Keats Yearned to Transcend the Human Condition Essay

“Keats yearned to surpasse the human condition but can only find a temporary alternative to mortality. ” Discuss. Keats, through his poetry, offers in effect gone up above the mortality which was and so prominent in his psyche both temporarily and permanently.

A lot of Keats’s beautifully constructed wording can be seen as an attempt to learn Keats’ acute awareness and musings within the transience of human existence. Coloured by simply his experiences of existence and death, and as luck would have it captured in the own sickness and early demise, there may be evidence in the poetry which will displays moments of visionary understanding of certain mortality; although interspersed inside the ambiguous poetry of a gentleman struggling to visit terms with one of life’s most intricate mysteries. Keats life knowledge was of upmost importance in building this consciousness.

Contacts with death such as the death of his buddy Tom in a young age group, as with different members of his family members, had a outstanding impact on the poet. ‘To Autumn’ shows this increased sense of time and its transferring. The brilliant description of the transition involving the seasons gives the reader an almost snapshot like vision of the moment at the end of fall months with “all fruit with ripeness towards the core; ” (I. 6) However were subtly told that this ambiance of “fruitfulness” and “warm days” may soon always be destroyed by “winnowing wind” of the upcoming winter. By the final stanza of the composition, we are given the harrowing reminder with the ready to always be slaughtered “full grown lambs” (III.

30) and the “gathering swallows” which usually signify that the new season is usually pending. For these times that appeared he found a brief respite through exploring his tortured nature through his poetry. Keep describes poetry he published in the “dark months” in which he contemplated the subject of death since: “the only release; poems itself was a kind of interaction with the undead dead, or of the useless with one another, as well as the and the poet a birdlike figure who have escapes who also escapes the bonds from the earth to sign up them. ” (Ward 40) Poetry in a sense provided a procedure for relief and catharsis for the man between and close to death.

Nevertheless , Keats yearned to achieve an infinitely more extensive relieve from the man condition than that obtained through the producing of poems. A letter to George Keats following Tom’s death displayed just how this encounter congealed Ruben Keats’ belief in growing old: “The3 previous days of poor Tom had been of the most unpleasant nature… yet the common observations of the commonest people on death happen to be as authentic as their proverbs. I have discourage doubt of immortality of some nature or other- neither got Tom” (Walsh 57).

A letter to Fanny reveals Keats’ longing to extend his being further than that of a mortal existence: “how short is the greatest Life- I would like to believe in immortality. I wish to experience you forever. ” (Ward 359) Keats’ own, shortly to be perilous illness definitely emphasised the transitory nature of your life. The final line of Keats’ Last Sonnet delivers additional proof of this fixation with the convenience of immortality: “Still to hear her tender- taken breath, as well as And so live forever – or else gush to death” (13– 4).

This refusal to accept fatality and the end of his life is replicated with a powerful allusion to Greek fable at the beginning of ‘Ode to Melancholy’: “No, no, go never to Lethe, nor twist/ Wolf’s- bane, tight- rooted, due to its poisonous wine” (1- 2). Keats, hugely aware of his mortality searched for to procure an escape, a means of escaping this kind of doom. In which he was to therefore find this is through the fine art of poetry.

Ode into a Nightingale explores the relationship among arts and immortality. The nightingale’s track is used like a gateway in the immortal universe; a world totally removed from the fleeting mortal one. While using song from the nightingale he was heard and admired by the human race for hundreds of years, there is a impression of immortality in its tune which Keats envies: “Thou wast not born intended for death, undead Bird, as well as No hungry generations stand thee down” (VII.

70- 1). Keats’ heartfelt anguish towards the nightingale is based on the fact that while the specific bird is definitely mortal the species’ artform, that is music, lives on. Furthermore Ode on a Grecian Urn, based on carry on your workout meditation upon art by Keats, further more explores Keats’ interest in fatality, and the capability which some forms of artwork have to avoid it. “The theme of precisely what is gone ahead of is the police arrest of magnificence, the fixity given by art to varieties in life which are fluid and impertinent, as well as the appeal of fine art from the sensory faculties to the spirit” (Garrod in Fraser 68).

The piege which has made it through and is being admired to get 2, 2 hundred years in a sense has a mastery over time which in turn Keats like a mortal would not: “Thou, muted form, dost tease all of us out of thought/ As does eternity. ” This admiration for art plus the artist is usually furthered in points in his poetry, which include in his inferring to ‘Old Meg’ as an, albeit at a far more unassuming level, artistic person who “with her fingers outdated and darkish.. Plaited mats o’rushes. ” However , the assumption of Keats keeping a working and absolute belief in the capacity for a person to, someway, achieve a form of immortality might be questioned.

Ambiguities and paradoxes in many poetry may present suggest that while there is an obvious interest in the energy to retain some type of mortality; this kind of belief is usually not as absolute, wholehearted as this. He constantly wrestles with the idea. One critic declares that: “He has found simply no haven on the globe.

He is not really the fanatic who lives within the human security of his basic safety, which is the safety of teorema. Nor is he the thinking savage who may be insecure in the mortality and will thus simply guess at heaven” (Pollard 118). This more well-balanced interpretation of Keats’ views can be seen particularly in the latter elements of poems which may have commenced with a confident emphasis on growing old succeeding above the power of time. In the final stanzas of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the entire poem is usually revealed as effectively a deceit.

The nightingale is definitely after all human: “a deceiving elf. ” Perhaps Keats’ desire to come in contact with a more sensuous and everlasting world is in fact materialising within a fantasy: “Was it a vision, or possibly a waking wish? / Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep? ” (VIII 79- 80). In the same way while ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ at first admires the capability of skill to have a impression of resolution, this standpoint transforms in the latter levels. The characters on the urn are, even so beautiful, just an artist’s attempt to capture the human mother nature and event’s portrayed. The paradoxical characteristics of the composition means that the probing questions asked finally have no adequate answers.

In searching melancholically for activity, Keats is usually conscious of how a concept of everlasting is, and always will be, a mystery to us. Ep?tre on Melancholy is another such poem which can substantiate says that Keats acceptance that art and beauty may not be an importance which has full immortal characteristics. Mayhead (96) argues that the is the case: “The Melancholy Ode allows the impermanence of splendor and joy as inevitable”. Keats understands that in a sense “beauty must die” (III. 21); not all art works will be able to tolerate the test of time.

Nevertheless for Keats fine art is, in the event that not an genuine way to achieve a level of immortality, then the best option this individual believes he can attempt. This agnostic awareness of the temporary state of human lifestyle at this point was heightened simply by his illness and certain death. Among his final poems, ‘Sonnet’, perhaps many obviously shows this hoping to transcend the human state, and a nearly prophetic mention of how the poet will find this kind of exemption by mortality: “When I have worries that I may well cease to get Keats longs that his writing’s and creativity will, as a form of art, hold his lifestyle to higher, almost platonic level.

Whilst featuring temporary respite the fugacity of the man conditions for points through his fine art, Keats through his functions, has managed to further lengthen his affect far beyond his lifestyle on earth through his writings. Works Mentioned Fraser, G. S. ‘Part 3: Recent Studies. ‘ John Keats: Odes. Birmingham: MacMillan, the year of 1971. Mayhead, Robin the boy wonder. ‘1: The Odes II. ‘ Ruben Keats. Birmingham: Cambridge School Press, 1967.

95- tips Pollard, David. The Poems of Keats: Language and Experience. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984. The Complete Poetry of David Keats. London, uk: Wordsworth Editions Limited, year 1994.

Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Producing of a Poet person. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Walsh, Bill. ‘3: The introduction of Self. ‘ Introduction to Keats.

London: Methuen and Co., 1981.