The Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Al_Qadisiyah University College of Education Department of English Imagery In John Keats ˈOde to a nightingaleˈ and Percy Bysshe Shelly’s ˈTo a skylarkˈ A Thesis Submitted By Qasim Hussein Kamel To The Council of the College of Education _ Al_Qadisiyah University Which is Part Fulfillment of the Requirements for obtaining a bachelorouis Degree in English Supervised By Asst. Lect. Ahmed Abdul Hussein Chiyad 1441 A.H 2020A.D ( ) صدق الله العلي العظيم سورة الفرقان آية 84 – 84 أ 1 Dedication To Allah the Most Merciful To the Teacher of Humanity, the Prophet Muhammad ( peace be upon him ) To My Family 2 Acknowledgement Firstly, I just wanted to extend my sincerest thanks to my supervisor for sparing his valuable time to give advices, assistances and valuable suggestions. Secondly, great thanks to all people who gave me their time, effort, and support during this work. III 3 Abstract This research paper discusses the importance and impact of imagination in poetry in general , and in Keats and Shelly’s poems in Specially, the purpose of imagery is to help get the poet's message across in langua ge that is strong, vivid and very visual. The poet will use words to create images in our heads that help us to interpret the poem in the way he sees it. This study divided into two sections , first one talk about the life and career of John Keats and Perc y Bysshe Shelly, while the second section discuss the imagery in Keats ̎ Ode to a nightingale ̎ and Shelly’s ̎ To a skylark ̎ At the end there is a conclusion which sums up the findings of the study, IV 4 CONTENT ABSTR ACT ........................................................ IV CHAPTER ONE : J ohn Keats: Life and Career .......... .. .. 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Life and career ............................. .....4 NOTES .............................................................................. .. ....8 CHAPTER TWO............................................................ .......10 Imagery In John Keats ̎ Ode To A Nightingale ̎ ... ......... ..... 12 Imagery in Shelly’s ̎ To a skylark ̎ ............................... .......17 NOTES ............................................................................... .....21 CONCL USION .............................................................. .. ......23 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................. ................ ....24 1 Chapter One 1.1 John Keats: Life and Career J ohn K eats was born on the 31st of Oc tober, (1795) , the first of a family of five children, one of whom died shortly after birth. His young parents had just begun to manage the livery stables that the father of Mrs. Keats, John Jennings, had built into a fairly pros perous business. The stable s, which bore the name of the "Swan and Hoop," 1 His father, Thomas Ke ats, was not a Londoner by birth, but came from the country to the town early, and was head hostler in a livery stable before he was twenty. He married Frances Jennings, the daughter of his master, who thereupon retired from business, leaving it in the han ds of his son - in - law. The young couple lived over the stable at first, but when their family increa sed, they removed to a house in the neighborhood. John Keats was the first born. He had two brothers and a sister who grew to maturity. George Keats was sixt een months his junior; Thomas was four years younger, and Fanny, who was born in (1803), was a girl of ten when John Keats was making his first serious ventures in poetry 2 He had two younger brothers, George and Thomas, and a sister much younger; John resembled his father in feature, stature, and manners, while the two broth ers were more like their mother, who was tall, had a large oval face, and a somewhat melancholy beh avior . She succeeded however in inspiring her children with the pro fondest affection, and especially John, who, when on an occasion of illness, the doctor o rdered her not to V 2 be disturbed for some time, kept sentinel at her door for above three hours with an old sword he had picked up, and allowed no one to enter the room. At this time he was between four and five years old, and soon after he was sent, with hi s brothers, to Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, which was then in high repute. Harrow had been at fi rst proposed, but was found to be too expensive 3 Keats ' life has gone th rough a lot of historical events, for example in April 16, ( 1804 ) Thomas Keats, John's father, dies after a fall from his horse. Two months later, Frances Je nnings Keats remarries, to William Rawlings, a clerk. Her parents, John and Alice Jennings, take custody of the Keats children at their home in Enfield, north of Lo ndon; after John Jennings' death the following year, the children move with Alice Jennings t o a neighboring village, Edmonton. March 10, ( 1810 ) Frances Jennings Keats, John's mother, dies of tuberculosis. ( 1811 ) Keats signs on as an apprentice to a surgeon , Josep h Hammond of Edmonton. ( 1814 ) u pon the death of Alice Jennings, Richard Abbey, pro - p r oprietor of a London counting - house and tea brokerage firm, becomes legal guardian of John Keats and his siblings also he writes his first poems. (1815) Keats matri culates as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, London, and is appointed a surgical dresser. (1816) Keats passes qualifying exams as an apothecary and receives a license to practice, but by the end of the year gives up medicine for poetry. 4 His first published poem appears in Leigh Hunt's Examiner. He takes up residence briefl y at Dean Street in the Borough and then, by the middle of November , with his brothers, at 76 Cheapside. Between October and December he writes "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and meets Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Hamilton Reynolds. Hunt bestows upon him the 3 familiar nickname "Junkets," a play on Keats' C ockney pronunciation of his own name. (1817) Keats publishes his first book, Poems, and in M arch moves with his brothers to Well Walk, Hampstead. Between April and November, reading Shakespeare intensely, writing steadily, and moving restlessly from place to place. Meets, by the end of the y ear, Benjamin Bailey, Charles Wentworth Dilke, Charles B rown, and Wordsworth. 5 When Clarke formally introduced Keats to Hunt in the autumn of (1816) , Keats had been a medical student at Guy's Hospital for one year. The medical profession was then comprise d of an elite group of university educated physicians wh o served the wealthy and a much larger number of surgeons and apothecaries who tended most of the population. Keats's career aspiration was to become an apothecary, and eventually to be licensed to pr actise as a surgeon. The surgeons and apothecaries were gradually gaining respectability in the early nineteenth century, but they had not been regarded as gentlemen at all u ntil the mid eighteenth century. 6 According to Keats (2003), “he had received a good education at John Clarke's Enfield private school. In 1811 he was app renticed to a surgeon, completing his professional training at Guy's Hospital in (1816). His decision to commit himself to poetry rather than a medical career was a c ourageous one, based more on a challenge to himself than any actual achievement “ (p.10). 7 In September (1820) , Keats's health was so much broken that his physicians advised that he go to Italy, hoping that a gentler climate might lengthen his life. He accordingly started on his journey, accompanied by his faithful friend Jos eph Severn, the painter. The journey wa s delayed by 4 storms and a quarantine of ten days at Naples. His health, when he arrived in Naples, was in no way mended. At Naples he received a pressing invitation from Shelley to visit him at Pisa. The travelers pre ssed on to Rome, however, where Keats w as taken in charge by Dr. Clark, who was all kindness and attention to the sufferer 8 In February 23, ( 1821 ) K eats dies in Rome at eleven in the evening. Three days later, he is buried at dawn in the English Cemetery there 4 1. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Life and career Shelley was born on 4 August (1792), just three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution. It was a well - timed arrival. Although born in the eighteenth century, he grew up taking it for granted that the world would never be the same again; and when, at the age of 24, he visited Versa illes and Fontainebleau, he thought the latter the scene of some of the most interesting events of what may be called the master theme of the epoch in which we live'. Fro m the age of 19 he had known how important it was that people should be active in oppo sing religious, political, and domestic oppression: in ( 1819 ), at the age of 27, he summed up his developed political philosophy. 9 Shelley was born when the Revolution was about to plunge into violence and bloo dshed after mainly peaceful origins. A few weeks after his birth the September Massacr es took place; in January ( 1793 ) the King was executed. For those who had hailed the Revolution as ushering in a 5 new golden age these events and the subsequent Terror wer e to prove traumatic. 10 Percy's educ ation began at age six under the direction of his tutor, Reverend Edwards, a Welsh par son. Percy received a traditional Welsh instruction from Reverend Edwards; as a part of that, he also learned Latin and Greek. In ( 1802 ), his family sent him to Sion Hous e Academy, Brentford, a rather odd choice for an aristocratic education, since many of the boys were tradesmen's sons. From there, he went to Eton in ( 1804 ). He was a lyric and Pindaric poet who desired to write revolutionary epic and lyrical drama. At heart a skeptic and not a Platonic visionary, he nevertheless broke through to a Gnostic vision very much his own, curiously parallel to the work of William Bl ake, whom he never read. 11 He was the son of Ti mothy and Elizabeth Shelley. As the elder son among one brother, John, and four sisters, Eliza beth, Mary, Margaret, and Hellen, Percy stood in line not only to inherit his grandfather’s considerable estate but also to sit in Parliament one day. In his posi tion as oldest male child, young Percy was beloved and admired by his sisters, his parents, an d even the servants in his early reign as young lord of Field Place, the family home near Horsham, Sussex. Playful and imaginative, he devised games to play with his sisters and told ghost stories to an enrapt and willing - to - be - thrilled audience. 12 In ( 1813 ) Shelley also fell in love with Godwin's daughter, the beautiful Mary Wollstonecraft (who would one day write the popular Gothic novel Frankenstein). At the time, Shelley was sti ll married to Harriet Westbrook, a woman with whom he had eloped within ( 1811 ) when she was only sixteen years old. He had married Harriet to save her from a "tyr annical" father, and he had vowed to love her forever, but now 6 he fled to France with Mary Wol lstonecraft and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont 11 While he was at Eton, Shelley published his first story, Zastrozz , a romance. He left Eton just before his eighteenth birthday, and entered Oxford University where he continued to be a voracious reader and writer. His second romance, St. Irvyne, was p ublished in April ( 1810 ). He also worked with his sister Elizabeth to write the poem " Victor and Cazire" 12 At Oxford in the autumn of ( 1810 ), Shelley's closest friend was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a self - confident young man who shared Shelley's love of phi losophy and rejection of orthodoxy. The two friends centered their serious reading on Plato, Locke, and Hume. The latter two philosophers bols tered their confidence that their religious skepticism was justified: In fact, the two friends collaborated on a p amphlet, The Necessity of Atheism , which claimed that God's existence could not be proven on empirical grounds (by mere observation or experie nce) and further, that "no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief”. Needless to say, this pamphlet creat ed shock waves and the university demanded a retraction of the ideas it promulgated. However, while James Hogg capitulated to pressure from bo th Oxford and his family to repudiate this pamphlet, Shelley refused. In fact, Shelley went so far as to send the pamphlet to all the bishops and other significant faculty members and administrators at Oxford, many of whom were devout churchmen. He was hop ing to receive counterarguments from them, but it was a naive act. As a result of his rebellion, Shelley was expelled from Oxford in ( 1811 ). His career at Oxford lasted a mere six months and the events surrounding his expulsion caused an ever - widening rif t with his father. In the end, Thomas Hogg admitted that he was eq ually involved with the 7 pamphlet scheme, and he was also expelled. The two young men left for London on March 26, ( 1811 ), and took lodgings in Poland Street. 13 In April ( 1822 ), the Shelley’ s settled on the bay of Lerici on the north - western Italian coast. On 8 July, Shelley was returning from visiting his friends Lord Byron and James Leigh Hunt when his boat overturned and he was drowned. He was cremated and his ashes placed in the Protestan t Cemetery in Rome, where Keats was also buried. 14 8 Notes 1 Bate, W.J. (1963). John Keats: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Massachusetts , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p:1 2 Keats, J., & Scudde, H.E. (1899). The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats Cambridge: CBE University Press, p:15 3 Houghton, L. (1867). The life and letters of J ohn Keats . London: Stanford University Press, p:4 4 Clark, T. (1994 ). Junkets on a sad planet: Sc enes from the life of John Keats. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, p:15 5 Ibid 6 Mizukoshi, A. (2001). Keats, Hunt and the aesthetics of pleasure . New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Press, p:109 7 Keats, J. (1977). The complete poems. London, 80 Stran d : Penguin Press, p:10 8 Keats, J. (1883). The Letters and Poems of John Keats, New York : Dodd, Mead & Compan press, p:313 9 Worthen , J. (2010). The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A critical biography . Wiley & 9 Hoboken, NJ: John sons press, p:3 10 O'N eil, A. (1989). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A literary life. Alfred Place , London: The Macmillan Press, p:8 11 Bloom, H. (2001). Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bloom’s major poets. New York, NY: Infobase publishing press, p:9 12 ibid 13 ibid 14 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy - bysshe - shelley (accessed in 17/2/2020) 15 http ://www.bbc.co.uk/history /historic_figures/shelley_percy_bysshe.shtml (accessed in 14 /2/2020) 10 Chapter Two 1.3 Poetic Imagery Imagery is one of the literary devices that engage the human senses; sight, hearing, taste, and touch. Imagery is as important as metaphor and simile and can be written without using any figurative language at all. It represents object, action, and idea which appeal our senses. Sometimes it becomes more complex than just a picture. There are five main types of imagery, e ach related to one of the human senses: Visual imagery (sight) , Auditory imagery (hearing) , Olfactory imagery (smell) , Gustatory imagery (taste) and Tactile imagery ( touch). Here is an example of imagery in a poetry: To Autumn – John Keats Until they think warm days will never cease , For summer has o’er - brimm’d their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft - lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half - reap’d furrow sound asle ep To autumn is rich in imagery, evoking the perception of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The above lines are primarily visual imagery. The tactile imagery (touch) is seen in the warmth of the day, the clammy cells, the soft lifted hair. 1 Imagery is sometimes used as a synonym for "metaphor" in poetry; often, on the other hand, the two are considered as entirely 11 distinct . To the psychologist and to many critics imagery in poetry is the expression of sense - experience, channelled through sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, through these channels impressed upon the mind, and set forth in verse in such fashion as to reca ll as vividly and faithfully as possible the original sensation. In these terms, a poetic image is the record of a single sensation If imagery is thought of as synonymous with metaphor, however, the single poetic image is a figure of speech involving comp arison or likeness. And since "metaphor" is also ambi guous, used as it is for a single class as well as the entire species of figures, confusion is worse confounded. 2 Images and symbols have always been the soul of poetry. Poets in all ages, in all countries and in all languages have employed these devices to enhance their expression and create an impact on the reader. Thought, Imagism and Symbolism as mov ements started rather late, that is, in early twentieth century yet, poets had been using images and symbols in the sixteenth century and even before. This clearly reveals the deep bond between poetry, imagery and symbolism. Kristian Smidt is of the op inion : Poetry is the language of actual thought, or actual ideas. Its actuality is not merely contingent, and does not merely lie in its faithfulness to an external subject matter : it resides far more in its faithfulness to the movements of the mind and spirit of the poet. And this is manifested in the poetic use of imagery. For actual thought also tends to move in images. 3 12 1.3.1 Imagery In John Keats ̎ Ode To A Nightingale ̎ In the spring of 1819, the months during which Keats wrote four of the five great odes , Keats stayed with his friend Charles Brown in Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Brown later wrote the following account, which may offer the reader insight about the experience expressed in "Ode to a Nightingale": ...A nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behin d the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. 4 In the ode, Keats responds to the beauty of the nightingale's song with a both "happiness" and "ache." Though he seeks to fully identify with the bird - to "fade away into the forest dim he kn ows that his own human consciousness separates him from nature and precludes the kind of deathless happiness the nightingale enjoys. First the intoxication of wine and later the "viewless wings of Poesy" seem reliable ways of escaping the confines of the " dull brain," but finally it is death itself that seems the only possible means of overcoming the knowledge and fear of time. The nightingale, after all, is "immortal" because it "wast not born for death" and cannot conceive of its own passing. Yet without consciousness, humans cannot experience beauty, and the speaker knows that if he were dead his perception of the nightingale's call would not exist all. This 13 paradox shatters his vision, t he nightingale flies off, and the speaker is left to wonder whether his experience has been a truthful "vision" or a false "dream”. 5 In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats uses synesthetic imagery in the beginning by combining senses normally experienced separately to unify unrelated objects or feelings, but as he nears the end h e stops making the connections. This helps the reader to make a dist inction between the dream and reality, which is a constant theme in Keats’ works. The poem starts off by explaining how the narrator is heart - broken and is thinking about options to kill t he sensation. He is considering hemlock, a poisonous drink made from the herb, and drinking from the Lethe River, a river in Hades that souls soon - to - be reincarnated drank from to forget their past lives. By choosing the latter of the two, the narrator wou ld have to kill himself (neither of which seems enticing). Then the narrator hears the music of a nightingale and like a drug itself, dulls his senses into his own special world with the bird. He then uses synesthesia “In some melodious plot / Of beechen g reen,” (8 - 9) to combine sound and sight. 6 “Ode to a Nightingale” is a superb example of Keats’s mastery of depicting beautiful imagery in his poetry. The re are numerous examples of sensuous imagery which affect the sense of sight, taste, hearing, smell etc in this beautiful ode. In lines 16, 17 and 18, the poet presents an imagery of sense of sight where the poet says: Full of the true, blushful Hippocrene / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,/ And purple - stained mouth ” (256). Here the reader visualizes the scene of that wine and the beauty of the bead shaped bubbles which are formed on the surface of that wine when it is poured into a glass. The bead s haped bubbles are winking at the edge of the glass in which the drin k is poured. The reader can experience beautiful colours as well in the above lines. He 14 describes a wine of red colour which makes the colour of the lips purple after drinking that wine. I n the same lines the reader perceives the sense of taste of the wine . In stanza 5 the beauty of the place where the poet has reached in his imagination is described marvelously. Keats says: The grass, the thicket, and the fruit - tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves ; And mid - May’s eldest child, The coming musk - rose, full of dewy wine 7 The poem also contains images associated with death, such as ‘hemlock’, ‘Lethe’, ‘embalmed’, ‘darkness’, ‘ requiem’, tolling bell, ‘plaintive anthem’ etc. When associated with ‘palsy’, ‘fret’ and ‘despairs’, death is a negative presence that quenches the human spirit. But death also has positive associations: it is ‘easeful’, a ‘rich’ experience which releases the poet into a pain - free eternity. 8 Ode to a Nightingale is one in which Keats' yearning dreams of release from the sufferings of the human condition are the most generalized and closest to the dominant impulse in his writings. The ode is marked f or its rich and suggestive imagery, and it is not simply because it is the longest of the odes, but because the treatment of the subject involves a totality of experience o n the part of the poet, which he wants to express with the maximum impact. There is a dramatic development in the poem, the gradual transformation of the living nightingale into a symbol of visionary art. Though this theme receives its fullest expression i n the ode, yet this is not the first time when Keats has dealt with the topic. There are references throughout the work which are connected with other poems of Keats. In the first stanza, the words 'aches', 'drowsy numbness', 'pain', and 'dull opiate' have a peculiar quality, created in part of their sound quality, and by the images they help to construct and the