John Keats On Seeing The Elgin Marbles
This sonnet attempts to convey the poet s complex attitude towards death couched in a reflection on the british museum s greek statues.
John keats on seeing the elgin marbles. More john keats sign up for poem a day receive a new poem in your inbox daily. John keats sonnet begins with a statement about mortality. Posted on september 20 2011 by impracticalcriticism. The sonnet on seeing the elgin marbles tells the reader how john keats struggles with mortality and that struggle brought this sonnet to express that accepting fate exceeds denying an inevitable death.
William wordsworth also viewed the marbles and commented favourably on their aesthetics in a letter to haydon. My spirit is too weak. On seeing the elgin marbles. John keats on seeing the elgin marbles.
Let me begin my dream. He states how he knows that his mortality means that one day he must die. Forgive me that i cannot speak. Explain how the poem conveys the idea that art can both move with its beauty and disturb by its tendency to remind us of our own mortality.
To haydon with a sonnet written on seeing the elgin marbles haydon. The marbles have immense beauty and grandeur but they used to be part of the frieze on the parthenon in athens. John keats was an english romantic poet and author of three poems considered to be among the finest in the english language. Now the sculptures are in fragments and in london no longer a living part of religion but exhibits in a museum.
On seeing the elgin marbles other sonnets of john keats my spirit is too weak mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep and each imagined pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship tells me i must die like a sick eagle looking at the sky. John keats 1795 1821. Upon seeing the elgin marbles keats is overcome by a sense of his own mortality. Although he died at the age of twenty five keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any english poet.
I come i see thee as thou standest there beckon me out into the wintry air. Investigating themes in on seeing the elgin marbles. On seeing the elgin marbles lyrics. A combination of obscure and abstract images give the poem a lightness which belies its proposed interest.
John keats visited the british museum in 1817 and recording his feelings in the sonnet titled on seeing the elgin marbles. What is keats saying about the worth of human artistry.