Exercises -- Week 10 & 11a

Exercise 1:

Analyze the following poems by John Keats:

• To Homer
• On the Sonnet
• La Belle Dame sans Merci

Exercise 2:

Identify and discuss the archetypes in Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci".

Exercise 3:

Perform scansion on Keat's "La Belle Dame sans Merci". Do all the lines have the same metrical feet? How do they differ? What do you think is the significance of this?

Exercise 4:

The form of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad. What is a ballad? How does it differ from a typical epic poem? How does it differ from a typical lyrical poem?

Exercise 5:

What might "La Belle Dame sans Merci" be about? For instance, the poem might be about the enslavement to sexual fantasy. Read the poem again and see if you can discover an alternative interpretation.

A Reading of Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci", as well as a interpretive trailer

Myths & Archetypes

The following are selections from An Introduction to Poetry (12th edition), by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (2007:253, 254, 257, 258).

About Myth

Poets have long been fond of retelling myths, narrowly defined as traditional stories about the exploits of immortal beings. Such stories taken collectively may also be called myth or mythology.

Traditional myths tell us stories of gods or heroes—their battles, their lives, their loves, and often their suffering—all on a scale of magnificence larger that our life. These exciting stories usually reveal part of a culture’s worldview. Myths often try to explain universal natural phenomena, like the phases of the moon or the turning of the seasons. But some myths tell the stories of purely local phenomena; one Greek legend, for example, recounts how grief-stricken King Aegeus threw himself into the sea when he mistakenly believed his son, Theseus, had been killed; consequently, the body of water between Greece and Turkey was called the Aegean Sea.

About Archetype

An important concept in understanding myth is the archetype, a basic image, character, situation, or symbol that appears so often in literature and legend that it evokes a deep universal response. (The Greek root of archetype is “original pattern.”)

Whatever their origin, archetypal images do seem verbally coded in most myths, legends, and traditional tales. One sees enough recurring patterns and figures from Greek myth to Star Wars, from Hindu epic to Marvel superhero comics, to strongly suggest there is some common psychic force at work. Typical archetypal figures include the trickster, the cruel stepmother, the rebellious young man, the beautiful but destructive woman [femme fatale], and the stupid youngest son who succeeds through simple goodness. Any of these figures can be traced from culture to culture.

Examples:

Visit this website for a list of many common archetypes. Many of these archetypes are found in literature and are known as "literary archetypes".

For fun:

Try this quiz and see which literary archetype you are.

Biographical Sketch: John Keats (1795-1821)

Image from Abolitionist.Com

John Keats was born in London, the son of a livery stableman and his wife. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, and on completion of his apprenticeship did further training at Guy’s Hospital, London. Having qualified, Keats abandoned medicine for poetry. In 1818 he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but was prevented from marrying her by financial difficulties. In 1819, his annus mirabilis, he produced all of his great odes, a number of fine sonnets, and several other masterpieces. The following year, he developed tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and beloved younger brother, Tom. Hoping to prolong his life, he traveled to Italy, but died in Rome the following spring. At the time of his death he had published only fifty-four poems, and his reputation as a great poet was by no means secure. In his poetry he struggled to make sense of a world riddled with “misery, heartache and pain, sickness and oppression.” Rather than take solace in religious or philosophical creeds, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, he strove to develop “negative capacity,” the ability to exist in a condition of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason.” He looked to sensation, passion, and imagination to guide him: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth,” he wrote to a friend. Despite the brevity of his life and writing career, Keats mastered a number of difficult forms, producing complex variations of the ode and the Petrachan and Shakespearian sonnets.