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For Monday: Keats: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn (handout)



NOTE: You can find these poems on the last pages of your “Christabel” handout. If you don’t have them for some reason, you can easily find these poems on-line. Each one is just over a page long, so you can read them quickly. However, each one is a quite subtle, so read more than once—and if possible, read them the first time aloud. Hear the music and consider how Keats wants you to read/experience it.

SECOND NOTE: These poems are “odes,” which are addresses to a specific person or object, usually in tribute to them. In the first, he is addressing his ode to a Nightingale singing in the woods, and he imagines flying along with the bird through the darkness of the imagination. In the second, he is examining a Grecian Urn in a museum, and walking around it trying to decipher the images and characters engraved upon it. In both poems, the living bird and the work of art bring to mind his own mortality, and how much more fortunate the bird and the urn are than him—though ironically, these things only live through him, the poet, as he writes about them.

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: In the opening lines of “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet cries that his “heart aches” and his senses are “as though of hemlock I had drunk” (hemlock is a poison). What seems to be ailing him in this poem, that he seeks the Nightingale’s help or assistance? Any clues in the opening stanzas of the poem?

Q2: In Stanza II of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he claims, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.” Why could “unheard” melodies be sweeter than those we actually hear? And why does the musician on the urn play “spirit ditties of no tone”? Why does Keats prefer this type of music?

Q3: Examine Stanza VII of “Ode to a Nightingale”: why does Keats think the nightingale is an “immortal Bird” which is “not born for death”? How can a single bird live forever, and why does the poem obsesses about the nightingale’s ability to escape the clutches of death?

Q4: In the final stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats reminds us that the urn will exist long after we have gone, just as it has survived countless generations. He ends this reflection with the famous lines, “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Why is the famous phrase quoted? Who is speaking these lines? And what is his response to them? Who is the you in this sentence?

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