Poems by Shelley & Keats
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Percy Shelley's poem "To a Sky-Lark" and John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale" are both centered on nature in the form of birds. Both poems are classified as Romantic and have certain poetic elements in common, but in addition both poems have differences in style and in theme that differentiate them clearly. Both poets are spurred to react and to write because of their encounter with a bird. Shelley is addressing the bird that excites his interest more directly, while Keats turns to reverie because of the song of the nightingale more than the nightingale itself. In the latter case, the song of the poet has a different tone from the song of the bird--the joy of the bird becomes a contemplative song for the poet. Each poet begins with the reality of the bird or its song and then uses that as a beginning point for aesthetic and philosophic speculation, delving in each case into his own inner world for a response to the stimulus offered by the sky-lark or the nightingale.Shelley begins his poem with a direct address to the skylark, and it is the skylark's song that is of greatest interest to this poet just as it will be to Keats. Shelley makes a direct reference to the song as an example of "unpremeditated art," which might also be the term to describe the goal of the Romantic poet--he or she would like each poem to appear to be unpremeditated and to flow from an emotional response to nature ore than from calculated rational design. In this, these poets are imitating
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ns and attitudes which prevent them from achieving the same level of understanding, emotions such as anger, hate, pride, and fear. What the poet wants to learn from the skylark is what nature has to teach, and Shelley says that these lessons are not found in books:
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then--as I am listening now (101-105).
Here the poet indicates that he will transmit those lessons through his poetry to later generations, just as the skylark is now imparting those lessons to him.
Keats in his "Ode to a Nightingale" reacts to the happiness brought to him by the song of the nightingale, and this seems to be a more contemplative poem than that of Shelley, perhaps because the song of the nightingale is a different sort of joy from that of the skylark, and perhaps because Keats is a different poet than Shelley. In any case, Keats focuses more directly on his own feelings and on the way the song of the nightingale has alleviated certain emotions and concerns he has been experiencing:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains (1-3).
Keats sho
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Approximate Word count = 1591
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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