English Literature

Source: http://somusagar.blogspot.in/2010/03/eroticism-of-john-keats.html EROTICISM OF JOHN KEATS Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry. He wrote of a young woman he found attractive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..."(Letter-94) 1 Love and death are intertwined

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 coulourful 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 fro nature b...

(Objective questions) 1. What does �La Belle la Belle� mean? Ans: �La Belle Dame Sans Merci� is French phrse which means in English �a beautiful lady without mercy�. 2. How does Keats describe the Knight-at-arms in La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Ans: In La Belle la Belle the poet sees a knight wandering alone. He is pale and haggard, and his face shows signs of agony. He has been deserted by a fairy after being seduced to her cave. 3. �The sedge has wither�d from the lake, And no birds sing.� Why does the poet refer to this kind of natural setting? Ans: The sedge is kind of long grass growing by the margins of lakes and rivers. It dies down in winter. With the onset of winter the birds have either gone away or stopped singing. Keats�s purpose here is to create an atmosphere of desolation and deprivation. The condition in the natural world has been used to refer to the condition of desolation and deprivation in the human world. 4. �The squirrel�s granary is ful, And the harvest�s done.� ...

(Objective questions) 1. Explain the metaphor �unravish�d bride of quietness�. Ans: In his ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats finds the urn in a perfect condition of peace and quietness. The clamorous changes in the human world have not had any impact on it. He imagines that the urn is wedded to silence and peace. 2. Explain the metaphor �foster child of Silence and slow time�. Ans: In his ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats finds the urn in a perfect condition of peace and quietness. The clamorous changes in the human world have not had any impact on it. It has remained preserved from the eyes of men in the lap of time, which moves very slow for it, as a child is preserved by its mother. 3. Whom does Keats address as �sylvan historian� and why? Ans: John Keats addresses the urn as �sylvan historian� because its decorations contain a description of countryside or of a pastoral setting. 4. �In Temple or the dales of Arcady�? What does Keats refer to in the line? Ans: John Keats here expres...