In Keats’s poems, he has the speaker find different ways to express his views on mortality and death. This common theme is not surprising because Keats was exposed to many deaths throughout his life; he lost his parents and two brothers (Smith, 390-404). In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”, for example, the speaker explains how the knowledge of mortality has affected him, and also includes a positive view towards it. In “The Human Seasons”, the speaker takes a direct approach and draws parallels between the human life cycle and the cycle of seasons, which emphasizes how short life is. In “Ode to Melancholy”, the speaker tries to separate the feeling of melancholy from feeling a need to die. He instead encourages taking advantage of the melancholy and eventually
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But the point that Keats tries to get across in many of his poems is simple; in “Ode on Melancholy” he wanted the reader to understand what melancholy was and how to deal with it. He used imperatives such as “go not to Lethe” and “emprison her soft hand”. In “The Human Seasons” he wanted to show how life was short and temporary by comparing it to a natural process that occurred over the course of one year. While these points are simple, Keats used complex ideas and examples in his poems to make them clear. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”, the tone of the second quatrain differs from the rest of the sonnet. In most of the sonnet, the negative rhyming words that stick out the most emphasize the speaker’s negative experiences with mortality. Examples include “feud” and “rude” in the sestet, and “mortality” and “die” in the octave. This last pair is an off-rhyme, which makes the speaker’s tone seem lost and confused. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker is deep in his thoughts and memories, but has trouble getting some of them across. For example, in the first tercet, he refers to an “undescribable feud” going on in his
But the point that Keats tries to get across in many of his poems is simple; in “Ode on Melancholy” he wanted the reader to understand what melancholy was and how to deal with it. He used imperatives such as “go not to Lethe” and “emprison her soft hand”. In “The Human Seasons” he wanted to show how life was short and temporary by comparing it to a natural process that occurred over the course of one year. While these points are simple, Keats used complex ideas and examples in his poems to make them clear. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”, the tone of the second quatrain differs from the rest of the sonnet. In most of the sonnet, the negative rhyming words that stick out the most emphasize the speaker’s negative experiences with mortality. Examples include “feud” and “rude” in the sestet, and “mortality” and “die” in the octave. This last pair is an off-rhyme, which makes the speaker’s tone seem lost and confused. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker is deep in his thoughts and memories, but has trouble getting some of them across. For example, in the first tercet, he refers to an “undescribable feud” going on in his