![]() ![]() What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? The poem inspired the title of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 work of environmentalism, Silent Spring, from the line of Keats’s poem, ‘And no birds sing.’ We have analysed this poem here. He silences her sighs with kisses, before she silences him in sleep by singing him a lullaby. There’s a sense of reciprocity between the knight and the lady, but how equal they are remains open to question.Īlthough we might view the knight as merely the passive observer, used by the beautiful faery-woman (yet another victim to fall under the spell of the beautiful woman without mercy) it is also worth noting the to-and-fro nature of the action in this ballad: the knight gives the lady three gifts, and she responds with three gifts for him. This ballad is among Keats’s most popular poems: it tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was more fairy than human (you know the sort of thing), lured back to her cave, and then abandoned on the cold hillside. On a cold night in a medieval castle, a young lover breaks into his sweetheart’s chamber, hides in her closet, and then persuades her semi-conscious self to run away with him. Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith … Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death, ![]() His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold Agnes’ is a narrative poem told using the Spenserian stanza, the nine-line verse form Edmund Spenser developed for his vast sixteenth-century epic, The Faerie Queene: One of the longer poems to feature on this list, ‘The Eve of St. This poem contains Keats’s famous objection to science as a discipline which unravels the mysteries of nature and ‘unweaves the rainbow’. While her robes flaunted with the daffodils … To see herself escap’d from so sore ills, There she stoodĪbout a young bird’s flutter from a wood, Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, Whether this mistake matters depends on your view of what Christopher Ricks has called ‘literature and the matter of fact’.Īnother product of Keats’s annus mirabilis of 1819, ‘Lamia’ is a longer, somewhat tragic narrative poem about Hermes’ search for a beautiful nymph, whom he finds thanks to Lamia, a queen who has been transformed into a serpent:Īnd rested at the foot of those wild hills,Īnd of that other ridge whose barren back 1559-1634), likening the experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown land.Ĭuriously, the poem contains an error: Keats writes of ‘stout Cortez’ sighting the Pacific, but it was Balboa, rather than Cortez, who conquered South America and would have stood ‘upon a peak in Darien’. This sonnet focuses on Keats’s initial encounter with an English translation of Homer’s poetry by George Chapman (c. Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes Then felt I like some watcher of the skies ![]() Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: ‘ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. The first two words of the sonnet were used as the title of the 2009 biopic about Keats’s life, Bright Star, starring Ben Whishaw as Keats.ĥ. ![]() Keats copied the finished version of the sonnet into a volume of The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare, placing his poem opposite Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint. ![]()
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