Form as Strategy: Keats's "On the Sonnet" and "Bright Star" Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "On the Sonnet" is a poem that deplores conventions, mocks conventions, is governed by conventions, and recovers conventions. It is neither a true Petrarchan poem nor a Shakespearean sonnet; both forms, however, serve as references for the poem. "Sul Sonetto" has five rhymes, as in the Petrarchan form, but they are distributed with apparent randomness and do not mark structural changes. Rhetorically, the poem refers to both Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms. As in a Shakespearean sonnet, its argument is organized into short imaginative units and ends with two final epigrammatic lines that form a couplet not through rhyme but through syntactic structure. While a Shakespearean sonnet is organized 4+4+4+2, Keats's sonnet is organized 3+3+3+3+2. Once again, I am talking about syntactic organization, not marked by rhyme, but this numerical scheme is echoed by a rhyme scheme in which four of the five final sounds appear three times, and the fifth only twice (ABC ABD CAB CDE DE; the spaces represent syntactic sounds divisions). The poem also indicates a larger, two-part Petrarchan structure, as the timbre of its series of images changes in the middle of the poem. This one-time suggestion occurs, however, not at the expected point of division between octave and sestet, but rather divides the poem into a sestet followed by an octave. The poem consists of a single sentence expressed in "if-then" constructions in which the "then" has been suppressed: "If...[then] let's leave it." The "if" is always concessive, and although it undermines the absolute certainty of the conditions it describes (Keats may have written "from"), the use of the indicative leaves the poem's fundamental assumptions unchanged: Keats does not overtly suggest that "the bare foot of poetry" is left unadorned, though the possibility may hover behind the terms of his argument. The first six lines of the poem, a section I hesitantly suggest as a sestet, take bond as the dominant trope. The opening image is by far the most violent one found in the poem: "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained, / And, like Andromeda, the sweet sonnet / Chained, despite the painful beauty": this is an image not only of slavery, but of sacrifice. It is the only time that poetry ("the sweet sonnet") is given a human face, and the only time that it is given a feeling: "pain". The poem's second set of three lines both feature a "then" clause. and repeats the "if" clause that triggered it. Repetition, however, brings about a difference: if before it was "our English" that was "chained", here it is "we" who are "bound": the weight of the bond has shifted from the language to its trainer. But if we are bound, we are also seekers of our own binding: “Let us discover… / Sandals more braided and complete / To fit the bare foot of poetry.” There's a curious change here: the "sandals" hardly resonate in tune with Andromeda's chains. This is not an image of violence, but of utility, protection and even, perhaps, ornament. Far from wanting to reduce constraints, the speaker seeks a more "intertwined and complete" connection. This image also makes explicit the speaker's conception of poetic making, at least for this moment in the poem: "the bare foot of poetry" precedes the form it fills; rhyme is conceived as external to "poetry". In the seventh line, as mentioned above, the tone of the poem's imagery shifts from constraint tocreation, from explicit slavery to art. The speaker suddenly transforms into a much more active figure: while the first-person pronoun was linked by the auxiliary imperative ("leave") to only one active verb in the first six lines ("find") of the poem, here there are three verbs ; each of them, in context, verbs of diligence and judgment: "inspect", "weigh", "See". This set of three lines is the first in which there is no concessive "if" (the word will not appear again until the penultimate line of the poem), as if the speaker had stopped questioning, even implicitly, the fact of constraint. Indeed, the sense of repression - of "pain" - that accompanied the notion of form ("boring rhymes") in the first six lines of the sonnet is replaced by a sense of possibility: let's see, says the poet, "let's see what can be gained ." And it is with this turn towards industry and making that the poet takes on the entire burden of the poetic craft: "To an industrious ear, and attention meets." The transition to art, from line seven, is for this poem a transition to sound ("lyre", "chord", "ear", "sound"). The poem's final group of three lines opens with a syntactic inversion; while lines one, four, and seven open with half of the poem's rhetorical structure—“if” or “let us”—line ten opens with two phrases that are appropriate to the “we” of the imperative construction: “Avaricious of sound and syllable, no less / than Midas of his coinage." Line nine's industry and attention are intensified to the point of obsession. Midas's comparison acts as a bridge between the two functions of poetic making: the poet must be stingy with "sound and syllable", never spending more than necessary, and must also prune, without leaving "dead leaves in the laurel". crown." The final syntactic unity of the poem and the epigrammatic nature of the last two lines are announced by the large "so", promising a concluding synthesis; the "if" clause absent from line four returns to give a sense of completion to the closing. The poem ends as it began, with a female figure, although in place of the unfortunate Andromeda there is now a triumphant Muse, "bound" not with chains but with her own "garlands", made, presumably, from the "garland" of line twelve. This final image clarifies the striking transformation effected in the poem. Every aspect of the opening image finds its opposite in the closing. While the poem begins with inorganic "chains" imposed externally on an unwilling victim, the Muse is adorned with organic, living symbols (the pruning of the "dead leaves" in line twelve emphasizes this life) symbols of victory and symbols that signify herself, that are "hers", not imposed from outside. The notion of constraint has not disappeared (the Muse is still "constrained"), but it has been completely revisited. The transformation of form from an external, separate, imposed bondage (chains), to a chosen ornament ("his") made of the symbol of poetry itself (the laurel wreath), signifies an identity between "poetry" and form. Indeed, that identity has always been present in poetry: what meaning could "Sonnet" have without the "strains" by which it is defined? Yet the practice of the poem suggests that these constraints must be chosen, or at least negotiated and created; the form must not become a received abstraction, "dead leaves". Thus Keats's sonnet is no less shaped than its Shakespearean or Petrarchan counterparts, however different they may be; indeed, one might argue that the greater number of parts of Keats's sonnet - here there are five divisions (3+3+3+3+2), not four or two - allows for more patterns, a "more intertwined and complete" form ." The received forms are visible in the poem, especially in Keats's deviations from them; the poem maintains contact with the sonnet tradition and drawsmuch of its meaning from that contact. The Muse is not “free,” but neither does she languish, chained to a rock, a sacrifice to a monstrous tradition. "Bright Star" opens with a sense of failure or decay: "Bright Star, were I as steadfast as you." This imploring and amazed desire ("If I were") generates a sentence of fourteen lines, whose syntax is much more fluid and complex than that of "Sul sonnet", full of hesitations, interruptions, corrections. The hyphen – that sign of carelessness, ambiguity, or artisanal syntactic hesitation – appears four times, two of its iterations cradling strangely reiterated negation at a time. Although rhymed in the Shakespearean manner, the syntax pays no attention to the divisions of the quatrains, nor are the last two lines a properly corded epigrammatic couplet. Instead, the rhetorical structure of the poem is clearly Petrarchan, with the primary division falling, as it should, between the octave and the sestet. This mixture of forms is not at all remarkable, or notable only in that "Bright Star" betrays little of the restlessness with the traditional form displayed in "On the Sonnet." The main rhetorical tool of the poem is, of course, comparison: awake in bed next to his beloved, the speaker looks at a star and would like to be, at least in some way, like her; this offers an opportunity to reflect on devotion, fidelity ("weldability]") and transience. Although the star is conceived as an ideal, after the first line the octave proceeds through negation, describing in great detail the speaker's reservations regarding his own much-desired simile. For three lines this reservation is entirely convincing: "Not in solitary splendor hanging high the night / And looking, with eternal eyelids open, / Like nature's patient sleepless hermit." Loneliness, however splendid, is the lover's great terror, and there is something strangely agonizing in the "eternal open eyelids" of the star. “Eternal” is an adjective and is appropriate to lids; but it is difficult not to perceive a certain adverbial force in it, and "aside" has a strangely unwanted, mechanistic aspect. The strength of the speaker's reserve, however, is tempered by the beauty with which he invests the poem's second quatrain, which provides the delayed object of "looking": The moving waters in their priestly task Of pure ablution around the human shores of the earth, Or of watching the new soft mask fallOf snow on the mountains and on the oarsThe first two lines achieve a beauty of adjectival excess: "moving", "priestly", "pure", "human". Much of the aesthetic force of this poem is provided by adjectives (there are, by my calculation, twenty-one adjectives in these fourteen lines, more than double the number in "On the Sonnet"), and lines five and six contain the adjectives more surprising than poetry: "moving" and "human". They are striking largely for their demotic insipidity: these waters do not "rush" or "overturn" or even "run"; they simply "move" as almost all waters are supposed to do. What justifies the modesty of the adjective is the vision of ordered devotion in which it is placed. The waters are personified with the second modifier of the verse, “priestly,” which consolidates the religious suggestion of the “Sleepless Hermit” in verse four. With the "pure ablution" in the next line, a natural process has become an act of charity and service, and the world is seen, from a heavenly point of view, as sublimely ordered and intelligible. "Human" means, presumably, "inhabited"; but it also personifies the landscape and invests it not with the ideal service of "priestly" waters, but with a pollution that requires purification. The metaphorical relationship between water and land imagined by Keats (he could have imaginedany other: lover and beloved, for example) requires this sense of pollution, without which "ablution" is meaningless; since "human" is the only modifier attributed to the shore, we must consider it the source of this pollution. I insist on this sense of pollution not to imbue the poetry with a sinister moralism, but rather because it exalts the tenderness and charity of the waters; it makes the image more beautiful. (I am tempted to see here a precursor to that other great poem of loving wakefulness, itself a meditation on tenderness and flaw: "Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my unfaithful arm.") This personification of the landscape vanishes in line seven, present only in the metaphor of the mask, which presumably is a human ornament; even here, however, a vague sense of pollution or shame may remain (especially if one recalls Milton's "To hide his guilty façade with innocent". Snow). While verse seven continues the intensity of modification that characterizes the poem ("new soft fall"), the beauty of line eight is ensured rather by its simplicity amidst such richness; it is the only line in the poem without adjectives or adverb intrinsic to these lines; there is an aesthetic investment in them incommensurable with their status as an interpolated negative qualification and the adversative insistence at the level of the sonnet suggests that the poet has also been attracted by his own creation, that he cannot move away from it without effort: "No - yet still still, still unchanging." The speaker reaffirms the main term of his desired identification with the star ("still"), but intensifies it: the desire is not simply a more perfect fidelity, but the 'immortality. The sentiment is familiar to Keats ("Happier love! Happier love, happy! / Forever warm and yet to be enjoyed"), but the dream of a. the eternal and imperishable consummation is given the lie in the next line: "Cushioned on the ripening breast of my fair love." form of expanding timelessness, the word loses any semantic distinction outside of temporal processes. “Maturation” is the action that links two states, that of unripeness and that of overripeness; the "maturing breast" is loved because it exists and ceases to exist over time. Even as Keats desires eternity, he reminds us that it is unattainable - and that the very conditions of our desire are based on its unattainability. The explicit mention of the senses reappears in line eleven; but, once again, it returns with a difference. In the octave the only meaning available to the "star" is a solitary, detached, platonic gaze; here the speaker experiences the beloved with a more carnal sense: "To forever feel his soft fall and swell." In fact, sight is not invoked at any point in the sestet (except by implicit reference to the star, on which the speaker continues to fix his gaze); instead the speaker invokes touch and hearing, which insist on greater proximity to their object. However, lest you think that the beautiful vision of the star has passed without regret, its shadow is cast in this very verse: “soft fall and swell” echoes the “soft fall mask” of verse seven. “Awake forever in sweet restlessness” recalls “nature's patient, the sleepless Hermit,” but “awake” gives a positive cast to “sleepless,” and “sweet” dispels any sense of agony I detect in “eternal eyelids open". The couplet repeats the double "again" of line nine, but now in its temporal, non-adverse sense: "Again, again to hear his tender breathing / And so you will live forever - otherwise you will faint until death." This is just one example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay La.