It was clearly written with a younger audience in mind. The poem immediately reads differently, as well. The lines are very short, between two and five words in length, and pile up on top of one another to create towering stanzas of verse. Keats is mainly known for his serious and usually complicated love poems and odes. Readers should also notice right away how unusual the structure is for a Keats poem. There are moments in which the lines rhyme in couplets or pairs of two, and the same end sound is repeated multiple times. For example, the first seven lines of the first stanza follow a pattern of ABCBDED. These lines do not follow a single rhyme scheme throughout the entire piece but do make use of a great deal of rhyme. ‘ A Song About Myself’ by John Keats is a four-stanza poem separated into two sets of twenty-five lines ( stanzas one and four) and two sets of thirty-four lines (stanzas two and three). Keats’s mother died of it when he was only fourteen, and Keats himself died of TB when he was 25, only two years after his walking tour. Tom is far from the only member of the Keats family to die of tuberculosis. When he returned home, he went back to nursing, his brother, Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis, a disease that eventually took his life. Keats, unfortunately, caught a bad cold, and their journey was cut short. The tour was filled with highs and lows, many of which are detailed in letters. For a time, he also walked with his brother and his wife. He traveled through Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District along with one of his close friends. ‘A Song About Myself’ was inspired by a walking tour that Keats began in June of 1818. The poem ends on this note, creating a nice moral for a young reader to consider. This is something that surprised and left him somewhat in shock. Weights, distances, and people were exactly alike.

When he got there, he realized that everything was very similar to the country he’d just left.

In the last stanza, the poet returns to the image of the child walking north to Scotland. The following stanza is about the child’s love of fishing and how he’d keep the fish in a washing tub.

There, he’s seen “witches” and “ditches” and more. In the second stanza, he spends time talking about the boy’s love for poetry, another clear reference to the poet’s own interests, and how he wanted to disappear into the mountains and write. Keats uses the humorous description of the boy following his “nose” there. He packed a lot into his small bag and set out exactly when and where he chose. In the first stanza of ‘A Song About Myself,’ the speaker begins by describing a naughty young boy who decided to pack up his bag and travel to the north, to Scotland. ‘ A Song About Myself’ by John Keats is a light-hearted, nonsensical poem in which the speaker describes a boy’s travels, habits, and eccentricities.

A song about myself poem