640 Keats, John
to become financially independent and move on.
Gregor’s sister, Grete, achieves what her brother
was unable to achieve in life: independence from
family needs.
Gregor’s suffering both as a human and as an
insect allows him to become stronger. Although
Gregor physically suffers before his untimely
death, his transformation into an insect allows him
to gain personal satisfaction. For a time, Gregor
emerges from his transmutation physically and
emotionally strong and self-confident while his
family suffers through financial hardships. This
change in the family dynamics creates resentment
toward Gregor that leads to his death. Gregor’s
death, like his transformation, serves to provide
change for the entire Samsa family. Kafka’s story
is a critique on family responsibility and the cost
an individual must pay in order to keep the family
unit going.
Sumeeta Patnaik
kEaTS, joHn poems (1795–1821)
Easily one of the most talented of the romantic
poets, John Keats’s career is all the more remarkable
for having ended so soon. His first notable poem,
“On Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), was
published when he was only 21 years old. In the
space of four years he went on to compose some of
the most memorable poems in the English language,
including “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820) and
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820). Keats’s remarkable
career was cut short by tuberculosis; he died in 1821
at age 25. At his request, his gravestone bore only
the inscription “Here lies one whose name was writ
in water,” a last poetic nod to the transience of art
and life.
Keats’s poetry is distinguished by its melodic
lines and sensual, concrete imagery. Highly con-
scious of both the importance of art and the fragility
of life, Keats’s poems focus on the contradictions
of lived experience—the connection between pain
and pleasure, for example, in “Ode to a Nightin-
gale” (1820), or the relationship between love and
death in “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1820). Like other
romantic poets, Keats was interested in the themes
of nature, art, love and death, but his treatment of
these themes is characterized by a celebration of
the physical world and thoughtful acceptance of the
limitations of human existence.
Siobhan Carrolldeath in the poetry of John Keats
John Keats was no stranger to death. By the time he
was 15, he had lost a brother, his grandmother, and
both his parents. Having witnessed so much death,
Keats looked to art as a means of achieving immor-
tality on Earth.
In “Endymion” (1818), Keats retells the Greek
legend about a man put into an eternal sleep of
youth. “Endymion” begins with a famous rejection
of death and transience: “A thing of beauty is a joy
for ever: / Its Loveliness increases; it will never /
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep . . . a sleep
/ Full of sweet dreams” (l.1–4). These lines sum-
mon up the image of a sleeping Endymion, but
also extend that idea to beauty itself. Keats insists
that death can be transcended through the creation
of beautiful objects. For example, he describes a
group of dancing Greeks as being “not yet dead, /
But in old marbles ever beautiful” (l.71–72). On the
one hand, Keats’s description brings death into the
poem, reminding us that the people we are reading
about are going to die. On the other hand, the next
line reminds us that the ancient Greeks continue to
“live” in the form of marble sculptures that preserve
their beauty.
Keats returns to the idea of art transcend-
ing death in his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
(1820). The speaker is captivated by the way
the artwork on an ancient urn captures an ideal
moment of life. The trees depicted on the urn will
never shed their leaves (l.21) and the musician
will never grow old or die. At the same time, the
speaker is also aware that the people who knew the
stories behind the pictures are dead (l.39–40). The
ode concludes with the poet reflecting that the art
he is looking at will also probably outlive him and
his generation (l.46–7).
“Ode to a Nightingale” (1820) begins with the
speaker sinking into sleep while listening to the song
of the nightingale. Caught up in the pleasure of the
experience, he feels himself losing touch with his
body, as though he has been poisoned or drugged