济慈诗歌简析及读后感(英文版)

The Experience of Reading John Keats’s poems

Part 1 Introduction

John Keats is one of the most distinguished Romantic poets in the history of British literature. Although in his rather short and tough lifetime, Keats received so little financial reward or public recognition, he kept writing. When reading Keats’s poems, I’m completely amazed by his boundless imagination and his incomparably beautiful sentences and now I have a deeper understanding of his attitudes towards life and death.

Part 2 Analysis

(1) His pursuit for beauty

Though Keats lived in a dark period of time and had suffered from heavy illness for quite long before his death, he never stopped his love and pursuit for beauty. And the beautiful realm of nature, life and poetry is the most common theme in the poems that I read.

In the poem Ode to a Nightingale, he describes the nightingale as a light winged Dryad of the trees who “singest of summer in full-throated ease” in “some melodious plot of beechen green, and shadows numberless”. Through these lines, we can almost see her graceful look and hear her nice voice. The night scene that Keats describes is also mysterious and amazingly beautiful with “the Queen-Moon”“on her throne”, “clustered around by all her starry Fays”and all kinds of fragrant blossoms such as the white hawthorn, the pastoral eglantine, the violets and the musk-roses. All of these create a kind of intoxicating beauty of nature.

Keats’s praise for natural beauty can also be found in the poem To Autumn and On the Grasshopper and the Cricket, where he writes about the stunning view of the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and the “poetry of earth” which “is never dead”.

Bright Star is a love song that Keats writes to his lover Fanny Brawne. In this poem, Keats not only writes about the beauty of the bright star, but also writes about his young lover’s “ripening breast”and “tender-taken breath”. From this, we can see Keats’s attachment to the beauty of life and the girl.

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer is a sonnet we learned in class. In this poem Keats shows his admiration for the beauty of poetry itself. After reading Chapman’s Homer, he felt “like some watcher of the skies” looking at a new planet or “like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes”staring at the Pacific Ocean. These figures show Keats’s ecstasy reading the fantastic and powerful lines of Homer’s epics.

After my reading experience, I find that almost each pieces of poem written by Keats express his untiring pursuit of beauty, of nature, life, poetry and love. I can hardly imagine how he did it throughout all his misfortunes and sufferings. Maybe the pursuit itself is the motivation that keeps him living, just as he said to Fanny in the movie Bright Star :“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”