1. English Poetry II

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was born in West Sussex, England. He was from a wealthy and conservative family. His father was a member of Parliament. At 12 Shelley joined Eton, a prestigious school for boys.

3. Shelley developed an independent mind and he embraced the ideals of liberty and equality from the French Revolution. Some people called him “mad Shelley.” In 1810, he joined Oxford University and published 2 stories and a volume of poetry.

4. But in 1811, he was expelled for writing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Atheism was an outrageous idea in religiously conservative 19 th century England.

5. After Shelley eloped to Scotland with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he then married. Later he became friends with philosopher William Godwin and fell in love with his daughter Mary. Mary would later write the novel Frankenstein (1818).

6. In 1814, Shelley left Harriet and eloped with Mary to France. The couple returned to England and married after Harriet committed suicide in 1816. Shelley continued to compose many of his poems including ‘Ozymandias.’ He also met Lord Byron at the time, who greatly inspired him.

7. In 1818, he moved to Italy and continued to compose his most famous poems like Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. In 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm in an accident off the Italian coast. He was only 29 years old.

8. Ozymandias is a sonnet published in 1818. It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem. It was written in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who wrote another sonnet entitled "Ozymandias."

9. The central theme of "Ozymandias" is the inevitable decline of all leaders and the empires they build, however powerful in their own time. Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses II who was an Egyptian pharaoh famous for his magnificent building projects.

10. The speaker recalls meeting a traveller “from an antique” (old) land who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his country. Two huge stone legs stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head is “half sunk” in the sand.

11. The traveller tells the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicates that the sculptor understood the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are now dead.

12. On the base of the statue appear the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, there is nothing, only the “lone and level sands,” which surround it.

13. ‘Ozymandias’ is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is unusual for a sonnet in this era because it does not fit a conventional pattern for example, there isn’t a rhyming couplet at the end.

14. This sonnet is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem which is strange because it is an unusual poem for Shelley. It touches only a little upon the most important themes in his work (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, ‘Ozymandias’ is a great sonnet.

15. It is devoted to a single image: the ruined statue in the desert with its arrogant, passionate face and the inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”) (L11). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved because Ozymandias’ city has crumbled and disappeared. His civilization is gone and has been turned into dust by the indiscriminate and destructive power of history and nature. The statue is a monument to Ozymandias’ hubris (pride) and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings in the passage of time.

16. Therefore Ozymandias is a metaphor for the temporary nature of political power and is Shelley’s most political sonnet. But it symbolises not only political power – it can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity. It’s significant that all that is left of Ozymandias is a work of art and words, thus Shelley shows that art and language can outlast the other legacies of power.

17. Also he structures the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” (1). This enables Shelley to add another level of ambiguity to Ozymandias’ position. Rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, we hear a description from the speaker who heard about it from someone else. Thus Ozymandias becomes even less superior as this distancing undermines his power over us.

18. The description of the sculptor also undermines Ozymandias’ power. It describes how the sculptor accurately copied Ozymandias’ face and emotions onto the stone statue (5-7), and notes it was “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”(8). ‘Them’ in this line could refer to Ozymandias’ people and how he mocked them with his power. However, it could also refer to the sculptor and how he knowingly mocked Ozymandias’ pride.

19. John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was born in London. When he was young his mother died of tuberculosis and his father died in a horse-riding accident. When he was 15, Keats started a medical apprenticeship and went to medical school.

20. But at 20, he left medicine to devote himself to poetry. He published his first book of poems in 1817. Critics attacked his poems and his second book was unpopular. Keats’s brother Tom died in December 1818 and Keats moved in with a friend to Hampstead, London.

21. In 1819, he fell in love with Fanny Brawne. At this time, Keats experienced an extraordinary creative burst and wrote all of his best poems. But unfortunately, Keats and Fanny Brawne could not marry because he was too poor.

22. I N 1820 his health and finances declined and he visited Italy. He hoped the warmer climate might improve his health. Sadly, in February 1821 he died of tuberculosis in Italy.

23. His death brought to a premature end to one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of the 19 th century. Keats never achieved recognition for his poems in his lifetime. But now he is regarded as one of the greatest poets in the English language.

24. Keats was one of the most important figures of Romanticism. Many of the ideas and themes in Keats’ odes are characteristically Romantic: 1. the beauty of nature 2. the relation between imagination and creativity. 3. the response of the emotions to beauty and suffering 4. the briefness of human life in time.

25. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats published in 1819 in London. Apparently a nightingale had built its nest near Keats’ home in the spring of 1819.

26. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day whilst sat in his garden. The tone of the poem rejects the cheerful pursuit of pleasure from Keats' earlier poems. It explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality.

27. The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug (hemlock) only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing in the trees and says that his “drowsy numbness” (L1) is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather from sharing it too much. He is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of the summer from the trees and shadows.

28. In the 2 nd stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol and wishes for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and peasant dances. It would let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale.

29. In the 3 rd stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: He refers to “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” (L23) of human life, with its awareness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” (26) and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes” (29).

30. In the 4 th stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away and he will follow, but not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest, where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blows the branches.

31. In the 5 th stanza, the speaker says he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess what they are in the darkness: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets and musk-rose and the sound of flies on a summer evening. In the 6 th stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” (52) with the idea of dying and described Death with nice names in many poems.

32. Surrounded by the bird’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems better than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours out its soul with song. He says that if he were to die the nightingale would continue to sing but he would “have ears in vain” (59) and be no longer able to hear.

33. In the 7 th stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal - that it was not “born for death.” He says that the bird’s song has always been heard, by emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth. Ruth is a character from the Old Testament. He says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

34. In the 8 th stanza, the word forlorn suddenly returns the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the bird flies away, he laments that his imagination has failed him and he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s song was “a vision, or a waking dream”(79). Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot decide if he is awake or asleep.

35. “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. The 1 st seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter. The 8 th line of each stanza is written in trimeter (3 syllables). It also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza. Each stanza is rhymed ABABCDECDE.

36. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an ode. An ode is a lyrical verse written to praise or dedicated to someone or something which captures the poet's interest or inspires the poet. Ode were popular forms of poetry in ancient Greece. But it was William Wordsworth who revived the ode around 1800 and it’s often used by Romantic poets.

37. In this poem Keats’ speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) (25-6) is set against the timelessness of the nightingale’s music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”) (61).

38. The speaker’s drowsiness/numbness is a sign of too full a connection rather than a disconnection. The speaker tells the nightingale he is “being too happy in thine happiness”(L6). Hearing the bird’s song, the speaker longs to leave the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the 2 nd stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself.

39. But after his reflection in the 3 rd stanza on the transience of life he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (L32) (Bacchus was the Greek god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) He chooses instead to embrace for the first time “the viewless wings of Poesy” (L33) or poetry and creative expression rather than alcohol.

40. The delight of poetic inspiration matches the endless creativity of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker imagine himself with the bird in the forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing pain or disappointment.

41. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fantasy is just an imagined escape from the inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

42. In the bird’s song, he finds a form of expression that translates the work of the imagination into the real world. This is the discovery that makes him embrace Poesy’s (poetry’s) “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable. It is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. The speaker’s language suppresses the sense of sight in favour of the other senses like hearing.

43. He can imagine the light of the moon. “But here there is no light” he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This is also a fitting metaphor for the nightingale’s song. In this poem Keats achieves creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression— the nightingale’s song — is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

44. Bright Star (2010) starring Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish is about the relationship between Fanny Brawne and John Keats.