Pessimism In John Keats Poetry

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John Keats’ poems represent a tone of pessimism. How far do you agree with the Statement? John Keats’ poems consist of a great variety of tones among which pessimism seems to be a prevailing one but in reality, if someone takes a deeper look and an insightful approach, he/she will find that it is, in fact, the reflection of Keats’ one of the controversial yet fascinating philosophies, Negative Capability, in all of his works. Based on the texts and the connotation of his poems - Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy, the tone which seems to be optimistic or pessimistic superficially is being refuted here with the theme from the viewpoints of the big picture which actually contains Negative Capability.…show more content…
This ideal of love is probably reachable hereafter and certainly attainable in the imagination, which can build Psyche a temple (a "fane") in "some untrodden region of my mind" (51). Moreover, the final stanza describes this world, where "branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,/ Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind" (52-53) and "a rosy sanctuary will I dress/ With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain" (59-60). Keats is thus making a direct comparison of the process of thought itself with "the ideal" making it beyond cynical about the impossibility of achieving the ideal. Unlike his other poems, it ends on a soft note: "a casement [window] ope [open] at night,/ To let the warm Love in!" (66-67). "Love," here, likely refers to Cupid/Eros, Psyche's husband. Henceforth, this poem bears a strong optimistic tone all through yet it is highly inferable that this ideal is barely attainable in real world and optimism is of no use if it surpasses reality. What actually Keats does here is he made the story of Psyche an ideal vehicle for expressing his yearning of embracing the uncertainty, living with mystery, and making peace with ambiguity-referring to his Negative…show more content…
The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. But, later, Keats shows limitations of human beings through the speaker’s meditation where this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “forever young”), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes). Likewise, in the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees seeing whom the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. First, he thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passion but, later, he finds out that in its sexual expression, it
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