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Keats
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beauty but at the same time he knows that all things of beauty must fade
and die. He experiences love and death with equal intensity, knowing
that they are closely connected. He shared with both Wordsworth and
Coleridge the view that suffering is necessary for an understanding of the
world and that great poetry grows from deep suffering and tragedy. In
one of his letters Keats wrote: ‘Do you not see how necessary a world of
pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’
The ode is a complex poetic form, and Keats is generally regarded
as one of the masters of the form. At the same time he develops a
poetic language appropriate both to the form of the ode and the
nature of his themes. Keats’s language renders experience precisely; it
captures the rhythm and movement of thoughts and feelings; it registers
a full range of sense impressions. For example, in the following lines
from Ode to a Nightingale the poet asks for a drink of cool wine:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
The description is an example of synaesthesia – a feature which
recurs frequently in Keats’s poetry and in the poetry of others, such as
the twentieth-century poets Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas, who
have been much influenced by Keats. Synaesthesia is a use of imagery
and language choices which describe sensory impressions in terms of
other senses. In the lines above, Keats manages to appeal to sight,
colour, movement, sound, and heat almost simultaneously. For
example, the movement of dancing and the sound of song is described
as a taste. ‘Sunburnt mirth’ describes the sight of sunburnt faces at the
same time as we hear the same people laughing. Keats also created a
rich poetic music. An example of his control of the rhythmic movement
and syntax is the following lines from the Ode to Autumn:
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
Here the rise and fall in the rhythm of the lines matches the flight of