John Keats - study questions
La Belle Dame sans Merci
The subtitle of the poem is “A Ballad”. How does Keats imitate folk ballads? You may compare this poem with such ballads as “Lord Randall” or “Bonny Barbara Allan”.
What does the title of the poem mean in English? Why does Keats choose to give it in French?
Who might the speaker be in the first three stanzas?
How are our expectations regarding the stereotype of knighthood subverted in the first stanza?
What flowers are mentioned in stanza 3 and what do they symbolize?
What does the lady do for the knight and what does he do for her?
What is the knight's dream and what happens when he wakes up?
How would you answer the poem's opening question?
In what sense is the lady merciless?
The poem is read by some critics as Keats' answer to “Kubla Khan”. In what respect the lady could be interpreted as a similar figure to the “Abyssinian maid”?
In what way the place the lady takes the knight to is similar to the land depicted on the Grecian urn (in “Ode”) and “faery lands forlorn” in “Ode to a Nightingale”?
How do you read the figure of the lady? Is she a vampire or a muse?
Ode to a Nightingale
In the opening lines, the poet feels as if he drank hemlock or opiates. What substances does he refer to and what feelings? (A cultural connotation - what is hemlock and what famous person died of it?)
What does the poet yearn for in stanzas 1 - 3 and why? Take into account the references to hemlock, opiates, alcohol and the mythical river Lethe.
Stanza 2 is, of course, about something more than just drinking oneself senseless. What does the wine stand for?
Why does the beautiful song of the nightingale evoke all these feelings in the poet? Pay a special attention to ll. 5 - 6.
Let us indulge in a bit of biographical reading: why could the fact that the bird is singing in “full-throated ease” be particularly poignant for John Keats in spring of 1819?
What stimulant replaces the ones listed in stanzas 1 - 2 in stanza 4?
From stanza 5, Keats uses his characteristic method of synaesthesia. What is it and how does it work here?
What particular words in stanzas 5 - 6 have funeral connotations?
What sort of impasse does the poet reach at the end of stanza 6 and how does he get out of it?
In what sense is the bird “immortal”?
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Describe in your own words the images on the urn. What are urns ually used for and what connotations does this carry?
This is another poem employing synaesthesia. Which senses are replaced by which?
The representations on the urn seem to be superior to real life. In what ways and at what price does this come?
How does the poet's view of the urn evolve?
The poem stresses the effect of permanence on us mortals. What kinds of effect does it have? Specifically, what does it mean that the urn can “tease us out of thought”? (l.44) Is it necessarily a good thing?
The ode's final lines supply much matter for debate - see Norton footnotes. Do you accept the moral of the urn?
To Autumn
This it the last poem in the cycle of great odes that Keats wrote in 1819. What motifs from “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” can you recognize? What similar subjects does it address?
How is autumn described? If you read closely, you'll see that there is actually no main verb in the first stanza. What effect does it have?
At what point does sound appear in the poem?