'Keats Yearned to Transcend the Human Condition Essay\r'

'â€Å"Keats yearned to transcend the humanitys condition but could except find a temporary reprieve from lethality.”\r\nDiscuss.\r\nKeats, done his poetry, has in entrap risen above the soulfulnessity which was so openhanded in his psyche both temporarily and permanently. much(prenominal) of Keats’s poetry can be seen as an attempt to explore Keats’ acute aw atomic number 18ness and musings on the transience of human disembo dauntd expression. Coloured by his experiences of sustenance and last, and ironically captured in his own sickness and archaeozoic demise, there is turn let out in his poetry which displays aftermaths of aeri conformation understanding of imminent lethality; albeit interspersed within the questionable poetry of a man struggling to fill in to terms with one of sustenance’s near complex mysteries.\r\nKeats life experience was of upmost enormousness in forming this awareness. Contacts with death such(prenominal) as the death of his brother tomcat at a unripe age, as with other members of his family, had a profound opposition on the poet. ‘To Autumn’ displays this heightened sense of time and its passing. The vivid description of the transition betwixt the hardens gives the reader an about snapshot like vision of a moment at the end of autumn with â€Å"all take with ripeness to the core;” (I. 6) as yet we are subtly reminded that this aura of â€Å"fruitfulness” and â€Å"warm days” may shortly be destroyed by the â€Å"winnowing drift” of the imminent winter. By the concluding stanza of the poem, we are minded(p) the harrowing reminder of the ready to be slaughtered â€Å" unspoilt grown lambs” (III. 30) and the â€Å"gathering swallows” which signify that the new season is pending.\r\nAt these times it appeared he found a temporary respite with exploring his tortured reputation done his poetry. Ward describes poems he wrote in the â€Å" baleful months” where he contemplated the subject of death as: â€Å"the solo release; poetry itself was a kind of discourse with the immortal dead, or of the dead with one another, and the and the poet a damnlike figure who races who escapes the bonds of the e nontextual matterh to join them.” (Ward 40) numbers in a sense cand a method of backup man and catharsis for a man surrounded by and near to death.\r\nHowever, Keats yearned to achieve a much more than extensive release from the human condition than that gained through the writing of poetry. A letter to George Keats after Tom’s death displayed how this experience congealed jakes Keats’ stamp in im mortality: â€Å"The3 last days of light Tom were of the most distressing spirit… merely the common observations of the commonest people on death are as true as their proverbs. I take scare doubt of immortality of some nature or other- incomplete had Tom† (Walsh 57).\r\nA letter to butt joint exposes Keats’ longing to extend his being beyond that of a mortal life: â€Å"how short is the longest Life- I respect to believe in immortality. I wish to live with you forever.” (Ward 359) Keats’ own, soon to be fatal malady surely emphasised the transitory nature of life. The final line of Keats’ Last Sonnet provides additional evidence of this fixation with the capacity for immortality: â€Å"Still to hear her tender- taken breath,/ And so live forever †or else black out to death” (13†4).\r\nThis refusal to accept death and the end of his life is replicated with a powerful allusion to Greek myth at the beginning of ‘Ode to Melancholy’: â€Å"No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist/ Wolf’s- bane, tight- rooted, for its poisonous wine” (1- 2). Keats, vastly aware of his mortality sought to procure an escape, a means of escaping this doom. Where he was to subsequen tly find this was through the art of poetry.\r\nOde to a Nightingale explores the relationship between arts and immortality. The nightingale’s song is use as a gateway into the immortal dry land; a world completely removed from the fugitive mortal one. With the song of the nightingale having been heard and respect by the human race for thousands of old age, there is a sense of immortality in its melody which Keats envies: â€Å"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird,/ No hungry generations go thee down” (VII. 70- 1). Keats’ heartfelt anguish towards the nightingale is ground on the belief that while the individual bird is mortal the species’ artform, that is song, lives on.\r\nLikewise Ode on a Greek Urn, based on an intense meditation on art by Keats, further explores Keats’ pursuance in mortality, and the capacity which some forms of art meet to escape it. â€Å"The theme of what is gone before is the arrest of beauty, the fixture given by art to forms in life which are fluid and impertinent, and the appeal of art from the senses to the spirit” (Garrod in Fraser 68). The artefact which has survived and is being admired for 2,200 years in a sense has a success over time which Keats as a mortal does not: â€Å"Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/ As does eternity.” This admiration for art and the workman is furthered at points in his poetry, including in his inferring to ‘Old trillion’ as an, albeit at a more retiring(a) level, artistic person who â€Å"with her fingers old and brown..\r\nPlaited mats o’rushes.” However, the arrogance of Keats holding a steadfast and absolute belief in the capacity for a human to, by some means, achieve a form of immortality may be questioned. Ambiguities and paradoxes in many poems may provide suggest that while there is an obvious interest in the power to retain some form of mortality; this belief is not as overbearing as this. He constantly wrestles with the idea. genius tyro states that: â€Å"He has found no haven in the world. He is not the fanatic who lives within the mortal security of his safety, which is the security of dogma. Nor is he the dreaming godforsaken who is insecure in his mortality and can therefore only guess at heaven” (Pollard 118).\r\nThis more balanced interpretation of Keats’ opinions can be seen especially in the latter parts of poems which may have begun with a positive emphasis on immortality come through over the power of time. In the final stanzas of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the whole poem is revealed as in effect a deceit. The nightingale is after all mortal: â€Å"a deceiving elf.” Perhaps Keats’ desire to come in contact with a more sensuous and interminable world is in fact materialising in a fantasy: â€Å"Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music: †Do I raise or sleep?” (VIII 79- 80).\r\n Similarly while ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ at first admires the baron of art to have a sense of permanence, this vantage point transforms in the latter stages. The figures on the urn are, however beautiful, only an artist’s attempt to capture the human nature and event’s portrayed. The paradoxical nature of the poem means that the probing questions asked ultimately have no satisfactory answers. In searching melancholically for synthesis, Keats is witting of how the concept of eternity is, and always pull up stakes be, a mystery to us.\r\nOde on Melancholy is another such poem which may substantiate claims that Keats acceptance that art and beauty may not be an consequence which has complete immortal qualities. Mayhead (96) argues that this is the case: â€Å"The Melancholy Ode accepts the impermanency of beauty and joy as inevitable”. Keats understands that in a sense â€Å"beauty must die” (III. 21); not all works of art will be able to wit hstand the test of time.\r\nHowever for Keats art is, if not an actual way to achieve a level of immortality, then the best woof he believes he can attempt. This agnostic awareness of the temporary state of human life at this point was heightened by his illness and imminent death. One of his final poems, ‘Sonnet’, perhaps most ostensibly displays this yearning to transcend the human condition, and an almost prefigurative mention of how the poet will find this exemption from mortality: â€Å"When I have fears that I may abdicate to be\r\nBefore my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,\r\nBefore high piled books” (1. 1- 3).\r\nKeats longs that his writing’s and creativity will, as a form of art, harbour his existence to higher, almost platonic level. Whilst providing temporary respite the impermanence of the human conditions at points through his art, Keats through his works, has managed to further extend his influence far beyond his life on earth th rough his writings.\r\n workings Cited\r\nFraser, G. S. ‘Part 3: Recent Studies.’ John Keats: Odes. capital of the United Kingdom: MacMillan, 1971. Mayhead, Robin. ‘1: The Odes II.’ John Keats. capital of the United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1967. 95- 101 Pollard, David. The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984. The Complete Poems of John Keats. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994. Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Walsh, William. ‘3: The Development of Self.’ Introduction to Keats. London: Methuen and Co., 1981.\r\n'