2.

Read the poem 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull' by George Gordon, Lord
Byron.
In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats compared the mortality of the nightingale and his
immortality, with his fear to being mortal. in 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a
Skull', Byron expresses his emphasis on fun derived from the idea of being mortal, as well
as debating the optimism in being mortal.
In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats compared his mortality with the Nightingale’s
‘immortality’ with ‘thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread
thee down’. The negation of ‘wasn’t not’ and ‘no hungry generation’ reflects the irony Keats
see that the nightingale beside him is yet so far from him due to their destiny and ability to be
immortal. The repetitive use of negation can express that the nightingale has a lot of ability
over what Keats longs. While ‘thou’ is usually used for intimate figures, Keats using ‘thou’
reveals his desire to be close with the nightingale as a model whose mortality is what he
wants to acquire. Since ‘thou’ is also commonly used to God, as an intimate figure, Keats
reference to nightingale as ‘thou’ can show Keats’ parallelism in viewing God and the
nightingale, revealing his pantheism view towards the sublime that applies to not just the
view but also the divine power, amusement in nature. The mortality of the nightingale is
reinforced with the repetitive /s/ sound throughout the stanza as it talks about the different
periods, eras in which the nightingale’s song has been spreading. This circulatory sound
mimics, in this poem, the voice of the nightingale in different ages, highlighting its continuity
and timelessness. Hence this passing down for whole stanza is like the passing down of the
song and immortality of the bird’s voice. This is heavily contrasted with Keats’ vulnerability
as a human to ‘I have been half in love with easeful death… into the air my quiet breath’. The
oxymoron of ‘in love’ and ‘death’ conveys the emotional weakness humans have that is so
different to the undying nightingale’s voice. This quote also connotes that death is so
interconnected to human’s everyday life that even ‘breathing’ is intertwined with the idea of
death, immortality is so inescapable that we are so easily drawn to death by nature of
breathing.
In 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull', Byron reveals his notion that
being mortal is the reason that we should enjoy life through ‘I lived, I loved, I quaffed’ and
‘quaff while thou canst’. The tricolon that mimics the famous quote of Julius Caesar – the
famous hero in ancient Rome of ‘I came, I saw, I conquer’ is a mockery of Byron to the
seriousness of their lives that shed the fun to ‘quaff’. The parallelism of both lines that
efficiently compares ‘quaffed’ and ‘conquered’, as if showing Byron’s view that drinking is
just as important as conquering. The building up of tension in ‘I lived, I loved’ is abruptly cut
off with the ‘quaffed’ that is per se a sense of humour in the serious atmosphere. The degree
of desperation and seriousness of ‘quaff while thou canst’ can also be seen both as mockery
and a real advice of life. The ‘while thou canst’ mirrors how cherishing Byron is towards the
chance of drinking like it is a very crucial part of living. The blunt /k/ sound in ‘quaffed’ that
abruptly destroyed the light sounded alliteration of ‘lived’ ‘loved’, emphasised the joking
tone which can also reflects the kind of sloppiness, disorderly speech pattern of a drunkard.
The contrast in ‘circle in the goblet’s shape the drinks of Gods, than reptile’s food’ of the
‘drinks of gods’ and ‘reptile’s food’ connote how degrading the skull or Byron thinks it is to
be fed on after being mortal. ‘god’ denotes a very obvious supremacy to ‘reptile’. It is
interesting that the skull didn’t only just mourn on its own death, instead, it states the pleasure
to offer other living ones the joy too. Showing the importance of fun and ‘revel’ even if it is
for others, truly showing his value in having fun and quaff. While the whole poem is written
in iambic tetrameter and is heavily structure to emphasised the regulations in the world that
needs alcohol to be broken free of, the line of ‘quaff while thou canst’ disrupts the meter to
show that drinking and having simple fun is so important that we have to pause in the middle
of life for it, since we are going to die anyway.
In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats express humans’ fear of being mortal. He uses
asyndeton in ‘palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs’, expressing the supernatural fear in
turning old in ‘where are you grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’. The asyndeton
describes the physical pain and appearance of being old, the punctuation that slows the speed
of the sentence simulates the slow yet torturing experience of growing old. ‘palsy shakes’
creates the imagery of a person who no longer has control over his own face and the ‘shakes’
implies the physical paralysis but also the strong desire to move but can only turn into
‘shakes’. The plosive palsy and the silence implied by the /s/ in ‘shakes’ echoing the
passionate desire that ultimately can only be reduced to quiet ‘shakes’, conveying the
sufferings in being mortal. The word ‘hairs’ which is supposed to be uncountable reflects how
little hair has left, how much someone has aged and is about to wither that they are now
countable, his body is not even able to provide a usual appearance for him anymore, as
echoed by the ‘last’ that implies the dying man with pitifully weak body. The unnaturalness in
‘spectre-thin’ evoke how being old has shed human of their humanity and is scary for others
when one die. The 3 part of the sentence of ‘grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ is like
different stages to finally dying, of one person slowly evolving more and more into a ghost,
reaching that state. Creating a building up in tension gradually.
In 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull', Byron explores the good and
bad boundary of mortality. There is a paradox in drinking ‘[Rescuing] thee from the earth’s
embrace, and rhyme and revel with the dead’. ‘Earth’s’ positive welcoming embrace is a
personification which create a sense of intimacy for the dead and it is a euphemism of dying
– which contrasts already to the positive imagery. Parallelly, the cheerful ‘rhyme and revel’
has a meter to imitate the repetitive musical structure with a contrast to that fact that you have
to die before partying ‘with the dead’. The oxymoron of the above seemingly positive
imageries and the need to be ‘rescued’ by drinking invokes the ambiguous boarder to whether
fatality is a black and white case. The repetition in conflict and oxymoron within these lines
shows the messiness of death and highlight how Byron's exploration of death's ambiguity and
the contradictory imagery he employs displays negative capability of being in a mess of
concepts of death being positive or negative. However, another perspective is the use of
mockery tone that all the ‘embrace’ and ‘fun’ are all used to be sarcastic towards the notion of
dying happily which Byron doesn’t agree to as he thinks ‘quaff when thou canst’ when one is
alive only.