Keats’s “Coming Muskrose” AND SHAKESPEARE’S “PROFOUND VERDURE” (1983)
This chapter criticizes English Romantic poet John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale and the relevant works of English poet William Shakespeare. It aims to explain the meaning of the phrase “coming musk-rose” and discusses the linguistic and botanical oddities in the fourth stanza. It suggests that Keats figuratively heard nightingales and smelled the rose simultaneously and that the flower and the bird in his poem copartners with Shakespeare's fairy crew in the mysteries of Keats' imagination.
Keywords: poetry criticism, An Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats, William Shakespeare, linguistic oddities
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