Tennyson and Keats
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Tennyson and Keats Alike in Subtle Ways
Lord Alfred Tennyson and John Keats are two writers who seem to have little in
common. In fact, many people would believe that there are almost no similarities
between these two poetical geniuses of the early nineteenth century. As time has often
proved, first impressions are not always correct and this is one of those cases. Through
in-depth analyzation of Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and Keats's "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci", the reader can find evidence that these two poets have more in
common than a time period.
The first similarity in both poems is that the authors foreshadow death and danger
with the sudden changing of the weather. Lord Tennyson replaces sunshine with "stormy
east-wind straining , The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks
complaining, Heavily the low sky raining . . ." before the death of his main character
(118-121). In Keats's poem, before the knight's dream of dead kings giving him a
warning, the weather changes from flowers blooming and birds singing to "the cold hill
side...