You don't give an excerpt in your question, so I will contain my answer to the first stanza of the poem, as representing its "opening lines."
We can certainly argue that the opening lines of this poem convey a sense of wonder and admiration. The phrase "still unravish'd bride of quietness" is a good example. The metaphor Keats uses here creates the impression of something that has never been touched, and yet which potentially contains wonders: it is waiting to be "ravish'd" and plundered for what it could yield.
Keats' reference to the "foster-child of silence and slow time," too, suggests awe and admiration. "Slow time," in particular, implies a long and quiet expanse of time beyond the poet's comprehension; the urn, in the speaker's mind, has been "fostered" by ages going back into ancient history. In its long life, the urn has also become host to "leaf-fring'd legend" which "haunts about" its shape. The use of the word "legend" seems to connect the urn to the great stories of the ancient past, by which it is haunted. The poet then mentions "deities and mortals," "men and gods," suggesting that the urn is a living memory of a time when these two types of beings were brought into contact with each other. Indeed, the phrase "Sylvan historian" personifies the urn as a historian of ancient times, who, through what is painted upon it, can speak to the poet of "slow time" long past.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Which words in this excerpt from "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats support the claim that the opening lines of the poem convey a sense of wonder and admiration?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment