Homework Read Chapter 2

Ireland

Written homework…

Choose a Keats poem and select at least 4 lines and write a few sentences on your

impression/feeling of the words

( 济慈诗集 )

(analysis not necessary, just your opinion)

homework

• Keats poems:

• Elysium

• The Eve of St Agnes

• Ode to a Nightingale

• Ode to a Grecian Urn

• Bright Star

Or others…

http://baike.baidu.com/view/39091.htm

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Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is an important literary work written at the end of the

14th century.

It is one of the first books to be written in the common language

of English (“Middle English”)

• The “Tales” are a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their

way to Canterbury Cathedral.

• The Canterbury Cathedral is one of England’s most important churches. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Church of England (the

Anglican Church)

• To pass the time, the pilgrims decide to have a story-telling contest.

• Some of the famous stories are based on King Arthur’s Knights, such as :

• The Wife of Bath

• The Wife of Bath is a story told by one of the pilgrims in Canterbury Tales:

• One of King Arthur’s Knights rapes a girl

• The punishment is death, but the Queen gives him a chance to save himself.

• (The Wife of Bath)

• The Queen sends the Knight on a quest to discover what women want the most.

• He has one year to find the answer, and if he fails, he will die.

• But after one year he is unable to find the truth.

• On the road, he meets an old hag, who says she will give him the answer if he will agree to any favor she asks him.

• The had says that what women want most of all is to rule their husband.

• The Queen accepts his answer

and the knight is allowed to live.

• Later, the old hag asks the Knight to marry her.

• They marry, but he is sad that she is too ugly and old.

• The hag tells her husband that he has a choice:

she can be always ugly and faithful, or she can be beautiful and unfaithful

• The Knight, remembering what women want most, told his wife that she should

chose.

• The hag, proud of her husband, then became beautiful. And they lived

happily ever after.

• First, lets begin with a clip from the movie Bright Star.

• This movie is about the life of the poet, John Keats, who died at 25 of tuberculosis (aka “TB”).

• British “Romantic” poet

• Died young and unsuccessful.

• His poems influenced many later great poets, including Tennyson.

• Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to a Grecian Urn

• Famous letters

• John Keats is poor and sickly.

• Throughout their romance, Keats’ health is poor.

• The movie is about the love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

• John Keats is a poor poet, but his friend, another poet, George Brown gives him a place to live and work.

• “If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then

it had best not come at all.”

“A poem needs understanding through the senses…

The point of diving in a lake is not to immediately swim to the shore, but to

be in the lake…

It is an experience beyond thought…

Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

• An artistic and intellectual movement in 18th century Western Europe

• Strong emotions, return to nature, intuition, imagination. Departure from rationalism.

Casper David Friedrich

The Romantic movement was not a “romantic” period of time,

But it was a time of change in art and philosophy.

emotional and imaginative

- Francisco Goya -

• (lit.) Edgar Allen Poe, Wordsworth, William Blake

• (music) Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt

• (art) Francisco Goya, Casper David Friedrich

Casper David Friedrich

William Blake (also a poet)

• (early Romantic period) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony

• (Middle period) Franz Liszt’s Dance Macabre

• (Late Romantic Period) Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers

• Ode to a Nightingale is Keats becoming more dark. He is thinking of mortality and his death

…

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!     No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard     In ancient days by emperor and clown

• Ode to a Nightingale:My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains    My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, …  That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

                In some melodious plot     Of beechen green and shadows numberless,

        Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

• Bright Star

• Written for Fanny Brawne

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art”

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:”

Famous first line of Endymion

(poem in the beginning of the movie)

Casper David Friedrich

• But this is human life:  the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the

anxiety,Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,All human; bearing in themselves this good,That they are still the air, the subtle food,To make us feel existence,

and to showHow quiet death is.• from Endymion, Book II, l.153-159.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-Ode to a Grecian Urn