Born in London,
England, on October 31, 1795, John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection
of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to
express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking
tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought
on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis which ended his life. Continue
reading here.
Notes on La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats
"La Belle Dame sans Merci,"
written in 1819 and published the next year, depicts a knight-at-arms who has
been seduced and abandoned by a capricious fairy. Told in the form of a
dialogue, the poem recounts the experience of loving dangerously and fully, of
remaining loyal to that love despite warnings to the contrary, and of suffering
the living death of one who has glimpsed immortality. At the beginning and end
of the poem, the knight remains on "a cold hill's side," a world
devoid of happiness or beauty, waiting for his love to return. Some readers
maintain that the poem is really about Keats's feelings for Fanny Brawne, his
fiancée, to whom Keats could not commit fully. Others claim the story is
symbolic of the plight (= a condition of extreme hardship) of the artist, who, having
"fallen in love" with beauty, can never fully accept the mundane (=
ordinary, temporal, wordly). Either way, the conclusion is the same: however self-destructive
intense love may be, the lover has little choice in the matter. Besides, the
more one entertains feelings of beauty and love, the more desolate and more
painful the world becomes.
2 comments:
Pasqua, you may have read this but I have just done so and I thought of you right away:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/01/jane-austen-illustrated-biography-alkayat-cosford/
Enjoy!
Warm regards
Rosa
Thank you, Rosa! Such a beautiful article about our beloved Jane Austen!
Kind regards ... and happy summer holidays!
Pasqua
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