On Seeing The Elgin Marbles Theme

On seeing the elgin marbles my spirit is too weak.

On seeing the elgin marbles theme. The marbles have immense beauty and grandeur but they used to be part of the frieze on the parthenon in athens. Read the analysis of a theme from ode on a grecian urn one theme in ode on a grecian urn is that art is an eternal and unchanging truth. On seeing the elgin marbles john keats 1795 1821 my spirit is too weak mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep and each imagined pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship tells me i must die like a sick eagle looking at the sky. This sonnet attempts to convey the poet s complex attitude towards death couched in a reflection on the british museum s greek statues.

Yet tis a gentle luxury to weep that i have not the cloudy winds to keep fresh for the opening of the morning s eye. An underlying theme to keats admiration is his identification with the beliefs and values which led to the marbles being brought to britain and publicly exhibited. Although he died at the age of twenty five keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any english poet. A combination of obscure and abstract images give the poem a lightness which belies its proposed interest.

They were removed by a british aristocrat lord elgin and taken back to england in the early nineteenth century. The elgin marbles are a famous collection of sculptures from the parthenon in athens. The end of a lover s embrace the images on an ancient urn the reaping of grain in autumn all of these are not only symbols of death but instances of it. Investigating themes in on seeing the elgin marbles.

Values which mixed artistic considerations with liberal politics. Mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep and each imagined pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship tells me i must die like a sick eagle looking at the sky. Now read the passage from keats s poem on seeing the elgin marbles so do these wonders a most dizzy pain that mingles grecian grandeur with the rude wasting of old time with a billowy main. On seeing the elgin marbles by john keats about this poet john keats was born in london on 31 october 1795 the eldest of thomas and frances jennings keats s four children.

John keats on seeing the elgin marbles. Now the sculptures are in fragments and in london no longer a living part of religion but exhibits in a museum.