Thread: How poems end
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Unread 05-21-2006, 12:10 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is online now
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If that's limited aspiration, I think it's the one that I prefer. The Romantics' aspiration was for death, in effect, which is eternal and unchanging, etc., with or without white radiance. But the Romantics would often then come to their senses and realize that death isn't really the answer they were seeking after all, since it's hard to enjoy eternity and white radiance when the self is gone. Think of Keats' nightingale fancy. The nightingale, like the birches, eventually delivered him back in the human world after giving him a taste of eternity, though Keats, unlike Frost, didn't get all sappy his return to earth -- earth might be the best place for love, but it's also where we find the weariness, the fever and the fret, so Keats wasn't quite satisfied with either his own world or the nightingale's.

But speaking of Keats, what do we think of the way he ends the nightingale or urn odes? I'm used to these endings enough to be satisfied, on the whole, but prefer the non-tendentious way he ends the autumn ode, which is more like the way he ended the grasshopper sonnet, letting the images simply speak for themselves.
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