Compare the ways Keats and Brontë present love in their collected poetry and 'Wuthering Heights' respectively.
Both Keats and Brontë explore love in a poetic and romantic style, but combine this with darker tones and aggression in very different ways. Keats presents a styled, romantic love and contrasts it to harsher reality, a reality shown in ‘Wuthering Heights’. Brontë highlights love’s rugged, passing nature through several relationships in her book. Keats’ poetry looks at the illusion of love and its reality, for example, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The urn is a ‘Sylvan historian’, an object that holds many mysteries, an idea emphasised by the large number of rhetorical questions in stanza 1; ‘What maidens loth?’, ‘What mad pursuit?’. The urn depicts a story of love, a romance immortalised through the urn. The love ‘cannot fade’, an idealistic, eternal love. However, locked into the urn, the lovers cannot express their love; ‘never canst thou kiss. Keats presents the romantic idea of perfect love, but also that it can never be experienced, only imagined. The idea is that this couple’s love will never be disrupted, it will live on forever, yet it will never be physical or real. Brontë also presents love in a pure and realistic way through the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. Their love transcends the isolation of wuthering heights and the social divide. Catherine declares that ‘I am Heathcliff’, presenting the couple as idyllic soul mates. Despite their division due to Catherine’s marriage to Edgar, a weak, comfortable love which serves to contrast the passionate love between her and Heathcliff, the love they feel is undying. Their love is presented through a metaphor of nature, likening Catherine’s love for Edgar to the ever-changing foliage, which will not remain for long, just like winter. Her love of Heathcliff however ‘resembles the eternal rock beneath’, an immortal affection. Their true love is also juxtaposed with the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella. She appears to love Heathcliff, though in an adolescent sort of way, whilst he has no love whatsoever for her. The marriage is just a method of revenge for Heathcliff, his sense of betrayal and anger overcoming his love for Catherine. However, their love is raw and imperfect, and they cannot completely escape the social pressures and their own selfish nature to fulfil their love. And, like all love, it cannot last forever. Their relationship ends in tragedy, and fuels a hate-filled desire for vengeance in Heathcliff. This perishable quality of love is summed up by Keats in Ode to a Nightingale. ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’: beauty fades with time, as does love, so can never last forever. The many allusions, for example the allusion to ‘Dryads’, creates a sense of longing, as if the speaker would rather be somewhere else, perhaps with someone else. This leads to the thought that all love ends in tragedy as all love must end.
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats looks at the contrast between the illusion of love and its reality. The idea of love is presented in a romantic, picturesque way compared with the raw, unrefined reality of love of which Catherine and Heathcliff are an example. Through one of the stories depicted on the urn, the metaphor of music is used to represent love. ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’. Keats is exploring the idea that the reality of love can never live up to the romantic concept of love.
The destructive, imperfect nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is the most natural and pure love in ‘Wuthering Heights’, presenting the flawed nature of love itself. Keats, who himself was never able to fulfil his own love with Fanny Brawne due to financial circumstances, and this is reflected in his poetry, with his illusions of love so perfect yet so unachievable. Despite the romantic connotations of love, it is portrayed as harmful, and fleeting.