The first quatrain I feel represents Keats fear of dying before he has had a chance to complete his dreams and ambitions; he feels he has a limited amount of time left in his life to achieve his dreams. This is shown in the opening two lines of the first quatrain where Keats uses Enjambment to link the two lines together, and uses the Imagery in the second line of the first quatrain of the “pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” which gives the reader of this poem the image of Keats ambition of getting his pen to collect together in writing the ideas that are filling his head. Keats also uses imagery of harvesting in this first quatrain, this is picked up by words that have been used such as “garners” which means to gather or store in, and “full ripen’d grain”, which together creates the image of a farmer collecting in his crop in the autumn.
The second quatrain I feel is still about Keats fear of dying, but in this quatrain he fears that he may not live long enough to experience and examine the magical wonder of nature that the world has to offer. Poets were often associated with their love of nature and the natural world and I think that this is reflected in this quatrain when Keats uses the metaphor “Night’s starr’d face”.
The third quatrain examines Keats fear that he will never see the love of his life again once he is dead. I get the impression that he is talking about his lover from the line, “And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more,” He feels that when he dies he will never again be able to see his lover and experience the magical feeling of “unreflecting love”.
In the concluding rhyming couplet Keats seems to deal with his fears listed within the previous three quatrains. Keats uses enjambment in the last line of the third quatrain to link it to the couplet, and he seems to conclude that when he thinks about his own death and all the fears that it brings him he realises that when he eventually does die then love and fame will no longer be of concern to him any way. Keats uses a powerful metaphor for death within the enjambment of the last line of the third quatrain and the first line of the couplet, which is, “then on the shore, of the wide world I stand alone,” and I feel that Keats is trying to say that when he eventually goes through death, although the world is a big place this is something he will have to endure on his own.
‘A Minor Bird’ by Robert Frost, is written as a poem that has no regular metrical rhyming pattern, this can be spotted because the rhythm when reading each line changes between 8, 9 and 10 syllables. The poem is made up of four stanzas of rhyming couplets. This poem has the rhyming scheme of AA, BB, CC and DD, which means that the first line of the first couplet rhymes with the second line, and this pattern is repeated through out the poem. I also think that the rhyme scheme is quite masculine because the last syllable of each line is quite accented which makes the rhyme quite strong.
The first two stanzas seem to concentrate on the poets annoyance that this bird is singing out side of his house all day making a noise, and the poet wishes that the bird would “fly away”, and has clapped his hands to try and scare him off.
The last two stanzas concentrate on the guilt the poet starts to feel because he can’t stand the noise and feels it must be un-natural to want to “silence any song”.
Frost uses a few examples of enjambment in this short poem, which is displayed in stanzas two and four, and he also personifies the bird by referring to it as “him” and “his”, this is shown in the second and third stanza. I feel that the poet hasn’t used many examples of figurative language as the poem is quite straightforward and to the point, there doesn’t seem to be any underlying hidden meaning to dig out in this poem.
In conclusion after comparing both of these poems, looking at their formal, structural and linguistic elements, and their thematic contents, I feel that ‘When I Have Fears’ by John Keats is the more effective poem. I think that this is because the poet, Keats, gets the reader of the poem to look more deeply at the meaning. It is written in the 19th century, and in a more traditional style, and although it is written in the English language, Keats uses some words that are either no longer used today or their meanings have changed since being written. This seems to get the reader of the poem to work harder to un ravel its meaning, where as ‘A Minor Bird’ was written in the 20th Century and is there fore a more modern styled poem. I think that this is reflected through out the whole poem, it is easier on the eye to read because of the way it is set out on the page, and there seems to be no deep hidden meanings that the poet wants the reader to de-mystify. Because of the rhyme scheme and the way it is set out ‘A Minor Bird’ seems to me to be almost like a child’s nursery rhyme.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fenton, J., (2003), ‘An Introduction to Poetry’ 5, page 27
Reader’s Digest., (1993), ‘Universal dictionary’
