John Keats 1795 - 1821

1. John Keats 1795 - 1821

2. Fanny Brawne – Keats’s “Fair Star”

3. When I Have Fears I May Cease to Be When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

4. Bright Star Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart,    Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task    Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask    Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,    Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,    Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

5. Examples of GRECIAN URNS (amphoras)

6. Ode on a Grecian Urn Guided Reading Questions Stanza I: What forms do most of the sentences take in this stanza? What metaphor describes the Urn? What are some of the images, in general, that the poet sees on the urn? Vocab: Tempe and Arcady are two exceptionally beautiful rural regions in Greece. Stanza II: What specific figures does the poet contemplate in this stanza? What should make the “bold lover” unhappy? What reassurance does the poet give him? Stanza III: Why should the tree boughs, the piper, and those who are passionate in love be happy to exist on the urn? What is the problem with human passion in the real world? Vocab: adieu – Middle English for “goodbye” Stanza IV: What kind of ritual is the viewer witness to in this stanza? What is a heifer, and how is she decorated? For what purpose? What can “never be known” about the town pictured on the urn? Stanza V: The poet compares the urn to what other subject that causes humans to think? What advantage does the urn have over human generations that live and die? Despite the woe of mortality (understandably felt by Keats), what consoling gift of wisdom does the urn give us, that all we need to know? Vocab: Attic – Grecian Brede – Interwoven pattern

7. The Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Italy