Form as Strategy: Keats's "On the Sonnet" and "Bright Star"Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay “On the Sonnet” is a poem that deplores conventions, flouts conventions, is governed by conventions, and reclaims conventions . It is neither a true Petrarchan poem nor a Shakespearean sonnet; both forms, however, serve as references to the poem. “On the Sonnet” has five rhymes, as in the Petrarchan form, but they are distributed with apparent randomness and do not mark structural changes. Rhetorically, the poem references Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms. As in a Shakespearean sonnet, his argument is organized in short imagistic units and ends with two final epigrammatic lines which form a couplet not through rhyme but through syntactic structure. While a Shakespearean sonnet is organized 4+4+4+2, Keats's sonnet is organized 3+3+3+3+2. Again, I am talking about syntactic organization, not marked by rhyme, but this numerical pattern is echoed in a rhyme scheme in which four of the five ending sounds appear three times, and the fifth only twice (ABC ABD CAB CDE DE; spaces represent syntactic sounds). divisions). The poem also gestures to a larger, two-part Petrarchan structure as the timbre of its set of images changes midway through the poem. This suggestion of a volta, however, does not occur at the expected point of division between the octave and sestet, but rather divides the poem into a seset followed by an octave. The poem consists of a single sentence cast in "if-then" constructions in which the "then" has been removed: "If... [then] leave us." » The "if" is always concessive, and although it undermines the absolute certainty of the conditions it describes (Keats could have written "since"), the use of the indicative leaves in place the fundamental assumptions of the poem: Keats does not overtly suggest that "the bare foot of poetry" be left unadorned, although the possibility may hover behind the terms of his argument. The first six lines of the poem, a section that I hesitantly suggest as its sesset, take binding as the dominant trope. The opening image is by far the most violent in the poem: "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained, / And, like Andromeda, the sweet Sonnet / Chained, despite painful beauty": it is an image not only of servitude, but of sacrifice. This is the only time where poetry (“the Sweet Sonnet”) receives a human face in the poem, and the only time where a feeling is attributed to it: “pain”. The second group of three lines in the poem both feature a “then” clause. and repeats the “if” clause that triggered it. Repetition, however, has a difference: if before it was "our English" who was "chained", here it is "we" who are "constrained": the burden of binding has shifted from the language to the one who shaped her. But if we are bound, we are also the seekers of our binding: “Let us discover... / More intertwined and fuller sandals / To fit the bare foot of poetry. There is a curious change here: the “sandals” barely resonate in harmony with the chains of Andromeda. It is not an image of violence, but of utility, protection and perhaps even adornment. Far from wanting to reduce the constraint, the speaker seeks a more “intertwined and more complete” binding. This image also makes explicit the speaker's conception of poetic creation, at least for this moment in the poem: "the bare foot of poetry" precedes the form it fills; rhyme is conceived as external to “poetry". In line seven, as mentioned above, the tone of the poem's imagery shifts from constraint to creation, from explicit bondage to art. The speaker suddenly transforms into a much more active figure: while the first person pronoun was linked by the imperative auxiliary ("let") to a single active verb in the first six lines of the poem ("find"), here there are three verbs; each of them, in context, verbs of diligence and judgment: "inspect", "weigh", "see". This set of three lines is the first in which there is no concessive "if" (the word will not reappear until the penultimate line of the poem), as if the speaker had stopped questioning, even implicitly, the fact of constraint. Indeed, the feeling of repression – of “pain” – which accompanied the notion of form (“dull rhymes”) in the first six lines of the sonnet is replaced by a feeling of possibility: let’s see, says the poet, “see what can be.” won." And it is with this turn towards industry and manufacturing that the poet assumes the whole burden of the poetic profession: "The industrious ear and attention meet". The turn towards art, from from line seven, is for this poem a turn towards sound (“lyre”, “chord”, “ear”, “sound”). The last group of three lines of the poem opens with a syntactic inversion while the; lines one, four and seven open with half of the rhetorical formula of the poem - either "if" or "let" - line ten opens with two sentences which are related to the "we" of the imperative construction : “The misers of sound and syllable, no less / Than Midas of his coinage The industry and attention of line nine are intensified to the point of obsession. The comparison of Midas serves as a bridge between the two functions of. poetic creation: the poet must be stingy with “sounds and syllables”, never spend more than necessary, and he must also prune, leaving no “dead leaf in the laurel wreath”. crown." The final syntactic unit of the poem and the epigrammatic nature of the last two lines are announced by the large "so", promising a final summary; the "if" clause is absent since line four returns to give a sense of The poem ends as it began, with a female figure, although in place of the unfortunate Andromeda there is now a triumphant Muse, "bound" not with chains but with her. own "garlands", made, presumably, from the "laurel wreath" of line twelve. This final image clarifies the astonishing transformation wrought in the poem. The closing image while the poem begins with inorganic “chains” imposed from the outside on an unwitting victim, the Muse is adorned with organic, living symbols (the size of the “dead leaves” in the twelfth line emphasizes this life). symbols of victory and symbols which signify it, which are “its own”, and not imposed from the outside. The notion of constraint has not disappeared (the Muse is still “bound”), but it has been profoundly rethought. The transformation of the form of an external, separate and imposed slavery (the chains), into a chosen adornment ("one's own") made of the very symbol of poetry (the laurel wreath), signifies an identity between "poetry » and the form. Indeed, this identity has always been present in the poem: what meaning could the “Sonnet” have without the “fetters” by which it is defined? And yet, the practice of the poem suggests that these fetters must be chosen, or at least negotiated and shaped; the form must not become a received abstraction, “dead leaves”. Thus, Keats's sonnet is no less structured than its Shakespearean or Petrarchan counterparts, however different they may be; infact, one could argue that the greater number of parts of Keats's sonnet - there are five divisions here (3+3+3+3+2, not four or two) - allows for more motifs, a "more interwoven and more complete. ". Received forms are visible in the poem, particularly in Keats's departures; the poem maintains its contact with the sonnet tradition and derives much of its meaning from this contact. The Muse is not "free" , but she does not languish either, chained to a rock, sacrificed to a monstrous tradition “Bright Star” opens with a feeling of failure or decline: “Bright star, would I like to be as firm as you. 'es? This imploring and wondering wish (“Would I like to be”) generates a sentence of fourteen lines whose syntax is much more fluid and complex than that of “On the Sonnet”, full of hesitations, interruptions, corrections . The hyphen – that mark of syntactic carelessness, ambiguity or hesitation – appears four times, two of its iterations cradling the negation strangely reiterated a la volta. Although rhymed in a Shakespearean manner, the syntax pays no attention to the divisions of the quatrain, nor are the last two lines a properly looped epigrammatic couplet. Instead, the rhetorical structure of the poem is clearly Petrarchan, with the main division falling, as it should, between the octave and the sestet. This mixture of forms is hardly remarkable, or remarkable only insofar as "Bright Star" betrays little of the turmoil with the traditional form displayed in "On the Sonnet." The main rhetorical tool of the poem is, of course, the simile: awake in bed. next to his beloved, the speaker looks at a star and wishes he were like her, at least in some way; it provokes reflections on devotion, fidelity (“firmness”) and transience. Although the star is presented as an ideal, after the first line the octave moves through negation, detailing the speaker's reservations regarding his own much-desired comparison. In three lines, this reservation is quite convincing: "Not in solitary splendor hanging in the air at night / And gazing, with eternal eyelids parted, / Like nature's patient, sleepless Hermit." » Solitude, as splendid as it is, is the lover's great terror, and there is something strangely distressing in the star's "eternal lids thrown aside." “Eternal” is an adjective appropriate to lids; but it is difficult not to detect a certain adverbial force in it, and “apart” has a strangely involuntary and mechanistic feel. The strength of the speaker's reserve is, however, attenuated by the beauty with which he invests the second quatrain of the poem, which delivers the delayed object of "looking": The waters in motion at their sacerdotal task, Of pure ablutions around the human shores of the earth, Or contemplate the new soft mask fallen From the snow on the mountains and the oarsThe first two lines achieve a beauty of adjectival excess: “moving”, “sacerdotal”, “pure”, “human”. Much of the aesthetic force of this poem is provided adjectivally (there are, by my calculation, twenty-one adjectives in these fourteen lines, more than double the number in "On the Sonnet"), and Lines five and six contain the poem's most striking adjectives: "moving" and "human." They are largely striking for their demotic insipidity: these waters neither “rush” nor “flow”, nor even “flow”; they simply “move,” as almost all water is assumed to do. What justifies the modesty of the adjective is the vision of ordered devotion in which it is inscribed. The waters are personified by the second modifier of the verse, "like a priest", which consolidatesthe religious suggestion of “the sleepless Hermit” in line four. With the "pure ablutions" in the next line, a natural process has become an act of charity and service, and the world is seen, from a heavenly perspective, as sublimely ordered and intelligible. “Human” means, presumably, “inhabited”; but he also personifies the landscape and invests it not with the ideal service of “priestly” waters, but rather with a pollution which needs to be purified. The metaphorical relationship of water to earth imagined by Keats (he could have imagined another: lover and beloved, for example) requires this feeling of pollution, without which “ablutions” has no meaning; as “human” is the only qualifier given to the shore, we must consider it as the source of this pollution. I emphasize this feeling of pollution, not to imbue the poem with a sinister moralism, but rather because it accentuates the tenderness and charity of the waters; it makes the image more beautiful. (I am tempted to see here a precursor of that other great poem of the awakening of love, itself a meditation on tenderness and flaw: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my unfaithful arm.”) This personification of the landscape fades away. in line seven, present only in the metaphor of the mask, which is probably a human adornment; even here, however, a sense of pollution or shame may slightly linger (especially if one remembers Milton's text "To hide his guilty face with innocents"). As line seven continues l he intensity of modification which characterizes the poem ("new sweet fallen"), the beauty of line eight is rather assured by its simplicity in the midst of such richness; it is the only line in the poem without an adjective or adverb On. recognizes, I think, the inherent beauty of these verses there is in them an aesthetic investment out of all proportion to their status as an interpolated negative qualification and the opposing insistence in the turn of the sonnet suggests that the poet, too, was. attracted by his own creation, that he cannot turn away from it without effort: "No, but always firm, always immutable" The speaker reaffirms the first term of his desired identification with the star ("firm"), but intensifies it: the desire is not only a more perfect fidelity, but immortality. The sentiment is familiar in Keats ("A happier love! A happier, happier love! / Forever warm and ever to be enjoyed"), but the dream of an eternal, imperishable consummation is belied in the following line: " Laid on the ripening breast of my beautiful love. » The very quality for which the beloved is cherished is inscribed in time: although "mature" can be expressed in the present participatory form, In the form of an expanding timelessness, the word loses all semantic distinction outside temporal processes. “Rature” is the action that connects two states, non-maturity and over-maturity; the “ripening breast” is cherished because it exists and ceases to exist with time. Even as Keats longs for eternity, he reminds us that it is unattainable – and that the very conditions of our desire rest on its inaccessibility. The explicit mention of the senses reappears in line eleven; but, again, it comes back with a difference. In the octave, the only meaning available to “the star” is a solitary, detached, platonic vision; here the speaker experiences the loved one with a more carnal sense: “Forever feeling its sweet fall and swelling.” Indeed, sight is not invoked anywhere in the sestet (except by implicit reference to the star, which the speaker is still looking at); instead, the speaker invokes touch and hearing, which emphasize greater proximity to his object. However, lest one think that the beautiful vision.