Keats On Seeing The Elgin Marbles Meaning

Through both love and pain depicted in the poem on seeing the elgin marbles john keats is able to demonstrate how he uncovers the enigma of beauty in our world.

Keats on seeing the elgin marbles meaning. On seeing the elgin marbles certainly can be read as a poem that is primarily preoccupied with the idea of mortality. John keats on seeing the elgin marbles posted on september 20 2011 this sonnet attempts to convey the poet s complex attitude towards death couched in a reflection on the british museum s greek statues. A combination of obscure and abstract images give the poem a lightness which belies its proposed interest in stone and monuments. On seeing the elgin marbles.

He states how he knows that his mortality means that one day he must die. The worth of human artistry. 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.

Keats s ode on a grecian urn is probably most associated with the elgin marbles simply because of benjamin haydon s battle cry against payne knight concerning the marbles. However with this particular poem keats seems to consciously writing with the intent of presenting an alternate meaning to the reader. 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. Poets like keats harness this beauty whether it is seen as beautiful or not and twist it to have an underlying meaning.

The poem is a reflection on the pleasures and the pains of human creativity. Upon seeing the elgin marbles keats is overcome by a sense of his own mortality. The marbles have immense beauty and grandeur but they used to be part of the frieze on the parthenon in athens. Keats would have never seen them in their intended placement situated on the temples of the acropolis complex.

Now the sculptures are in fragments and in london no longer a living part of religion but exhibits in a museum. John keats sonnet begins with a statement about mortality. Yet tis a gentle luxury to weep that i have not the cloudy winds to keep fresh for the opening of the morning s eye. Beauty lies throughout every corner of the universe.

The elgin marbles are a set of statues and friezes removed from the parthenon in athens by a british lord elgin and taken back to england at the beginning of the 19th century.