Come a-knocking on Death’s door Essay

The Ode is used as a poetic form for philosophical contemplation. Compare two odes by Keats in the light of this observation How much do you agree with the statement: John Keats was unfortunate in his upbringing to some extent? On one hand there was a chance for a budding surgeon but he gave that away to his literary awakening which drew him to write odes such as the ones I am going to analyse. Personally, learning about his life prior to literature, I feel that the situations he dealt with, at such a young age were remarkable but perhaps had he not faced those decisions, he wouldn’t have come to write such poetry brimming full with philosophical contemplation. John Keats was born on the October 31st, 1795 in Finsbury Pavement, near the centre of London. He learnt to deal with death from an early age as his father died in an accident when he was only eight years old. Seventeen years later in 1810, his mother died due to consumption, leaving John in the care of his grandmother. Subsequently, under the care of guardians he left school to become an apprentice to a surgeon. Unfortunately, before the completion of his apprenticeship, John had a quarrel with his master and therefore left to pursue a stronger path in literature, deftly in the company of his good friend Cowden Clarke. Three years of receiving scarce and negative feedback on his sonnets and poems, John was once again in the presence of a dying man: this time it was his brother. Tom Keats was also taken by consumption in 1818. Though by this time, distinct signs had begun to show in the decent of Keats’s own health. Keats himself was fighting illness and death in his latter years. Despite the fact of his deteriorating wellbeing, Keats continued to delve deeper into love and time. His mental understanding of what lies beyond was perhaps something that I could never even begin to contemplate. His dying wish was to have the words: â€Å"Here lies one whose name was writ in water,† on his gravestone when he died on 23rd February, 1821. Writing his most famous odes in his dying years was a sign of great character; I think that being able to face such a prospect of dying young, his mind matured faster than that of others. Increasingly throughout the odes, I can see that John has indeed spent many thought provoking sessions in front of the artefact he describes. He sees, he feels, he waits and then he writes. The form of poetry which Keats was most celebrated for was the Ode. This style of elaborate and stately lyric poem was lengthened or shortened at the whim of the poet. However, the basic arrangement of the stanzas was patterned in sets of three – a strophe and an antistrophe, of which both had an identical metrical scheme, and an epode, which had a structure of its own. Dating back to the Greek choral songs, the ode has appeared in many centuries over the world. Roman poets such as Catullus took the form of poetry to their own meaning. The ode was generally used to express strong emotions that flooded the poets mind at the time, the poet would be transfixed onto the idea and he would try to convey his meaning through the literary form.