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Sparknotes analysis on john keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn
Sparknotes analysis on john keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn
Sparknotes analysis on john keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn
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While differing in technique and subject matter, John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) and W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) demonstrate how using the rhetorical device of Ekphrasis in poetry helps to guide the reader to the central themes and messages of the poem. Both poems confront and explore the works of art differently: while Keats uses the rustic urn (in which scenes and myths are depicted upon it) to confront the nature as well as the limits of the world of art and fantasy; Auden uses Brueghel’s painting, The Fall of Icarus, in his second stanza to help reinforce the speaker’s comments (stated within the first stanza) on the apathy or indifference that seems to be present within the human condition in regards to human suffering. In comparing these two poems, it is evident that there are many different ways and techniques that ekphrasis can be used within poetry, also demonstrates how the work of art being described in the poem becomes instrumental in conveying a poem’s complex ideas in an effective and meaningful way.
Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written in iambic pentameter, featuring five stanzas (signatory of the ode), mainly making use of poetic devices such as apostrophe, personification, and paradox. Throughout the poem, the urn is personified through metaphor as the speaker describes the urn as a “still unravish’d bride” (1), the “foster-child of silence” (2), and the “Sylvan historian” (3). These descriptions of the urn are also paradoxical, as although the urn is an old and rustic artefact it is simultaneously being described as something young and naïve. Also paradoxical within these lines is in describing the urn as silent, also calling it a sylvan historian suggests that it has the capacity ...
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...ect the meanings of the poem as well as provide context to these meanings. While ekphrastic poems are retelling a story, it is in this retelling that the work of art can help bring together a poem’s elements so that the poem feels more like a cohesive whole. Poems such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Musée des Beaux Arts” provide good examples of how confronting works of art can help to better convey a poem’s meaning and how techniques of confronting works of art can bring together these poetic elements.
Works Cited
Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Ed.
Godrick-Jones, Amanda, and Herbert Rosegarten. Peterborough, Ont:
Broadview, 2008. Print.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Godrick-
Jones, Amanda, and Herbert Rosengarten. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview,
2008. Print
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In the poem “A song of Despair” Pablo Neruda chronicles the reminiscence of a love between two characters, with the perspective of the speaker being shown in which the changes in their relationship from once fruitful to a now broken and finished past was shown. From this Neruda attempts to showcase the significance of contrasting imagery to demonstrate the Speaker’s various emotions felt throughout experience. This contrasting imagery specifically develops the reader’s understanding of abandonment, sadness, change, and memory. The significant features Neruda uses to accomplish this include: similes, nautical imagery, floral imagery, and apostrophe.
John Keats’ belief in the beauty of potentiality is a main theme of him great “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” This idea appears in many of his other poems that precede this ode, such as “The Eve of St. Agnes,” but perhaps none of Keats’ other works devote such great effort to showcase this idea. The beauty of the Grecian Urn (likely multiple urns), and its strength as a symbol, is a masterful mechanism. Just about all facets of this poem focus on an unfulfilled outcome: but one that seems inevitably completed. Thus, while the result seems a foregone conclusion, Keats’ static world creates a litany of possible outcomes more beautiful than if any final resolution.
Many literary critics have observed that over the course of W. B. Yeats’ poetic career, readers can perceive a distinct change in the style of his writing. Most notably, he appears to adopt a far more cynical tone in the poems he generated in the later half of his life than in his earlier pastoral works. This somewhat depressing trend is often attributed to the fact that he is simply becoming more conservative and pessimistic in his declining years, but in truth it represents a far more significant change in his life. Throughout Yeats’ career, the poet is constantly trying to determine exactly what inspires him; early on, in such poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Wild Swans at Coole,” Yeats obviously looks towards nature to find his muse, thereby generating idyllic pastoral scenery that is reminiscent of the nature-based poetry of Wordsworth. However, his later works are darkened not by his own perspective, but by the fact that he is no longer certain that nature is truly the fountain that he taps for inspiration. A number of his later poems, such as “Leda and the Swan” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” employ symbolism and metaphor in order to reflect the author’s battle to find his true source. Yeats spends his career dealing with this conflict, and he eventually concludes that while nature itself may have been the source of the general ideas for many of his poems, the works themselves came to life only after he reached into the depths of his heart and sought the fuel of pure human emotions and experiences. Ultimately, he discovers that the only true inspiration comes from the trivial and mundane influences found in everyday life; the purest poetic inspiration is humanity itself.
Truth remains a mysterious essential: sought out, created, and destroyed in countless metaphysical arguments through time. Whether argued as being absolute or relative, universal or personal, no thought is perceived or conceived without an assessment of its truth. In John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and E.E. Cummings' "since feeling is first" the concern is not specifically the truth of a thought, but rather, the general nature of truth; the foundation which gives truth is trueness . Both poets replace investigation with decision, and that which would be argumentation in the hands of philosophers becomes example and sentiment in their poems. Each poet's examples create a resonance within the reader, engineered to engender belief or provoke thought. Employing images of unconsummated actions on an ancient urn carved with scenes from life, Keats suggests that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Cummings, on the other hand, offers emotion as the foundation of truth, and supports living life fully through diction, theme-suggestive syntax, and images of accomplished action.
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In Auden’s “Musèe des Beaux Arts,” the speaker is in a museum admiring the works of famous artists. The second stanza references Icarus, specifically Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of...