In drear nighted December Flashcards
(14 cards)
Form
Lyrical poem
- Short and emotional
- Song like
“In Drear Nighted December”
- Plosive alliteration, suggestion of bleak and melancholic winter
“Too happy, happy tree”
- Repetition, childlike and simple language
- Emphasis of the happiness of the tree for not remembering the summer
- Song like tone - emotional
“Thy branches ne’er remember”
- Archaic language - highlights length of time the trees have been on Earth, how many times they have lived through winter
- Personification of trees
- When in difficult times (Winter), the trees are unable to remember the good times (Summer)
“Green felicity”
Green - colour of envy + joy + fortune + summer (beauty)
“Sleety whistle through them”
“Frozen thawings glue them”
Highlights the pain and harshness of Winter
- Nature presented as untroubled by the loss/ change
- Implication that the reader/ speaker longs for the sense of oblivion
“Sleety whistle” - Alliteration, onomatopoeia
- aural image
“Budding at the prime”
“Prime” - spring
- Speaker is envious at the lack of memory (oblivion)
- Wanting a release from pain/ suffering
“Thy bubblings ne’er remember Apollo’s summer look”
- Aural and visual imagery
- “Apollo”, God of sun
- Summer presented as a blessing and a spiritual time
“A sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting”
- Speaker desires to not be conscious of the change
- Not be aware of the good times so that the bad times aren’t as painful
- Nature accepts change
“Ah! would ‘twere so with many”
- Archaic language
- Speaker longing to be like the natural world
“Writh’d not of passed joy?”
- Rhetorical question
- Melancholy (and feelings of loss and change) is a central aspect of feeling human, inevitability
- Sad aspects of nostalgia
“The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it”
- Paradoxical emotions, feeling of absence
- Keats negative capabilities
- Melancholy and absent feelings are incurable
“Nor numbed sense to steel it”
- Feelings as stolen/ removed
- Humans are always feeling something
“Was never said in rhyme”
- Feels unable to put it into words
- Paradoxical - negative capabilities
(Keats just put this feeling into words)
