Both Keats and Frost write about the pleasure and pain of human experience - Choose two poems and compose the ways in which the poets deal with these issues.

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 English Essay

Both Keats and Frost write about the pleasure and pain of human experience. Choose two poems and compose the ways in which the poets deal with these issues.

Through out the poems – “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Birches”, both Keats and Frost shows us of their happy and beautiful human experience in the two poems, which are contrasted with the sadness and pain of their past.

In “Ode to a Nightingale”, John Keats displays the quality of the pleasure of the human experience (in this case the human experience of encountering the nightingale) and also the pain and sorrow of the real world, so much that he wishes for a painless death so that he can forget the past and go for a heavenly escape. One of the reason why Keats display so much sadness in this poem is probably because of Keats’ younger brother had died the previous December and in this ode the poet attempts to come in terms with a world so cruel that:

“Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;”

A world full of sorrow, which the nightingale cannot feel.

In the first stanza, Keats describes a pleasure so powerful that it pains him, the pleasure in which the nightingale gives Keats it bringing a feel of numbness to the pain of the real world:

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“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pain

…as thought of hemlock I had drunk,”

On the above quotation, we see a description of how the pleasure is so good that it hurts Keats by giving him a heart aches, we know this is because the sentence carry on by explaining that it feels like he has been drink hemlock (A drug drink that allows the drinker to feel no pain.) and it is the nightingale’s ability to be numbness that hurts Keats the most as Keats cannot get that. (The word numbness here does not really mean that it ...

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