Nisar Ahmed ( Keats Assignment ) PDF

Preview

Summary

Keats as a poet of senses...

Description

Keats has been called a poet of the senses. To what extent is Keats’ appeal to the senses an integral part of his poems’ meaning and how does Keats use language to appeal to the senses of taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell? John Keats (31 October 1795-23 February 1821) was an English Romantic writer. He was one of the primary figures of the second era of Romantic artists, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, in spite of his works having been in production for just four years before his passing at 25 in the year 1821. Despite the fact that his sonnet was not commonly welcomed by critics during his lifetime, his notoriety developed after his demise, and before the finish of the nineteenth century, he had gotten one of the dearest of every English writer. He affected a different scope of artists and scholars. Jorge Luis Borges expressed that his first experience with Keats' work was the hugest abstract understanding of his life. Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts. Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and colourful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell and so on. Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses. Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great principle that: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion for nature by giving his whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty. Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense impressions generate poetry. The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters: O for a life of sensation than of thoughts He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight

Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and solid picture of sensuous beauty.

“Her hair was long; her foot was light And her eyes were wild.” And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active. “O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with Brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed;” The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart. “The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days, by emperor and clown:” In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;” The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme cold: “The sedge is withered from the lake And no birds sing.” In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and the idea of their tastes in intoxication. “O for a beaker full of the warm South Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene ” In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers. “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.” The sense of taste is well expressed in Ode to a Nightingale: O for a breaker full of warm south: Full of the true, blushful Hippocrene. In the Ode on Melancholy, again, we have several sensuous pictures. There is the rain failing from a cloud above and reviving the drooping flowers below and covering the green hill in an “April shroud”. There is the morning rose; there are the colours produced by the sunlight

playing on wet sand; and there is the wealth of “globed peonies”. And then there is another exquisitely sensuous picture. Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. The Ode on a Grecian Urn contains a series of sensuous pictures—passionate men and gods chasing reluctant maidens, the flute-players playing their ecstatic music, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the tree enjoying an everlasting spring, etc. The ecstasy of the passion of love and of youth is beautifully depicted in the following lines: More happy love! more happy happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young. The Ode to a Nightingale is one of the finest examples of Keats’s rich sensuousness. The lines in which the poet expresses of passionate desire for some Provencal wine or the red wine from the fountain of the Muses appeal to both our senses of smell and taste: O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. These lines bring before us a delightful picture of Provence with its fun and frolic, merrymaking, drinking and dancing. Similarly the beaker full of the sparkling, blushful Hippocrene is highly pleasing. Then there is the magnificent picture of the moon shining in the sky and surrounded by stars. The rich feast of flowers described in the stanza that follows is one of the outstanding beauties of the poem. Flowers, soft incense, the fruit trees, the white hawthorn, the eglantine, the fast-fading violets, the coming musk-rose—all this is a delight for our senses.

Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;” For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus, autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear. At the end we came to know that how Keats use sensuousness in his work, and how it appears in his poetry....