J. V. Ward's "The Constant Theme of Death in the works of Keats and Shelley"

In his essay, The Constant Theme of Death, J. V. Ward examines the views, on death, of the great Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, through their groundbreaking poems.

Ward opens the essay with an inspection of the opening lines of Shelley’s Adonais, written in mourning – ruing the loss of his dearest friend Keats at the age of only 25. Shelley is heartbroken and he rends his thoughts and feelings about the meaning of death in immaculate verse.

The author then alternates to Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes, where he examines the poet’s views on death, through the narrative arc of Madeleine and Porphyro. Next, Ward alternates back to his examination of Adonais, although, this time, the focus is not in the immutability of death, but on the perpetuity of memory.

Ward uses this opportunity to detail the similarities in the comparisons of death made by Shelley and Keats in their respective poems. Shelley, in Adonais, refers to death through chilly words such as “frost,” “cold,” icy,” and “frozen” – all pointing to the irrevocable cessation of life. Ward notes with interest that Keats used similar language and imagery to paint an icy picture of death – “the sculptured dead,” effigies which “seem to freeze” and “emprisoned” in “icy hoods and mails,” and “frosted”

Later, Ward switches focus to Keats’ The Ode to a Nightingale, where he dissects the paradoxes of death and its function as the consummation of life’s endeavors, as viewed by Keats. To buttress his case, Ward also recalls an earlier work by Keats, Can Death Be Sleep, When Life is But a Dream, and quotes the poet thus: “future doom…is but to awake.”

Ward continues in this vein, weaving his way in and out of the magnificent poems of the two great Romantics, and at one point, even points out that Shelley was in debt to St. Paul for his reference to “many-coloured glass.”

Finally, Ward concludes with a wistful note that Shelley, grieving and inconsolable to the loss of his dearest friend, may have, cast a death wish (the Freudian thanatos) upon himself through the following magnificent lines:

My spirit’s bark is driven…to the tempest given

Ward notes the cruel irony of Shelley meeting his end in a sea craft that sank in perilous waters, just like he had predicted in his own lines. Ward concludes that although Shelley and Keats seem to obsess about the meaning of death, it is really to refute the idea of extinction after death.

The one difference that we note (from the text) as the difference between Shelley and Keats is that Shelley appears to, at times, view death more despondently than Keats – Keats, on the other hand, considers death allegorically, set against the backdrop of a life after. If this difference is because of Shelley’s obvious and irredeemable grief at the loss of his friend so early in life, it is understandable indeed.