In the poem “To Autumn” the initial impression that we get is that Keats is describing a typical Autumn day with all its colors and images. On deeper reading it becomes evident that it is more than just that. The poem is rather a celebration of the cycle of life and acceptance that death is part of life.
The first stanza begins with Keats painting a picture of Autumn as being a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”. This is used in conjunction with the use of the image of a “maturing sun” which ripens the Autumn harvest of views and the fruits. The excessiveness of the Autumn harvest is achieved with the use of hyperbole. He describes the fruit being ripened to the core, the gourds are swelled, the hazel nuts plumped and trees bend from the weight of the apples. So the first stanza describes quiet vividly the fullness and abundance of life.
The second stanza has a bit of a different approach where Keats is addressing someone. He personifies Autumn as a woman for he refers to Autumn by “thy hair is soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”. In line 12 he addresses Autumn to rhetorical question. It is clear that Autumn is the time for harvesting, gathering and preparing for the Winter that lies ahead. The stanza ends appropriately in that it literally describes the process of the last apples being pressed for cider, but more importantly it describes the last breathes of life being squeezed out of Autumn.
The common factor found within these two poems were in fact, metaphors. The writers Waddington and Tennyson both apply them to accentuate crucial opinions that influence love relations. In the third stanza, line one Waddington writes, “late as last autumn…”, however in the beginning of the poem he had written, “Late as last summer”. Therefore, autumn is a metaphor for different phases of life; spring represents childhood, summer is young adulthood and in this case autumn represents the middle age as winter would be death. Metaphorically speaking, as the season changed from a blissful summer to a dry autumn, so did their relationship. And we can all agree that as long as the clock remains to tick, time can change everything, even love. In Tennyson’s poem the fourth stanza, line two it mentions, “A shinning furrow, as thy thoughts in me”. This charmingly written metaphor refers to the author and his significant other. Tennyson uses a farmer’s tractor which produces furrows on the ground to relate to his sense since this person has had furrows of her thoughts leave a shining trace in his mind.
The other five autumn poems have references of Keats’s poem within them, yet they give much more than that. The poem Fr288 “My First Day Well – Since Many Ill” is written in ballad form with abundant usage of slant rhymes. While on the surface of the poem contemplates the passage of time, seasons, and illnesses, it actually describes an event in Dickinson’s life. In 1862, the year the poem was believed to be written in, she had been bedridden from an illness for months, which often left her wondering if her illness would end in death during the duration of her sickness (Mamunes 39). The Brazilian threads in the poem signify the red streaks of blood mingled in her sputum, but it can also signify the fall foliage. The final stanza reveals Dickinson 's insight into her life-threatening illness, where she looked the positives and decided it opened a path to deeper awareness of her own body. This poem has a lovely depiction of autumn and the poet is able to admire it, but thoughts of summer cast ponderous feelings of loss. In contrast, autumn hides death and decay. According
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for political commentary as some might suggest or was he simply another “childhood” that had; until that time, been ignored? If so, what inspired him to move in this direction?
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
In his poem “Field of Autumn”, Laurie Lee uses an extended metaphor in order to convey the tranquility of time, as it slowly puts an end to life. Through imagery and syntax, the first two stanzas contrast with the last two ones: The first ones describing the beginning of the end, while the final ones deal with the last moments of the existence of something. Moreover, the middle stanzas work together; creating juxtaposition between past and future whilst they expose the melancholy that attachment to something confers once it's time to move on. Lee’s objective in this poem was to demonstrate the importance of enjoying the present, for the plain reason that worrying about the past and future only brings distress.
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
Keats presents his feelings on how he no longer wishes for impossible goals, and how it is much more preferable to enjoy life as much as possible. It is of no use longing for things we cannot have, and so we must learn to live with the myriad of things we already have, of these one in particular appeals to Keats: the warmth of human companionship and the passion of love.
Shakespeare uses seasonal imagery in the first quatrain of the poem to show the comparison of aging to the time of season in the year. The narrator does this by using smaller images to create the larger main image of Autumn in the poem, which is his reflection on approaching old age. “That time of year thou mayest in me behold” (1). This is set in Autumn, the time between fall and winter. Fall is a representation of middle age and winter represents old
In the first quatrain of the poem the speaker compares himself to autumn. The speaker says, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (1). He is seeing himself as the fall season of the year. A time of the year when nights arrive quicker and the temperature becomes cooler. When relating this season to life, it is when a person is experiencing stages of decline in their life making them closer to death. He creates an image of a tree, with leaves that have been falling with the change of season into winter. “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” (2) When using the image of leaves falling from a tree and leaving it bare,
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
In order to experience true sorrow one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions. In this poem, the speaker tells of how to embrace life by needing the experience of melancholy to appreciate the true joy and beauty of
We get the idea that the poem starts out in the fall, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" (5). The season fall represents the year coming to an end, and e...