle about these two poems are their differences. While they do touch on very similar topics, the objects used to personify Keats' ideas on death and immortality differs from Wordsworth's ideas on an inherent unity between man and nature. Thus, the ideas represented by them do diverge at different points in the poems as well.Comparison of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud"JohnKeats uses this beauty to create a central theme in one of his prominent poems, "Ode to a Nightingale". The beauty in "Ode to a Nightingale" is that of the Nightingale's song. The beautiful song of the nightingale is reminding the poet of his own mortality by singing to his senses. It is the beauty that he sees in the world which makes it apparent that society is destined to perish and die. Keats shows the deepest expression of human mortality in this poem as he discusses the relationship to mature age and how it compares to the fluid song of the Nightingale. The man in the poem longs to flee from the world he lives and join the bird in its world.Keats's symbolism of the Nightingale and the contrast between life and death reveals his changing view of life resulting in the belief of death being his means to overcome pain. Keats begins this revelation by describing the beauty of life, but his use of fantasy words foreshadows a change in his outlook. By using the symbolism of the nightingale, Keats becomes uncertain of his view of life and begins to ponder theconcept of death. In the conclusion, Keats feels deceived by the nightingale's representation of life, and desires death to overcome his pain instead of enduring it in life.As Keats continues his thoughts, he becomes more and more skeptical of life. Fascinated by the nightingale, Keats recognizes the bird's innocence: "What thou among the leaves hast never known, /The weariness, The fever, and the fret". One would fret when uneasy or uncertain towards a matter. Keats reveals that the nightingale is oblivious to the concept of death as it sings its melody. The nightingale is completely free for it does not know about death. Keats becomes tormented by the innocence and freedom of the bird, as all of Keats' uncertainties regarding life and death overwhelm him: "Where but to think is to be full of sorrow". Living his life brings a constant reminder of his pain, driving Keats to change his opinion of life and death.Similarly, as a great poet of nature, William Wordsworth wrote many famous poems to express his love for nature, one of which is "I wandered lonely as a cloud". In the narrative poem, the poet successfully compared his loneliness with the happy and vital daffodils. The daffodils, the symbol of the nature, bring great joy and relief to the speaker. So Wordsworth's conception of nature is that nature has a lot to do with man, it can not only refresh one's soul and fill one with happiness, but it can also be reduced into a beautiful memory which will comfort one's heart when in solitude.I chose the poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth because I like the imagery in it of dancing daffodils. Upon closer examination, I realized that most of this imagery is created by the many metaphors and similes Wordsworth uses. In the first line, Wordsworth says "I wandered lonely as a cloud". This is a simile comparing the wondering of a man to a cloud drifting through the sky.I suppose the wandering cloud is lonely because there is nothing up there that high in the sky besides it. It can pass by unnoticed, touching nothing. Also, the image of a cloud brings to mind a light, carefree sort of wandering. The cloud is not bound by any obstacle, but can go wherever the whim of the wind takes it.This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworthcanon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet's wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. Romantic poet William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" extols the virtue of nature and highlights the value of participating in its beauty.ConclusionIn "Ode to a Nightingale" and" I wandered lonely as a cloud ", both poems tells of an experience in which the human characters encounters nature in the poems, and the experiences are handled quite differently in the two poems. Natures have always held significance in human lives. They achieved heights unattainable to humans and sung while they did that. These two poets use nature as their muse and also symbolically for the human experience. The two poems, "Ode to a Nightingale" and "I wandered lonely as a cloud", clearly portray both of the poets' treatment on the idea of escape.Both poems construct vivid illusions but insist on their desolating failure. The poems do seem similar in several ways because in both, Keats and Wordsworth do portray symbols of realism while depicting the nature, as well as the spectrum of emotions from grief to joy. The central themes of the two poems are neither a nightingale nor a daffodil, but, the poets' eternal search for a center of refuge in a world of flux. It is through such a conception that Keats and Wordsworth sets to resolve the dichotomy between the world of the ideal and that of reality within the order of experience.Reference[1]Plumly, Stanley.: "The immortal evening: a legendary dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb." New Y ork; London: Norton, 2014. pp. 368. (2014)[2]Lau, Beth.: review of Stillinger, Jack. "Romantic complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth." Studies in Romanticism (47:3) 2008, 420-5. (2008)[3]Horrell, William C.: review of Milnes, Tim. "The truth about Romanticism: pragmatism and idealism in Keats, Shelley,Wordsworth and Coleridge."Wordsworth Circle (42:4) 2011, 266-9. (2011)[4]Burkett, Andrew.: review of Roe, Nicholas. "John Keats: a new life." Studies in Romanticism (54:1) 2015, 138-42. (2015)[5]Michael, Timothy.: review of Milnes, Tim. "The truth about Romanticism: pragmatism and idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge." Romanticism (19:1) 2013, 101-3. (2013)[6]Scott, Matthew.: "Wordsworth among the Romantics." In (pp. 749-66) Gravil, Richard; Robinson, Daniel (eds). The Oxford handbook of William Wordsworth. Oxford; New Y ork: [2015:458328]. (2015)[7] Wu, Duncan.: "Wordsworth and sensibility." In (pp. 467-81) Gravil, Richard; Robinson, Daniel (eds). The Oxford handbook of William Wordsworth. Oxford; New Y ork [2015:458328]. (2015)。
Lecture 7, John Keats
我看不出是哪种花在脚旁
什么清香的花挂在树枝上 在温馨的幽暗理,我只能猜想 这时令该把哪种芬芳 赋予这果树,林莽和草丛 这白枳花,和田野的玫瑰 这绿叶堆中易凋谢的紫罗兰 还有五月中旬的娇宠 这缀满了露酒的麝香蔷薇 他成了夏夜蚊蚋嗡营的港湾
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
A Great Romantic Poet
Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, which celebrated the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are essentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time .
Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among “the English poets” when he had died.
英美文学 人物介绍 John Keats(济慈) Major Works
-- the Poetry of John Keats
Brief Introduction of Keats’ Poems
• Keats’ poetry, characterized by exact and closely-knit construction, emotional descriptions, and by force of imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world. • His artistic aim is to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the miserable reality of his day. He sought to express beauty in all his poems. His leading principle is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.
Five Long Poems
• Endymion (Luna in Greek Mythology)恩底弥 翁 (his first long poem) • Isabella 伊莎贝拉 （The Pot of Basil） • The Eve of St. Agnes 圣·爱格尼斯节前夕 爱格尼斯节前夕 • Lamia 莱米亚 • Hyperion 赫里波昂
Hyperion
• The opening page of the manuscript of Keats's epic fragment, `Hyperion', begun in 1818 but not published until 1820, which was considered by Keats's contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. It was never finished.
JohnKeats英文简介
JohnKeats英文简介John KeatsJohn Keats (1795-1821), major English poet, despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Keats’s poetry describes the beauty of the natural world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination. His skill with poetic imagery and sound reproduces this sensuous experience for his reader. Keats’s poetry evolves over his brief career from this love of nature and art into a deep compassion for humanity. He gave voice to the spirit of Romanticism in literature when he wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.” Twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot judged Keats's letters to be 'the most notable and the most important ever written by any English Poet,” for their acute reflection s on poetry, poets, and the imagination.II Early LifeKeats was born in north London, England. He was the eldest son of Thomas Keats, who worked at a livery stable, and Frances (Jennings) Keats. The couple had three other sons, one of whom died in infancy, and a daughter. Thomas Keats died in 1804, as a result of a riding accident. Frances Keats died in 1810 of tuberculosis, the disease that also took the lives of her three sons.From 1803 to 1811 Keats attended school. Toward the end of his schooling, he began to read widely and even undertook a prose translation of the Aeneid from the Latin. After he left school at the age of 16, Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon for four years. During this time his interest in poetry grew. He wrote his first poems in 1814 and passed his medical and druggist examinations in 1816.III Life as a PoetIn May 1816 Keats published his first poem, the sonnet 'O Solitude,' marking the beginning of his poetic career. In writing a sonnet, a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, Keats sought to take his place in the tradition established by great classical, European, and British epic poets. The speaker of this poem first expresses hope that, if he is to be alone, it will be in “Nature’s Observatory”; he then imagines the “highest bliss” to be writing poetry in nature rather than simply observing nature. In another sonnet published the same year, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,' Keats compares reading translations of poetry to awe-inspiring experiences such as an astronomer discovering a new planet or explorers first seeing the Pacific Ocean. In “Sleep and Poetry,” a longer poem from 1816, Keats articulates the purpose of poetry as he sees it: “To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” Within a year o f his first publications Keats had abandoned medicine, turned exclusively to writing poetry, and entered the mainstream of contemporary English poets. By the end of 1816 he had met poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, editor of the literary magazine that published his poems. He had also met the leading romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.“Endymion,” written between April and November 1817 and published the following year, is thought to be Keats's richest although most unpolished poem. In the poem, the mortal hero Endymion's quest for the goddess Cynthia serves as a metaphor for imaginative longing—the poet’s quest for a muse, or divine inspiration.Following “Endymion,” Keats struggled with his assumptions about the power of poetry and philosophy to affectthe suffering he saw in life. In June of 1818, Keats went on a physically demanding walking tour of England’s Lake District and Scotland, perhaps in search of inspiration for an epic poem. His journey was cut short by the illness of his brother Tom. Keats returned home and nursed his brother through the final stages of tuberculosis. He threw himself into writing the epic “Hyperion,” he wrote to a friend, to ease himself of Tom’s “countenanc e, his voice and feebleness.'An epic is a long narrative poem about a worthy hero, written in elevated language; this was the principal form used by great poets before Keats. The subject of “Hyperion” is the fall of the primeval Greek gods, who are dethroned by the Olympians, a newer order of gods led by Apollo. Keats used this myth to represent history as the story of how grief and misery teach humanity compassion. The poem ends with the transformation of Apollo into the god of poetry, but Keats left the poem unfinished. His abandonment of the poem suggests that Keats was ready to return to a more personal theme: the growth of a poet's mind. Keats later described the poem as showing 'false beauty proceeding from art' rather than 'the true voice of feeling.' Tom’s death in December 1818 may have freed Keats from the need t o finish “Hyperion.”Two other notable developments took place in Keats’s life in the latter part of 1818. First, “Endymion,” published in April, received negative reviews by the leading literary magazines. Second, Keats fell in love with spirited, 18-year-old Fanny Brawne. Keats's passion for Fanny Brawne is perhaps evoked in 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' written in 1819 and published in 1820. In this narrative poem, a young man follows an elaborate plan to woo his love and wins her heart.Keats’s great crea tive outpouring came in April and May of 1819, when he composed a group of five odes. The loose formal requirements of the ode—a regular metrical pattern and a shift in perspective from stanza to stanza—allowed Keats to follow his mind’s associations. Lite rary critics rank these works among the greatest short poems in the English language. Each ode begins with the speaker focusing on something—a nightingale, an urn, the goddess Psyche, the mood of melancholy, the season of autumn—and arrives at his greater insight into what he values.In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale’s song symbolizes the beauty of nature and art. Keats was fascinated by the difference between life and art: Human beings die, but the art they make lives on. The speaker in the poem tries repeatedly to use his imagination to go with the bird’s song, but each time he fails to completely forget himself. In the sixth stanza he suddenly remembers what death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his own humanity.In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' the bride and bridegroom painted on the Grecian urn do not die. Theirlove can never fade, but neither can they kiss and embrace. At the end of the poem, the speaker sees the world of art as cold rather than inviting.The last two odes, 'Ode on Melancholy' and 'To Autumn,” show a turn in Keats’s ideas about life and art. He celebrates “breathing human passion” as more beautiful than either art or nature.Keats never lived to write the poetry of 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts' to which he aspired. Some scholars suggest that his revision of “Hyperion,” close to the end of his life, measures what he learned about poetry. In the revision, 'The Fall ofHyperion: A Dream,' Keats boldly makes the earlier poem into the story of his own quest as poet. In a dream, the poem’s speaker must pass through death to enter a temple that receives only those who cannot forget the miseries of the world. Presiding over the shrine is Moneta, a prophetess whose face embodies many of the oppos ites that had long haunted Keats’s imagination—death and immortality, stasis and change, humankind’s goodness and darkness. The knowledge Moneta gives him defines Keats’s new mission and burden as a poet.After September 1819, Keats produced little poetry. His money troubles, always pressing, became severe. Keats and Fanny Brawne became engaged, but with little prospect of marriage. In February 1820, Keats had a severe hemorrhage and coughed up blood, beginning a year that he called his “posthumous existence.” He did manage to prepare a third volume of poems for the press, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.In September 1820, Keats sailed to Italy, accompanied by a close friend. The last months of his life there were haunted by the prospect of death and the memory of Fanny Brawne.。
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科技信息IntroductionAs the abandonment of self is described by many critics and scholars as an“important romantic character”for Romantic poets(Benton33),it seems to be a tradition that Romantic poets are always pinned down by their inten-tions to reach sublimity,and their identification and expansion of egoism are therefore generally ignored.Even the poets themselves,emphasize their abil-ity to surrender their individual thoughts to a grander existence.John Keats,the poet who puts forward the very concept of“Negative Capability”,is one of these poets.In a letter to his brother in1817,Keats writes,“…I mean Negative Capability,that is,when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,mysteries,doubts,without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration,or rather obliterates all consideration”(Keats).As a Romantic poet,Keats does not care whether his thoughts can be explained fully by rational arguments,but focuses on the emotional passions which give him an obscure understanding of a sublime beauty.Even an ob-scure understanding,however,sometimes may seem to be dispelled,which allows passions to take over his mind completely:“I carry all matters to an extreme-so that when I have any little vexa-tion it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles-then and in that tem-per if I write to any friend I have so little self-possession that I give him mat-ter for grieving at the very time perhaps when I am laughing at a Pun”.(Ke-ats191)By reminding friends of his strange temper,Keats reveals his constant loss of“self-possession”,which prevents him from behaving the social eti-quette properly,indicating his loss of self-identity to a certain extent.Apart from the interpersonal relationships,these passions are so strong that they even keep Keats from distinguishing between moral ridiculousness and righteousness:“I feel in myself all the vices of a Poet,irritability,love of effect and ad-miration-and influenced by such devils I may at times say more ridiculous things than I am aware of”.(Keats271)In this letter,Keats violates some restrictions and disciplines set by the civilized society by expressing“more ridiculous things than[he][is]aware of”.In this way,he gets rid of cultural experiences and norms so thoroughly that even he himself feels shocked and guilty when regaining rationality.Though Keats’emphasis on the importance of the ability to loss the in-dividual self is so strong that his individual personality seems to have been completely overwhelmed by the imaginary sublimity,he also urges for the preservation and pursuit of self-identity.In the criticism of“Isabella”(Davies79),Keats says,“If I may so say, in my dramatic capacity I enter fully into the feeling:but in Propria Persona I should be apt to quiz it myself”(Keats391).By saying this,on one hand, the poet admits his ability to feel extreme empathy for the characters in the poem,especially for Porphyro,who pursues his love passionately regardless of class and wealth distinctions.Keats’empathy towards Porphyro draws from his personal experience where he loves his neighbor feverishly until he exhaled his last dying breath,despite his poverty and weakness.On the oth-er hand,more importantly,he states that he“should be apt to quiz[the dra-matic capacity][himself]”,indicating preservation of the individual perspec-tive is essential even during the process of self-abandonment.Furthermore, according to Keats,men“are not Souls…till they acquire identities,till each one is personally itself”.In this way,he regards the meaning of life on earth as a process of soul-making.In other words,everything human beings do is for the pursuit and discovery of individuality,including composing poetry.If this is the case,then the ultimate aim of poetry is just to help men to self-re-alize through finding their souls and identities.As a result,it seems that on one hand,the poet speaks highly of the ability to lose one’s identity in order to achieve the state of extreme beauty and ecstasy,and he himself sometimes can achieve a state of absolute self-abandonment.On the other hand,however,he indicates the ultimate aim of poetry is to discover one’s soul.Even if he loses his identity partially or completely for some time,he does this in order to introspect into his ownmind and heart deeply and discover a truer self.In this way,Keats does not emphasize either side severely,but urges for a balance between self-aban-donment and self-preservation,which may lead to a result of self-discovery.I“Ode to a Nightingale”,a poem written in1819when Keats had known his soon-coming death,may serve as a perfect embodiment of Keats’idea. It portrays a circular and harmonious journey,as the narrator,though suffer-ing physically and mentally,manages to come back to his realistic world and regain his identity.In this way,by analyzing causations and processes of self-abandonment,self-preservation,and self-discovery in this poem,it is possible to understand this poem,as well as Keats’ideas.Before the narrator enters the world of the imaginary,his hatred towards reality and desire for sublimity can indicate his tendency of sacrificing iden-tity in order to achieve the ecstasy.Firstly,by portraying his sufferings,the poet makes it reasonable and desperate to quit the painful reality.Unlike other odes which always begin with appeals for the objects praised,this poem starts with a description of the narrator:“My heart aches,and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense,as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…”(ll.1-3),indicating that the only concern of the narrator is his endless suffering.Furthermore,exaggerated expressions like“numbness”,“hemlock”,and“opiate”,which are all related to a loss of consciousness to some extent,not only express the extreme pain of the narrator,but his desire to lose logic,senses,identity as well.Apart from his individual sorrows,the narrator also describes suffering as inevitable for every life on earth:The weariness,the fever,and the fretHere,where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy shakes a few,sad,last gray hairs,Where youth grows pale,and spectre-thin,and dies;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.(ll.21-30)In the first four lines,the poet lists the physical suffering of people in detail,including“weariness”,“fever”,“fret”,“palsy”and Tuberculosis. The reaction of man,however,is barely to“sit”and“hear each other groan”.Therefore,the gap between the enormous varieties of miseries and the sole solution of human beings elicits a feeling of helplessness from read-ers.In the last four lines,instead of physical pains,mental sufferings are portrayed by involving“despairs”,“Love”and“Beauty”.What’s interest-ing is,“despairs”in line twenty-six is treated as a countable common noun, indicating there are so many despairs that it is very difficult to distinguish between them.“Love”and“Beauty”are proper names.This shows Love and Beauty are so unique and rare,indicating the narrator’s disappointments to-wards the reality and his desire for beauty.Besides,a vivid language is em-ployed and thus deepens the sorrowful atmosphere by personifying the palsy as an old but obstinate specter with“a few,sad,last grey hairs”,and Love and Beauty as a powerless female,who though wishes to help,can do noth-ing but“keep lustrous eyes”and pine.Apart from portraying the inevitable and numerous miseries of men,the narrator also describes the sublime things,which stands for forgetfulness,re-lief,ease and happiness,showing his wish to quit the real but sorrowful world.Right after the first few lines where the narrator describes his individu-al suffering,an unrelated line is inserted abruptly:“One minute past,and Lethe-wards had sunk…”(l.4).In this line,the poet combines two normally irrelevant or even contradictory thing to create a majestic effect.It seems ri-diculous as“one minute”is an extremely short time in the real world while “Lethe”is a magnificent river existing only in legend.However,as Lethe is the river of forgetfulness which wipes away memories and experiences,the concept of time becomes nonsense--one minute is equal to Eternity.In this way,the forgetfulness and immortality represented by the river Lethe is really appealing for the sad narrator,and contribute to his self-abandonment.John Keats,a Contradictory Unity of Self-abandonment and Self-preservationUniversity of Macau Chen Qianwei科技信息In addition,the happiness of the nightingale also serves as an appeal and contributes to the narrator’s abandonment of his individual identity:‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,But being too happy in thine happiness,--That thou,light-winged Dryad of the trees,In some melodious plotOf beechen green,and shadows numberless,Singest of summer in full-throated ease.(ll.5-10)In these lines,life for the nightingale seems to be extremely easy;it en-joys both physical and mental vitality.The phrase“full-throated ease”is like a paradox as“ease”and“full-throated”,which is not a common state and requires a lot of energy,can never be achieved at the same time in the real world,indicating the bird’s invulnerability to physical pains.In this way,for the sick narrator who is harried by“numbness pains”(line1),using full energy to sing is a luxury or even wasteful to a certain extent.Besides, the spiritual happiness of the bird can be felt as it is connected with energet-ic words like“light-winged”,“beechen green”,“summer”,“Flora”and “sun-burnt green”,indicating the mental condition of the narrator,though has never been revealed evidently,is heavy,grey,and like a sluggish winter. Thus,an enormous contrast between the two is drawn,leading to the envy and sadness of the narrator,even if he states he is“too happy”and not“jeal-ous”.Pursuant to the contrast between the reality and the imaginary,the nar-rator’s desire to lose his identity and join the sublime is so strong that even a draught of vintage which can bring him nearer to the sublime state makes him nervous and longing: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 Proven?al song,and sunburnt mirth!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 mouthThat I might drink,and leave the world unseen,And with thee fade away into the forest dim:(ll.11-20)In these lines,instead of portraying his suffering or the ecstasy in the sublimity,the narrator starts to imagine what he MIGHT hear and see in that magnificent state.As he is so agitated by these possibilities,he deepens his desire from a physical level to a spiritual level.In the first four lines,he de-scribes drinking a draught of vintage as a possibility for vitality,an energetic and healthy physical state,by referring to“Flora”,“country green”,“dance”,“Proven?al song”and“sun-burnt mirth”.In the following four lines,however,the narrator is concerned more about inspirations brought by that world,by mentioning“the blushful Hippocrene”,a fountain of the mountain where the Muses lives.In this way,the narrator can be cheered solely through the possibility of fading into sublimity;because of this bright prospect,he is not concerned about his physical situation only,but desires more,including a metaphorical inspiration.He eventually states“[he]might drink,and leave the world unseen”,indicating he cannot hold his own iden-tity anymore,and plans to take the path and dissolve into sublimity.In this way,by comparing the agony of reality to the ecstasy of sublimi-ty,the narrator shows his wish to lose his identity,in order to have a taste of the magnificent world constructed by imagination.IIAlthough the narrator shows his desire to lose his identity distinctively by portraying the enormous contrast between ghastliness of the reality and the ecstasy of the imaginary,his reluctance before entering sublimity implic-itly indicate his wish to keep his identity.Firstly,as the narrator is hesitant to lose his identity to some extent,it shows that he wants to cherish and retain his own mind.Though the narrator starts to portray his sufferings and pains at the very beginning,he does not surrender and lose his identity until line thirty-four.Every line between these two points seems to form a difficult self-persuasion:The poet has to use extremely vivid and hyperbolic language to describe the suffering of men as well as the possibilities for an easeful and peaceful life after the self-abandonment(see examples demonstrated in I),only to persuade him-self to forget about his suffering and identity.In addition,even after the narrator has decided to go with the sublime, sufferings of the whole human species in reality,however,still linger in his head even when he IS dissolving:“Fade far away,dissolve,and quite forget/ What thou among the leaves hast never known,/The weariness,the fever, and the fret/Here,where men sit and hear each other groan;/where palsyshakes a few,sad,last grey hairs,/Where youth grows pale,and spec-tre-thin,and dies;/Where but to think is to be full of sorrow…”(ll.21-27).A paradox has been created when the poet keeps persuading himself to “quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known”.On one hand, the narrator is trying to tell himself the hideousness of the real world by list-ing all the suffering in detail.On the other hand,however,by repeating and portraying the miseries so intensely,he cannot help but remembers these sufferings automatically.In this way,this process shows not only his hesita-tion towards losing identity,but ideas about pain and suffering,ironically, help him to bear the reality in mind as well.Therefore,the narrator is a contradictory unity.Before entering ecstasy, on one hand,he persuades himself to abandon his identity by comparing the reality with the sublimity;on the other hand,he is reluctant to loss himself and manages to bear an idea about reality in mind.After having tasted the sublime,however,the narrator cannot help thinking about miseries and woes of human beings even in a much deeper way.IIIBecause of the very struggles and balances of self-abandonment and self-preservation,the narrator finally comes back to the reality and arrives at a place where his deepest individuality lives.Firstly,the visions of the sublime brought by self-abandonment provide the narrator with an extreme tranquility which is inaccessible in reality.This kind of feeling is elicited because of the enormous gap between the expecta-tion of the narrator and his actual experiences.Before entering the state of ecstasy,the narrator uses words like“beechen green”,“country green”,“sun-burnt mirth”,“forest dim”,indicating his wish for bright colors and light;he also uses“full-throated”,“dance”,“Proven?al song”,showing his prospect for lively noises.The true circumstance in the sublime world,how-ever,is quite the opposite:“But there is no light,/Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown/Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways…”(ll.48-50).This unexpected result may shock the narrator so much that his concern about the physical suffering is left behind completely,which allows him to introspect into his real attitudes towards death and living.In addition,the quietness and peacefulness created by the absolute darkness also help:I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,But,in embalmed darkness,guess each sweetWherewith the seasonable month endowsThe grass,the thicket,and the fruit-tree wild;White hawthorn,and the pastoral eglantine;Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;And mid-May’s eldest child,The coming must-rose,full of dewy wine,The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.(Stanza V)In the first two lines,by saying“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs”,the narrator seems to indicate his inability to embrace the sublimity because of the loss of visual acuity and his ordinary olfactory sensation.However,the loss of his physical eyes seemed to have opened his inner eyes;by following his own heart,the narrator is able to“see”the general shape of“the grass”,“the thicket”,“the fruit-tree”,as well as colors the hawthorn white and distinguishes the variety of the eglantine.Plants,flowers and other surrounding elements are thus correlated through synesthesia.He even manages to imagine an animat-ed picture with violets fading fast and musk-rose coming out.In this way, the narrator’s admiration towards nature is so immense that even the mur-murous flies,which can spread diseases,are related with eves of summer,a time involving both serenity and vitality.Because of the tranquility created by the self-abandonment,the narra-tor eventually manages to introspect into his deepest mind:“Darkling I lis-ten;and,for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/To take into the air my quiet breath…”(ll.61-64).The significance is,it is the very first time that the narrator reveals his opinion towards death directly and clearly,though he has portrayed numerous and detailed suffering of men in previous lines.By admitting he is“half in love with easeful Death”,the narrator indicates he also loves the living equally,and it is the physical pains that blind the eyes of his mind.After the very fundamental question that troubles the narrator so much has been elicited,the preservation of identity then leads to his decision.By saying“The voice I hear this passing night was heard/In ancient days by emperor and clown”(ll.73-74),the narrator indicates death is an inevitable journey for every single man,including himself.（下转第171页）科技信息However,as “thou wast not born for death,immortal Bird ”(line 70),the nightingale is different.In this way,he can never achieve an eternal ecstasy like the bird,as when human beings die,they simply “be-come a sod ”(l.69)and nothing remains.If this is the case,then by uttering “The same that oft-times hath/Charmed magic casements,opening on the foam/Of perilous sea,in fairy lands forlorn ”,the narrator eventually sees the other side of death-it does not only mean eternal ease and peace,but ever-lasting loneliness as well:Forlorn!The very word is like a bellTo toll me back from thee to my sole self!Adieu!The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do,deceiving elf,Adieu!Adieu!Thy plaintive anthem fades …(ll.81-85)Therefore,because of the self-abandonment,the narrator ’s own strug-gle towards death and living is exposed;and because of the self-preserva-tion,he finally chooses to live by finding out the dark side brought by death as well as his deepest desire.IVThe balance of self-abandonment and self-preservation not only helps the narrator to introspect into his mind,but the poet himself as well.Keats composed this very poem when he was tortured by tuberculosis,a disease in-volving chronic coughing and constant hematemesis until the death of the patient.At that time,the poet was struggling to make a choice between a peaceful death and a torturous life,and only through composing poems could he comfort his sorrows.In this way,this poem is in line with the real situa-tion of the poet and also raises the very to-be-or-not-to-be question.Therefore,the sublime realm brought by the nightingale which has lim-itless and unchangeable vitality,happiness and ease can be regarded as a symbol for the positive side of death.The sorrowful and suffering reality in the poem,evidently,represents the struggling life of Keats himself.If this is the case,Keats ’also involve his own identity in this poem.Although it is evident that all lines about physical suffering have some-thing to do with Keats ’life,line thirty-six stands out as it describes exactly the symptoms of tuberculosis:“…youth grows pale,and spectre-thin,and dies ”,indicating Keats ’extremely sorrow for his premature death as well asthe desire for a healthy body and a long life.Moreover,the identity and memory of the poet are involved when he re-fers to Ruth,a female who has lost her husband and son,as Keats ’himself has undergone the loss of his parents and dearest brother.Therefore,by say-ing “Through the sad heart of Ruth,when,sick for home,/She stood in tears amid the alien corn;The same that oft-times hath/Charmed magic case-ments,opening on the foam/Of perilous seas,in fairy lands forlorn ”(ll.77-80),the poet expresses his feeling of loneliness and helplessness;the whole world for him seems to be forlorn and alien.However,as Ruth eventu-ally gains her courage and starts a new life,Keats may also indicate his wish to fulfill his short life to the largest extent.To sum up,both self-abandonment and self-preservation are important elements in Keats ’poems,as a deeper understanding of self can be achieved through a harmonious balance of these two.The narrator in the po-em “Ode to a Nightingale ”can be seen as a representation of Keats;though hesitates and struggles for some time,he eventually chooses to leave the sub-limity and fulfill his short and suffering life.Bibliography ［1］Benton,Richard P.“Keats and Zen.”Philosophy East and West 16,No.1/2(1966):33-46［2］Bisson,L.A.“Rousseau and the Romantic Experience.”The Modern Language Review 37,No.1(1942):37-49［3］Davis,R.T.“Was ‘Negative Capability ’Enough for Keats?”Studies in Philosophy 55,No.1(1985):76-85［4］Keats,J.“Letter 152.”The letters of John Keats.Ed.Forman,M.B.Oxford:Oxford University Press (1942):391［5］Keats,J.“Letter 123.”The letters of John Keats.Ed.Forman,M.B.Oxford:Oxford University Press (1942):336［6］Keats,J.“Letter 102.”The letters of John Keats.Ed.Forman,M.B.Oxford:Oxford University Press (1942):271［7］Keats,J.“Letter 79.”The letters of John Keats.Ed.Forman,M.B.Oxford:Oxford University Press (1942):191［8］Keats,J.“Ode to a Nightingale ”（上接第169页）5.倾听读者意见，提高服务质量图书馆是为读者服务的，没有读者的参与，图书馆就成为一潭死水。