Tennyson_And_Keats

Tennyson And Keats In the early 19th century, the industrial revolution provoked a return to medievalism by the poets and painters of the age. They wrote about the medieval world as idyllic and harmonious – a contrast to their own turbulent century. Although these two poems aren’t entirely idyllic, they are set in the medieval age, and use many similar ideas. The focus was on stories of courtly love, chivalry and tragedy. The two poems I will be comparing are ‘Mariana’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, by John Keats (1795 – 1821). They tell of love and loss and explore the realm of unrequited love, but in very different ways. Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ was a character taken from Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’. She is a young woman, deserted by her lover and left in a ‘lonely moated grange’. The Poem consists of seven 12-line stanzas; the last four lines of each stanza are always the same, with a slight variation in the last stanza. Thus, one third of the poem consists of a repetition of poem, tennyson, keats, knight, imagery, mariana, one, word, mariana’s, love, landscape, again, yet, words, life, last, lady, first, she, very, lines, line, image, different, describes, thus, tennyson’s, sounds, sound, said, pale