Tuesday, January 10

A little bit of literature

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

         What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

             Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

                        And leaden-eyed despairs,

         Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

             Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

         Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

         Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

         And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

             Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

                        But here there is no light,

         Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

             Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”

Vocabulary build-up

Pronouns in archaic English can sound strange to contemporary readers. As we have already seen such English grammar used in texts in both first (William Shakespeare) and second (Herman Melville) phases, it is important to get familiarized with the use of some of these pronouns.

Thou, thee, and thy are the second person singular personal pronoun. Thou is in the nominative case and is used to denote the person or thing addressed: “Thou shalt not kill.” 

Thee is the objective form of thou, an old word for `you' used only when addressing one person, especially God (usually Thee), as the object of a verb.: “We thank Thee for Thy goodness.”

Finally, thy is the possessive form of thou, and is used as a modifier before a noun: “thy table.”  

Comments

For three hours, John Keats (1795-1821)  sat in a friend’s garden listening to a nightingale while writing his everlasting “Ode to a Nightingale”. He was 23 years old and trying to live by poetry, even though reviews so far had been woundingly critical. He had just watched his younger brother die of tuberculosis, which he had, too. In essence, the poem tells the following to the nightingale: “You sound so happy. I don’t envy you, I’m glad at your happiness, I long to escape this world of suffering. You, though, will never die. Your song opens vistas on to history and myth, which, though magical, are very lonely. When you stop singing I’m back, asleep or awake, with reality.” Keats was a complex and candid poet. At the same time fragile and powerful, loved and misunderstood. Despite his first volume of poetry being published only four years before he died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five, he came to be regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic movement, alongside Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth. During his lifetime, however, his writing was not well-received by critics and his talent remained largely unrecognized.  Two hundred years after his death, he is one of England’s most beloved poets.