John Keats: An Overview. Keats’s Odes: Themes, Motifs & Symbols. Themes The Inevitability of Death Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work.
For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817). The English Faculty. The English Faculty. The English Faculty. The Life and Work of John Keats (1795-1821)