Keats’ Tragedy AQA Example Essay Paragraph
Keats is an extremely tragic poet, both in his unfortunate personal life and his literary works - here’s an example paragraph that shows you how to write on Keats in the AQA A Level Literature Aspects of Tragedy exam.
If you need more help with John Keats’ Poetry, please check the link below:
QUESTION:
'At the heart of the tragic experience is an overwhelming sense of shame.’To what extent do you agree with this view in relation to two texts you have studied?
PARAGRAPH:
Keats’ own tragic life filtered into his works, creating an all-pervasive tragic mode in his poems that was often also centred around his personal feelings of guilt and shame. It could be argued, for instance, that the ‘Knight-at-arms’ in La Belle Dame Sans Merci is ‘alone and palely loitering’ because he is stuck in a kind of transient state of depression, after attempting and failing to save the ‘faery’s child’ from suffering. The use of medievalist tropes is intentional here - the archetypes of the damsel-in-distress and knight-in-shining-armour, which were once the idealistic portrayal of courtly love, are now entirely revised and twisted into a tragic setting. Firstly, the ‘lady in the meads’ is not who she professes, the nouns ‘child’ and ‘lady’ are used to allusion to the Knight’s erroneous perception of her as a woman who needs rescuing. Secondly, the ‘anguish’ and ‘fever dew’ that describes the Knight’s present state within the poem alludes to his own suffering - perhaps through lovesickness, or arguably also through a lack of having been able to realise his purpose as an heroic rescuer of lost women. This 19th century revision of idealistic principles turns them tragic - implying that in Keats’ world, there is no longer the possibility of straightforward love and union between men and women. Furthermore, the whole ballad is not simply a tragic tale, but an allegorical allusion to Keats’ own distress at his lack of being able to provide financially for Fanny Brawne, the love of his life - it was written in 1819, the year that he himself resigned to being unable to marry her, and just over a year before his own death from tuberculosis. The years 1819-1820 were the most productive in Keats’ life; during this time he seems compulsively drawn to explaining his own tragic inability to achieve his dreams and live in a state of fulfilment through the use of allegory. Therefore, it could be argued that guilt and shame lie at the heart of his own tragic experience of life, and that this filters directly into the unrequited tragic heroes of his narrative poems.
You might be interested: The Eve of St Agnes: What is it about?
