Oct 5, 2015 Ramblings and Musings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0XYZNx6854
I’m in the mood for Keats!
When I was young, about ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen — I was madly in love with the Romantic Poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, plus a poet who SHOULD have been a Romantic Poet, but is categorized as a Victorian Poet — Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I LOVED all the poetry I read, and would sit with my Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, which I bought in a tiny alley in a busy shopping area in the city of Madras, now Chennai, India. I would walk around with this book in hand, and drink, nay inhale, the poems therein — keep in mind I was only ten, then. (I also climbed trees, read Enid Blyton, comics, Mad Magazine and all manner of stuff, apart from reading English Romantic poetry. Oh, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake and others, too, of course, and loved it all. But it was the poetry of the Romantic Age that caught me in its net. The influence of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on me is incalculable, even if I may not mirror them in my own work. It’s the feeling, the emotion, the magic of their language that ensnared me. And above all, it was John Keats who spun a silent web in which I was happy to be trapped.
Strangely, I didn’t memorize his poetry the way I memorized WW or Coleridge, or Eliot in the 20th century. I just drowned in his evocative moods, much as a bee might drown in a flower, drunk and delirious, and not bothering to analyze why.
These three poems, especially, moved me greatly:
Ode to a Nightingale – John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci — John Keats
When you read his lyrical, melancholic, musing, dream-imagistic poetry, you’ll see why I love him so much.
I always wonder what he would have been like had he lived beyond the age of 25. It makes me deeply sad to think of those whose flame burned so brightly that it consumed them (or so, I think fancifully, but it really was about the lack of good medicine in those days).
To know more, here’s good old Wikipedia on John Keats!
Tags: English Poetry, Fancy, John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn, Romantic Poetry, S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth