So far autumn as been portrayed as very beautiful and forceful way of life. The characters are not given names but are autumn, itself. The poem contains an essence of autumn being in every one of us and the ‘mellowing’ that age brings. Autumn is one of earth’s gifts; this is related to the harvest and the wheat and the corn, and the apples giving us a sweet taste. Keats sees autumn as a festive time of joy and happiness, despite the coming of winter. His attitude towards nature and this particular season shows us of Keats attitude to life itself. The word ‘maturing’ opens the meaning of ‘To Autumn’. The poem in a way is dedicated to experience, wisdom, knowledge and the ability to accept death. Autumn can be described as growing up; ready to face the challenge of survival, a time when the old live out the last days they have before winter. Autumn could be a metaphor for life; it would represent those of middle age, who have the experience of years to gain from. The old have been taken over by the energy of the young, Keats has shown us the magnificence and the blessing of autumn and that maturity can offer us the best experience. The harvest is a symbol of the benefits of such qualities and the ‘music’ of the season. Death is a very important fact here. As with winter just around the corner, maturity and age calls the inevitable. Keats reveals his acceptance. He takes a great view of the earth, and he grows a close description reflecting the old times as autumn and as life, draws to a close.
‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day. And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue’. The end of the poem is a welcoming to winter, and to death, which is a pleasant, gentle passing that is a beautiful experience and should not be feared. There is no threat here; only an agreement that life on this earth must have an end for every one of us. The poem ends with the cycle of seasons and how it will continue and life will return as Keats reminds us in his final line. ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’ Keats is expressing his feelings of life and death. His moral in these lines, is that we need to appreciate everything because every stage of life, just like every season has its own uniqueness, every stage of life has its charm and you should enjoy all your hard work. Not all Keats views on death were positive, he thought quite negatively as well, as shown in the next poem I studied ‘La Belle Dans Sans Merci’. Keats major works do not deal with religion, ethnics, morals etc. but about sensations and experiencing the richness of life. In this poem, Keats is focusing on how experiencing beauty gives meaning and value to life. In ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Keats seems to be telling the reader about something that may have happened or may happen someday, even to you. You discover something you really like, but something you’re not sure about, but it is the best thing you’ve ever experienced. You are bedazzled by it; you give in to everything and let it amaze you. But all of a sudden the desire is gone, just like life, the experience has let you down and you are regretting ever being so interested in it. In the poem, Keats is letting the reader decide whether the knight’s experience was really worth it, or whether like life it was something to regret. Keats records no response to the dying knight. ‘To Autumn’ and this poem, are such opposites, this poem has a lot of negative images which are very dull and cold, it also holds a sense of loss. The first two stanzas ask a lot of questions, they are a narrative, ‘what ails thee knight at arms, alone and palely loitering’. The poem is continued, with answers and ideas to the original question. It was known, that Keats got his inspiration for this poem through a dream he had with the same story line as the poem, and he also uses his own experiences to create the character in the poem. The knight is an image of Keats, himself. In the story of the poem, the knight meets a ‘faery’ in the fields and he falls in love with her. She made his life a pleasure and gave him all the happiness in the world, but then he woke up and the experience was gone. The imagery in both the poems is very different. ‘Manna dew’ and ‘honey wild’ relates to a witches cauldron. ‘No birds sing’ lets the reader know, that the knight is all alone in the world, and this gives a negative aspect to the poem. The women in the poem, made the knight happy, and how ever hard he tried he could not escape her, she made his life a wonder to live. Death is the same, it is inevitable, and nobody can escape it, it can not be avoided, and so can be seen as a metaphor. The poem holds a super – natural theme to it, Keats uses words like ‘faery’, ‘elfin grot’, this gives the reader the impression that the women may not be natural, and possibly super –natural. Keats tries to portray a sad and miserable atmosphere, using words like ‘alone’ and ‘gloam’. In the poem, he uses references to plants, because plants are like life, they grow old and die and the cycle continues. He describes tuberculosis as a day in the life of a flower. ‘I see lily on thy brow’, is meaning dullness. ‘With anguish and moist fever’, he describes the flower as being ill, probably growing old. ‘And on they cheeks a fading rose’, giving a reference to the skin colour changing, and this all relates to death. Keats believed that everybody begins identical to God, and grow with individuality only by experiences in life. By doing this, we prepare ourselves for happiness in the afterlife. It's significant that this most intimate explanation of the personal attitude behind his work follows a powerful composition about emotional destruction. Keats is saying that any intense experience, even letting yourself get depressed and die after a failed relationship, or dying young of tuberculosis, is a precious experience. Each experience goes into making you into a unique human being.Keats has different opinions of death, as you can see by the poems, this one being very negative and the other being very positive.
Robert Browning has a completely different view to death, both of the poems I have studied by him, have very negative attitudes towards the inevitable. ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. They are both written about murder and are dramatic monologues. Both poems are unemotional. The reasons for murdering their lovers in the Victorian age would have been seen as killing for love and passion of their partners. In today’s society, things are very different; it is seen as pure murder. This is an example of changing attitudes of death over time. In a way, these poems can be seen as biased, as they are only told by one person. Each poem also has a silent listener, in ‘My Last Duchess’ the silent listener is the Ambassador for the Count (father of the Duke’s next bride) ‘his fair daughter.’ In ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’ the silent listener could be either a police officer, or the story could be told to somebody, there is no evidence in the poem who he is talking to. As the poems are dramatic monologues, the characteristics of the characters become very clear. The Duke is very cold, and selfish. Porphyria’s Lover, is a possessive lover, and quite obsessed. You can see through the characters why they kill their lovers, through jealousy and possession, with the idea of control and getting what they want through killing their loved ones. ‘And give herself to me forever’, this is a quote from ‘Porphyria’s Lover’; it is stating that if you want something to stay with you forever that is possession. ‘That moment she was mine, mine’, he feels that by killing her, she is his, another sign of possession. ‘I have drawn for you, but I’ from ‘My Last Duchess’ , he is saying that he keeps the curtain shut over the picture of her so nobody can see it but him, again possession. The language used by Browning, makes the poems very similar, although he uses different language in each poem. Both the Duke and the lover get jealous of their lovers way of life. The Duke is jealous, because he feels he is not important to her as she smiles the same to him as she does everyone else. He is jealous of her ‘blush’. The Lover is jealous for a different reason, because Porphyria cannot be his and she already has a husband. The lover believes she does not worship or love him as much as her husband, but later on realises that she does in fact worship him. ‘Porphyria worshipped me’. The lover believes he is of a higher class than her because you only love someone of a higher class just like ‘The Last Duchess’, and the Duke being of a higher class to the Duchess and she chooses to ‘stoop’. The relationships between the each of the lovers in the poems are very different; Porphyria and her lover are very close and affectionate while the Duke and the Duchess are very cold and distant. Both poems are about keeping a reminder of the victim close by e.g. the painting and on his shoulder. The two poems are very similar, but the difference is in the language, in ‘Porphyrias Lover’, the language is trying to make you feel sorry for the lover. However in ‘The Last Duchess’ the language is trying to persuade you that the Duke did the wrong thing killing the Duchess, this is a change of attitude towards death. Both poems contain themes of jealousy, power, obsession, love and most importantly death, but on a very different scale to Keats poems.
In conclusion, after discussing the attitudes towards death in the some of the poems I have studied, it is clear that everybody has a different view on death, whether it is good or bad. Keats has a mixed view on death but overall had learnt the life was an experience and one to remember, Browning thought badly of death, and had an opposite view on it. But nonetheless death is inevitable; it happens to all of us, it should not be a threat just a fact of life.
Latin for ‘seize the day’, Caesar.
