The Eve of St. Agnes: An Analysis

The Eve of St. Agnes: An Analysis:

             The Eve of St. Agnes was first published in 1820 along with La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Isabella and the five famous odes and Lamia and Hyperion. The story narrated in the poem is simple one. It is the story of the elopement of two lovers – Porphyro and Madeline who belong to two different families hostile to each other. After the feast of St. Agnes, Madeline prepares to dream of her future lover. Porphyro steals into her bedroom and hides. As she dreams, he awakens her and she sees him in a living dream. Then Porphyro elopes with Madeline on St. Agnes’ eve. It is “a story where-in something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young Lochinvar.” Though the story is simple and has been dealt in many poems and dramas, Keats with his mature craftsmanship distills the entire medieval spirit of romance and chivalry in this poem. As a romantic poet, he with his treatment of the theme of love, use of sensual images, pictorial quaity and rich musical effect leaves a high watermark in this poem. According to Drinkwater, the poem “must be reckoned on the whole, the most splendid of Keats’ poem.”

            The poem deals with the theme of romantic and idealistic love. Porphyro, the lover, has taken great risk to meet her lady love. Madeline also wishes to dream of her future husband on the eve of St. Agnes. Their love is presented as something divine and unearthly. Madeline is depicted as an angel without wings: “She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,/ Save wings, for heaven.” She is a deity for Porphro and he is her devotee as he says: “ Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite.” Madeline,too, has deep affection for Porphyo as she says to him:

“Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,

For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go."

But the warmth of their youthful love is always threatened by a sense of uncertainity and doubt. Porphyro appears to be cold and pale as contrasted to the bright and shining Porphyro of Madeline’s dream. At the moment of ultimate consummation of their love, “Love's alarum” is heard in the “pattering the sharp sleet.” The warmth and cosiness of the room is contrasted with the bitter cold and stormy environment outside. The poem is structured around a series of oppositions of dark and light, warm and cold, permanence and mutability. The most central of these is the opposition between dream and reality. The world of young lovers might be thought of as a dream world, a world a rose may shut “and be a bud again.” But we are often reminded, they actually live in a world where roses can only wither and die. If their love is to be validated, they must leave the protection of the warm and magical room and go out to face the storm. In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet, too,  after his brief sojourn in the world of Nightingale says:  “the fancy cannot cheat so well.” As a poet of “negative capability”, capability of mysteries and uncertainty, it is typical of Keats that he can hardly keep faith in the values of the ideal world though he desperately craves for it. That’s why some critics are at a loss to decide whether the poem celebrates the youthful love of romance or subverts it.

            The poem encapsulates the entire spirit of medievalism with old castle, gothic art, superstition, chivalry and heroism. Above all a sense of mystery and wonder, an important aspect of medievalism, pervades the entire poem. The poem opens with the picture of bitterly cold night. An ancient beadsman returns from his prayer through an empty chapel. He hears the sound of music coming from a medieval castle but continues on his way to say prayer for the soul of the sinner. In the castle, a celebratory feast is held on St. Agnes eve. All the Knights and Barons have arrived. There is a popular medieval superstition that on the eve of St. Agnes one who performs certain rite will have the vision of her future husband. Believing this Madeline goes to bed preparing her mind to dream of her future husband. Potphyro, the lover, also makes hazardous journey to meet his beloved Madeline in the castle of his enemy. Thus a complete medieval environment is depicted.

            The poet not only makes use of typically medieval incidents, but also mentions medieval arts and crafts to give a medieval setting to the narrative. He refers to the plume, tiara, carved angel and the gothic window. His subtle description evokes the sheer beauty of the multi-coloured window of a medieval castle:

“A casement high and triple­arch'd there was,

            All garlanded with carven imag'ries

            Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot­grass,

            And diamonded with panes of quaint device,”

Then there are medieval curtains, the cravings of angels near the cornice. All these are described very clearly. Moreover, “(T)he rich perfume and the perfect silence of Madeline’s room, the fine description of the gothic chapel and the various ceremonies connected with the festival of St. Agnes’ eve all combine to create an atmosphere of medieval romance.”

            The Eve of St. Agnes is a rich feast to all the senses – the eyes, the ear, the tongue, the nose and the touch. The pictorial description, rich in colour, makes an excellent appeal to the sense sight. Goser in this respect remarks, “It was an axiom with Keats that poetry should surprise us by a fine excess. The pictures of Keats are all aglow with colour, not always very accurate painter’s colour but colour which captivates the senses.” His pictorial description of the gothic window and art appeals to our eyes. Description of the sumptuous foods and drinks appeals to our different senses:

            “While he forth from the closet brought a heap

            Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;

            With jellies soother than the creamy curd,

            And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;

Madeline’s bodice is fragrant and her bed is lavendered. The description of Madeline’s body and her undressing is sensuous enough:

            “Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

            Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

            Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

            Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

            Half­hidden, like a mermaid in sea­weed,”

There are a plenty of sounds that appeal to our ear. In Madeline’s house a feast is going on. The silver trumpets are being played upon. There is also the music of clarion, the kettle-drum and the clarinet. Porphhyro himself plays upon the lute in chords. Keats appeals to multiple senses with a single expression which is often called synesthesia. Following line is a remarkable example: “Filling the chilly room with perfume light.”

            Keats was also a pictorial artist. Like Pr-Raphaelite poets, he portrays a detailed picture of what he describes in the poem. In The Eve of St. Agnes, a complete picture of a cold night is depicted with the images of frozen grass, the limping hare, the shivering owl and the numb finger of the beadsman. Like a miniaturist artist, Keats draws the effect of the reflection of moonlight upon different parts of Madeline’s body. Here he makes beautiful use of colour:

            “Rose­bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

            And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

            And on her hair a glory, like a saint”

Equally important is the sense of chiaroscuro (light and shade) in the following description:

            “Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

             And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,”

Then the moon sets and all is dark:

            “'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw­blown sleet:

             "This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"

            'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:”

Apart from the detailed pictures of the above lines, there are pictures created by single phrases and lines. The following are some of them: “azure-lidded sleep”, “Thy beauty's shield, heart­shap'd and vermeil dyed” etc.    

              

The Good-Morrow: A Critical Analysis

The Good-Morrow: A Critical Analysis:

                A cursory glance upon John Donne’s The Good Morrow will regard it as a conventional love poem that derives its form from two related genres in Renaissance love poetry: aubade, a morning serenade of a lover to mistress and a similar popular literary form: aube, a love poem which presents a conversation between two lovers as they wake up at dawn after a night of love making. This later genre  was one  which Donne used on other occasions in Break of Day and The Sun Rising where he worked for somewhat different effect in his handling of it. The standard dramatic situation for this literary form  is established in The Good Morrow by the implications of the title and by the rather oblique indications of lines 8-11 and 15-16 which present a bed-room  scene in which two lovers lie peacefully in the  morning gazing at each other.

                Though the normal tone of this literary form is one of relaxed, tender eroticism, Donne breaks this pattern, as he did in The Sun Rising, by starting the poem with colloquial phrasing,  the heavy stress and broken rhythm of an impassioned speech:  “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I/ Did, till we loved?” The lover is astonished to discover that he and his mistress have wasted their time in simple childish “country pleasure” that are described by the breast feeding images like “weaned” and “sucked” before their last night of love making. They might have hidden themselves and their mind like the seven christian young men of Ephesus who escaped Roman persecution by sleeping in cave.  But the pleasure which the poet has experienced is not a nonsexual one. Rather it refers to the sexual conquest which is revealed by the words “pleasure”, “beauty”, “desired”, “got” that have specific usage in Donne’s vocabulary in the following lines:

            “ ’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.”

Donne uses “beauty” in a sense roughly equivalent to the modern slang use of “babe”, “desired” and “got” have a specifically sexual implication. Similarly “pleasure” was strictly restricted to the meaning sensual pleasure. They seem merely a “dream” of her, a shadowy manifestation of the ultimate reality which she embodies.

            In the early stanza we find that the two lovers especially the speaker are not young innocents who have just discovered  sex. They are old hands at the game. Therefore they had thought that love was nothing more than lust. But he present love affair unlike the lover’s fleshly liaisons. It has brought about awakening of their souls and their souls have entered as active agents into a new realm of experience. This is stated in the following line: “And now good-morrow to our waking souls”. In their new experience of love, they do not watch one another out of suspicions and fear of infidelity which trouble ordinary lovers because this love is strong a force that it overpowers any desire  which may divert  their attention to anything outside. The small bed room, which shuts out the world, serves as a symbol for the entire contentment of a love that enables them to renounce not only other loves but also all of the normal activities of life in the world. That’s why the poet says:

            “Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.”

These images of “sea-discoverers” and map-readers, if taken literally, are used by Donne to differentiate his love which is fixed, self-satisfied and has a world of its own from the frantic adventurous curiosity, heroism and the romance of life of Renaissance. But if we penetrate into these literal meaning, we will find that the poet associated these images of “sea-discoverers” with the immature physical restless instability of love which is called in the first stanza childish country pleasure and “all love of other sights” in the poem.

            In the next stanza the poet again returns to the bed scene  where each lover finds his and her face reflected on the other’s eye:  My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,/ And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;”. At the end of the previous stanza the poet has presented each of the lovers as a complete world, in absolute possession of the separate world of other ( “each hath one, and is one”). But now in the above lines he presents these two worlds as a single globe made up of two congruent hemispheres. Thus Donne makes a logical transition from a conception of the love relationship as the lover’s complete possession of one another to a conception of love as a fusion of the lover’s soul into a single new identity. As Donne develops this metaphor, he presents the globe formed by the two hemisphere as characterised by the same qualities of permanence and peace which were implied by his characterisation of the love in the statement: “true plain hearts do in the faces rest”. It is “without sharp north, without declining west”. Drawing the evidence of scholastic philosophy, the poet says: “Whatever dies, was not mixed equally”. But the poet thinks their love is immortal and permanent. Unlike the gross union of the unstable matter of lovers’ bodies, their love is a pure union of the eternal substance of lover’s soul to the heavenly sphere: “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I/ Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.”

            The poem is typical love poem in which Donne discards the clowning and antic poses of his early love poetry and treats love with a gravity and richness of thought and emotion. The central idea of the poem that the long inner debate of body and soul can be resolved in wholly satisfying love which includes both physical sex and spiritual union points out to Neo-Platonism. But the poet comes to his conclusion not by emotional assertion but by logical analysis drawing examples and images from various spheres of knowledge.  But Donne’s technique in spite of his scholarly references is not pedantic and appeals to the readers for its depth of thought and sincerity of feeling and emotion. Thus here occurs What T. S. Eliot says “association of sensibility” while praising the poetry of Donne.

  

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: A Critical Analysis

A Valediction Forbidding  Mourning: A Critical Analysis:

                Parting is in Donne’s love poetry is what Death is in his religious poetry – the test of faith. He handled this theme in different ways. His Picture, where the lover is about to go to the wars, fears how he may look when he returns, is one of the most beautiful of Donne’s songs: “Sweetest love, I doe not goe/ For weariness of thee.”  The theme is handled at greater length in one of Donne’s most torturous poems: A Valediction: of my Name, in the Window. Here the lover scratches his name on a pane of glass as a charm to secure his mistress’ fidelity during his absence. In A Valediction: of the Book, he advises her to spend time while he is away making a book for the lovers out of the letters that have passed between them. On these last two, though they contain fine messages, intellectual ingenuity has destroyed the sense of poignancy of parting. But in A Valediction: of Weeping, in spite of its celebration, the loss and pain of parting are rendered by the passionate music of the verse.

                                             But the present poem A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, that depicts the lover’s attempt to dissuade  the beloved from mourning their  separation by showing logical reason, lacks the emotional and passionate mood that may drench the sorrow of separation. Like The Good Morrow, the poem celebrates higher spiritual love that stands apart from the gross sensuality of ordinary lovers. That’s why the lover asserts that the separation cannot affect their love which is not associated with bodies that may be separated, but with soul that cannot be separated. But the lover comes to his conclusion logically citing examples, witty comparison, ingenious conceits and far-fetched metaphors.

                As the poem opens, we find the poet comparing their separation with the death of “virtuous men” who “pass mildly away/ And whisper to their soul to go.”  Similarly the poet bids her beloved to accept their separation quietly without “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”: “So let us melt and make no noise/ No tear-floods nor sigh sigh-tempest move”.  Otherwise it will profane their sacred love by revealing it to the common people. Men are afraid of earthquakes and the damages caused by them. But the moment of the heavenly sphere, cause by them, though much greater and violent, is quiet and harmless. Similarly ordinary lovers may lament a separation but their love is so holy and pure that  they have no feeling of loneliness. This contrast of the corruptible earth and the incorruptible heaven leads to the contrast between “Dull Sublunary lover’s love” whose animating principle is sensual desire and the refined love of the poet and his beloved. A love which is “elemented”  or “composed” of  physical contact cannot endure absence. But the refined sort of love which joins soul to soul can endure absence. As their souls are joined into one, there can be no breach but only expansion. The poet explains with the image of gold, the purest metal, which can be beaten out almost to transparency, but it will not break: “Our two souls therefore, which are one,/ Though I must go, endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to airy thinness beat.” The alchemical symbol for gold was a circle with a point at its centre and it has been suggested that the memory of this led Donne to his final image of the compass. If their identities are not one, but two separate entities, the poet compares them to the two feats of a geometrical compass. The soul of the beloved is like the fixed foot of the compass as she stays at home. The poet’s soul is like the other foot of the compass which moves in a circle: “If they be two, they are two so/ As stiff twin compasses are two;/ Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if the other do.” The fixed foot leans towards the moving foot and afterwards the moving foot rejoins the fixed foot. The rejoining of the encircling foot suggests the return of the poet to his beloved and their union – in spite of their separate identities – is the very consummation and joy of love:  “Thy firmness makes my circle just,/ And makes me end where I begun”.

“To this comparison”, wrote Dr. Johnson, “it may be doubted whether absurdity and ingenuity has the better”.   However, he considered it as the crowning example  of the metaphysical poets’ “pursuit of something new and strange”. Like a typical metaphysical poet, Donne drives home his concept of love that is very akin to neo-platonic love with witty, ingenious conceit, images and comparison. Images of death of virtuous men, earthquake, gold beaten to transparency and lastly the incomparable conceit of compass add to quaintness and ingenuity of the poem. The strength of the poem lies in its argument and the use of appropriate conceits and images. Sometimes hyperbole is used to emphasise a point that “tears’” are floods and “sighs” are tempests. Thus the poet has been able to prove his point that his absence is no cause for mourning for his beloved because their love is pure and constant.

            

Ode to Psyche: A Critical Analysis

Ode to Psyche: A Critical Analysis:

 

With reference to Ode to Psyche, Keats himself said in a letter to his brother:

“It is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in hurry”

Though it was written in hurry, it is Keats’ one of the most perfect piece of poetic creations. Here the poet revives and recreates the Psyche myth from Greek mythology. According to the Greek mythology, Psyche was a beautiful nymph loved by Cupid, god of love. He visited her each night, but departed at sunrise. Psyche was told never to attempt to discover his identity, but her curiosity won out. One night she lit a lamp to see him. But some of the burning oil dropped upon him. Awakened angry at being disobeyed, he left her. Psyche wandered helplessly in search of her lover and became the slave of Venus who imposed cruel tasks on her. Eventually she was reunited with Cupid and made immortal. Because of her late arrival on Olympus, as Keats observed, she was never honoured and worshiped in the way of other gods. He also explained in the same letter that Psyche was not regarded as a goddess before the time of Apuleius, who lived after the Augustan age, and that the goddess was never worshiped with any of the ancient fervour. Keats did not wish to let a heathen goddess remain neglected. He therefore wrote this poem as a tribute to her and attempted to restore her place among the gods and goddesses.

            The poem begins with an invocation to Psyche apologizing for singing to her of herself:

           

           “O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

            By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

            And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

             Even into thine own soft-conched ear”

Then the poet describes that in a vision he has seen Psyche and Cupid embracing each other in an idyllic surrounding in a forest. They sat beneath “ the whispering roof of leaves and trembled blossoms.” A brook, hardly visible, because of the thick grass that grows on its bank, ran by them. Amidst the deep grass and soft and fragrant flowers, they were found in an intimate moment:

           

         “Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

         Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

         They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;

         Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;”

Then the poet praises Psyche’s beauty abundantly. He says that her beauty is unparalled among the Greek gods and goddesses living in mount Olympus. She surpasses both Lucifer and Vesper in beauty. Yet no tributes or offerings are made to her. The poet pleads the goddess to allow him to take the role of her priest. He will create a shrine for her within his own mind. He imagines his mind to be a forest with ‘zephyrs’, ‘streams’, ‘birds’, and ‘bees’. Here he will build a temple which will be decked with roses which signify his verses. A bright torch will be kept burning in the temple and one of its windows will be left open to let her to come at late night.

           

            The ode has often been seen as an extended metaphor about poetry, a reading that can be supported by an analysis of the development of ideas in relation to structure. Keats restores and recreates the forgotten Psyche myth twice in this poem and these recreations occurs within the two tableaux which frame the ode. When the poet asks, “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see/ The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes”, he introduces the first recreation. Here she is represented in a mythological past world, a forest bower,  a place exterior to the passive poet’s mind and accessible by dream or vision. The second recreation occurs when he vows to be her priest. Here she is more consciously and artfully recreated within the bower of poet’s mind and brought into the present. The movement from one tableaux to another is complemented by a change from the language of erotic experience to the language of aesthetic experience. The first lush natural setting is firmly anchored in sense impressions while the description in the final tableaux is too consciously artful. There is movement from the warm language of physical love to the cooler language of religious formality. Thus the poem illustrates the process of poetic creation – from sensation to sublimity. Some critics have seen this ode as an allegory of soul which has not been recognized until modern times.

            The ode is typically Keatsian for being utterly sensual in nature. It contains plenty of sensual and synaesthetic images. The description of pastoral landscape in which Cupid and Psyche spend their blissful moment is richly sensuous. Different expressions like - ‘Whispering roof of leaves’, ‘cool-rooted’ and ‘fragrant-eyed’ flowers, and ‘bedded grass’ appeal to our different senses.

Ode to a Nightingale: A Critical Analysis

Ode to a Nightingale: A Critical Analysis: 

Ode to a Nightingale is one of the famous odes of John Keats. It addresses a bird, Nightingale which stands for an ideal world where everything exists in a perfect order. It may symbolise the pure or unmixed joy. It may also stand for an artist and its song for a perfect piece of art. But the poem is structured around a series of binaries of ideal and real, joy and pain, intensity of feeling and numbness or lack of feeling and life and death.  The poet wavers between these binaries throughout the poem. Even at the end of the poem he is doubtful of the existence of the ideal world of the Nightingale as well as his imaginative flight into that world. His conflict and doubt may be attributed to his ‘negative capability’, capability of being in mysteries, uncertainties and in doubt. This conflict forms the heart of the poem and makes it more appealing to the reader.

                The poem begins with the poet listening to the song of Nightingale. His senses become numb and dull due to the excess of feelings of joy that Nightingale is pouring forth in his song: “MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pain/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk”. The poet compares this state of numbness to a state of having drunk hemlock, a poisonous European herb, or consumed an opiate and “Lethe wards sunk.” Lethe is an allusion to one of the five rivers of the Ancient Greek underworld, Hades. The Ancient Greeks believed that a soul drank from Lethe before reincarnation to eradicate the memory of their previous life. The repetition of ‘s’ in ‘a drowsy numbness pains my sense,’ combined with the long ‘o’ and ‘a’ sounds, sonically reflects the speaker’s soporific state .The poet’s ambivalent emotional response, which constitutes a mixture of pain and pleasure, to the song of Nightingale is possibly due to the imperfect nature of human mind and its inability to experience the absolute happiness. That’s why perhaps P.B. Shelley says in To a Skylark :  “We look before and after, / And pine for what is not:/  Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught;/ Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”.

              In the next stanza the poet longs for wine to “fade away” in the mystic world of Nightingale. The description of the beautifully picturesque, sensuous and appeals to our different senses. This wine not only consists in all the goodness of flowers and country green but also it evokes the entire festive mood merry making in an idyllic village: “Tasting of Flora and the country-green,/Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!”. In the next stanza the poet stops his imaginative flight for a while and comes back to the real world of “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” what Nightingale “among the leaves hast never known”.  Here youth and beauty are transitory and thinking only causes despair. So the poet decides to escape into the world of Nightingale again not by dint of wine but by poetic imagination, “ the viewless wings of poesy”. Now the poet reaches the world of nightingale. In spite of the presence of the full moon, it is dimly lighted because of the dense green forest which casts “verdurous gloom” and allows a meagre amount of moon light to reach the earth through its “mossy ways”.

                  The 5^th  Stanza is the climax of the poet’s imaginative flight.  It is a rich description of the speaker’s surroundings. It is so dark that he identifies the plants and flowers around him through their scents, employing olfactory imagery. But the stanza gives the impression of the juxtaposition of beauty and death as Keats refers to an “embalmed darkness”, “Fast fading violet covered up in leaves” and the allusion to the funeral flower of musk-rose. Keats seems to be telling us that death does not mean the end of beauty for his soul. Death maybe is not just a release from the earthly confinements and mortal pains but also the way to perpetuate the moment of ecstasy. This is clearly expressed in the next stanza. The intensification of contrasting feelings of pain and pleasure turns into his death wish: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath;/ Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” .But the poet’s attitude to death is ambivalent as he realises that death will not bring him closer to nightingale. It leads the poet to non-existence, inability to feel the bird's ecstasy:  “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/ To thy high requiem become a sod.”

            The meditative trance with which the poem begins and which reaches its peak in the fourth and fifth stanzas and that starts declining in the sixth, continues in the stanza VII through the mundane images of "hungry generations". The poet again compares the nightingale’s care free state of existence to his present one, in which “hungry generations tread” each other for survival. Nightingales’s song also soothed agony of the distressed soul to different persons (Ancient emperor, clown, Biblical homesick Ruth and captive princess of the Middle age) at different times in the past. Though they sought inspiration from the song of nightingale, they could never be united with nightingale remained at their solitary state of his existence. The solitary state of the existence of the captive princess reminds the poet that of his own, the unbridgeable distance between the poet and the nightingale. The widening of this eternal gap is marked by the slow rhythm of the verses towards the end of the poem.

           This decline, this awareness and awakening will be completed with the transition between this penultimate stanza and the last as the word "forlorn" (l.79 and l.80) closes the former and opens the latter with a change in its meaning, the second one referring to the dreamer, now back to his "sole self”(l.72), to the physical and real world, and the Romantic flight of imagination not being sustained any more..  "Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well" (l.73) It is the end of the poet’s exaltation. That stanza VIII begins with the poet bidding farewell to the nightingale. The bird has ceased to be a symbol and is again the actual bird the poet heard in stanza I, closing in a perfect circle the poem. The bird flies away to another spot to sing, but he cannot follow it as he had hoped; he had only momentarily been separated from himself by its song. Even as he listens, the melody fades into the distance like an illusion, slowly. The end of the dream, the return to reality is also accompanied with a hard awareness as a painful pilgrimage that the Ode has been: the knowledge of the limitation of the power of imagination which is identified with the nightingale and that parallelism is made complete when imagination departs the poet at the same time the nightingale does.

Donne’s Treatment of Love

Donne’s Treatment of Love: Donne’s poetry may be classified under three groups –  love poetry, the miscellaneous and occasional poems and verse letters and the religious poetry. But as a poet of love, he is chiefly remembered. Donne love-poems deal with the basic theme of the problem of the place of human love in a physical world dominated by change and death. The problem is approached in different ways - sometimes by asserting the immortality of love and sometimes by declaring the futility of love. That’s why the mood of his poetry extends from ecstatic and passionate idealization of love in The Sun Rising, The Undertaking, The Good Morrow and The Dream to the deliberately cynical flippancy of The Flea and Go and Catch a Falling Star. The poet who is capable of profound sense of spiritual union in love is also capable of savage bitterness. The poet who affirms the constancy of love in absence of the lovers can also go to the extent of describing “changed lovers” as “changed sorts of meats”. But in spite of his fluctuating attitude to love, Donne’s poetry is marked with an unusual directness and concreteness of suggestion. He deliberately avoided the smooth fluency and courtliness of diction of the average Elizabethan lyric and introduced colloquialism in poetry. Moreover he dispensed with Petrarchan tradition of woman-worship. To Donne, woman is no goddess. She is a creature, desirable but not adorable. “His love poetry”, says Prof. R.G. Cox, “is remarkable for realism, psychological penetration and above for the range and variety of mood”.

                                            The Sun Rising opens with colloquial tone with the poet rebuking sun for intruding upon his private room and disturbing his pleasant moments of intimacy with his beloved. Then the poet in a sardonic tone belittles the mundane activities which are subject to change and immortalizes his love: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” His love is the real experience. Everything compared to it is a mere counterfeit: “…compared to this, / All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy”. Finally their private world of love transcends the mundane reality and becomes self-contained, complete and the microcosm of the world. So the poet advises the sun: “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.”. Though the poet here speaks of higher love that transcends earthly reality, the poem smacks of an implied eroticism. The poet celebrates higher love. “But it must reach out”, A.E. Dyson and Julian Lovelock remarks, “beyond the bedroom if it is to carry conviction, to clearer loyalties, stronger renunciations of erotic possessiveness, than this poem affords”

                                            In Go and Catch a Falling Star, the poet in a bitterly cynical tone subverts the romantic concept of courtly love and deification of lady-love. He speaks of the impossibility of finding a truly sacred woman. It is the most bizarre thing in the world to find a pure woman: “All strange wonders that befell thee, / And swear / Nowhere / Lives a woman true and fair”.

                                          Thus in the two poems Donne reveals his two completely different attitudes to love and its treatment. Sometimes Donne considers love as a divine experience and sometimes he sets it in ground reality. In this respect we can quote Louis Martz who said in his essay John Donne: Love’s Philosophy: “ His best poems are not those which move toward either extreme…but they are rather those in which the physical and the spiritual are made to work together, through the curiously shifting and winding manner that marks Donne’s movements toward Truth”. This shows that Neoplatonism which was in vogue in Renaissance in England influenced Donne to some extent. 

John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci : A Critical Analysis

La Belle Dame sans Merci is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. As a ballad was usually written to be sung or recited by the common people, its very form demands a simple and straightforward narrative in an equally simple language.  Though the poem offers an apparently simple story of a Knight abandoned by his lady love, a very common motif of many love lyrics in English literature, the poem is full of doubts and misgivings about the nature of love spoken of here. Moreover a feeling of frustration pervades the entire poem. Behind this simple narrative structure the poem is highly symbolic in portraying love as a self-destructive, self-consuming passion (as Shakespeare has done in many of his sonnets) with suggestive images. The poem can be also taken as an illustration of the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the real, the ideal mystic world of the elfish lady and the desolate reality of the Knight.

            The frame narrator of the poem asks the Knight at arms the cause of his present state of misery. Then the knight proceeds to tell his sad story of love. He met a lady “Full beautiful—a faery’s child” in the meadow and fell in love with her. Her wild eyes made a hypnotic spell on him. While admiring the lady he made a garland for her. The lady sang an extremely enchanting song, a “faery’s song”. She treated him with sweet roots, honey and nourishing dew. She reacted with great love. Though the Knight does not know the strange language of the lady, he was sure of her confession of her love for him: "And sure in language strange she said—/ “I love thee true.” These lines cast doubt upon this mysterious woman and her nature of love. It also indicates that the Knight’s assertion comes only out of his intense passion for the lady. Then the lady takes the knight to her faery cave and weeps and sighs. The reason of her unhappiness may be her realisation of the fact that they can never be united as they are from different worlds. Otherwise it may be the pretension of a mischievous elf. The knight soothes her agony with kisses. Then the knight falls asleep by the magic spell and horrific dream follows. The pale Knights and warriors come in his dream and declare that he has been enslaved by the beautiful woman without mercy. It appears from their “death-pale” faces that they also been cheated and betrayed by the lady. He wakes up to find him “…on the cold hill’s side”, symbolising a life devoid of warmth of love. This is the reason why the knight at arms explains that he is here when it is extremely cold and nobody even no animal is seen outside.

                  The setting of the poem is the coming of winter suggested by the images like withered sedge, lake without birds, saturated granary of the squirrel and empty field after harvest etc. The cold, desolate and empty condition of the environment at the coming of winter reflects the inner world of the knight which is lonely and devoid of the warmth of love. Lily which signifies death, “anguish moist and fever dew” that suggest the feverish death -like condition of the knight and  the “fading rose” that signifies dying spirit of the knight are all negative images that helps to build the gloomy atmosphere of the poem. At the end the cold hill’s side where the knight roams symbolises the knight’s own life devoid of warmth love.

             Written in the traditional ballad stanzas of four lines each, the form seems to be perfect for stating the unhappy existence of the knight. The sad undertone, the mournful elegiac note is obviously as well as effectively carried on through the free flowing movement of the stanzas.

                Keats as we know is famous for being the poet of negative capability, the capability of being in mysteries, uncertainties and in doubt. That is why in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, he comes down to reality after having flight into the realm of the Nightingale, the ideal existence for him where everything exists in perfect order. In La Belle Dame sans Merci the Knight too meets with hard reality after flight to the realm of supreme satisfaction in love.

             Keats as Romantic poet shows a love medievalism. In many of his poem he idealised the  Middle Age. The Eve of St. Agnes is such an example. Though the poem is shaped around a series of intense contrast of cold and warm, of dark and white, of hardness and softness, of cruelty and love and though sometime it appears the negative images make stronger sway on the paradigm of the poem, yet the hero and heroine Porphyro and Madeline reach the destination for which they crave. The end shows uncertainties as to the future of these two, but we can never doubt the oneness of heart and the warmth of love of the hero and the heroine. But the present poem deconstructs the Romantic assumption concerning the aspect of medievalism.