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Escapism in nightingale and 1 other poem - Coggle Diagram
Escapism in nightingale and 1 other poem
O solitude
Portrays the world as tiresome and wearisome something to be escaped from
O solitude
"Jumbled heap of murky buildings"
metaphor shows chaos, emphasised by enjambement highlights lack of order. "murkey" connotations of darkness and uncertainty, ugly city weather or percived moral darnkness of the citiy
"let it not be"
Passive, emphatic, like a plea. He has no strength to act himself
Keats's loneliness in Suffolk by himself studying to be a surgeon
As an romantic keats would have been diametrically opposed to the industrial revolution going on in cities
Nightingale:
Anaphora in "the weariness, the fever, and the fret", gives the impression that these issues are piling up and increases their sense of numeracy. All emotive nouns, linking to Keats's family tragedy, losing both parents and a brother in such a short span of time.
"youth grows pale, spectre thin, and dies" and "palsy shakes a few ..grey hairs", focus primarily on his brother's death by juxtaposing the antithetical pairing of youth and pale, and the blunt language of "dies". Keats also personifies palsy, a disease to do with age
He seeks escapism through his exclamatory statement "o for a draught of vintage" O is onomatopoeic and almost sounds as if in pain, and draught of vintage refers to wine, which K and other romantics were known to have substance abuse issues with, but by linking the means of escape with the past in "vintage", Keats may be wishing to escape from his current situation to the last time he war really happy, his childhood.
Presents nature as a means of escapeism:
Solitude
portrays nature very positively, "it's flowery slopes, it's crystal swell". Anaphora increases sense of numeracy, sibilance in crystal swell increases Sense of beauty too
Keats then uses religious imagery to portray nature as a means of escapism from solitude with "let me thy vigils keep mongdt the boughs". Apostrophe to solitude, imperative "let me" shows K wants to spend time in the "boughs" and the fact theat he uses the religous imagry of vigil makes it seem peaceful, also like a duty that needs to be fulfilled.
Naturalism: seeking the sublime through nature as a reaction against the cocntrol/logic the age of reason had ushered in. It was not man made or controllable, and it was constantly growing and changing, unlike the macnines and cities of the day. Keats would see this as means of escape for solitude and loneliness that he elxprenced in suffolk and throught his life
Nightingale
as discussed K's wis for oblivion through alcohol is linked with the past, but it is also linked with nature. "tasting of flora and the country green, dance and provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!" the highly emotive noun of mirth is linked through anaphora of "and" with natural imagery "country green" and "flora", implying that not only can Keats achieve oblivion through these things, he wishes to achieve happiness and bliss through immersing himself in nature. It's a metaphor for nature's intoxicating nature.
this is also echoes in his wish to "fade away" later intensified to "fade far away" into the "forest dim", the alliteration of F mimicking slurred speech, implying that Keats is successfully escaping into nature through metaphorical intoxication
Relationships as a means of escapism in Solitude and poetry as a means of escapism in Nightingale
solitude:
After portraying nature as the ultimate means of escape from daily life, Keats then qualifies this in the volta with the conjunction of "but" qualifying this previous sentiment
the abstract nouns used such as "words.. images, thought... soul" are contrasted with the concrete nouns in the octane like "slopes.. boughs... deer". This may signal that while nature is beautiful the most effective way to escape and transend daily life is to find genuine connection with another person, shown through the synathesia in "sweet converse" making company more attractive and "the synecdoche of "soul" in soul's pleasure, hi-lighting how intangible and unreal the happiness he would feel is.
Keats has not met brawn at this point, but is exceddingly lonely in suffolk and longs for human connection. in this context, we can reinterpret the structure of a Petrarchian sonnet from being a love letter to solitude among nature to being a love letter to someone keats has not yet met.
the sublime context: romantics looking elsewhere for feelings of transcendence that were previously found in religion.
Nightingale:
As Keats had already fell head over heels for Fanny Brawne by the time he wrote Nightingale, K probably no longer felt that escapeism through relationships provided him the security he felt he needed. Instead in N he portrays poetry as the ultimate escape. At this point he was struggling with his writing career not only did critics but fellow romantics criticsise his work
Firstly, he characterises portray and inspiration as attractive but coy through the personification of the fountain of "hippocrene" as 'blushful". Blushful - attractive, coquettish, when linked with the classical allusion of the fountain of inspiration, portrays poetry anc creative expression as attractive but hard to attain.
Then he rejects his previous means of escapism through the imperative and exclamatory "away! away!" and the reference to "bacchus" god of wine, instead he chooses the "viewless wings of posey". "Viewless" indicates danger in not being able to see but also implies there are no other equals, and when taken with viewless wings seems to portray poetry as angelic and pure, contrasting it directly with bacchus, a god of debachery.
Finally K explores the transient nature of poety in the justaposition in "emporor and clown", and it's comofiting escapeism with the biblical refence to ruth's story