Bits of Life 2

F-20 Words-575

timelessness of its art and death in the intended use of the urn (ashes).
The poet concludes that the urn will say to future generations of mankind:

"'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".

Ode to Autumn-
Ode to Autumn unfailingly catches our imagination. Personification of autumn strikes us as a novel experiment.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;”
The romantic note in the description of the season takes us to the environment of autumn. It makes us pause and take in the mists and the fruit. It is a season of abundance. Harvesting just got over and there she is relaxing in the vacant land and in the granary floor.
““Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing1 wind;”

“to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease”

Once again we see the poet personifying the bees as they drink from the honeyed flowers incessantly.
Are we missing spring? No, not so, says the poet.

“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,"

In other words, beauty of nature never dies. It transcends from season to season. Beauty transcends and is forever through nature. People can be beautiful but they will eventually die beautiful, whereas nature can be beautiful forever. There is daily observation of the activity of nature subtly introduced throughout the poem.

Ode on Melancholy-

Some of the lines in the last stanza of the poem remain on my mind forever.

“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips..”

This Ode is full of ancient Greek references and symbols particularly in the first stanza. The poet refers to Lethe and Psyche and the “ruby grape of Proserpine;”

“Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sov’ran shrine,”

Melancholy is a hidden part of joy. This thought would certainly make us think about our joys and the fear within whether this joy continues or not and this is what that contributes to melancholy, I believe.

Keats composed some of the greatest poems in the language, including ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘Lamia’ in 1819.

We had “La Belle Dame sans Merci’ for a detailed study.

“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.”

The poem was written in the form of a ballad, the oldest form of poetry in English.

The speaker of these lines meets a knight-at-arms roaming all by himself by the lonely hill side. He looks so anguished that the poet cannot help feeling sympathy and therefore asks him the reason why he looks sad and lonely.

The knight answers the question as to what made him look so. He tells the Speaker how he met the Lady and what subsequently happened. In stanza seven the Lady speaks ‘in language strange’ “I love thee true”, which rather begs the question, if the language was strange how did the Knight know what she said? In stanza ten the lady ‘lulled’ the Knight to sleep, and this could be taken to mean that she has deceived or tricked him, and by stanza ten and eleven the Knight tells the speaker