shelley keats
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
(1) How do the natural elements (like the wind, the cloud, the sea, fire, etc) serve the poet's artistic ambitions? How can they help him in achieving his purpose?
The poet is directing his speech to the wind which blows across the earth and through the seasons. The wind is able to preserve and to destroy all on its way. The wind takes control over clouds, seas, weather, and more. Recognizing its power, the speaker realizes that he could use the wind’s power. It could assist him in his work of poetry and prays that the wind will deliver his words across the land and through time how he does the same with the nature elements like with the leaf.
(2) What is the poet's ultimate aim to reach throughout the poem? (You can focus on especially the 4th and 5th stanzas of the poem.)
In the fifth we can see clearly that the wind is a metaphor for the poet’s own art, which drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”. The new birth is the spring. The spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination, and liberty. Shelley hoped his art could help to bring these things into the human mind.
.
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
(1) What are the main ambivalences/duplicities that characterize the whole poem?
The main duplicities that characterize the whole poem are the human figures which are carved into the side of the urn and the real men. On the urn people do not age, do not die, lived through centuries. They are frozen in that moment. They do not have the problem like real people have in life. They do not need to deal with aging and with death, although they can not have the experience of life neither. So on one side we have the carved people without the problems of real people and on the other hand we have the real people with problems but experience.
(2) What is the true beauty that Keats mentions (quite emphatically) in the last lines of the poem?
(1) How do the natural elements (like the wind, the cloud, the sea, fire, etc) serve the poet's artistic ambitions? How can they help him in achieving his purpose?
The poet is directing his speech to the wind which blows across the earth and through the seasons. The wind is able to preserve and to destroy all on its way. The wind takes control over clouds, seas, weather, and more. Recognizing its power, the speaker realizes that he could use the wind’s power. It could assist him in his work of poetry and prays that the wind will deliver his words across the land and through time how he does the same with the nature elements like with the leaf.
(2) What is the poet's ultimate aim to reach throughout the poem? (You can focus on especially the 4th and 5th stanzas of the poem.)
In the fifth we can see clearly that the wind is a metaphor for the poet’s own art, which drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”. The new birth is the spring. The spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination, and liberty. Shelley hoped his art could help to bring these things into the human mind.
.
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
(1) What are the main ambivalences/duplicities that characterize the whole poem?
The main duplicities that characterize the whole poem are the human figures which are carved into the side of the urn and the real men. On the urn people do not age, do not die, lived through centuries. They are frozen in that moment. They do not have the problem like real people have in life. They do not need to deal with aging and with death, although they can not have the experience of life neither. So on one side we have the carved people without the problems of real people and on the other hand we have the real people with problems but experience.
(2) What is the true beauty that Keats mentions (quite emphatically) in the last lines of the poem?