John Keats -- Analysis, Themes and Devices

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Themes

  • Appreciation of the Greeks
  • Greek references
  • Intertextuality: Chapman's Homer, Chaucer, Petrarch
  • Love or die
  • Immortality for love
  • Knight
  • Women as sorceresses
  • Meta- art
  • Yearning for immortality
  • Lovers depicted on the Grecian urn:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

        • Reveling in nature
        • God

        No one who once the glorious sun has seen,
        And all the clouds, and felt his bosom clean
        For his great Maker's presence, but must know
        What 'tis I mean, and feel his being glow
        • Poetry as sacred
        O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
        That am not yet a glorious denizen
        Of thy wide heaven – Should I rather kneel
        Upon some mountain-top until I feel
        A glowing splendour round about me hung,
        And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?

        • Excitement about writing poetry; emotions toward poetry
        Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
        Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
        Within my breast; so that the morning light
        Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
        And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,
        Resolving to begin that very day
        These lines; and howsoever they be done,
        I leave them as a father does his son.

        Devices

        • Change of speaking voice mid-poem
        • Odes: drawing profundity from objects or things to which he writes odes
        • Addressing the (inanimate) subject of the ode

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