Rhythm and Meter in La Belle Dame Sans Merci

In "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", John Keats subverts the traditional ballad form. Since traditional ballads are composed of four or six lines, and use one of two basic meters: 4-3-4-3 or 4-4-4-4. Insted John keats doesn't follow this since each lines finished before than expected. This makes the poem have a slower pace and this emphasizes the ending of the knight, alone and maybe dead. These are the variations in the rythm.
"La belle Dame sans merci" follows an iambic tetrameter. For example:
I made a garland for her head
And bracelets too, fragrant zone

Ideas on Ode to Autumn

• Excess of vitality and growth
• Personification of Autumn: as if it were a woman
• Cycle of life in one day
• Ambivalence in the tone: Duality towards Autumn, happiness and sadness
• Reminder of Death but rejoicing of nature
• Description of nature

THE END

Task two

1) How does To Autumn differ from the other poems you have studied?

To autumn differs from other poems since it describes autumn with a lot of colours, excess vitality and growth ("To bend with apples"). Nature is depicted in a joyful way. The structure is the progression of one day, the first stanza for the morning, the second stanza for the afternoon and the third stanza for the night. There is an ambivalence in the tone, a duality towards autumn; happiness and sadness throughout the poem. In the last stanza which is in the overall more melancholic it still uses certain words as a reminder that it is not all sad ("soft-dying day"). The big difference is that the speaker is reminded of death but rejoices nature. Much more positive than other poems, he is more accepting of the inevitable end not like Ode on Melancholy where death is rejected. In Ode on a Grecian Urn the speaker doesn´t accept death, in fact it resents the urn since it will prevail throughout time and he is going to die and be forgotten. Also he is admiring nature in the urn and imagines what it would look like while in Ode to Autumn he is actually admiring nature. 

2) I mentioned in a letter to my old pal Reynolds that the stubble fields in Autumn looked "warm" to me. How do I communicate a sense of warmth in my poem?

It communicates the warmth through the language and the synaestethic images. "Warm days will never cease", which means that the warmth will prevail.

3) How do I use language to reflect the passage of time and a sense of an ever-changing world in this poem?

The poem reflects the cycle of life, it not only refers to the progression of the seasons but to the passing of one day. 

In the first stanza there is an excess of vitality and growth, just like in the beginning of life; "maturing sun". It personifies the sun to show how the day is starting and the sun is coming up. 

The second stanza relates to middle of life, the day is already coming to an end; the afternoon. There is a hint of a lazy, mellow and apathetic mood; "Drows´d with the fume of poppies". It is a syneathetic image which combines vision, sound and smell. It doesn´t have the same vividity as the first stanza. 

The last stanza refers to life coming to an end; "rosy hue". The author embraces and accept this ending, "hedge-crickets sing", nature prevails and vitality is still there even though it is the very ending. 

To conclude, the poem is about life and death, form the very beginning of life until the very end. It shows the progression of how time goes by thorough the language used. 

Comparing Our & His Poetry

The similarities we found with Keats' "To Autumn" are:

- The description and aprecciation of nature, and the sense of admiration towards it.
- The personification of nature, in our case in "sorrowed brow" compared to how Keats' compares Autumn to a woman.
- The themes of life and death and the cycles in life. Keats' describes natures cycles (Summer, Autumn, etc), as we portrayed on our first picture, and as we expressed on our lines on it. We wrote about how life and death meet and how we are bound to it, as Keats' does in his poem; "Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies".

Ode to Autumn

Rebirth and birth

And it goes round and round

From Zeus' hands to the arms on Thanatos

To the cycle you are bound

The colours expand across the grey sky

Alas, the arc upon your sorrowed brow

Is as pulchritudinous

As the glistening, transluccent bow

Shadows reach for me

I walk alone

But the shadows reach up

As so I go on

Ode on Melancholy ---> Discovering its Imagery

"Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;"

The image portrays the physical appearance and the poisonous aspect that is presented in the poem about the wolfs bane, which is a beautiful flower but in this case it is shown to be deadly. The image highlights the shadows and lights, especially the darkness, evil death brought about by the flower.

 

" Make not your rosary of yew-berries;"

      The image on the right presents a rosary that is red just like the yew-berries. The shape of the balls in the rosary have the same shape as the ones of the berry. Also the fact that it talks about a rosary relates to religion and god.  This is one more allusion to nature that is present in the first stanza. It portrays the idea that everything is connected. 

"Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud"

The image on the right shows a landsacape in which there is a storm and it is raining. This highlights the metaphor in the poem about the rain and sky. Melancholy is unexpected, just like rain and is presente through nature.  

 "And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes"

This image is a direct portrayal of the "peerless eyes". Keats' makes use of repetition of the word 'deep' to highligh this idea, and the eyes on the picture give an impression of deepness.

"Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,"

This picture represents the "aching pleasure", as the woman is 'throwing up' love. It is a portrayal of the oxymoron as two opposite terms are joined. In this case, the oxymoron expresses that even though you are happy, you will eventually be sad as melancholy makes it's way to us, and joy is only temporary.

"Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:"

The image above shows a bee sipping the pollem of a flower. The bees make honey which is really sweet but they can also sting which can ache. In some way this can show how the speaker enjoys melancholy. 

Ode on Melancholy

 Lyric Poem:"A short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre."

Melancholy: "is beyond sad, it's a word for the gloomiest of spirits.Being melancholy means that you're overcome in sorrow, wrapped up in sorrowful thoughts. The word started off as a noun for deep sadness, from a rather disgusting source."