John Keats: Ode to Grecian Urn and Bright Star

John Keats: Ode to Grecian Urn and Bright Star

There is so much to say about John Keats and not near the time to say it. I actually had a lot of fun, YES fun, memorizing the section from Ode to the Grecian Urn. I wished I could have presented out loud, but I struggled to get the last 2 lines perfect. As we know, to mess up a word is messing up a whole lot more. If each word is chosen with care, to mess up a word is to be irresponsible with someone else’s hard work, effort, and care. I found the actual poem beautiful, and I don’t know the full details of why. I greatly appreciate the romanticism of it and the pace that the romanticism offers. The formalities Keats follows remind me of the formalities that one must follow to court a lady(especially from the time when Keats was alive). As we saw in Bright Star, John Keats was a hopeless romantic and fell for a romantic as well. The two together brought up great points for love and poetry in their conversations. So many quotes from this movie will forever stay with me. For example: when she looks completely disheveled and asks her mother, “Is this love?” I found this so striking, beautiful, and raw. I was jealous as a filmmaker how wonderfully they captured and conveyed the intensity of the love and loss so well. Every second in that scene was its own poem and its own photograph to me. Another amazing quote and metaphor from the film, was the amazing incite into poetry by viewing it as a swim in a lake. One does not just dive into the lake to immediately swim to the side and get out. One swims in the lake and “luxuriates” in the lake. This is something that I continually need to make myself aware of and practice at. I am so used to trying to plan my day out to the minute, and I never allow myself to luxuriate in much of anything, but when planning time for this class I definitely need to allow more time to indulge in the poems, perhaps their slow pace or their complexities that I do not immediately understand.

--Kelly J.