tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8300321474428682567.post5581544926422585855..comments2023-10-18T02:30:35.781+13:00Comments on The New Zealand Poet Laureate blog: At home in my head with Keats and ColeridgeNational Library of New Zealandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05067703181520460430noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8300321474428682567.post-92190176964497479162015-11-20T23:00:08.509+13:002015-11-20T23:00:08.509+13:00Very glad there's someone out there reading th...Very glad there's someone out there reading these blogs, and especially pleased it should be someone as ear-sensitive as Alan Roddick. As for abroad and sod - I hadn't noticed how imperfect it is as a rhyme - unless of course, as Alan says, Keats pronounced abroad as abrod, or sod as sawed. It was said Keats was one of 'the Cockney school' - but did that mean a Cockney accent? I seem to remember that Yeats refers to him as 'low-born' but that's more a reflection of Yeats's snobbery than of anything else; and in any case, how would it affect his speech? One doesn't know.<br /><br />KarlKarlnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8300321474428682567.post-81418350783648365232015-11-19T12:52:38.600+13:002015-11-19T12:52:38.600+13:00Thank you, Karl, for taking us back to Keats’ ‘Nig...Thank you, Karl, for taking us back to Keats’ ‘Nightingale’ ode. It is good to be reminded of what has made memorable verse when some of what gets published at present reads like chopped-up chatter, hardly even ‘prose’. For me, a large part of Keats’ magic is the patterns of sounds that speak what he is experiencing (actually or in his mind). In stanza 6, for example, with the line ‘While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad’: the long vowels and diphthongs of though, pouring, forth, soul and abroad, which seem to voice the nightingale’s ‘full-throated ease’.<br /><br />There’s another instance of the poet’s cunning in stanza 7, ‘…The same that oft-times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas…’. ‘Charm’d magic casements’ is a curiously difficult thing to say, almost as if the casement had got stuck – but then at the next word swings wide, with that gloriously expansive ‘opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’<br /><br />The repetition of ‘Forlorn!’ to open the last stanza, excitingly suggests that Keats was tracking his own experience and listening to what he’d been writing, to discover now how his poem would move to its conclusion. But the magic continues, as we follow with him the fleeing bird-song ‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side…’. It looks so easy! <br /><br />One small niggle: to my ear, ‘abroad’ and ‘sod’ are not-quite rhymes. Did Keats, I wonder, say them as ‘abrod’, or ‘sawed’? Pointless to question, though, when ‘sod’ sounds dead right.<br />Alan Roddicknoreply@blogger.com