An A* essay that received 30/30 on Keats’s presentation of nature in ‘Autumn’ and 'On the Sea', with top A02 quotes and unique A03 context to impress examiners.
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A/AS Level
PEARSON (PEARSON)
English Literature 2015
Unit 3 - Poetry
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Explore Keats’s presentation of nature in ‘To Autumn’ and one other
poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant context.
Romanticism was a cultural and literary movement (1750-1900) that is
best understood as a reaction to the modern world that was
characterised by industrialisation, urbanisation and consumerism.
Romantics were fascinated with the sublime beauty of nature, but they
also depicted nature as unpredictable and capable of great destructive
power, breaking from Enlightenment representations of the natural world
as orderly and subject to human control. In ‘On the Sea’, Keats contrasts
the calamity-inducing potential of nature with its beauty and restorative
powers, through the form of the sea. ‘To Autumn’ celebrates the season
of Autumn for the abundance of life it hosts, but it also uses the cyclical
patterns of nature as the basis for a profound reflection on fulfilment and
mortality.
Keats celebrates the beauty of Autumn through the use of descriptions in
the lexical field of excess to show the rich abundance of life that thrives
during this season. Multi-sensory imagery is used to transport the reader
into a world of sensory glut: with the taste of “a sweet kernel” or the
sound of the bees buzzing created by the rhyme scheme in “bees/Until
they think warm days will never cease”. Frantic activity is packed into
monosyllabic verbs like “swell” and “plump” which creates a sense of
compressed energy, as though the stanza itself is pulsating with life. All
this is a result of the “maturing sun conspiring” with Autumn, the “season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. The sun is referred to as masculine,
which could be a classical allusion to the Ancient Greek God of the sun,
Apollo. Whilst Autumn isn’t gendered, it could be inferred that Autumn is
therefore Demeter, the Ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility.
This links to Hellenism, which was the Romantics’ fascination with
Ancient Greek culture. They admired the simplicity with which ancient
Greeks discussed complex philosophical questions, and for second
generation Romantics, it was considered to be a basic working point for
all aspects of life (1st generation Romantics, eg Wordsworth considered
Hellenism to be an inappropriate substitution for religion). The theme of
abundance is also shown through the form of the poem: instead of 10
line stanzas, Keats uses an extra hypermetric line, reinforcing the natural
bountifulness as an intrinsic part of the season.
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