John
Keats
On death
I.
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.
II.
How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom which is but to awake.
Source:
On the sea
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be mov'd for days from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd
and tir'd,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd
and tir'd,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinn'd
with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody -
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir'd!
Source:
http://www.online-literature.com/keats/486
In this paper I am going to analyse two poems, both of them written by John
Keats, and compare them, telling the similarities and differences about the
topic, the title, the form, the rhyme, vocabulary and verb tenses.
In the first poem, On death, the idea is
to make the reader think about what the poem talks. It is as if the poet wrote
it thinking about the idea of death, and that living the present is living as a
zombie.
The second poem, On the sea, is sadder
than the other one. The idea of that poem is the solitude of the sea. Here the
poet is describing the movements of the sea and how the water moves.
There are differences in the form. On death consists in two stanzas,
numbered I and II. The poem starts with a question that are
verses one and two. This is the question which starts the reflection the poet
wants the reader to make. Each stanza has four verses, and each verse has ten
syllables.
The form of On the sea is very different
from the fist poem. That poem consists in sixteen verses without spaces,
without stanzas. All the verses have ten syllables, just like the other poem.
The rhyme of these two poems is different, too. The rhyme of the first poem, On death, is ABAB-CDCD, while the rhyme in the
second one, On the sea, is ABBA-ABBA-CDCD-EFEF. The poet has written
this poem in rhymed quatrains. The two first blocks with the same rhyme, and
the third and fourth are very different from the others.
Focusing
on the title of these poems, the reader can find differences on the meaning.
The first, On death, the reader can
imagine that the poet is going to talk pessimistically, but he does not. He is
making a reflection about a sad moment, but not sad for the person who dies,
but for the family and the nearest people of the person who dies. Death is a
taboo for people because we connect it with bad times, sadness or illness, and
the poet does not want to transmit this feeling. The second, On
the sea, is not so sad. Thinking about the sea one can think on calmness,
because the sound of the sea, its movements, transmits calm.
The verb
tenses in the first poem, On death, are
in the present simple tense, so it is very easy to read and understand. In the
second poem, On the sea, the tenses are
combined; present tense: keeps (line 1), past tenses, sometimes
abbreviated to make less syllables in one verse: mov’d
(line 7), vex’d and tir’d
(line 9), dinn’d (line 13) and quir’d (line 16).
The poem
On the sea has complicated vocabulary,
old vocabulary, and that makes the reading difficult. The poet uses the old
form of the personal pronoun: YE instead of YOU.
About
the semantic field in the second poem, there are some words referring to the
sea, like shores and swell (line 2), and a lot of words referring
to pessimism.
The
effect of the poem On death on the
reader, is a sense of confrontation between happiness and sadness. I
thought about living the moment, that is the most important thing in life. Not
being like a zombie, not living the life, but roaming through this world. And
that is the main idea of the poem. Not being like a puppet, only live one’s
life, thinking and acting by you, without the influence of other people.
I think
the poet wants that readers could change the way they see the life, and want
them to live their lives.
The
second poem, On the sea, transmits to
the reader calmness and tranquillity, because the similarity of all the verses,
but it is full of negative elements, so, I prefer the first poem, On death,
rather than the second, On the sea.
Bibliography:
John-Keats.com
The
literature Network
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