English Literature / Unit 13 ENL 1241 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Keats Ode
The idea
Keats's odes share a movement, and reading for it answers most questions. First, find the object the speaker addresses: a nightingale, an urn, a season. Second, find the speaker's desire, usually to escape time, pain or mortality by joining the object, as he longs to fade into the nightingale's world. Third, find the turn, the moment the desire fails or is qualified: the word "Forlorn" tolls him back, and the urn's lovers will never kiss. Fourth, find what he settles for, often an acceptance of transience, as in "To Autumn," or an open question, as in "Do I wake or sleep?" Fifth, notice the sensuous detail, since taste, touch and sound carry the argument. Then state the poem's attitude to beauty and mortality, not only its subject.
In practice
Object, desire, turn, settlement, sensation.
Where people slip
Do not stop at the escape. The ode's meaning lies in the return, where the desire is tested against reality.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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