Grade: A

Who I Believe Wrote the Presented Poem

To help prove that the author John Keats writes this poem presented, a background of Keats’ family life may help to prove where Keats comes from in his poems. His life contained many events that did not nourish the soul. At age eight, Keats’ father died. Later, at age fourteen, Keats’ mother also died, but she died of tuberculosis. The death of his mother posed problems for the Keats’ children; the death left the family finances tied up and inaccessible to the children. A few years later, Tom, Keats’ brother also died of tuberculosis. Keats understood that he too would probably die the same death that his brother and mother fell ill too.

            Keats owned a sense of knowledge that his life will end, and he expressed his feelings ceasing to describe beauty as he sees it in his poems. He doesn’t think he will own time to finish his poems, for he will die before he can accomplish all that he hopes to accomplish. In his poem, "When I have Fears", Keats writes about death and how fear of death makes him want to sit in his own misery. He tries to distance himself from the world, and fall out of reality, rather than staying in with reality. Keats tends to drift from reality to dreams in his poems.

            In the poem that begins with "O soft embalmer of the still midnight," the author, I assume Keats, seems to drift in and out of reality. Keats speaks little time to finish the poem he writes. What if he died while writing the poem? Then the reader would wonder how the poem ends. Keats realizes that he lives in reality, but that he is also a fictitious character, in that he is not real to the reader. But really, if Keats fell asleep before finishing the poem, the poem would cease to exist. But Keats decides to finish the poem and then fall asleep. Keats decides also that if he does not finish the poem, he will lay awake all night thinking about every minute of the day before him. He says that he wants sleep to lock himself up in his soul, to take him away from all of his troubles of the day and to protect him in a calm place. This dream world is a precious place, a place where he can lock himself in with his treasure. This shows Keats’ inability to stay in tune with reality, just as displayed in his other poem "When I have fears".

            Keats writes most of his poems in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. The poems contain no normal rhyme schemes like in a normal sonnet. The poem that begins with "O soft embalmer of the still midnight" is a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. This matches up with Keats’ other poems.  Keats’ poems also exhibit characteristics of Romanticism. For instance, in his poem "Ode to a Nightingale", the word "beauty" contains a capital "B." People’s names start with a capital letter making the name formal, and letting the reader know that the word refers to a person. Making beauty formal gives it personification. This characteristic entitles the word beauty in the poem to have a pantheistic effect. Since both of Keats’ poems talk about death, Gothicism can apply to his works. Also, the idea that man represents the primitive object in his works applies primitivism in the poem presented.

            Based upon the tone, style, and central thoughts of Keats’ poems, one can conclude that Keats wrote the poem presented on the green paper. No other authors can even begin to match up with this poem by their style, tone, or central thoughts.