John Keats' "After dark vapors"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Arts, Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2021

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

John Keats (/kiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, though his poems were in publication for only four years before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.[1] They were not generally well received by critics in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death.[2] By the end of the century he had been placed within the canon of English literature and had become the inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with a strong influence on many writers; the Encyclopædia Britannica described one ode as "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges called his first encounter with Keats' work an experience that he felt all of his life.[3] It had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. It was typical of the Romantics to accentuate extreme emotion through emphasis on natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature. Especially acclaimed are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Sleep and Poetry" and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, May 5th, 2021.
0:07.4	Today's poem is by, as with yesterday's poem, a classic of English poetry, an essential poet of the English language and of, well, the English country.
0:17.6	It is John Keats, who lived from October of 1795 to February of 1821. Of course, he died
0:23.3	at the age of 25, tragically. And despite that, and despite the fact that he died, unknown,
0:30.7	his work is now considered among the very best in all of English poetry. I've read O ode to a nightingale um and on first looking into
0:40.5	chapman's homer here on this podcast as well as others and today i'm going to read i'm an unnamed
0:46.2	sonnet but the first line um we'll call it the first line the first three words are after dark
0:52.1	vapors so we'll call it that this is how words are after dark vapors, so we'll call it that. This is how it goes.
0:57.0	After dark vapors have oppressed our plains for a long, dreary season, comes a day born of
1:04.7	the gentle south and clears away from the sick heavens all unseemly stains. The anxious month, relieved of its pains, takes as a long lost right the feel of May.
1:19.3	The eyelids with the passing coolness play like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
1:26.1	The calmest thoughts came round us, as of leaves budding, fruit ripening in stillness,
1:34.4	autumn suns, smiling at Eve upon the quiet sheaves, sweet Sappho's cheek, a smiling
1:42.7	infant's breath, the gradual sand that through an hourglass runs, a woodland
1:50.3	rivulet, a poet's death.
1:57.5	This is a wonderful poem.
2:02.0	It's a sonnet, so 14 lines.
2:04.7	And those first lines up through the line that goes,
2:09.1	like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
2:12.6	Up through that, we have a traditional patrarchan lime scheme, A abba abba and it seems to be about the seasons changing
2:25.3	the gray dull coldness the the the awfulness of winter fading away and may coming on relieving us of that the long lost right of
2:37.3	the season's changing and bringing with it something new as we get in the first eight lines
	...

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